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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  “The weaker partner is always dominant, because we are always trying to prevent them from tipping over, while they can pretty much do what they want,” advised Kilcullen. For example, the Finance Ministry, he said, was quietly contributing to “soft ethnic cleansing” by refusing to allow banks to operate in Sunni areas. That meant Sunnis either needed to keep a lot of cash in their homes, where it might be stolen, or drive it to a bank through Shiite checkpoints, where it might well be taken from them. This Hobson’s choice forced many Sunnis simply to leave Baghdad, which of course achieved the aim of the Shiite death squads. Likewise, he said, the government was supplying electricity twenty-two hours a day to Shia areas, but just one or two to Sunni neighborhoods. “You have no refrigeration, so you have to go to market every day, and the big food markets are in mixed or Shia neighborhoods.” In both cases, he said, “the purpose is to encourage people to leave.”

  Not everyone was a Kilcullen fan. “He didn’t know a thing about Iraq,” sneered a senior U.S. intelligence officer, who also noted that Kilcullen was only in Iraq for a few months early in 2007, as Petraeus settled in. “He took just enough pictures so he has a great slide show.”

  That said, Kilcullen’s influence on how the U.S. military thought about counterinsurgency campaigning cannot be overstated. “For a staff guy, he had an extraordinary feel for what was happening,” said Col. Michael Galloucis, who commanded a military police brigade in Baghdad in 2007.

  SADI OTHMAN

  Of the three foreigners who became key advisers to new American commanders, the most unusual was also the one closest to Petraeus. Of them, Sadi Othman probably also had taken the longest journey, both physical and psychological, to becoming part of the American war effort.

  Othman was a Palestinian born in Brazil but raised in Jordan, where he attended a boarding school run by Mennonites, the pacifist Protestant sect related to the Amish. While he is ethnically Sunni, he said that decades later, he feels “more Mennonite than anything else.” How does he reconcile that with being the political and cultural adviser to the top U.S. general in a war? “I am here for peace, not for war.”

  At the University of Amman, he grew to 6 foot 7 inches, and soon achieved a bit of local celebrity as the first Jordanian ever to dunk a basketball. Even today, he seems all legs and arms, with the fingers of a pianist, which tend to always be holding a cigarette. Sitting in the bright winter sunlight by the pool behind the U.S. embassy, he seemed almost haloed by his thin white hair and the curling smoke of his Marlboro Lights. He carried two cell phones, which rang every few minutes. On this day he was answering them with a visible sag—he was fatigued from nonstop telephone calls he had been making to help free eight Turkish soldiers being held hostage in the north by Kurdish guerrillas. Othman also became Petraeus’s envoy to emissaries from Moqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shiite cleric who has been a big winner in post-Saddam Iraq. Could Sadr’s people be brought into a working relationship with the Americans? He also was sent frequently to talk to senior members of the Iraqi government.

  At age nineteen he transferred to Hesston College, a Mennonite institution in Kansas, and later became an American citizen. On 9/11, he was a taxi driver in New York City. He found the day’s terrorist attacks devastating in three ways. “As an American, I was attacked. As a New Yorker, I was violated. As an Arab American, I was humiliated.” He felt he had to do something, and signed up to be a civilian interpreter for the U.S. military in the Mideast.

  Two years later he wound up as Petraeus’s interpreter in Iraq, used for the most crucial and sensitive meetings, not just for the general but for other senior Americans. In January 2007, he interpreted as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Representative John Murtha chewed out Prime Minister Maliki. “The meetings were very tough,” Othman said, banging his fist on the table to illustrate the tone. He recalled that Pelosi told the Iraqi leader, “You have made a lot of promises, but nothing was delivered.”

  After Pelosi and Murtha left the room, Othman recalled, Maliki, his face pale, turned to Othman and said, “Now I understand what President Bush is going through.”

