The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq

by Thomas E. Ricks

  The court-martial took an illuminating turn: The accused cited the aggressive tone set by their brigade commander, Col. Michael Steele, whose ham-fisted approach long had raised eyebrows in the Army. Retired Army Col. James Hallums, one of his predecessors in commanding the same unit, and himself a veteran of much combat, commented, “The supermacho image that Steele projected permeated his unit, and in my opinion, led directly to atrocities.” When the brigade deployed, Steele, whose role in the fighting in Somalia in 1993 was captured in the book and film Black Hawk Down, had given a speech that was captured on videotape by documentarians following the unit. “Anytime you fight, you always kill the other sonofabitch,” he had told his soldiers. “Do not let him live today so he will fight you tomorrow. Kill him today.” When you go to Iraq, he added, “You’re the predator.”

  The fight would be won, Steele told his men, by those who “get violent the fastest.” The counterinsurgency manual then being written advised almost the opposite: “Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is.” The manual also would recommend that prisoners be treated kindly, the better to obtain information from them and perhaps even get them to change sides. Steele was from the old school, telling his soldiers that ensuring that prisoners were shaded from the sun and given water was “bullshit.”

  The documentary, made by John Laurence, a veteran war correspondent, captured how one of Steele’s sergeants interpreted that approach. Speaking to his soldiers before a raid, the sergeant instructed them, “We are not bringing anyone back alive.”

  BY MID-2006 insurgents were detonating about 1,000 roadside bombs every week, according to the U.S. Central Command. Much of the U.S. effort was focused on countering those attacks. Meanwhile, large numbers of Iraqis were being slaughtered almost daily. Insurgents who later changed sides would report that during 2006, primacy in their movement shifted from former members of Saddam Hussein’s regime, some of whom were running low on cash, to al Qaeda, which “came in with a lot of money and bought away the young men,” reported Maj. Joel Rayburn, an intelligence officer who would later work for Petraeus.

  On May 7, car bombs killed about 30 people in the Shiite Muslim holy city of Karbala, 60 miles southwest of Baghdad. One of the car bombs was heading to a major mosque when it exploded in traffic—an echo of the Samarra attack 10 weeks earlier. On the same day, 51 bodies were found in Baghdad, handcuffed, blindfolded, and shot. A week later, 9 bombs detonated in the capital, killing 37. Six days later, a pickup truck loaded with explosives blew up in a crowd of day laborers in Sadr City, the huge slum on the eastern side of Baghdad. Called “Saddam City” until the American invasion, it was almost immediately renamed for the father of Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric. It became the heart of the son’s growing power. The bomb that day killed or wounded 99 people. Also, 6 policemen were killed by a bomb in the town of Qaim, and police found 40 bodies.

  The slide into anarchy accelerated at the end of May after Nouri al-Maliki, a second-tier Shiite politician who was the grandson of a pre-Saddam minister of education, became the compromise pick for prime minister, ending months of stalemate between Shiite leaders. Gen. Chiarelli, the number two 2 U.S. commander in Iraq at the time, argued later that the U.S. effort went off track not because of February’s Golden Dome Mosque bombing but because of the six months of drift that occurred when the elections didn’t quickly lead to the selection of a prime minister. During that time, he said, Americans kept saying that the government, when it formed, would be a force for reconciliation. “We had said it so long, we believed it,” he said, the regret evident in his voice. Instead, he explained, the selection of Maliki may have been the starting gun for a small civil war because the Shiites no longer felt they needed to be on their best behavior with the Americans. They finally held power, and also had the Americans backing them up. So why hold back?

  “All hell broke loose,” Chiarelli recalled. On May 30, another 51 people were killed in bombings. Inexplicably, American officials blithely continued to talk about drawing down the U.S. troop presence and turning over control of security to Iraqi forces. Such talk begged the question: If well-equipped and well-trained American troops couldn’t control the situation, why would a new, divided, and distrusted Iraqi police and army be able to do any better?

  In the following 12 months, the Army’s 24th Transportation Battalion sent over 400 convoys north from Kuwait and across Iraq, and was hit 170 times. “Every time you left the gate, it was a greater than one-in-three chance that you were going to get hit,” said Maj. Dan Williamson, the battalion’s executive officer.

