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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Nor did Capt. Liz McNally, the eager young Rhodes Scholar who was drafting Petraeus’s speeches, think they were on the path to success in Iraq: “Even given the perfect amount of resources, I don’t know if what we’re trying to do is possible,” she confessed one day in the spring.

  Hearing that Petraeus might be given command in Iraq, Sadi Othman prayed that he wouldn’t take it, “because the situation was very bad, and because I care about my friend Dave Petraeus.” The stakes were huge, Othman believed, and the odds against success nearly overwhelming. “Let me put it this way, it is very hard to be very optimistic,” he said one day in May 2007, as the casualties continued to rise. “Having said that, I strangely believe it is doable. If, God forbid, Iraq falls apart, I think it will impact the entire region in an unbelievable way. If the problems aren’t solved, I believe the consequence is the whole region up in flames.” It was a chilling thought. He folded his hands in his lap.

  One day early in 2007, Col. Bill Rapp, Petraeus’s closest adviser, was in his office watching CNN’s Michael Ware, a reporter he respected, discuss the state of the war. The correspondent gloomily said to his colleague Anderson Cooper that “it just doesn’t seem that there’s any road forward that does not involve the spilling of so much innocent blood or the abandonment of so many of the principles that we of the West hold dear.”

  Col. Rapp, who was already worried, “trying to figure if we needed to get out of Dodge,” was so struck by the comment that he wrote it down. Then he picked up a marker and copied it onto the big erasable white board he used with his subordinates to brainstorm. “I wrote it down as a challenge to myself and the CIG [commander’s initiatives group] to help the CG [commanding general] find an alternative. Those days were fairly bleak.”

  Their job as the brains behind Petraeus, he instructed them, was “to prove Mick Ware wrong.” Rapp’s deputy, Charlie Miller, arriving in Iraq in February 2007, estimated the chances of success at 10 to 15 percent. By May he considered himself a relative optimist and raised his guess to 35 to 40 percent. It was better but still far from a safe bet.

  Soon after he arrived in Iraq, Lt. Col. James Crider, commander of a cavalry squadron deploying in Baghdad, was pleasantly surprised to run into Col. Mansoor, whom he had known and admired for years.

  “Hey, sir, I’m pretty optimistic, I think it’s gonna work,” Crider said.

  “I’m not,” Mansoor replied, gray-haired and expressionless behind his glasses. “I’m not sure it’s gonna work. In fact, the odds are against it.”

  It was a sobering, even frightening exchange for Crider, who had orders to take his unit into one of Baghdad’s toughest neighborhoods. He thought to himself, “This is a guy I know, and he’s General Petraeus’s executive officer, and he’s not sure it’s gonna work?”

  One of the few relative optimists around Petraeus was a senior intelligence official who would be interviewed only on the condition that he not be identified by name. “I thought we had a real chance of making it work,” he remembered. At the American military headquarters in Iraq, he said, “A lot of people were thinking ten percent, fifteen percent.” He was at 40 percent, he said.

  Despite the odds, they were going to try, especially because they didn’t see a lot of good alternatives. Just because the odds were bad didn’t mean there was a better choice available. There was in this period a sense of being dutiful: They had to cast a cold eye on the blunders of their predecessors while trying to be positive about their own chances. They had to risk their lives and see comrades bleed and die, all the while believing it was likely their efforts would fall short. Mixed with that ambivalence was a determination to at least try, to give it one more shot and at least salvage as much as possible.

  Even the principals harbored profound doubts. “I didn’t know,” said Ambassador Crocker. “I thought it could work. If I had thought it absolutely would not I would be insane to come out here . . . I will not be one of those who said I saw this all along. I thought probably it was a long shot, given the levels of violence that had prevailed and the damage they had done to the political and social fabric.”

  Odierno also harbored doubts but was at the optimistic end of the scale. “I thought about seventy-thirty, it would work,” he said, looking back. He didn’t think five brigades were enough, but figured that by adding in a Marine battalion, an aviation unit, and various Special Operations units, he could get close to what he needed.

  Petraeus, the apotheosis of “can-do”-ism, may have been alone in holding that the new mission was entirely plausible. “I didn’t consider it a Hail Mary pass,” he insisted one day that spring. He saw a series of tasks that needed to be performed, and thought they could be done with some additional troops, some reasonable improvement in the quality of Iraqi forces, and some application of the theory of counterinsurgency. At the ceremony at which he took command, he gave a short talk in which he assured his audience, “this mission is doable.” But a year later he would concede that part of the role of a commander is to stay publicly optimistic.

  “THE MESOPOTAMIAN STAMPEDE”

  Petraeus’s chosen image of his task was a Frederic Remington oil painting called The Stampede, a 1908 work that depicts a nineteenth-century cowboy riding for his life as a herd of cattle panics under a breaking thunderstorm. The cowboy’s own pony is wild-eyed with fear, all four hooves clawing in the air. Next to the cowboy, cattle with their heads and horns down are driving as hard as they can away from the storm, which already is beginning to douse them with sheets of rain. The sky behind the cowboy and the herd is blackening. One long white streak of lightning is striking near another cowboy and cows in the misty distance, which is murky, a green and black haze of rain and storm. Everything about the painting conveys the threat of chaotic danger. If the cowboy’s pony trips, or throws him to the stony ground, the unfortunate man will be ripped by the horns of the charging cows or pulped by their heavy hooves.

