On Monday morning, Rapp would take back the memo, by now edited down to four or five pages long, and e-mail it to just a handful of people—the defense secretary, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the chief of the Central Command. Not even the other service chiefs, or the White House, were copied in—President Bush would get the message directly from Petraeus during their electronic meeting that afternoon. “When they are declassified, these weekly reports will be a big part of the history of the war,” Rapp said. “He doesn’t pull any punches.”
In late October 2007, for example, Petraeus began to worry that the president would again begin talking about how everything was going well in Iraq, in part because of assertions by some Special Operations officers that al Qaeda in Iraq had been defeated, so one memo then focused on avoiding presidential triumphalism. “I just wrote for him, ‘Mr. President, you need to be measured, you need to say, “We are putting the hurt on al Qaeda, but they are not finished,” ’ ” Rapp said.
On Monday afternoon, at 3:35 Baghdad time, which during much of the year was 8:35 in the morning back in Washington, Petraeus would talk by video-teleconference with the president. Ambassador Crocker usually would also participate. These sessions usually would go on for about an hour, with Petraeus and Crocker on camera, and Mansoor and Rapp sitting to the side. Rapp said Bush was far more imposing in the sessions than his public persona would lead one to expect. “I think America’s view of the president, whether they like or dislike him, is what they see of him reading a statement at the podium, which isn’t impressive, in my opinion,” Rapp said. “In these meetings, he is masterful—good political insights, good handle on the subject.”
Miller agreed that the private Bush was strikingly different. “I wish he would come across a little more in public like that.”
If Bush and Petraeus disagreed, Rapp said, Bush would make his view clear but still give the general a green light. “He’ll say, ‘I’ve got some concerns about that, but if you think that’s the way to go, Okay, let’s try it,’” he said. Overall, the tone of these meetings was remarkably more collegial than they had been when Rumsfeld was defense secretary, said one Army officer. “The VTCs I sat in on, I was just fucking amazed at how that guy treated people,” he recalled. “He was just exceedingly combative in an unhelpful way.” Now, with Gates’s becoming a quiet force at the Pentagon and Petraeus’s bonding with the president across the oceans in a way the American people never saw, the American conduct of the war moved forward, perhaps less grandly, but with a coherence and unity of effort it had lacked since the invasion long ago in 2003.
8.
THE DOMESTIC OPPOSITION COLLAPSES
(Summer and Fall 2007)
At 9 A.M. on June 13, 2007, insurgents dynamited the two minarets remaining at the shell of the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra, which had been bombed 16 months earlier. The renewed attack on one of the holiest sites for Shiites clearly was meant to spark sectarian fighting. Petraeus’s heart sank as an aide told him about the attack. “You know, you have moments where you can feel the blood coursing through your body as news comes in.” He had previously endured only two such moments during his three tours in Iraq, he said. The first time was when his 101st Airborne Division took casualties during the invasion of Iraq, and the second was later in 2003 when two Black Hawks collided over Mosul, killing 17 of his soldiers.
Petraeus’s Green Zone office is only a few steps from Crocker’s. He immediately walked over to see the ambassador, who listened and then said, “Oh, shit!” They were both thinking that this could be like the first bombing of Samarra that had preceded the small civil war of 2006.
The two immediately decided to go see Maliki. As they were driving across the Green Zone, with Sadi Othman, Petraeus’s interpreter and counsel on Iraqi affairs, also in the car, Crocker recalled, “Dave and I just looked at each other, didn’t say anything—didn’t need to say anything—because we both knew that this was where the whole thing could spin out of control.” Upon their arrival at the prime minister’s office, Maliki told them the same thing. Everyone was terrified that this would kick off another round of sectarian fighting.
“It was a hard meeting,” recalled Othman. Maliki was furious. The prime minister complained that his commanders in Samarra had said they had control of the city and promised to him that the remains of the mosque would be protected. He worried that Shiites in the capital would soon be in the streets hunting Sunnis, burning their shops, homes, and mosques. That in turn might confirm to the Sunni Arab world what it had suspected all along about Maliki, that he was simply the head of the biggest Shiite gang in Iraq, not a real national leader who deserved diplomatic recognition.