  He had first met Petraeus at the end of the invasion of Iraq in April 2003, as the general was coming out of a men’s room at the Mosul airport. Othman, not seeing any insignia, assumed that the small, thin, smiling man in a plain brown T-shirt was like him, a civilian. Petraeus is always searching for new insights, especially from people with different perspectives. They began to talk about Iraq. Othman soon found himself assigned to be Petraeus’s interpreter. He also came to admire this unusual general. One day he and Petraeus were in Mosul and encountered a man and a woman carrying a baby, with a daughter walking alongside. They looked hungry. Petraeus took out $3 in cash. The woman hesitated, and Othman urged her, “Take it—for the children.” A week later the woman saw Othman again and approached him to say, “We ate meat for the first time in two years.”

  Petraeus and Othman stayed in touch while the general was at Leavenworth developing the counterinsurgency manual. After Petraeus was picked to be the top commander in Iraq, he asked Othman to work with him again. A member of Casey’s staff called Mansoor, Petraeus’s executive officer, to try to block the move. “We recommend highly you don’t take him,” the Casey man said. Asked about this in an interview, Othman said there had been some bad blood between him and the staffer. Mansoor, knowing how close Othman was to Petraeus, politely thanked them for their interest. In 2007-8, Othman’s most important task was to be Petraeus’s personal liaison with the Iraqi government. “We use Sadi a great deal,” Petraeus said, “to talk to the prime minister, the minister of finance, to talk to a number of different ministers with whom he has very close personal relationships at this point.” There was one major difference beween the two men: Petraeus was no schmoozer while Othman reveled in the endless hours of chatting with Iraqi officials. “When we talk to Sadi Othman and General Petraeus, we are talking to twins,” said Rafi al-Assawi, a Sunni who became a deputy prime minister in 2008. “Talking to one, the message would always get to the other.”

  EMMA SKY

  As close at Othman was to Petraeus, Emma Sky grew even closer to Odierno, becoming a kind of physical shadow to him. The birdlike British woman made a dramatic contrast to the hulking American general, both physically and intellectually. “People always thought we were funny, this huge man and this tiny British woman who went everywhere with him,” she recalled.

  It was a sign of how much Odierno had changed that he sensed he needed someone like Sky to second-guess him in Iraq. He had seen her in action in Iraq in 2003-4, when he was commanding the 4th Infantry Division, and she was advising the Americans on Kurdish issues in the north. Odierno asked her to come back to Iraq to be his political adviser, but she resisted. She had opposed the war, and she didn’t have a lot of time for armies, especially the American one. “From my perspective, the military were the bad guys,” she said one still, oven-hot summer evening, sitting on the balcony of a palace and gazing out over the darkness of one of Saddam’s shallow artificial lakes. “I was about human security, not state security.” A specialist in third world economics who speaks Arabic and Hebrew, she found the military approach jarring. “I come from a world where it is, first, do no harm. When you work in development, you are very conscious of that.” By contrast, she said, “The military comes in like a great crashing beast.” (One well-connected U.S. Army officer said he believes that Sky works for British intelligence. Upon being asked about this, she laughed.)

  She surprised herself by taking the job. “Odierno, by bringing me in, has probably brought in the most opposite person he could find.” She did it because she thought it was time to get the United States out of Iraq and wanted to see it happen in the least damaging way possible. “Can we exit with some dignity? Can we have relations with Iraq for a generation to come? All this is still to be decided. There is still a lot we can get from this.”

  Aware of the reputation Odierno carried from his time
in command of the 4th Infantry Division, she agreed to join his staff on one condition, that if she ever witnessed him condoning a human rights violation, she would report him to the Hague—where the International Criminal Court prosecutes war crimes. Odierno agreed, probably a bit amused. She only learned later that the United States isn’t a signatory to the statute creating the court, which it maintains doesn’t have jurisdiction over U.S. soldiers or other U.S. citizens.

  To her surprise, she would become one of Odierno’s biggest fans. “He is the only person I would come back to Iraq for,” she maintained. “I’d follow him to the end of the world. Usually when you work closely with people, you see the warts and all, and your opinion goes down. My opinion of him has gone way up.”

