The Gamble

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Fallon declined to be interviewed for this book. But in a previous interview with me, in December 2007, he conceded that he might occasionally have stepped on subordinates’ toes. “If you’re trying to lead,” he explained, “you’re never going to have everyone wanting to do the same thing.” Fallon never seemed to grasp that even though Petraeus was technically his subordinate, the general held all the cards. As long as Petraeus, Odierno, and Crocker held a united position, and Keane was in the background conveying their views to Cheney, they outweighed not just Fallon but the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff as well. As one of Petraeus’s aides put it, “If there is a beauty contest between the chiefs, Fallon, Casey, and I don’t know who else—well, Petraeus wins.”

  As the friction between Fallon and Petraeus went on for months, some officers in Baghdad wondered whether they were getting the support they deserved and indeed needed at a very difficult phase of the war. This would especially hit them when they went home for leave or consultations. “You go to the Pentagon, and there’s no sense of a war going on, there’s no sense of everybody surging,” said Charlie Miller. “People ride the bus to work, ride the bus home, and go on. There’s been no inclination to accept institutional risk—like shutting the War College for a year, and sending the colonels out here as advisers.”

  Nor did Fallon seem to grasp that with the ascendancy of Petraeus and Odierno during the winter of 2006-7, a generational shift had taken place in the war. Petraeus was the first officer to serve as top commander in Iraq who had fought in the war on a previous tour. So had Odierno. And many of the officers around them had commanded brigades or battalions on their own previous tours. They had been bloodied. They had been targeted for death by insurgents and militias. They had looked men in the eye and sent them to their deaths. For the first time in the war, younger officers could feel that they were being led by men who had some sense of what life was like for soldiers out in the streets, palm groves, and deserts of Iraq. “These are people who have moved forward through a very, very tough crucible,” said Abizaid, who had known them for years. They were far less inclined than their predecessors to tolerate peacetime protocol or bureaucratic chickenshit. And that was what they thought they were getting from Fallon in the spring and summer of 2007.

  There also was a growing suspicion that while Fallon was meddling in Petraeus’s arena, he was neglecting his own responsibilities, with the result that Petraeus had to take on some of those tasks. Maj. Rayburn, who had worked for Central Command, for McMaster, and for Petraeus, and also had helped devise the American Enterprise Institute plan for a surge, offered as one example working with the Gulf States to lay the groundwork for their support of political compromise in Iraq. It was something that Fallon should have been doing, but it was being left to Petraeus. “It seems to me he’s had to do the job of the Centcom commander,” he concluded. “There’s a vacuum up there.”

  Dubik, one of the most senior generals in Iraq in 2007, argued that the friction between Petraeus and Fallon wasn’t entirely a bad thing. “There’s a healthy tension that comes from an alternative path being considered. It adds to the intellectual energy. I think both sides grew, and I think it helped Petraeus and Crocker prepare for the congressional hearings in September. It sharpened their thinking.”

  That was not the dominant view. One senior intelligence officer in Iraq called Fallon’s attempt in the summer of 2007 to rewrite the strategy a “disaster.” Mansoor, Petraeus’s executive officer, just shook his head: “Boy, that was weird.”

  But it carried serious implications for the future conduct of the war. As the summer went on, it appeared that the Joint Chiefs might be closing ranks with Fallon against Petraeus. They were growing impatient, pushing for a swifter end to the surge and more emphasis on transitioning to Iraqi security forces. They also tried to shut down Petraeus’s back channel through Keane to the White House. In August, Gen. Casey, the chief of the Army, told Petraeus to back away from Keane. “You need to understand that Jack is perceived by the Chiefs as going around them,” Casey told Petraeus.

  Petraeus wasn’t buying it. “The president should be able to get advice from anyone he wants,” he said, according to a senior officer who heard him express his strong views on the subject.

  Petraeus’s direct line to the president made it difficult to slap him down. But his support could be nibbled away. That summer, Keane, who had worked to bolster support for Petraeus among White House aides, ran into Gen. Casey at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in northwest Washington, D.C. Casey was seething. “We feel—the Chiefs feel—you are way too out in front in advocating a policy for which you are not accountable,” Casey said to Keane, in a conversation first reported by Bob Woodward in his 2008 book, The War Within. “We’re accountable. You’re not accountable. And that’s a problem.” It was a particularly fatuous argument for Casey to mount, because there had been extremely little accountability for military officers—or others—in the Iraq war. Gen. Tommy Franks had designed an inept war plan and then retired as the insurgency erupted in the summer of 2003, only to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, along with two other officials who had made grave mistakes, former CIA chief George Tenet and former occupation chief L. Paul Bremer. Other Army generals had taken actions that had enflamed the insurgency, only to receive promotions at the ends of their tours. Indeed, Eliot Cohen, among others, pointed to the lack of accountability for generals as a major flaw in the conduct of the war. There seemed to be no relationship between battlefield performance by officers and subsequent promotions and assignments. By helping White House officials ask tough questions about the conduct of the war, Keane was injecting accountability into the system—and that was making the generals uncomfortable. “I always felt as a professional military officer that if he felt he had something to offer to the mission, he ought to have called me or contacted me in some way,” Casey said. “He never did.”

