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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Maj. Gen. Michael Barbero, who at the time was the J-33, the director of current operations for the staff of the Joint Chiefs, recalled that during the fall of 2006, Keane “was the one driving the planning.” Asked if Keane effectively was acting as director of the Joint Staff—that is, a crucial but low-profile slot—Barbero responded quickly that Keane was playing a far more elevated role. “No, like the chairman” of the Joint Chiefs, he said—meaning the highest military officer of the land. “He was a key player, and he was saying, ‘We’ve got to win this thing.’ ”

  Keane’s unusual journey to the center of American military policy making commenced on August 3, 2006, a hot, sticky day typical of the Washington summer. Keane was at home in McLean, a pleasant Virginia suburb. That evening, while the temperature was still in the nineties, he went downstairs to his easy chair in his basement den, put his feet up on the ottoman in front of his big-screen television, and keyed in C-SPAN, which was carrying a hearing on the Iraq war that been held earlier in the day by the Senate Armed Services Committee. Keane had come to believe that “it was obvious that we had serious problems, that the strategy wasn’t working.” He wanted to see if Rumsfeld, Pace, and Abizaid, the three witnesses at the hearing, had anything new or different to offer.

  Keane had been worrying about Iraq since his first visit there, in the summer of 2003. Then the vice chief of staff of the Army, he had left the country feeling deeply concerned and a bit guilty. “When I flew out, I was really troubled,” he recalled. “I knew the Army collectively was not prepared to deal with irregular warfare. I said to my guys, we simply are not prepared to do this.” He began to think about how to make amends.

  Of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers then on active duty, he was one of the handful with firsthand knowledge of what the Army had done wrong in Vietnam, where he had been a platoon leader and a company commander in the 101st Airborne. When he left Vietnam and got back to Fort Benning, Georgia, he began reading history to figure out what he should have been doing. “I and others came to the conclusion that we had been conducting a conventional war against an irregular enemy.”

  By the end of that war, he said, the Army had learned how to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign. “We’d studied the history, we’d learned the doctrine, and some of us had the experience,” he remembered. After the war, the Army “purged” that knowledge, he said. But “I kept the memory, especially the idea that you must protect the population.” That idea would become the core of Keane’s 2006 campaign to change the American approach to the war in Iraq.

  Big Jack Keane talks like the native New Yorker he is, with a working-class tone that he brought with him from the Lower East Side and Washington Heights, the two neighborhoods where he was raised. “I think New York is such a magical city because it is a place where, truly, immigrants get started, and then immigrants come and go, and different cultures are there, so it all transitions,” he said in an interview. With his accent, big hands, square face, and hair combed straight back, Keane could easily be mistaken for an old-style member of the New York City Police Department. Indeed, he bears a passing resemblance to the corrupt police captain shot by Michael Corleone in an Italian restaurant in The Godfather. Underneath that old-school appearance, Keane is crackerjack smart, and extremely articulate, often in a concise, blunt way. Most importantly, and unusually, he is an independent and clear thinker.

  He didn’t go public with his concerns in 2003, but after he retired he began to share them privately with others. He had gotten to know Henry Kissinger, an adopted son of Washington Heights, when both served on the Defense Policy Board, and in 2005, he began a series of conversations with the former secretary of state. One day that year, Kissinger, preparing to visit President Bush, asked Keane, “What is the military strategy to defeat the insurgency?”

  Keane paused, then said, “We don’t have a military strategy to defeat the insurgency.”

  “Jack, we will lose,” Kissinger replied. As Keane remembered it, Kissinger meant that there would have to be a political solution, but it would come about only if enabled by an effective military strategy. So, Keane said, “if we don’t have a military strategy to defeat them—and by defeat we meant change the behavior and attitude of the insurgent—then we would lose.”

