The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq
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The road to that meeting began on Friday, December 8, when Kagan gathered a handful of like-minded analysts and military planners on the top floor of the American Enterprise Institute’s 12-story building. The most important person invited to the conference was Gen. Keane. Kagan had heard about his dissent on the conduct of the war, which was becoming the talk of conservative Washington, but had no inkling that Keane was talking regularly to Odierno and Petraeus, who were about to take command of the war.
The three-day exercise wasn’t intended to change the course of the war, or even to add more troops, which Kagan didn’t think was possible. Rather, it was to see if it was possible to devise an alternative military approach for Iraq. At any event, Kagan thought, it was quite possible that the exercise would be purely academic, because the word from the White House was that the president would be giving a major speech on Iraq within just a few days. “We were disappointed with the quality of the debate over the military aspects of the war,” Kagan said. “Baghdad is burning, Iraq is about to explode, and we are moving toward a primitive civil war. This is about to head off the cliff. So, the mandate was: Stop the bleeding in Baghdad.”
An untold aspect of the exercise at the think tank was the involvement of some active-duty Army officers. These weren’t just any random military planners. Rather, the ones attending had served with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq under Col. H. R. McMaster. That’s meaningful for two reasons. First, they had participated in McMaster’s maverick 2005 campaign in Tall Afar, the first place in the Iraq war where the U.S. military conducted a successful large-scale counterinsurgency effort. They had shown how to use more troops effectively. Their example had not been embraced by top commanders, probably in part because it wasn’t consistent with stated U.S. strategy, and perhaps also because the Army didn’t see how to replicate the effort in larger cities: The McMaster approach worked in relatively small Tall Afar, but to many seemed inapplicable to the larger, more important ones, such as Mosul, Kirkuk, and, most of all, Baghdad, home to around 6 million souls. At any rate, the Army seems never to have taken a serious look at the feasibility of following the Tall Afar example elsewhere.
On top of that, at the time the American Enterprise Institute exercise was being held, McMaster was playing a significant role across the river at the Pentagon as a member of the council of colonels reviewing Iraq policy for Gen. Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He had been suggested for service on that panel by Gen. Petraeus. In the course of working on the study, he met Gen. Keane, and the two hit it off. Tying all these connections in a neat package, McMaster had shared an office with Kagan when both taught at West Point, and the former thanks the latter in the acknowledgments to his influential book Dereliction of Duty, about the failures of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Vietnam War.
Another officer helping Kagan was Maj. Joel Rayburn, also a veteran of West Point. His involvement wasn’t official, he said, but rather grew out of months of “writing and talking and arguing” with Kagan about the war. “It became sharper as we went along—and became urgent in the fall of ’06.”
Not all the officers attending bought into the American Enterprise Institute’s hawks’ view of the world. “They completely blew it,” said retired Army Col. Joel Armstrong, the former executive officer of McMaster’s regiment. “All the assumptions [about Iraq] were wrong.” But when Kagan, spurred by McMaster, asked Armstrong to fly in from Spokane, Washington, for the weekend exercise, he agreed because he thought the United States was sputtering toward defeat in Iraq. “We were basically heading for a loss, and I couldn’t see anything changing without something dramatic,” Armstrong said. It felt odd, he added, to advocate a course of action that the generals leading the war opposed. “I felt kind of strange going against the chain of command, but I felt I had to.”
The basic concept was to figure out how to redeploy American troops in Iraq so that they might protect the population, which had become a major theme of Gen. Keane’s. Establishing outposts with that mission was an issue Armstrong had thought about since early 2005, when he had suggested putting a small, company-sized base in Salman Pak, southeast of Baghdad. “I was told by division I was out of my mind,” he recalled. Donnelly and others from AEI sat with Armstrong and retired Maj. Dan Dwyer, another officer who had served in Tall Afar. “We’d look at a neighborhood, and use the 3rd Armored Cav’s experience to say, ‘Yeah, we could do that,”’ Donnelly said. The military officers unrolled maps and Google images of Baghdad and began discussing what sort of troop numbers might be needed in its neighborhoods. There were company-sized problems, they would decide, and there were battalion-sized problems.
Armstrong’s role was to make the participants loosely adhere to the military-planning process, which is basically to pose a problem, figure out a solution, decide which tasks are the logical steps toward reaching that solution, and then calculate what troops and other resources are needed to execute those tasks. Ultimately, they concluded that to improve security in Baghdad and neighboring al Anbar Province, nearly seven brigades would be needed—five from the Army, almost two from the Marine Corps. The next question was how to find those extra troops. On midafternoon Saturday, AEI’s Donnelly and Armstrong, the retired colonel, had a quick discussion about the actual number of troops they thought doable. Looking at the Army’s planned rotation schedule, which he had found posted on the Internet, Donnelly quickly figured out how many combat brigades the Army could send. “The five-brigade answer was immediately obvious, in terms of the max that could be done in a timely fashion based upon the current force generation model,” he said. (The calculations would prove to be so accurate that when Keane and Kagan went to brief Gen. Richard Cody, the Army’s vice chief of staff, on their recommendations, he offered only one tweak, which was that they were three weeks off in their estimate of the availability of one of the surge brigades.)