  SUCCESS ON THE BATTLEFIELD

  The summer of 2007 gave Petraeus the trump card he needed to prevail over Fallon. By late June and early July there was a new feeling emerging in parts of the American military across central Iraq. Despite the hard hits taken during their counterattack, there was a sense of having regained the initiative. That is an extraordinary accomplishment—typically, once one loses the strategic initiative in war, it is difficult, if not impossible, to regain it.

  The effects first starting appearing at the bottom and began filtering upward. Capt. Keirsey, the commander of Baker Company, operating in southern Baghdad, began in the spring to notice “a shift in the mentality of the Iraqi populace.” In the beginning of the year, his men were attacked repeatedly every day. During the last quarter of 2007, they would not be attacked once. “The populace went from being entirely complicit with the insurgency to being supporters of our efforts,” he said later.

  Overall, no clear improvement could be discerned. In fact, violence was increasing in many areas in reaction to the new presence of U.S. troops. But even as that happened, soldiers like Keirsey were noticing, here and there, that the mood of the people, the vibe in the air, was different—there is no more precise way to put it. One day in early spring a senior intelligence officer argued in a Baghdad meeting that despite the rise in U.S. causalities, the situation was improving radically. “When everyone was saying it was worse, I said, ‘Hey, this is working,’” recalled this officer, who until then had been known for his dour assessment of the situation. “I said, ‘We’ve turned the corner.’” He was greeted with disbelief. No, he persisted. “We are seeing it in interrogations.” Sunni fighters were reporting fatigue and disappointment. Their anger against the Americans seemed to have dissipated.

  “Let’s be careful,” Petraeus admonished him. Everyone at the table knew that the American effort in Iraq had been plagued for years by assessments that overly accentuated the positive, to the detriment of understanding what actually was happening.

  In past years this intelligence official had been se
nt to the White House to deliver his dark, contrary views of the Iraq war. Now, still contrary, he was ready to stand by his more hopeful evaluation—and once again he would find it unwelcome. “No,” he responded, “the enemy can no longer achieve his objectives.”

  Another veteran intelligence official who was familiar with his longtime pessimism about the war and had heard about his conversation ran into him in Iraq that fall and asked, seriously, “Have you gotten Baghdad-itis? Are you just a cheerleader or do you really believe things are better?” The answer, of course, was the latter.

  In April, Ambassador Crocker went to Doura, the same south Baghdad neighborhood whose devastation had so shocked Petraeus two months earlier. There he saw theory turned into practice: that is, that having an American soldier on the street corner would have a different political effect than having several Iraqi soldiers in the same spot. In response to the new presence of U.S. troops in the neighborhood, about three dozen shops had reopened. When he spoke to the shopkeepers, he recalled, “They said, ‘You’re back.’ I said, ‘We’re back because you’re here.’” They also told him that they didn’t trust the Iraqi National Police, which had acquired the reputation of being a Shiite militia in uniform, and still weren’t confident of the Iraqi army, but felt that the U.S. troops treated them decently. “Damn, this might work,” Crocker thought. By midsummer, he would be confident that it was, at least in improving security.

  May proved to be an odd month, with contradictory signals: U.S. military deaths peaked at 126 lost, with more than another 600 wounded, yet there were also some signs of improvement. “There was a real clash of the data,” said Lt. Col. Douglas Ollivant, a planner for the 1st Cavalry Division who had been a prominent advocate of moving troops out into the population. “The casualty statistics were godawful. But it began to feel like it was working. We could sense the progress before it was measurable—we could feel it.” For the first time, he was getting upbeat messages from officers out in the streets, he said, with company commanders calling to say, “This is different, people are finally coming to us, and telling us what we need to know.”

  In June, Barbero went on a foot patrol in Baqubah. “I was talking to company commanders, second-tour guys”—that is, officers seasoned enough to judge events on the ground—“and they were saying, ‘We’re beginning to see something different. The Sunnis are rejecting al Qaeda”’ He came away thinking, “Hey, this has got a chance.”

  By midsummer, as the full surge took effect, with a total of about 155,000 U.S. troops in the country, the signs were becoming measurable. “It began cascading,” said Ollivant.

  Sadi Othman began to think things were changing when he was in a market one midsummer day in Yusifiyah, one of the hard little towns just southwest of Baghdad, along the fault line between Shia and Sunni, an area, he noted, where a few months earlier “you couldn’t go in a tank.” He strayed away from the official party and its bodyguards to buy some figs. An aide to Petraeus took a photograph of him alone in the market and e-mailed it to him. Looking at the photo that night, he gulped: This was the street where just a few months before, “they used to dump bodies and decapitate people.”

  Galloucis, the hawk-nosed, bald MP commander who had been so gloomy earlier in the year, began to see improvements in the quality of Iraqi forces immediately after a Baghdad Operational Command was established in March to coordinate their efforts, which had a “surge” effect of its own. “By July, you started seeing Iraqi forces out on the street—Iraqi army, local police, National Police. There was people all over the friggin’ place. Over time, the attacks, the deaths, the found bodies, all started going down. You started to feel better.”