  As Iraq grew bloodier, Keane watched and worried more. “I knew that the violence was worse in ’04 than it was in ’03, worse in ’05 than it was in ’04. And now the wheels were coming off and it was going off the charts.” Yet American strategy, inexplicably, wasn’t changing—“I also knew at the time that we are still on a mission to transition to the Iraqis despite this.” His worry was that the American strategy didn’t protect the people and instead remained focused on transitioning to Iraqi forces, who could not protect the population either, so staying the course really meant riding a losing strategy into defeat.

  Other insiders were also becoming persuaded that the course in Iraq was a loser. In May 2006, after five months of wrangling, a new Iraqi government was finally assembled, to be led by a compromise candidate, Maliki, to the relief of American officials in Baghdad and Washington. But in the following weeks, it became clear that this political movement wasn’t leading to a lessening of violence—which was the keystone of the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq—but rather increasing it. “At this point, the strategy couldn’t explain what was happening,” said Fred Kagan, the American Enterprise Institute analyst who was a member of the group that met with the president at Camp David in June. “I think it [the strategy] became visibly bankrupt” at that point.

  One day in the summer, Keane got a phone call from Adm. William “Fox” Fallon, the U.S. commander for the Pacific. As Keane remembers it, Fallon began by saying, “Jack, I just came out of Iraq. Could you help me to understand what the fuck is going on? . . . Casey is up to his ears in quicksand and he doesn’t even know it. This thing is going down around him.”

  For Keane, the final straw came on that August night as he settled before the television and watched that tape of Rumsfeld, Pace, and Abizaid appearing before the Senate Armed Services panel earlier that day.

  “Despite the many challenges, progress does continue to be made in Iraq,” Abizaid had reassured the senators. That could be understood as code for: Get off my back, we are going to stay on the same path of passing the mission of providing security to Iraqi forces. Indeed, he said he could “imagine” additional U.S. troop reductions later in the year.

  Abizaid, a bright, witty officer who spoke Arabic, had been the great hope of the Army when he replaced Tommy R. Franks as chief of Central Command in 2003. Not only did he understand the region, he also had shown a willingness to stand up to Rumsfeld. But by 2006 he appeared burned out, as did many who worked closely with the defense secretary. In 2003-4, Abizaid had left in place as his top general in Iraq Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, seen by many inside the Army, especially those in Iraq, as an overwhelmed and perhaps incompetent general. Abizaid had failed to get the Army to send out enough specialists to staff Sanchez’s headquarters. He had stood by as persistent differences poisoned the relationship between the U.S. military and U.S. civilian officials in Iraq, with Sanchez and L. Paul Bremer III, the civilian occupation chief, barely civil to each other by the end of their 12 months together. He had not been able to get other parts of the federal government to engage enthusiastically in Iraq. Most of all, he had failed to stand up to the Bush administration’s blandishments of “steady progress” in Iraq, and instead, over time, seemed to join in them.

  Rumsfeld said at the hearing that ending the sectarian violence was a job for Iraqis, not American troops. As Keane watched, he knew that wasn’t happening, and he worried that such false hopes would lead to defeat. “I liked these guys,” he said. “What was bothering me most, it seemed blatantly obvious that our strategy had failed. It had blown up in our face. We were on the precipice of the new Iraqi government fracturing. That’s where we’re heading, a humiliating defeat for the United States,
and all the security problems that would ensue from that.”

  The hearing climaxed with Senator Hillary Clinton’s rebuke of the defense secretary. “We hear a lot of happy talk and rosy scenarios, but because of the administration’s strategic blunders and, frankly, the record of incompetence in executing, you are presiding over a failed policy,” the New York Democrat asserted. “Given your track record, Secretary Rumsfeld, why should we believe your assurances now?”

  Rumsfeld’s response made it even clearer to Keane that the administration was digging in its heels. “My goodness,” Rumsfeld began in his anachronistic fashion as he launched into a passionate defense of his past deeds and of current policy. “History will make a judgment” on past decisions about troop numbers, he announced, as if to tell her that coming to such conclusions was above her pay grade.