The next major step was for an active-duty officer who was attending to “red team” the planning—that is, to look at the proposed operation from the enemy’s point of view. He discussed how al Qaeda might react, what the Shiite militias would do, the steps other fighters might take to counter the American moves. This was the moment “when I really came to believe this could work,” Kagan said. “He persuaded me that we had a pretty good feel for the operational patterns of the enemy.”
Keane mainly sat and watched, absorbing their thinking. “He was pretty quiet,” said Armstrong.
Keane said later that he was impressed by the quality of the information and analysis the group presented. “I was amazed by the intel they got from open sources,” he said. “I was very current but they understand pretty clearly what was happening among the factions; the level of detail that they understood was amazing to me.” Much of what they told him, he noted, he would use a few days later in a meeting with President Bush. By coincidence, the White House had called Keane on Friday and asked him to come by on Monday to talk to the president about Iraq. He already had an appointment that day with Vice President Cheney, who also had gotten wind of Keane’s concerns, so Cheney’s office said the two meetings would somehow be combined.
One major assumption of the exercise was that improved security would lead to a political breakthrough. At first, this kind of slipped in as an afterthought. Donnelly said he wasn’t focused so much on what the surge might produce as he was on just getting one. “It was more a sense of, if you don’t turn the security issue around, you’re about to lose,” he said. He was just trying to figure out a way to keep the United States in the war.
But Keane had what he needed to take to the White House the next day: an informed look not just at why more troops were needed, but how they might be used differently. This what was the White House had wanted to know, but the Pentagon hadn’t bothered to look into. It wasn’t a subject that seemed to interest the Joint Chiefs of Staff—a lapse that, to borrow McMaster’s title, amounted to dereliction of duty.
BUSH GETS BOTH BARRELS
At a White House meeting that began at 3:20 that afternoon, Keane listened as Professor Eliot Cohen began on a frank note. About a dozen high-level note-takers—Karl Rove, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, and some of his staffers—sat in the outer circle. Cohen, the sole attendee from the Camp David meeting the previous June to be asked to this session, remembers it as being far harder edged than the desultory discussion six months earlier. “There was something in the air—more tension,” he recalled.
Stephen Biddle, a defense expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, later said that going in, he had half-expected the session to be a photo opportunity, intended to demonstrate that the president did indeed talk to smart outsiders. Instead he found the tone of the hour-long meeting to be open, even confrontational. “It was obvious that the president and Cheney were taking this seriously,” he said. “The president had a drawn face, was very subdued, looked depressed.”
Cohen was determined to be clearer and more emphatic than he had been the previous June at Camp David. “Mister President, I’m going to be very blunt,” he began. “I don’t mean to cause offense, but this is wartime, and I feel I owe it to you.” He also owed it to his own family and friends: Not only were many of his former students at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies military officers on duty in Iraq, so was his own son, a recent Harvard graduate who deployed there as an Army lieutenant specializing in military intelligence.
This time Cohen hit the issue of generalship squarely. It was high time to get a new team and a new strategy in Iraq, he advised. “It’s not enough to say these are good guys—of course they are good guys. The question is, are they the right guys?” He said he didn’t think so. He urged the president to hold them accountable.
He also talked about how presidents need to push their military advisers. “Generals disagree, sometimes profoundly,” he said, citing a lesson he knew both from his academic work and from his time assessing Iraq for the Defense Policy Board. “Civilian leaders need to discover these disagreements, force them to the surface, and probe them. This is what Lincoln and Roosevelt did. LBJ’s failure in Vietnam was not micromanagement, but failure to force serious strategic debate.” Cohen, who is steeped in military history, was on solid ground in rejecting the conventional wisdom that President Johnson’s error had been to meddle too much. Retired Army Brig. Gen. Douglas Kinnard, who surveyed Army generals who served in Vietnam for his study The War Managers, wrote that it is possible to argue that “there was not enough civilian participation in terms of asking the big questions about what we were really doing in Vietnam.” As Cohen himself had pointed out in Supreme Command, during World War II, Winston Churchill also injected himself into the smallest of issues, but while doing so he never lost hold of the big strategic picture.
Cohen, whom retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, also at the meeting, sometimes called “Mr. Bow Tie,” also questioned the nature of advice Casey was providing, in which the general sought to balance his needs in Iraq with the state of the Army. That wasn’t Casey’s job, Cohen said. There were plenty of people at the Pentagon paid to take care of the Army. Casey’s mission was very different, he said. His job was to win the war. “Not all generals are up to the task,” he advised, knowing, for example, that well over a dozen division commanders had been relieved during World War II. Yet the Bush administration handled its generals as though they were all equally successful, interchangeable parts. “Not a single general has been removed for ineffectiveness during the course of this war.” The Army needed a push here, he noted. “The current promotion system does not take into account actual effectiveness in counterinsurgency. We need not great guys but effective guys. Routine promotion and assignment systems for generals in wartime is a disaster.”
