Chiarelli, the number two U.S. commander in Iraq in 2006, said that MacFarland’s operation marked the first time in the Iraq war that a counterinsurgency campaign had been conducted and then had been sustained by the succeeding unit. “Sean was the first guy who did it and it stuck for the guy who followed,” he said.
Upon arriving in Iraq, Odierno would seek to build on what MacFarland had started. “He’s the guy who put this together”—that is, how to operate differently and more effectively in Iraq, Odierno said later. “Once they cleared Ramadi, and they stayed in Ramadi with a significant amount of force, that was the tipping point. The whole province seemed to turn over.”
But Baghdad would be more complicated. Not only was it at least 10 times larger, it also had both the Shiite militias that weren’t active in Ramadi, which was homogeneously Sunni. Tribes were less significant in the cities and among Shiites. Securing Baghdad in 2007 would make MacFarland’s experience in Ramadi in 2006 look relatively simple.
A RUN IN OCTOBER
In October 2006, Petraeus was in Washington, partly to lay the groundwork for rolling out his counterinsurgency manual a few months later, but also because Gen. Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had sent word that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld wanted to see him.
Petraeus didn’t know what the meeting would be about. But he could see his time at Leavenworth coming to an end, and he was eager to get back into the fight in Iraq. Every indication was that a radical change in the handling of the war there was urgently required. He felt ready to lead that charge.
As he prepared, he contacted Lt. Col. Charlie Miller, whom he had known since he himself was a lieutenant colonel and Miller was a green officer in his battalion in the 101st Airborne, to ask him to go for a morning run. In 2006 Miller was a strategic planner on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and like many of his peers, was anxious about the state of the war. The next day the two met at Petraeus’s hotel. It quickly became clear that Petraeus wanted to talk about Iraq. “He was very spun up on the war, knew what was happening,” Miller recalled.
As they ran along the sandy paths of Washington’s mall toward the Capitol, Petraeus posed a series of questions. “The nation has to decide what it is going to do—is it going to do what it takes, or is it going to get out?” he began.
After the run, Petraeus said to Miller, “What are we trying to accomplish there? And what resources do we need to do it?”
This was magic to Miller, a native of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley who was trained in strategic thinking and who had believed for years that more troops needed to be sent to Iraq. “This had been a major frustration for me,” he said.
“We have undertaken a major national project and put it on the backs of a small group of volunteers.”
These also were the basic questions any strategist would ask about a war—especially if he suspected he might about to be put in charge of that war.
When Petraeus went to see Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, he thought that perhaps he would be offered command in Iraq. But as he was walking up the Pentagon stairs with Pace to Rumsfeld’s office, the Joint Chiefs chairman turned to him and said, “Don’t be surprised if this is about the Afghanistan job.” That was not a bad command, but it was still a relative backwater compared to Iraq. As it happened, Rumsfeld, who could be extremely noncommittal, didn’t offer Petraeus anything.
3.
KEANE TAKES COMMAND
(Fall 2006)
The turning point in the war was the American midterm elections of November 2006, which transferred control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats. Without that “thumping,” as President Bush termed it, the administration might never have contemplated the major revisions in strategy and leadership that it would make in the following two months. Until the election, Bush seemed satisfied with blather. After it, he began to speak about the war seriously. The sweeping changes that followed ultimately would reverse the steady downward course of the war—and perversely for Democrats, thus likely extend the conflict for many more years. “I think that without the ’06 elections, there might not have been a change” in U.S. strategy, said Tom Donnelly, one of the original Iraq hawks who in the wake of the November elections would help plan the escalation that would become known as “the surge.”
The precise moment of the shift in both congressional majorities came two days after the election, when Senator George Allen of Virginia conceded to James Webb, a pugnacious Marine veteran and former Republican who had trailed him by a wide margin during most of the race. Webb’s win tipped the Senate into Democratic hands, giving the party control of the entire new Congress. Webb, celebrating his extraordinarily narrow victory, stood outside the Arlington County Courthouse, just outside Washington, D.C., and held in the air the Marine combat boots that his son had first worn in Iraq and that the senator then had worn while campaigning.
Webb said in an interview that he displayed the boots at the rally not as a reference to the war, but as a symbol that the campaign was over. Yet those boots that had trod the bloody streets of Ramadi gave Webb’s opinions on the war an added gravitas: Not only had he served in Vietnam, his son was in the fight now. He knew what it was like to stand in combat boots. After he waved those boots, he delivered a speech unusual for any politician, but especially for a Democrat. He began not by thanking the people of Virginia or his family or his campaign staff, but instead by saluting the Marines. “The first thing I’d like to say is tomorrow is the most special day for the United States Marine Corps—they celebrate their birthday. You almost have to be a Marine to understand that, but I want to say ‘Happy Birthday’ to all our Marines. There are a lot of them in harm’s way today. We are going to remember them tomorrow.” Next he cited those who had served in the military in earlier days. “The day after that is Veterans Day, and we remember all of those who have served our country and who are serving it, wherever they are, we all have them in our hearts and prayers.” Then he turned to the politics of the situation and, among things, predicted that the shift in congressional power meant that there would “result soon . . . a diplomatic solution in Iraq.”