  As for an increase in troop levels, the prospect that Keane was mulling, Rumsfeld rejected the idea. “The balance between having too many and contributing to an insurgency by the feeling of occupation, and the risk of having too few and having the security situation not be sufficient for the political progress to go forward, is a complicated set of decisions. And I don’t know there’s any guide book that tells you how to do it. There’s no rule book, there’s no history for this.” In fact, as Keane knew, there was ample history on just that point. The experiences of the British in Malaya, the French in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, and in a dozen other smaller counterinsurgency campaigns all taught the same lesson: You must protect the people and separate them from the insurgents, and to do so you had to live among the population. And doing all that required a lot of troops. Indeed, the manual on counterinsurgency that Gen. Petraeus was drafting out at Leavenworth as Rumsfeld spoke would make just that point.

  But Rumsfeld was sticking to the existing plan, despite the multiple setbacks it had encountered. “The goal is to not have U.S. forces do the heavy lifting in Baghdad. There are many, many more Iraqi forces in Baghdad. The role of the U.S. forces is to help them.” As Keane knew, there was growing evidence by this point that this transitional approach wasn’t working.

  The defense secretary concluded by lapsing into his trademark rhetorical device of posing a question and then answering it himself. He didn’t seem to grasp how condescending this could be, especially with people like United States senators who tend to have a strong sense of the importance of their positions. He did so some ten times. Three of them were, “Are there setbacks? Yes. Are there things that people can’t anticipate? Yes. Does the enemy have a brain and continue to make adjustments on the ground requiring our forces to continue to make adjustments? You bet.”

  Abizaid supported Rumsfeld. Going above the current level of 140,000 troops in Iraq, he said, would place “a tremendous strain” on the Army.

  Gen. Pace, never particularly impressive as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had even less to offer that day. “Shia and Sunni are going to have to love their children more than they hate each other,” he said. It was an almost despairing phrase, pointing toward no discernible strategy for the U.S. government. He apparently so liked the thought that he repeated it later in the hearing.

  As Keane watched, the doubts he had been gathering for months coalesced and solidified. “My God, if we don’t do something different, we’re going over a cliff,” he thought that night. He was not a man who came to a conclusion like that idly.

  The next afternoon he sat in his living room, meditating on what to do and how to do it. He was there for so long that evening fell. Lost in thought, he didn’t turn on any lights, and his wife came into the room to find him sitting in darkness. She asked what he was doing. “Iraq,” he responded. “Our strategy there is failing. We need a new strategy, and new people, ’cause the guys doing it don’t think it’s failed.”

  “What are you going to do about it?” she asked. It was an unusual question to pose. She knew that many Americans had similar concerns, but that her husband was uniquely positioned to do something about it. After decades of service, he was an Army insider. In particular, he had been a mentor to two rising Army generals, David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno, and he thought they could be key to making the changes, even though neither was in Iraq at the time.

  “I think I am going to try to change it,” he told her. It wasn’t an idle response. He began to write some notes, outlining the problem.

  Since retiring from the Army, he also had come to know influential strategic experts such as Kissinger and Eliot Cohen, other members of the Defense Policy Board who were growing increasingly worried about the direction of the war. In May 2004, Cohen had gone to Iraq for the board and come back to deliver a grim assessment. “There is no sense of a common vision or direction, a real operational or strategic level plan,” he reported. A senior officer had told him that mid-2003 to mid-2004 was “a lost year.” In addition, Cohen had concluded that Army and Marine doctrine for conducting a counterinsurgency campaign was badly outdated—an observation that may have encouraged the Army to send Petraeus to Leavenworth.

  Keane agreed with many of Cohen’s worries. And while many active-duty officers shared his deepening concerns, he possessed an option they didn’t: If he felt he didn’t get a thorough and serious hearing, he could take his concerns public. He knew how to do it—he was a retired four-star general who maintained cordial relations with several defense reporters.