Petraeus suggested sending in one Iraqi unit he knew that was trained and competent. But, as he knew, it was also 40 percent Sunni. Maliki resisted. Later that day, Maliki’s office would dispatch another more Shiite unit, the 4th Brigade of the 4th Division, that the Americans regarded as unready. “There was a big tug of war over that,” Petraeus said. Asked if he threatened to pull U.S. support for the operation, as some U.S. officers have claimed, Petraeus said, “I don’t know if I went that far, but I certainly raised it as a very serious concern. I am pretty sparing about ever saying that we are not going to support an operation of the importance of that one, [but] it was very clear that . . . we had very serious reservations about moving forward with a predominantly Shia, largely untrained, new unit that had a very low number of the leaders that it needed as well.”
The first two Iraqi units sent in weren’t ready to fight, Petraeus said. Some of them melted away rather than go into Samarra, a majority Sunni city. “It was unbelievably painful,” Petraeus said.
They also discussed whether to impose a nationwide curfew. Maliki said, “No, it’s going to be Baghdad, obviously up in Salahuddin, in Mosul,” but not anywhere else. The reason, he told the Americans, was “I don’t want to send the signal that we are panicking.”
That afternoon Maliki, Odierno, and Othman flew to Samarra. Upon arrival at the ruins of the mosque, Maliki fired some Iraqi commanders, Othman said.
Lt. Gen. Dubik, who had only been in the country a few weeks as the new overseer for training and advising Iraqi forces, also hurried to Samarra, where he was shocked. Months later, sitting in his Green Zone office late at night, he folded his arms and gazed up at the ceiling. “It was a harrowing day for me,” he recalled. “The first time I went up there it wasn’t chaos, but it was near. I thought, you got to be kidding me.” But he was impressed to see the minister of defense step in and personally reorganize the operation. “It improved over the following weeks.” Still mulling the memory, he folded his arms and again looked up. Overall, the battle was a huge learning experience for him, because his initial assessment was that the Iraqi military likely would fail—but it improved in a way he said he didn’t expect. “That was a big couple of weeks for me.”
Fourteen Sunni mosques were attacked in the days following the Samarra bombing, but after that, violence was no worse than usual. A full week later, Crocker began to relax a bit. “We just kind of took it day to day. I think it was probably day six or seven that I unclenched a little bit.” He had the sense that the Iraqis had looked into the abyss and turned away.
At Odierno’s headquarters, Maj. Kent Strader had a similar reaction. “You’re waiting for something bad to start happening”—he paused—“and then, nothing’s happening!” Intelligence officials began to speculate that the political atmosphere in Iraq was changing.
AN ADMIRAL IN THE HALLWAY
The battle of Samarra that never happened was one of three significant engagements Petraeus would face during the summer of 2007, events that would shape the next phase of the war. None of them came close to approximating a normal military campaign. Most important would be Petraeus’s confrontation with the U.S. Congress in September.
But well before that, he found himself engaged in a sharp and significant quarrel inside the U.S. military about
how quickly to reduce the numbers of American troops in Iraq and also when to make those cuts. It began in March, when Adm. William Fallon took over at Central Command, headquartered in Tampa, Florida, but with a forward base in Qatar. He was new to the region and unfamiliar with ground warfare, but he was one of the most senior officers in the U.S. military—and indeed one of the few veterans of the Vietnam War still on active duty. Petraeus, by contrast, was one of the first members of the post-Vietnam generation, taking his first duty assignment as a platoon leader in May 1975, days after the last Marine helicopter lifted off the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon and North Vietnamese troops crashed a tank through the gates of the Presidential Palace there. In 2007 Fallon had been an admiral for 13 years, having received his first star in October 1994, when David Petraeus was still a lieutenant colonel.