  The U.S. intelligence community warned at this time that a cycle of “self-sustaining violence” had begun in Iraq, recalled Feaver, the NSC aide. As criticism of the U.S. strategy mounted, he added, “I was finding it harder to answer these critiques.”

  What was happening was that the “strategic edifice” of the American effort in Iraq was collapsing, Col. Peter Mansoor, Petraeus’s executive officer, later observed. But, soft-spoken in his steel-rimmed glasses and short graying hair, he added with dry underestimation, “It took a few months longer to realize it.”

  RETIRED GENERALS VS. “THE DECIDER”

  Back in Washington, the feeling of deterioration in the war was intensifying. One Pentagon official recalled the dysfunctional dynamic of the Bush administration that spring. “The president would say, ‘Get this done,’ and leave the room,” he recalled. “And then Rumsfeld would start squabbling with Condi—‘We’re not gonna secure your PRTs!”’—a reference to the State Department-led Provincial Reconstruction Teams that were at the heart of the strategy of rebuilding the economy of Iraq from the bottom up in order to improve security and so eventually reduce the American military presence. His thought on Rumsfeld at that point, he said, was, “Well, you fucking idiot, that’s your ticket out of Iraq.”

  Officially, all was going well. “Iraq is making steady progress in meeting the president’s short-term and medium-term security goals,” said a bizarrely cheerful assessment of Iraq released by the Bush administration in April. The elections and subsequent security operations had led to “a political process that now includes all of Iraq’s major communities for the first time.”

  But behind the scenes, a rift was developing between senior commanders in Baghdad and their bosses back in Washington about how to see the war. “It was clear to me that it had shifted from an insurgency against us to a struggle for power, that it wasn’t any longer totally about us, it was about them,” Gen. Casey said in 2008 as he looked back at that time. He was sitting in his Pentagon office under a portrait of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, the Old Testament patriarch of today’s Army. When he sought to convey that sense of an altered war to officials at the Pentagon and White House, he got blank stares. “We tried until we were blue in the face to get folks [in Washington] to understand that the struggle had fundamentally changed. . . . I always felt I wasn’t conveying it in a way that people could grasp it.”

  Officials at the White House were likewise beginning to lose faith in their military interlocutors. “We could just see the Samarra thing spiraling, and no progress on getting a government,” recalled Feaver, who had become one of the key NSC staffers working on Iraq issues. “As we see the situation eroding, there’s a growing question: Do we have the right strategy, is it going to work? And is it time for Rumsfeld to go? This is at the White House staff level—this is people talking at the water cooler. The nub of this is, who can replace him?”

  The continuing lack of realism in official statements was one of the factors that precipitated the “revolt of the generals,” which really was just a few retired officers going public with concerns, albeit ones that had grown fairly widespread in their peer group. The wave of criticism began on March 19, when retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who had been the first overseer of the Iraqi military training effort, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times that essentially made the Army’s case against Rumsfeld. More troops were need
ed in Iraq, the senior military officers around Rumsfeld were too pliant, and the defense secretary was “incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically,” he wrote. There wasn’t much new in these assertions. Their significance was that they were made by a general who had been on active duty in Iraq. If Bush was simply heeding the advice of his generals, as he had so often asserted, then why was this one calling for his defense secretary to be fired?

  The next officer to jump Rumsfeld’s ship was retired Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, who went public with a similar critique in Time magazine. Like Eaton, he had been on active duty during the run-up to the war, serving in the key position of operations director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Arguing that the Iraq war was a mistake, he took aim at the entire Bush administration, which he blamed for a series of failures. Among them were distorting intelligence, micromanaging the war, alienating allies, failing to retain the Iraqi army, and denying that an insurgency existed. Again, this came not from any one of a thousand retired officers, but from someone who had seen Rumsfeld up close.

