The Fourth Star

by Greg Jaffe

  The woman’s screams faded and the video jumped again. Now the troops had just shot an unarmed cabdriver who had ignored their orders to stop. A few minutes later they were rushing to save an Iraqi soldier whose legs had been blown off by a roadside bomb. It ended with a close-up of another young Army specialist angry at the extension of his tour from a year to fifteen months: “We were supposed to be flying home in six days. But because we have people in Congress with the brain of a two-year-old we are stuck here. I challenge the president or whoever has us here for fifteen months to ride along with me. I’ll do another fifteen months if he comes here and rides with me every day.”

  The lights came up and Chiarelli told the generals that he was the one who had pressed Gates to extend tours to fifteen months after the president committed to sending the additional 30,000 troops to Iraq. The alternative, meting out three-month extensions over the course of a year, would have been even more painful to soldiers and their families. “It was a necessary evil,” he said. Then for the next hour he talked with the generals about his successes and his admittedly larger failings during his last tour. His biggest disappointment had been his inability to get the U.S. military more involved in the effort to build the Iraqi government. “If I got involved in Iraqi governance and economics, I got my hand slapped,” he said. “It wasn’t from Casey. It was from the embassy. And it frustrated the hell out of me.”

  He was packing up when Casey walked into the room for his presentation to the same generals. He was the senior officer in the Army and moved around with an entourage of colonels who reflected his status. “Pete, what are you doing here? I thought you were a horse holder,” Casey said, using the Army slang for an aide whose main job is to shadow his more important boss, in this case Gates. Casey was only needling him, but Chiarelli looked crushed. His shoulders slumped and the blood drained from his face. It felt like a jab, reminding him that he was still the junior three-star general and not a real commander. Chiarelli had always seen himself as a bit of an outsider within the clubby general officer corps. He regularly boasted that in his entire Army career he’d never been tapped for an early or “below-the-zone” promotion, like most golden boys. He was one of those rare Army leaders who had plodded up the chain of command, proving wrong all those who had thought he wasn’t quite good enough.

  The rumor was that Petraeus was going to leave command at the end of the year, and Chiarelli had already started thinking about what he would do if he was picked for the top job. He’d push harder to reform the corrupt ministries and use the high-profile command to rally the military and the rest of the U.S. government to jump-start the economy. The job was just beyond his grasp. Chiarelli shoved his speech notes into his briefcase and quickly hustled out of the room.

  Green Zone, Baghdad

  July 2007

  Petraeus and Admiral William “Fox” Fallon boarded a Black Hawk helicopter for an aerial tour of Baghdad. Fallon had replaced Abizaid, who retired as the top commander in the Middle East a few months earlier.

  Abizaid had left the Iraq war strategy largely to Petraeus during his final weeks in command. He’d signed off on all Petraeus’s requests for additional troops with no argument. Fallon, by contrast, had decided to focus his attention on what he saw as the shortcomings of Petraeus’s strategy, which he thought was failing. He’d crafted his own plan calling for swift cuts to U.S. troop levels and a renewed focus on shifting the fight to the Iraqis. Petraeus had invited him on the helicopter tour as a last-ditch effort to convince Fallon to ease off. The temperature had soared past 115 degrees and the hot air pouring through the helicopter’s open windows felt like a hair dryer on maximum power. Soon every uniform was drenched in sweat. Petraeus’s enthusiasm bordered on desperation. After a few minutes, the two officers were hovering over downtown Baghdad; Petraeus was pointing out a soccer field. “They have real games there. The teams wear uniforms. You wouldn’t believe it,” he said. The helicopter banked over an empty public swimming pool. “They are fixing that pool, by the way,” he told Fallon. “You see that amusement park? It’s empty now, but on Thursday and Friday nights it is full of people.”