His main emotion at the time, he said later, was one of relief. Webb had proven an energetic but awkward candidate, at first walking down the center of the street in parades, rather than shaking the hands of spectators. He seemed most at ease among the coal miners of southwest Virginia, home of his Scots-Irish ancestors. The Virginia Senate campaign had been contentious but not exceptionally so. Yet Webb emerged from it furious, later declaring it “one of the nastiest campaigns in American history.” He said that at the time of his victory speech, “I literally felt like I was stepping out of a sewer.”
Webb had been molded by his experience as a young Marine officer in the Vietnam War. Back then, his Appalachian tenacity and populist distrust of centralized power made him a fierce critic of anti-war activists. He ended Fields of Fire with a scene in which a Vietnam vet challenges a crowd of Harvard protestors: “How many of you are going to get hurt in Vietnam? I didn’t see any of you in Vietnam.” Yet those same deep-running character traits had made Webb an opponent of the Iraq war, where he thinks elites once again are recklessly sending someone else’s children to die while their own stay home and tend their careers.
For decades Webb had nursed a cold contempt for such people who took from their country more than they gave.
One of those who had evaded service in Vietnam was George W. Bush. In mid-November, Webb went to a postelection function at the White House for newly elected members of Congress. He avoided the reception line, but Bush sought him out. “How’s your boy?” the president asked.
“I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,” Webb responded.
“That’s not what I asked you,” Bush persisted. “How’s your boy?”
“That’s between me and my boy,” Webb said. It was an abrupt, ungracious response that proved to be controversial. Seven months later, in a gesture of reconciliation, Webb would b
ring his Marine son, wearing his dress blues, to a White House meeting and introduce him to the president.
Even as the ghosts of Vietnam flitted over Washington, there was a growing sense among defense experts that the strategic consequences of the Iraq war could be far worse than that earlier war. The United States could walk away from Vietnam, a relatively isolated country with few resources, and six years later, with the election of Ronald Reagan, declare it “morning in America.” (Of course, it didn’t feel like that in Cambodia, or in the reeducation camps of Vietnam where former allies of the United States were held.) It was unlikely to be morning in Iraq anytime soon. The Iraq war “makes Vietnam look like a cakewalk,” said retired Air Force Gen. Charles Wald, a Vietnam veteran. The domino theory that nations across Southeast Asia would go Communist was not fulfilled, he noted, but with Iraq, he said, the “worst-case scenarios are the most likely thing to happen,” such as a spreading war in the Middle East, which likely would cause a spike in oil prices that would shock the global company.
THE TRIUMPH OF THE DEMOCRATS
The day after the election, the president announced that he was removing Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Uncharacteristically, Rumsfeld was subdued, brief, and inarticulate. His verdict on Iraq that day was that it was “a little understood, unfamiliar war, the first war of the twenty-first century—it is not well known, it was not well understood, it is complex for people to comprehend.” He seemed to be saying that the American people just didn’t get it and had demonstrated their lack of understanding in the previous day’s vote.
There was little unhappiness in the U.S. government about his departure.
“Rumsfeld appeared to draw from the commissar school of management, leading with a pistol from the back, because he would tell folks to advance, not offering his own vision of where to go, instead waiting to watch their choices and then questioning or potentially penalizing them,” said Philip Zelikow, who was then counselor at the State Department. “The style can be praised as one of delegation and prodding, but it is also designed to allow the chief to keep his own preferences obscure as long as possible.”
There was abundant evidence that Rumsfeld was an inept leader. For all his willingness to chew out subordinates, he consistently seemed unable to address major problems and make adjustments in personnel, policy, or command structures. On top of that, his leadership of the U.S. military establishment was eroded by the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, which became public in the spring of 2004. It was a major setback for the U.S. war effort, and indeed a strategic loss for the United States globally. But only underlings took the hit for it. “From May of 2004 onward, he was damaged goods,” military commentator Francis “Bing” West later observed. “He had lost the moral authority to lead.”
After his last day in office, Rumsfeld took his family to Buck’s Fishing & Camping, which, despite its rustic name, is an upscale Washington restaurant. Underscoring the loathing Rumsfeld had generated in many Americans, the chef-owner there, Carole Greenwood, told her coowner, James Alefantis, to kick him out. “I’m not serving a war criminal in my restaurant,” she declared. Alefantis pointed out that her business was to serve people and that Rumsfeld was with his family. Greenwood eventually relented but only on the condition that someone else cook Rumsfeld’s meal. To Alefantis’s chagrin, he heard that Rumsfeld soon was telling people that Buck’s was his favorite restaurant in the area. Greenwood likely would go ballistic if Rumsfeld returned with his buddy Dick Cheney.