  Other retired generals decided it was time to speak out. The third blow came from another officer with credibility gained from firsthand experience, both in the Pentagon and in Iraq. Retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste had been the senior military assistant to Paul Wolfowitz, who as deputy secretary of defense had been one of the leaders of the drive to war. Batiste then had become commander of the 1st Infantry Division, leading it to fight in Iraq in 2004-5. It also was widely known that he had been offered a promotion to lieutenant general to return to Iraq as the number two officer there but had declined because he no longer wished to serve under Rumsfeld. “I think we need a fresh start” at the top of the Pentagon, Batiste said. “We need leadership up there that respects the military as they expect the military to respect them. And that leadership needs to understand teamwork.”

  Reporters soon found more generals willing to criticize the administration. Retired Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, who had commanded the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq, laid responsibility for the Abu Ghraib scandal at Rumsfeld’s feet, saying it was the result of top-level pressure to step up interrogations. Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni and retired Maj. Gen. John Riggs, who previously had questioned the handling of the war, now were recast as members of a growing group of dissident officers. Riggs made the point that three years into a war that was intended to end in weeks or months, it was growing increasingly difficult to believe the Bush administration’s explanations of events. “I think they’ve made fools of themselves, and totally underestimated what would be needed for a sustained conflict,” he said.

  Rumsfeld’s response was to sidestep the substance of the criticism and instead belittle the critics. Rather than respond to the fact that people who had seen him operate firsthand were offering heartfelt—if angry and tardy—commentary, he acted as if they were a few inevitable if inexplicable malcontents. “I don’t know how many generals there have been in the last five years that have served on the United States armed services—hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. And there are several who have opinions. And there’s nothing wrong with people having opinions. And I think one ought to expect that. When you’re involved in something that’s controversial, as certainly this war is, one ought to expect that.” That anodyne comment was fundamentally dishonest because it didn’t answer the nagging question. Nor did Rumsfeld’s dismissiveness serve his president well. Bush had been saying since the start of the war that he relied on the judgment of his generals, and these were generals whose opinions mattered because of their personal experience in Iraq or with Rumsfeld. To swipe aside their collective judgment could only deepen the public’s lack of faith in Bush and those around him.

  The generals’ revolt may have been most significant for the irritated response it provoked from a peeved President Bush a few days later. At the end of a press conference to announce the appointment of a new director of the Office of Management and Budget, Bush was asked about talk that Rumsfeld might be forced out by the officers’ criticism. “I don’t appreciate the speculation about Don Rumsfeld,” Bush said. “He’s doing a fine job.” As for the generals, he said, “I listen to all voices, but mine’s the final decision. . . . I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I’m the decider, and I decide what is best. And what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense.” With that awkwardly put comment, Bush gave Rumsfeld another seven months in office.

  Just as the generals’ revolt was simmering down, the killings at Haditha the previous November erupted into a major news story. Investigations had been under way since February and had intensified after Time magazine ran a thorough article in March that cast doubt on official accounts. But the incident jumped onto page one because of comments made during a press conference by Representative John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and a Marine veteran of Vietnam who had turned strongly against the Iraq war. Midway through the conference, he blurted out that the incident was “much worse” than was understood. “Our troops overreacted because of pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood,” he said. In the following days, amid talk of another Abu Ghraib scandal that would inflict a strategic wound on the war effort, other members of Congress used less inflammatory language but expressed grave concern. The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Michael Hagee, flew to Iraq to address his troops.

  Andrew Krepinevich, who had written the Foreign Affairs article that laid out much of the strategy that the United States eventually would adopt, but much later, observed that the center of gravity in Iraq was the Iraqi population. The task is to convince the population that you will protect them, and also that you will win. So, he concluded, allowing an incident such as Haditha to occur, and then dismissing it as routine, as the Marine chain of command had done, was tantamount to “losing a major battle.”

  Oddly, the revelations and allegations about the killings provoked less reaction in Iraq—but not for reasons that were good for the American cause. Some Iraqis said they hadn’t heard the news because they lacked electricity. “We live in darkness,” said Muhanned Jasim, an antiques seller in Baghdad. At any rate, he added, “What’s the big news about Iraqis getting killed? We’re powerless to change the situation.”

  As Ghasan Jayih, a pharmacist, ruefully and correctly observed, “It’s normal now to hear twenty-five Iraqis are killed in one day.”