  She may have been soft on Odierno, but she retained her sharpness about the rest of the world. Asked in an interview early in 2007 about Iraqi politics, she interrupted to redefine the question. “It’s not a government, it’s a failing state.”

  She still could blow the whistle on the U.S. military, but now she did so from inside the tent. In the spring of 2007, she was in a “battle update assessment” as an officer showed gun camera footage of an attack helicopter surprising insurgents emplacing a bomb and blowing them to bits. This was red meat for officers who had spent years being attacked by anonymous roadside bombers. “They all loved it,” she recalled, so much so that the officers at the briefing began talking about taking the declassification steps necessary to release the imagery to the media. “We should get this out, get it on TV,” they commented.

  Sky was shocked. “These are American versions of jihadi videos,” she interrupted angrily, knowing they would be taken aback by the comparison to decapitation photographs and videos posted on the Internet. “Is this the image you want to present to the world? This is America killing people. Yes, it has to happen. But let’s not glorify it.” Furious, she stood up and strode out of the conference room.

  After she left, Odierno discussed her comments with his corps sergeant major, the highest-ranking enlisted man for tens of thousands of troops. Half an hour later, the sergeant major walked into her office. “Ma’am, you’re right,” he said, and then hugged her.

  Yet the two still had their differences. At one point in 2007, Odierno called Sky into his office and told her she was being overly pessimistic. “I need you on this!” he said, half arguing and half imploring.

  “I never liked the idea of this war anyway,” Sky muttered.

  At another point, she recalled, she was so tense and frustrated by one issue—she said she couldn’t remember what it was—that she decided to quit. Like Odierno, but unlike Petraeus, she tended to show emotion and then get over it. She stayed.

  Once, when Petraeus pointed out in a meeting to Odierno that Sky, Odierno’s political adviser, made a certain argument, Odierno responded, “She’s not my adviser, she’s my insurgent.”

  To her astonishment, in the course of 2007 she would also become an admirer of the U.S. military. “I love them,” she said. She added provocatively that she thinks the military is better than the country it protects. “That’s the way I feel about it—America doesn’t deserve its military.”

  The willingness of American commanders to ask for her advice consistently surprised her. “The Brits came in with more experience in this sort of operation, but over the years I think the American Army has learned a lot more. I mean, there’s no way the British army would ask someone like me to come along.” She also came to appreciate the meritocracy of American culture: “What I found with the Americans is they always gave me a place at the table. Once there, it was up to me to prove myself. With the British military, it’s always a fight to get a seat at the table—I’m female, I’m not military, I’m a tree-hugger.”

  TIME WAITS FOR NO ONE

  Looming over this new American team and its revamped approach was the nagging question: Was it simply too late? “The one resource that Petraeus needs, and lacks, is time,” Col. Holshek, the civil affairs veteran of Iraq, said as the surge began in the spring of 2007.

  Fastabend agreed. “The first thing you need,” he told Petraeus, “is more time on the clock.” And he would get that, Fastabend continued, only if when he went before Congress later that year he was able to show clearly understandable successes, like sharply lower violence in some parts of the country. “It can’t be a 1.5 percent improvement in ministerial capacity and blah blah blah.” In another Army connection, Fastabend years earlier had served as Jack Keane’s executive officer.

  There were many expert observers who thought the U.S. effort already was out of time. After all, this argument went, the American people had voted against the war in November 2006, and the task now was to wind it up. “It’s too late to make a difference in Iraq,” said Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University expert on terrorism who had advised the U.S. government on the war effort.

  Petraeus recognized the pressing need for more time. “The Washington clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock,” he said. “So we’re obviously trying to speed up the Baghdad clock a bit and to produce some progress on the ground that can, perhaps . . . put a little more time on the Washington clock.” But many of Petraeus’s critics didn’t seem to recognize what he needed that time for: not to bring the war to a close, which everyone involved thought would take years, but simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it. That would be the real war goal for 2007.

  6.