IN BOTH ART and strategy, personality plays a large but murky role. The personality of Robert Gates was the strongest asset he would bring to the Pentagon as Rumsfeld’s successor. Where Rumsfeld was blustery, Gates was quiet, even stealthy. He was a career intelligence officer, spending most of his life serving his country in the federal government, an organization that people like Rumsfeld and Bush tended to denigrate. Gates did share with them a strong sense of loyalty—but in his case, to his longtime best friend, Brent Scowcroft, who had been close to the first President Bush but had become persona non grata with the second because of his public opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Gates also had been a member of the Iraq Study Group, which had introduced him to the principal players in policy and steeped him in the current debate.
“Bob Gates will bring a fresh perspective,” President Bush said with unusual understatement. And while a few weeks earlier Bush had said that tactics might change but that the strategy would remain the same, he now pronounced himself open to change in both. “Stay the course means let’s get the job done, but it doesn’t mean, you know, staying stuck on a strategy or tactics that may not be working,” he said.
Despite the change at the Pentagon, everything seemed to be going the way of the anti-war Democrats. In early December, Senator Gordon Smith, a low-key Republican from Oregon, made his way to the Senate floor to break dramatically with the president on Iraq. He had been reading John Keegan’s somber history of World War I, which had led him to meditate on the sins of the British generals who sent a generation head-on into the slaughter of German machine guns, despite growing evidence that their frontal approach wasn’t working. It had made him think, he said, about “how we kept doing the same thing over and over again at the cost of our soldiers’ lives with no improvement in the political environment in Iraq.” He also had been reading books critical of the Iraq war. One Thursday in December, he awoke to news on his clock radio that another ten soldiers had been killed in Iraq. (Six of the ten were those Col. MacFarland lost in Ramadi, including Maj. McClung and Capt. Patriquin.) He decided that he had heard and seen enough. “I went from steamed to boiled,” he recalled.
“I have tried to be a good soldier,” Smith began in his very personal statement to the Senate that evening. “I have tried to support our president.” But he said he could no longer. He remembered back to 2003, when it seemed as though the fall of Baghdad had brought a swift victory. “Now all of those memories seem much like ashes to me,” he said. He no longer would be able to stand with the president, he continued. “He is not guilty of perfidy, but I do believe he is guilty of believing bad intelligence and giving us the same.” So, he said, the time had come to speak out. “I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day,” he said. “That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore.” It was a stunning statement.
It began to look like 15 or more similarly upset Republicans might during the course of 2007 go into opposition on the war—a shift that promised to give the Democrats a veto-proof majority. The Democrats also knew that soon they would take over the committees where much of the substantial business of Congress is done. No longer would the panels on Appropriations, Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence be chaired by diehard supporters of the administration. Instead, starting in January 2007, skeptics of the Iraq war would be setting the agendas, directing the committee staffs, initiating investigations, and calling the hearings.
In their moment of triumph, some Democrats began to sense the dilemma that was about to ensnare them: How to bring an end to the war without being blamed for how it ended? Their evasive answer, unfortunately, would be to appear to do something without really doing anything. They liked having the Iraq conflict be “Bush’s war” and most certainly didn’t intend to take possession. “Like it or not, George Bush is still the commander in chief, and this is his war,” Harry Reid of Nevada would say in 2007, months after becoming Senate majority leader.
This result would be a prolonging of the war, because it meant that the Democrats ultimately would shy away from any confrontation with the Bush administration—and the White House knew it. So, for example, by the end of December, Senator Joseph Biden, the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and two years later Barack Obama’s running mate, would emphatically oppose an increase in troop levels. “I totally oppose the surging
of additional troops into Baghdad, and I think it is contrary to the overwhelming body of informed opinion, both people inside the administration and outside the administration,” he said. Neither he nor other Democrats, despite controlling both houses of Congress, would take any serious steps to block it.
BIG JACK KEANE INTERVENES
In the fall of 2006, Jack Keane effectively became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stepping in to redirect U.S. strategy in a war, to coordinate the thinking of the White House and the Pentagon, and even to pick the commanders who would lead the change in the fight. It was an unprecedented and astonishing development for a retired general to drive policy making and indeed bypass the entire chain of command in remaking war strategy. “Retired four-stars can be very influential, but this was really an order of magnitude beyond that,” commented Tom Donnelly, who worked with Keane on developing the idea of “the surge.” “He is almost the keystone in the whole thing. The window was almost closed. He kept it open.”
Keane was given his opening by the failure of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Peter Pace, who was proving unable to deal with the Iraq war. With no official backing, and nothing but his credibility and persuasive abilities to go on, Keane helped one general in Iraq and some civilians in a think tank formulate “the surge” as a new strategy for Iraq, pitched it to the president, and then, with a green light from Bush, told top officials at the Pentagon about how to proceed. He continued to work with that general in Iraq, Raymond Odierno, behind the back of Gen. Casey, the senior commander there, who told Keane not to visit Iraq.
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