  Fallon kept asking about the Sunni areas of the city, where trash filled the streets and stores were shuttered. Petraeus tried to direct his attention to more positive areas. After forty-five minutes in the area the two men went their separate ways. The sales pitch backfired. “He’s not seeing the whole city,” Fallon groused. He worried that Petraeus’s preternatural enthusiasm and ego wouldn’t allow him to admit that the war might not be winnable. Rumors of Fallon’s contentious visit spread through the palace. In the morning update, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, who had replaced Chiarelli as the number two commander in Iraq overseeing daily military operations, did his best to reinforce confidence in the strategy. He had played a key role in pushing for the extra surge forces and deciding where to place them. “My sense is that we are in the pursuit mode in many areas throughout Iraq,” he said. “The extremists are running in Baghdad. They are running in Anbar and in Mosul. The Iraqis are starting to see the results of our offensives.” Publicly Petraeus and Odierno weren’t going to show a hint of doubt.

  When the two generals were paired up, some in the Army buzzed with concern about how they would get along. In 2003 they both commanded divisions in northern Iraq. Petraeus easily charmed the media and visiting congressmen, his division quickly becoming everyone’s favorite success story. Odierno’s 4th Infantry Division was often cited as an example of overaggressiveness in its single-minded pursuit of FREs—former regime elements. The generals clashed a year later when Odierno visited Baghdad as part of a Pentagon team looking for ways to accelerate Petraeus’s training of Iraqis.

  In 2007, the pressure cooker of Iraq drew the two men closer. On particularly hard days Petraeus and Odierno, recalling a Civil War moment that Petraeus had read about, would quote Ulysses S. Grant’s exchange with William Tecumseh Sherman after the bloody first day at the Battle of Shiloh. Unable to sleep, Grant was standing beneath a tree as rain fell on him. Sherman appeared out of the darkness. “Well, Grant,” Sherman said, “we have had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?”

  “Yup,” Grant replied. “Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”

  The really difficult days dwindled over the summer as commanders organized former Sunni insurgents into armed neighborhood watch groups, known as the Sons of Iraq. By the fall the United States had almost 70,000 sons of Iraq on the payroll. To control Iraqi neighborhoods, U.S. commanders blocked off neighborhoods with concrete barriers that made it harder for Sunni extremist groups and Shiite death squads to come and go. In some cases the Americans used the barriers to keep Shiite-dominated national police and army forces out of Sunni areas. The idea for the walls had come from the field, not headquarters. David Kilcullen, an Australian specialist on guerrilla war whom Petraeus had recruited as his counterinsurgency advisor, referred to the walls as “urban tourniquets,” a temporary measure designed to stop the bleeding so that the patient doesn’t die.

  In September Petraeus returned to Washington to give his first assessment to Congress on whether his strategy was producing lasting results. He and his staff went through twenty-seven different drafts of his opening statement. The final version ran a stunning forty-five minutes. The Iraq debate had become too superheated for logic. So he decided that he was going to bludgeon skeptical lawmakers with data. His testimony was going to be a war of attrition.

  A few days before the hearing, the Bush administration arranged for several officials well acquainted with congressional hearings and Iraq to come to Petraeus’s house at Fort Myer to fire questions at him in a mock hearing. In Washington, it was known as a “murder board.” The civilians who had been sent to help him prepare told him to start slashing his statement. Petraeus began stripping out paragraphs with his executive officer, Colonel Pete Mansoor, and Captain Liz McNally, a Rhodes scholar who acted as his speechwriter.

  The final presentation, which Petraeus
delivered in a flat monotone, still ran a lengthy eighteen minutes. Violence levels were down in eight of the previous twelve weeks, he told the lawmakers. Civilian deaths had fallen by 45 percent. The number of weapons caches discovered was higher, suicide attacks were down, and Iraqi defense spending was increasing. “The military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met,” he concluded. To hold on to the fragile gains, he recommended sustaining the increased troop levels and the fifteen-month tours through the summer of 2008.