The Iraq war was the first extended campaign fought under the 1986 Goldwater Nichols Act, which reorganized the command structure for U.S. military operations, made the chairman of the Joint Chiefs the principal military adviser to the president and the defense secretary, and also cut the service chiefs out of combat operations. The law also made the “combatant commanders”—the chiefs of Centcom, European Command, Southern Command (for Central and South America), Pacific Command, and two specialized headquarters, Special Operations Command and Strategic Command (for nuclear weapons)—the powerful princes of the American military. Until Petraeus and Fallon, the top pair of U.S. commanders in the Iraq conflict—Franks, Abizaid, Sanchez, and Casey—had all been Army generals, operating as much under its culture as under the formal structure of the U.S. military. But with Fallon’s move to Centcom, for the first time, the regional commander, or “CinC,” was from a different service than the war commander, the officer actually in the country leading the effort. Formally speaking, Petraeus answered to Fallon. But in practice he reported to President Bush. Indeed, Petraeus probably had a more direct relationship with his president than any field commander in an American war had enjoyed since the Civil War, when Lincoln could summon a general to Washington or board the River Queen to steam down the Potomac and up the James and meet with Grant and Sherman at City Point, Virginia. Defense Secretary Gates, like Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s secretary of war, was welcome to listen.
But Fallon prided himself on being a strategic thinker, a sense he may have developed because there was little competition in that arena in the Navy, which in recent years had tended to be weak intellectually, aside from its elite counterterror force in Special Operations, which is practically a separate service. It is difficult, for example, to think of a senior Navy officer who has played a prominent role in shaping American strategy since 9/11, or of an active-duty Navy officer who has written a book or essay as influential as those produced by the Army’s Col. H. R. McMaster, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, and Lt. Col. John Nagl. There was some forewarning in his confirmation hearing that Fallon wouldn’t step aside simply because Petraeus was an Army general who talked weekly to the president while Fallon was a novice both in the region and in this type of war, and was arriving just after a new strategy had been hammered out. “I’m not going to hesitate to dive down and ask the tough questions if I don’t think we’re getting results,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee at that January session. “And that’s the key thing that’s missing in this entire program of late.” Just in case the senators didn’t get the message, he added later that day, “I am not a particularly patient man.”
Petraeus went out of his way to be respectful of Fallon, who had been shaped by the Navy, the most tradition-conscious of the armed services. “In e-mails and conversations he always ensures that he calls Admiral Fallon ‘boss’ or ‘sir,’” observed one Centcom official who watched the two interact. “This is a big point with Admiral Fallon as he has the Navy mentality of formality.”
In April, just weeks after taking command at Centcom, Fallon called into his office Gen. Barbero, who was preparing to replace Fastabend as Petraeus’s strategic adviser in Iraq. For about half an hour, the admiral held forth on what was wrong with the way the Iraq war was being conducted. The theme of Fallon’s lecture, Barbero recalled, was, “I think we have too many troops there, we have to relook this.” Barbero, who had been thinking about the Middle East since 1989, when he wrote his master’s thesis on the Iran-Iraq war, thought the admiral didn’t have his eye on the ball. What Petraeus needed, he thought, was help with regional influences on the Iraq war, such as intervention by Iran’s Quds Force. “What we didn’t need is someone to tell us what to do in Iraq, which is where we were” at that point, he said.
Fallon began by holding up troop requests that until then had been considered routine, such as for a company of engineers or some specialists in traumatic wounds to the brain. “We were putting in requests and getting fucked continuously,” recalled Fastabend. “Fallon’s default position was No. You had to prove why he was wrong.” After a lot of back and forth, the admiral would accede to the request, having made his point. To smooth the way, senior Centcom staffers began to send back channel notes to Baghdad, telling Petraeus’s subordinates what not to ask for, because they wouldn’t get it.