  On Baghdad’s northwest fringe, Maj. Michaelis, the operations officer of the 1st Brigade of the 1st Cavalry, began to notice in July a change in the “atmospherics” around the outposts the unit had established, in “the engagement we were getting from people who had been ignoring us, or had been hostile.”

  For some Iraqis, the sign of improving security was a decline in the price of cooking gas, from $22 a tank, the price charged by some Shiite militias, to $2, the normal cost. Suddenly, with the Americans nearby and saying they would stay there, it no longer seemed like a bargain to pay high prices in exchange for militia protection against Sunni death squads.

  Returning in midsummer from ten days of leave in London, Emma Sky was struck by the security improvement described in the military’s morning briefing. But, “as a matter of principle,” she had a policy of not believing anything she heard in official briefings. “I don’t believe statistics,” she explained. “Also, I don’t believe violence can stop violence. I didn’t have confidence in these population security measures, like these big concrete barriers.” She wanted to hear it from Iraqis. In late July, she said, to her surprise, Iraqis began telling her that American troops were protecting their communities. “Around Baghdad, we started seeing whole neighborhoods start to revive. We see neighborhoods start to sign agreements, and the government starting to bring in services. You started seeing ink spots—and ink spots spreading.”

  Spec. Mark Heinl, a soldier posted in Doura, told an officer from the Center for Army Lessons Learned that the new posture of living among the people was working. “I’ve built real relationships and care about these people. And they care about me. . . . I’ve taught myself Arabic and can converse pretty well. Many people call on my private cell to let me know of a problem or something bad happening. At first, most of the ISVs [Iraqi Security Volunteers] were bad folks. But they realized AQI lied to them. Now they are willing to work with us as long as they see progress.” His conclusion: “This could work.”

  Lt. Jacob Carlisle, his platoon leader, said that Petraeus’s new manual on counterinsurgency had changed his thinking. “We had read the COIN manual while at the IZ [International Zone, or Green Zone], and now it really began to come to life in our minds. We started to treat the people differently.” He added, “You must get to know the people. It’s only been recently that people started waving to us and treating us like people. It took us treating them like that first.”

  For years, one of the major killers of U.S. troops had been attacks on supply convoys, both with bombs and with small arms such as rocket-propelled grenades. In response, U.S. commanders had outfitted trucks with armor and machine guns, but enemy tactics also improved, with the result that the number of attacks actually increased fairly steadily in 2005 and 2006. They peaked early in 2007. In January and February of that year, the chances of a civilian supply convoy being attacked was 1 in 5. By December, it would drop to 1 in 33. (And by April of 2008, it would be 1 in 100.) Also, the attacks were becoming less effective. “By the end of 2007, less sophisticated forms of IEDs—such as command wire-and pressure-plate detonated devices—had become the most common, possibly indicating a degradation in the supply networks or ability to coordinate and operate of the adversary,” the Congressional Research Service reported.

  Reflecting such trends, in the second half of 2007, U.S. combat deaths declined steadily. After peaking in May at 126, there were 93 KIAs in June, when the surge troops all were in country, then 66 in July, 55 in August, and—eventually—just 14 in December.

  Also, the Army’s annual survey of the mental health of troops in Iraq found that morale had rebounded sharply in 2007. Despite the hard fighting of the first half of the year—one-third said they had been exposed to sniper fire during their current tour of duty—the researchers found fewer reporting being depressed, anxious, or acutely stressed. “The surge hammered us at first but over the past couple of months it seems to be working,” one soldier told the mental health researchers. “Things are calmer now.” Soldiers also reported being more satisfied with the units’ leadership, cohesion, and military readiness. “If we were a football team, we are just now having a winning record,” another soldier stated.

  One especially strong feeling was that of relief in not having to constantly keep “retaking” cities such as Sa
marra and Fallujah, which had become almost annual events. As a third soldier said, “I understand the surge and I believe the surge. I went into Fallujah three times and I could never understand why we kept having to retake things.”

  There also was an intense debate going on inside the U.S. military about whether al Qaeda in Iraq had been defeated as an entity. The cascade effect that Capt. Cook had seen in one town was being replicated across central Iraq. In every city but Mosul, to which al Qaeda fighters were retreating, the terrorist organization was far weaker than it had been a year earlier.

  Still, it was a near-run thing. In early August, just weeks before he would have to return to Congress to deliver his assessment of the state of the war, Petraeus began to think the surge was working. He later would insist that he always had thought it would, but conceded that actually doing it was a far tougher proposition. That is, he had believed that getting troops out with the mission of protecting the population would have a strong positive effect. “We were seeing the facts validate the academic proposition. The COIN manual has it—but it’s one thing to write it, another thing to operationalize it.” He began to write another letter to his troops that would say, “my sense is that we have achieved tactical momentum and wrested the initiative from our enemies in a number of areas of Iraq.” Coming from the careful Petraeus, that was a strong statement of optimism.