  A few days after he had returned to Baghdad he met with Prime Minister Maliki, who was ecstatic. “We all thank God for your successful hearings,” he said. “I can now see the beginning of a victory in Iraq.” Petraeus tried to tamp down his confidence. “Obviously we are going to need to see continued security improvements, but we are also going to have to show progress in other areas,” he said. In particular, Petraeus was eager to see the Iraqis hold provincial elections that would allow Sunni tribal leaders who had boycotted earlier balloting to amass some political power. The Iraqis also had to settle on a formula for distributing oil revenues and develop a plan to find permanent jobs for the more than 100,000 Sunnis participating in the Sons of Iraq neighborhood watch program.

  Like Casey and Chiarelli in 2006, Petraeus found it almost impossible to pin down Maliki’s real intentions toward Sunnis. A few weeks after his fall testimony he and Ryan Crocker met with the president via a video teleconference link from Baghdad. Maliki had been feuding with his Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, and Bush asked whether the prime minister disliked all Sunnis or just Hashimi. “Maliki is not viscerally anti-Sunni, but he thinks that Hashimi is out to get him and he might be right,” replied Crocker, who had been working closely with the country’s political leaders for almost a year. “This is not a government of national unity,” the ambassador continued. “The only time the Iraqi leaders behave that way is when you hold their head under water for a while and then let them back up.”

  The Sunni tribal leaders’ fledgling alliance with the United States, the increase in American troops, and Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy continued to drive down violence. The United States also caught a break when radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who was losing control of his militia, called for a six-month cease-fire. The sectarian and ethnic tensions that had sparked the civil war in 2006 were still strong but increasingly were being pushed below the surface.

  In September 2008 the last of the U.S. reinforcements started heading home. Petraeus was just a couple of weeks away from leaving as well. He’d been chosen to lead U.S. Central Command, replacing Abizaid’s successor, Admiral Fallon, who resigned after a short, rocky tenure. In the United States Petraeus was being hailed as the most influential military officer of his generation. The problem, as he reminded his staff, was that the war wasn’t over. Daily attacks had plummeted to levels not seen since early 2004, when the insurgency was in its infancy. But the relative quiet was still dependent on the presence of U.S. forces and the relationships that they had forged with former Sunni insurgent groups. How dependent? No one actually knew.

  In an area south of Baghdad known as the Triangle of Death, the Rakkasans battalion that Petraeus had commanded in the early 1990s was going to find out. Petraeus had visited the battalion more than any other in Iraq, doling out advice on counterinsurgency and just about everything else, including what dance steps to use when the unit went home and partied. “If you want to throw a good welcome-home ball for your troops, you need to learn how to do the electric slide,” Petraeus counseled the battalion commander. “Then you need to get out and do it. Everyone else will follow.” It was pretty good advice if you were commanding the battalion in 1992, joked Lieutenant Colonel Andy Rohling, the current commander.

  By 2008, the Rakkasans epitomized Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy. They had been so successful that they were averaging less than one attack a day and were on the verge of turning over their sector, which only a year earlier had been one of the most violent in Iraq, to a company about one-third the battalion’s size. Colonel Rohling called his company commanders together a few weeks before the handover to lay out the plan.

  The battalion headquarters was in a half-finished power plant that a Russian construction company had abandoned on the eve of the 2003 invasion. Al Qaeda-affiliated fighters had occupied it for much of 2005 and 2006. American troops had seized the compound in a bloody nighttime raid the following year and had held it ever since. The partially completed steel-and-cement skeleton stood ten stories. Graffiti on its support beams praised Saddam Hussein and listed the names and dates of “martyrs” and their suicide missions. Surrounding it were green pastures, reed-choked irrigation ditches, and dirt-poor farmers.

  Rohling and his company commanders crammed into the battalion’s main conference room, which they had fashioned out of plywood sheets on the power plant’s second floor. “This is where we’ve been and what we’re trying to avoid,” Rohling said. He flashed a slide showing Vietnamese civilians scrambling to board a helicopter perched precariously on the roof of the CIA building in Saigon. No one laughed.