  GAMBLING ON A “SHITTY HAND”

  (Spring and Summer 2007)

  We were dealt a really shitty hand, but we’ve played it to the best of our ability,” Col. Peter Mansoor said as he looked back to the troubled beginning of 2007.

  They had deplaned into a small civil war, and the streets of Baghdad seemed to grow bloodier by the day. On January 16, two bombs were detonated during the after-school rush at a Baghdad university, killing at least 60 people. Six days later, two more bombs devastated a street bazaar, killing at least 79 more. On January 30, 60 Shiites were killed in multiple attacks across central Iraq. “We had U.S. Air Force F-16s engaging the enemy on Haifa Street, twelve hundred meters from the embassy,” recalled Kilcullen.

  It is easy to forget now, after it has become conventional wisdom that the surge worked, at least tactically, how audacious a venture it was. Almost all military experts agreed with the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the U.S. troop presence was an irritant, so more troops likely would only worsen the situation. The liberal position was to withdraw as soon as possible. Hawkish centrists advocated getting smaller and staying longer. Escalation of the sort that was chosen was a radical position advocated by a small minority. At best, it was unclear what a relatively small number of additional troops might do. At worst, many thought, it simply was reinforcing failure—a cardinal sin in military operations. The consensus seemed to be that at best it probably was just delaying a horrific civil war that unfortunately seemed inevitable.

  But all that pessimism had one positive side effect, because it created the conditions for strategic surprise—which as Clausewitz, the great Prussian philosopher of war, observes, is the most important and effective kind of surprise. After four years in Iraq, no one seemed to expect the Americans to develop a way to operate differently and more effectively.

  The shift was all the more unexpected because it came as President Bush was politically cornered. Usually, “sustained strategic boldness . . . requires a solid foundation of popular support,” Oxford historian Piers Mackesy observed in The War for America, his classic study of how the British managed to lose the American Revolutionary War in 1781 after appearing to have won it just a year earlier. But in agreeing to a troop escalation, Bush was operating from a position of extraordinary political weakness. Not only was he deeply unpopular, he had reversed course at a time when it seemed that stubborn persistence was his sole virtue as a leader: After years of saying he would heed the advice of his military, Bush had split with the overw
helming view of his top military leaders, from the Pentagon to Central Command to the top general in Iraq.

  What probably saved Bush was his political opposition—a splintered and confused Democratic Party. The Democrats were close to paralyzed by the Iraq war, wanting to gratify their supporters by questioning it but not wanting to be responsible for the outcome. The major weapon available to them was to cut off funding for the war—but to do that would make them appear antimilitary, which would carry a political price they were not willing to pay. Put bluntly, they wanted to appear to be doing something about it without really doing anything. So, while the House of Representatives voted 246 to 182 in February 2007 to oppose the surge, it wasn’t prepared to follow up that nonbinding resolution with action. This empty-handed approach would prove to be a huge political advantage to Bush, enabling him to launch and continue the counteroffensive.

  PETRAEUS AMID THE PESSIMISTS

  In news photographs, they are the people on the side, escorting a top official or leaning in to interpret during the photo shoot. In one such image that ran on the front page of the New York Times, two Petraeus aides, Col. Mike Bell and Sadi Othman, flank the Iraqi prime minister and the American secretary of state. These were the people who studied operations, wrote critiques, and drafted papers, the plumbers and mechanics of policy. As 2007 began, few of them believed the surge would succeed. “When I first got here in January,” said Emma Sky, her “sense was, the war was lost, how do we get out?” Nor, with her pacificistic tendencies, was she attracted to the new American strategy. “At the beginning of the surge, I felt violence begets violence. I felt sick. I felt horrible.”

  Kilcullen calculated that Petraeus would achieve his goals on security but not on politics. He went on to bet that he could summarize the situation in just ten words and did: “My bottom line: good team, right strategy, possibly too late.” He even had drawn up a paper to give to Petraeus if the situation fell apart. First, he advised, you will need to recognize that you have reached a decision point. Second, act on that recognition in a timely fashion. Third, “credibly communicate” your assessment to the president and other Washington decision makers.