  Feaver, whose official title on the staff of the National Security Council was Special Advisor for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform, thought it was time to confront the president with the bad news. The cheerful son of a Lehigh University classics professor, Feaver himself was a political scientist with a full professorship waiting for him back at Duke University, which gave him a bit of freedom. He was in no position to oust Rumsfeld, but he could and did write memos to the national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, urging that the president hear from some sympathetic but worried outsiders. Feaver and a fellow staffer put that meeting together for a day in June at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the hills of Maryland. One of those on his list was his old friend Eliot Cohen, whom he had known since both were at Harvard in the early 1980s.

  But then Feaver’s plan was undercut by an unexpected stream of good news arriving from Iraq. It all had started weeks earlier with the arrest in Jordan of Ziad Khalaf al-Kerbouly, a Jordanian customs worker, who confessed that he had helped smuggle cash and supplies to Abel Rahman, who was believed to be the spiritual adviser to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq. Rahman also was thought to be the liaison between the Iraqi Sunni religious leadership and Zarqawi. U.S. Special Operations teams then began using his contact information to find Rahman and monitor his movements. After three weeks of watching, in the late afternoon of June 7, the spiritual adviser was tracked to a farmhouse in a palm grove in the village of Hibhib, about 35 miles north of Baghdad. U.S. forces went on high alert because Rahman had performed certain tasks—the specifics
were never disclosed by the U.S. government—that he usually did before meeting with the terrorist leader. An F-16 jet that had been refueling was dispatched to the area. At 6:12 P.M., its pilot released two 500-pound laser-guided bombs that obliterated the hideout. American troops came upon Zarqawi as he lay near the rubble. He was suffocating as his lungs, torn and bruised by the bombs’ blast waves, ceased to function. He died at 7:04. It was a surprisingly swift and merciful end for the man who was believed to have been behind much of the car bombing of Iraqi civilians in the preceding weeks and months, attacks that had killed and maimed hundreds of innocent men, women, and children. Soldiers from a military intelligence unit found not only Islamic religious material, as they had expected, but also a copy of the May 2nd issue of the Arabic edition of Newsweek.

  A MISSED CHANCE AT CAMP DAVID

  In June 2006, the presidential meeting with those sympathetic war critics came together at Camp David, atop a ridge in the Maryland foothills just southwest of the Gettysburg battlefield. Eliot Cohen, Michael Vickers, Fred Kagan, and Robert Kaplan—the first three men, smart national security experts; the last, an influential journalist—were generally supportive of the war but critical of its conduct. They were invited to tell the president how it might be better run.

  Kagan went to the meeting hoping that it would be “a major turning point.” He had believed for years that the war was being mishandled. “Doing the right thing the wrong way” was the phrase that came to characterize the views of his faction of hawks who thought that the decision to invade Iraq had been correct but who were troubled by the U.S. performance since the fall of Baghdad. “Do we have enough troops?” he asked at the meeting.

  Cohen, who on the advice of Feaver had given up his customary bow tie for the meeting, agreed that this wasn’t the time to discuss troop cuts, as the generals were doing, but thought Kagan was fiddling too much with the tactical level of operations and wanted the president instead to focus on strategy. “You probably need more people, but the real question is what you do with them,” he said. He also urged the president to get the rest of the U.S. government beyond the military more seriously engaged in the effort in Iraq. Cohen knew that Bush had read his Supreme Command. He wanted to make Bush think about how to deal with his generals—and consider replacing some. For him, the heart of the matter was “different commanders and a different approach.” After the meeting, he would lash himself for not hitting this point as hard as he should have. Also, he said, “You know, the Army is in worse shape than you think.” Bush didn’t respond. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, also listening, squirmed a bit. Pace had proven a weak chairman, seemingly unwilling to stand up to Rumsfeld when other generals thought he should and instead trying to simply ease the discord at the Pentagon between uniformed military and its civilian overseers. He had a reputation for being a good and decent man, but too pliant. His accomplishment may have been of another sort—keeping the Joint Chiefs from going off the reservation when they split with the president later in the year over whether to change the strategy in the war.