  Rohling’s best counterinsurgent was Captain Michael Starz. He stood out for his passion, intelligence, and youthful bravado. Under Rohling’s plan, Starz’s ninety-man company was turning its area over to a thirty-soldier platoon. Starz, who had the look of an earnest graduate student in camouflage, had bluntly told his boss a few days earlier that he thought it was a dangerous and dumb idea. The area was too complex. The fledgling relationship he was trying to foster between the local Sunni tribes that had until recently backed the insurgency and the Iraqi army was too strained and fragile.

  When Petraeus ventured out into the field—typically twice a week—he made sure that he spent at least an hour with company commanders such as Starz. He’d kick out their bosses, close the door, and ask the young officers what they thought was really happening in their sector. What had they learned? What mistakes had they made? What did they need to win? Petraeus knew that captains such as Starz had the best understanding of the politics and personalities on the ground.

  Starz’s sector, which included the cities of Mohmudiyah and Yusufiyah, had been among the most violent and unforgiving in Iraq. Over the years insurgents had inflicted heavy casualties on U.S. troops in the area, and in brazen attacks twice kidnapped U.S. soldiers off checkpoints, torturing and killing them. It also was the place where four angry, drunk soldiers raped a young girl and murdered her and her family. By mid-2008, several thousand of the area’s young men had been organized into Sons of Iraq groups and were being paid $400 a month to guard street corners. “We pretty much employ all the extremists in my area,” Starz said. He said it without pride or outrage; this was how the war was being won.

  A few weeks before he turned over his sector, he grabbed a briefcase packed with crisp $100 bills and paid a visit to the Owesat tribe. The first time that Starz had driven down the dirt road that leads into the tribe’s village, insurgents had seeded it with more than twenty roadside bombs, one of which killed Lieutenant Tracy Alger, a thirty-year-old officer from rural Wisconsin. “The people who killed Tracy were all from this tribe that we are going to pay,” he said. “To tell you the truth, it doesn’t bother me that we are paying them. I am very detached from it. I don’t hold any anger in my heart.” As Starz entered the village, barefoot tribal elders all rushed to greet him, and the tribe’s preeminent sheikh welcomed him with kisses on each cheek. Sheikh Musahim al-Owesat led him past a cluster of boxy one-story cement houses to the tribe’s diwan, a large room with benches and pillows lining the walls and a wheezing air conditioner connected to a clanking electric generator. Soon the men of the tribe were lining up to collect their $100 bills from one of Starz’s lieutenants.

  “How old are you?” Starz asked one boy, no more than fourteen. The United States wasn’t supposed to pay anyone younger than eighteen. Before the boy could answer, the sheikh barked at him to take his money and leave. “His fat
her was killed in the fighting and his family needs the money to survive,” Sheikh Musahim explained. Starz crossed his name off the list for the next payday but let him keep the money. “I guess he’ll be our target audience in a couple of years,” he said philosophically. Tables full of cash were replaced by a feast of eggs, watermelon, bread, yogurt, and tomatoes. It was Ramadan, when Muslims fast during the day, but few seemed reluctant to eat. Starz was fasting to see what it was like to go without food or water in 120-degree heat. Once the meal was done, Starz said goodbye to Sheikh Musahim, who lavished him with praise. “I respect you and love you as a human,” the sheikh told him.

  Soon his convoy was back on the road, rumbling past new, U.S.-funded poultry farms. The area south of Baghdad had raised most of the chickens for Iraq when Saddam Hussein was in power. Now Starz’s unit was trying to relaunch the industry. His brigade commander had spent about $1 million to import 95,000 chicken embryos from the Netherlands, which were of hardier stock than the scrawny, disease-prone local chickens. Petraeus loved the project and demanded regular updates on its progress in the morning briefing.