  “DAVE, YOU’RE SHOT”

  Perhaps most important, Keane had known Petraeus for years. An advocate of realistic training, Keane loathed seeing soldiers toss grenades as if they were outfielders hurling metal baseballs, instead of in the context of how they would be used in combat, where people who want to survive don’t stand up in view of the enemy. So he had pushed for “live-fire” exercises, in which soldiers used real bullets while training and moved as if they were on a battlefield. One day in 1991 at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Keane and Petraeus were observing just such an exercise, in which a squad was practicing taking down a machine gun bunker. Some soldiers provided suppressive fire while one of their comrades crawled forward from one side and, leaning to one side while still prone, lobbed a hand grenade into the bunker.

  Under the cover of the explosion, the grenade thrower turned and ran as fast as he could back to his fellow squad members. He hit the dirt using the butt of his M-16 rifle to break his fall, as he had been taught to do in order to get down quickly. But the soldier, probably distracted by his grenade throwing, had made two mistakes: He had his kept his finger on the trigger of his weapon, and the safety was off.

  Petraeus, observing from 40 yards away, grunted and stepped back, but didn’t fall. Keane, standing next to Petraeus, looked over. “Dave, you’re shot,” he said. The bullet from the soldier’s weapon had pierced Petraeus in the right side of his chest, just above the A in PETRAEUS on his fatigues, and clipped both a lung and an artery. Keane laid Petraeus on the ground, then reached around him and felt for the exit wound. It was about the size of a half-dollar coin. He called for a medic. Then he looked down at Petraeus and said, “Dave, you know what’s going on here, we’ve got to stop the bleeding. . . . Then we have got to make sure you don’t go into shock.”

  Characteristically, while waiting for a medical evacuation helicopter, Keane took aside the commander of the company training that day and told him to continue the exercise. “What I was trying to teach them,” he recalled, is that “in combat it’s going to be much worse than this, we are going to get our guys shot and get our guys killed and, one, we go on with the mission, two, we find out what the mistakes were after it’s over so we can fix it for the next time.”

  Keane held Petraeus’s hand on the short helicopter hop to Fort Campbell’s Blanchfield Army Community Hospital. A doctor there picked up a suction tube to clean the entry wound of strands of Petraeus’s uniform and dirt. “Colonel Petraeus,” he said to his new patient, who was supine but still conscious, “I’ve got to clean this wound out, because when the bullet goes in there it takes all of tha
t with it. I’ve got to get as much out of there as I can so it doesn’t start to get into your bloodstream.” Not waiting to administer an anesthetic, he worried: “This is going to hurt like hell”—and told some orderlies to hold him down. Then he jammed the tube into the bloody hole in Petraeus’s chest.

  Usually, the doctor later told Keane in the hallway, the procedure inflicts so much pain that the body jumps up on the operating table and the patient “screams like hell.”

  Petraeus just grunted. “That really is one tough soldier in there,” the doctor said.

  “Yeah, I know that,” Keane replied. The chest operation that Petraeus would need required a second flight, this time by an Army Black Hawk helicopter to a hospital in Nashville, where he was met by Dr. Bill Frist, who had yet to enter politics but who would later become Senate majority leader. Frist, still in his golfing outfit, saw the small entry wound and wondered what all the fuss was about. Turning Petraeus over, he saw the exit wound and understood. Keane told him that the exit injury was typical of a high-velocity weapon, which was outside Frist’s usual cases of wounds made by cheap pistols and knives. Frist operated for more than five hours.

  Less than a week later, Petraeus was back recuperating at the Fort Campbell hospital and growing impatient with it. “Dave was raising all sorts of ruckus because he wanted to get out of there and go home,” Keane recalled.

  A senior doctor went to see this troublesome patient. “Hey, Dave, you’re not going home so just leave my staff alone,” he ordered. “You’re just out of surgery, you’re not going to be able to get out of here for a few more days.”

  Everybody heals differently, Petraeus argued. “I believe that I’m recovered enough to be able to go home,” he said.