Keane, speaking second, was also emphatic. “Mister President, to my mind, this is a major crisis,” he began. “Time is running out.” We need more troops, he said. And more important, he continued, we need to use them differently. “For the first time, we will secure the population, which is the proven way to defeat an insurgency,” he explained. “In time the troops will be more secure, but I can’t hide from you that the casualties will initially go up. In any counteroffensive operation that we have ever done, from Normandy to the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific, Inchon in Korea, multiple ones in Vietnam, casualties always go up, because you are bringing more troops and more firepower to bear on the problem.”
To Keane’s surprise, the two other retired generals at the meeting, McCaffrey and Wayne Downing, disagreed with his call for an escalation, while the two academics there, Cohen and Stephen Biddle, supported it.
“No more U.S. forces,” argued Downing.
McCaffrey explained why. “Sir, I have known Jack Keane since we were young officers,” he began. “I have great admiration for him. But this so-called surge is a fool’s errand. Yes, it will have a short-term impact. But it isn’t sustainable. The solution is Iraqi forces.” But even as he spoke, McCaffrey began to suspect that the president really wasn’t listening to his view and had already made up his mind. Indeed, a study of personnel-mobilization issues associated with the surge done by William Luti, a staffer on the National Security Council, already had concluded that a surge was doable both in terms of the effect it would have on readiness and on how long the troops would stay. “I think it went in one ear and went out the other,” McCaffrey said later. “I don’t think the president was listening. Cheney was—he was taking extensive notes.”
Bush asked them what to do with the advice, especially about selecting generals. “All well and good, but how am I supposed to know, and who I am supposed to pick?” Bush responded, according to Biddle, who spoke last.
“David Petraeus,” said Cohen. His thinking, he recalled was that “all armies get it wrong at the beginning, as [the great British military historian] Michael Howard says—the question is who adapts fastest.” Cohen believed that Petraeus was the general who while serving in Iraq had best shown the ability to adapt. Keane and McCaffrey seconded the idea. (McCaffrey believes he was first to mention the name, but others disagree.) All the invitees were in accord that Petraeus was the only serious candidate for the job.
Then why is he disliked by some people at the Pentagon? Bush asked, apparently referring to some supposed friction between Petraeus and Rumsfeld, who liked to be the smartest person in the room.
Don’t worry about that, the participants said. “You got to go with this guy,” McCaffrey responded, with Keane supporting him.
Cheney asked only one question during the session. As it ended, McCaffrey watched as the vice president took Keane down the hall with him, which he thought confirmed his hunch that “the fix was in.” Asked about this, Keane said that he was just going to his existing appointment with Cheney to go through the details of how a new counterinsurgency strategy might be implemented in Iraq.
Not long after, Keane got a call from a White House official telling him that the meeting had had a decisive impact on the president’s thinking. A small group of NSC staffers had been pushing for a troop surge for weeks, pointing to the examples of Tall Afar and Ramadi. Now this group, which dubbed itself “the surgios,” had been given ammunition by a respected group of outsiders.
Despite that, Bush continued to hold his cards close. He would say later in the month, “I haven’t made up my mind yet about more troops.”
THE COUNCIL OF COLONELS UNLOADS
Two days later, on Wednesday, December 13, Bush traveled to the Pentagon, where Gen. Pace briefed him on the ominous findings of the council of colonels.
Despite general discouragement, the group had been unable to find a consensus on the war, especially on whether to escalate. “The Air Force and Navy guys were clearly anti-surge. But Mansoor, H. R. McMaster, an
d the Marine, Colonel Greenwood, were for it,” said one Pentagon official who worked with the council. These were the three most influential members of the council. After commanding a brigade in Baghdad, Peter Mansoor had become a counterinsurgency adviser to Petraeus at Fort Leavenworth. Tom Greenwood had served several years on the staff of the National Security Council and then done two tours commanding units in Iraq. H. R. McMaster was probably the most prominent colonel in the Army at this point. All three agreed with Keane: Put more troops into Iraq even if it means breaking the Army. That’s what you do in war, this official said: “You serve the national interest.”
Nor did Pace, the chairman of Joint Chiefs, who had ordered the study, settle the argument. “Passive Peter Pace, he was looking for the path of least resistance,” this Pentagon official continued. “He brought no strategic vision, and no determined leadership—and the nation was at war. He is an honorable, genuinely nice man, but a tool for others.”
The council ultimately recommended a small increase in forces, but nothing like the surge that eventually would occur. Yet the group’s minority view in favor of a bigger escalation, although put aside at the time, ultimately would have more staying power and impact, because its leading advocates, Mansoor and McMaster, would be asked by Petraeus to come to Iraq. The colonels’ group, along with the barrage of pointed criticism being gathered for the development of the counterinsurgency manual, played a little noticed but helpful role in civil-military relations: Together they quashed the growing view among officers that the U.S. military had performed marvelously in Iraq but had been let down by the rest of the government, the Congress, the media, and the American people. “There had been a ‘stab in the back’ school emerging, but then there was a point at which the Army turned introspective and said, ‘You know, we can do this better,”’ said Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, a veteran of three tours in Iraq.