Fallon’s next step, in June, was to quietly send an emissary, Rear Adm. James “Sandy” Winnefeld Jr., to Iraq to review Petraeus’s strategy. It was a surprisingly inept move for Fallon to make. The strategy had been in place for just a few months, and was at the make or break point. If it didn’t work, it would be time not to revise it but probably to pull the plug on the war and begin planning a strategy to contain post-American Iraq. Also, Winnefeld was a career naval officer, out of step with the Iraq environment. “Why don’t we put a general in charge of a carrier strike group?” laughed Charlie Miller, who referred to the admiral as “the spy.” There were plenty of Army and Marine officers at Central Command whom Fallon might have sent to Baghdad. Winnefeld might bring a fresh view, but it was an ignorant one, painfully unaware of many of the bruising lessons learned by the Army and Marine Corps—let alone Iraqi civilians—over the previous four years. Nor was he steeped in counterinsurgency theory, as were all major U.S. commanders in Iraq by the summer of 2007. Fallon, inexplicably, thought he knew more about counterinsurgency than did Petraeus, telling Bob Woodward that the new manual was okay as far as it went but was outdated. Most unforgivably, Fallon, for all his emphasis on formality, didn’t seem to give people a heads-up, a violation of military courtesy that unnecessarily antagonized commanders in Baghdad. “What surprised me is I didn’t know he [Winnefeld] was here wandering around, for the longest time,” said Odierno. “When you have a two-star here for three weeks—that’s strange.”
Officers in Baghdad didn’t see Winnefeld, who had served as Fallon’s executive officer, as stupid. “You don’t get to be where he is by being a dumbass,” Rapp observed. But they didn’t find him intellectually honest in his mission. “He came here with a conclusion and was looking for evidence to fit above that final paragraph of recommendation in his report.”
Winnefeld’s proposed solution echoed Fallon’s inclination to withdraw the U.S. military from the fighting, and move completely into training of Iraqi forces. “Great idea, sir,” Rapp commented sarcastically. “Who’s gonna do it? And who’s gonna fight while those people train?” Fallon’s hope was to make the main mission of the remaining U.S. forces sealing the border to stop the flow of foreign influences into Iraq. Meanwhile, Special Operations troops would continue to go after al Qaeda in Iraq, and U.S. forces would draw down to 10 brigades during 2007—that is, halve the U.S. combat power in Iraq, not only going back to the pre-surge level of combat power almost as soon as the five brigades had all arrived, but then taking away another five brigades.
To officers in Baghdad, Winnefeld’s views amounted to a recommendation to dump everything that was beginning to work—the troop increase, the use of counterinsurgency tactics, and making the mission the protection of the population—and instead return to the failed policies of 2003-6, which in their view
had brought the United States perilously close to the edge of defeat in Iraq. His conclusions, said one senior officer, shaking his head, were “so simplistic.” This in turn deepened their unease with Fallon: This was his idea of helping out?
Fallon apparently liked what Winnefeld had to say. In midsummer, he sent word to Petraeus, recalled Barbero: Get ready for a change of mission this fall. Security was going to be downgraded as a goal, and the top task would be transition—that is, exactly what it had been until Odierno and Petraeus arrived. And as part of the change, a drawdown in forces would begin in the fall of 2007.
Petraeus sent word that he disagreed. He wanted to continue the mission. He offered some thoughts about the points at which future decisions could be made about the size of the U.S. troop presence.
“This wasn’t just a disagreement between flags, but a military command structure that was, in effect, fighting the president’s direction by nibbling away at the general he’d picked to carry out his mission,” retired Army Col. Bob Killebrew commented in reviewing this bureaucratic infighting. “By bucking Petraeus, he [Fallon] was bucking the commander in chief.” Fallon’s disruptive role was beginning to be talked about back in Washington. Eliot Cohen, who had joined the administration earlier in the year as counselor at the State Department, noticed this during his assessment trips in Iraq. “Fallon was just a disaster,” he concluded. “He left people seething. The Marines were saying, “We were trying to tell him what is happening in Ramadi, and he starts telling us.’” Petraeus had the same experience, with Fallon flying to Baghdad to tell him what was going on in Iraq.
Petraeus generally was open during a series of interviews done for this book in 2007 and 2008, but the subject of his relationship with Fallon was one area where he not only grew close-mouthed but testy. “Look, this isn’t a soap opera,” he snapped in January 2008, showing more anger than is his wont. “This is a deadly serious endeavor and we talked about things in a deadly serious way, but not some kind of great emotion.” He dismissed a rumor circulating at the time that Fallon had called him “chickenshit.” Among other things, he noted, he wouldn’t stand for it. “It’s bullshit,” he said, “If some fucking guy told me that, I would walk out of the office. I’d say, ‘Here, you got it, take over.’ ”
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