  Petraeus included a copy of the Remington painting in a briefing on “The Mesopotamian Stampede” he would give to members of Congress and other visiting Americans. It is “a metaphor really of the need to be comfortable with slightly chaotic circumstances,” Petraeus explained, seeming a bit uneasy, perhaps because of the role the image assigns Iraqis. “A stampede is not always orderly. In that particular painting the ground is rugged, the wind is howling, it’s raining cats and dogs, there’s lightning—and you can use the lightning as a metaphor, it could be an IED, it could be a tasker from higher headquarters, it could be some sort of political challenge in Iraq, who knows what it might be. And the concept of outriders and trail bosses—again the concept of the challenges on the trail, the idea that some issue, some cattle, some tasks, will actually get out ahead of us. They will move on their own and that’s fine. We will catch up with them. But some will also fall behind and we will have to go back and round those up. That some cattle are killed along the way. There’s bad guys out there, rustlers who are trying to kill us and to kill those in the cattle drive. And you can use the cattle to represent any number of different items, from the ISF—the herd is growing, they are getting stronger. There are Iraqi trail bosses out there with us, and we are gradually handing off more of the responsibility for the cattle drive to them.”

  He also used the painting to convey to his subordinates his notion of command. “I don’t need to be hierarchical,” he explained. “I want to flatten organizations. I’m comfortable with a slightly chaotic environment. I know that it’s okay if some of you get out ahead of us. Some of the cattle will get out ahead and we will catch up with them. And some will fall behind and we will circle back and we won’t leave them behind.” He didn’t show the image to Iraqis, he said. It was more useful with Americans. “We’re just trying to get the cattle to Cheyenne.”

  Lt. Col. Nielsen, one of his aides, added that, in her view, the image is also about the limitations of high command. “A lot of it is about intent, about setting parameters, and an incredible decentralization
,” she said. The message, she said, is, “I can’t tell you exactly what to do,” because Iraq simply was too chaotic.

  Petraeus adopted a posture of much lowered expectations, and as was his wont, set the tone for his entire command. One of his most striking characteristics is his ability to discern and evaluate the reality of events. That isn’t as easy as it sounds, and it is especially difficult to pick out reality through the fog of war. The first and foremost task of a commander is to understand, with a steady head, the nature of the conflict in which he is engaged. In order to achieve that understanding a commander can be neither overly optimistic nor pessimistic, and especially, not subject to McClellanesque mood swings, seeing every minor victory as a triumph and every partial setback as disaster.

  Even more important, Petraeus injected a new spirit into senior commanders. At his first meeting with his division and brigade commanders and senior staff members, in February, he sought to convince them they could succeed. “I was amazed with what Petraeus did,” recalled Keane, who attended the meeting. “He took over a command with a sense of futility and hopelessness about it and almost overnight he changed the attitude and he brought them hope and a sense that we can do this, we can succeed at this.”

  Crocker brought a far different self-image to his partnership with Petraeus. In keeping with the morose outlook that led President Bush to dub him “Mr. Sunshine,” he joked once that he saw the general and himself as resembling the lead characters in a movie about two convicts on the run from a chain gang, “shackled” together and so forced to cooperate. He seemed to be referring to The Defiant Ones, a 1958 film starring Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier.

  Both Crocker and Petraeus had served in Iraq before but didn’t know each other until early 2007, when both arrived for their current tours. Crocker’s thought after their initial meeting then was, “I had just gotten very very lucky, given his ability, his drive, his experience, and his intellect.”

  At the embassy, Crocker began to oversee and revive a staff that Keane found lethargic. “The whole attitude of the place changed” after Crocker arrived, Keane said. “They had passion. They were taking personal risks. They were connecting with Iraqi officials.”

  SMALLER GOALS . . .

  One of Emma Sky’s fears in returning to Iraq was that she would be subjected to endless rounds of happy talk at top American headquarters, as she had on her previous tour in Iraq, when she worked in the northeast. “They say ‘Camp Victory’ without any sense of irony,” she noted archly.

  Instead she was surprised to walk into a marathon conversation among top commanders and advisers about how to lower the goals of the mission. In the course of several weeks early in 2007, she said, “We redefined success in a much more modest way as ‘sustainable stability.”’ This was key: The grandiose goals of the past three years, of turning Iraq into a beacon of democracy that would transform the Middle East, or even of turning Iraq into a dependable ally of the United States, were quietly put on hold. Bush administration rhetoric didn’t always reflect this shift. But on the ground in Iraq, the new goal was simply getting to a more or less peaceful Iraq that didn’t explode into a regional war or implode into a civil war.

  As Odierno, Sky, and others talked into the night, hours at a time, three or four nights a week, they focused on the way that parts of the Baghdad government exercised power to further sectarian agendas, undermining the legitimacy of the entire enterprise. “It is a failed state with ungoverned spaces in which the government is part of the problem,” Sky summarized as their conclusion. In particular, they would target Shiite militiamen employed by the Ministry of Health, who among other things were killing Sunnis who sought medical care.

  They also decided that they needed to reposition the U.S. government. In February, Odierno would tell his subordinate commanders to conduct “balanced operations targeting groups on both sides of the sectarian divide.” That is, rather than act as an ally of one side, the Shiites, they would recast the American role in Iraq as an arbiter between groups.

  As part of that move, Odierno ordered the abandonment of the term “AIF,” for “anti-Iraqi forces,” an Orwellian designation that U.S. officials had given to insurgent groups, as if Americans could decide who was a real Iraqi. They also would carefully release certain leaders of insurgent groups to see if they might begin to cooperate. The message to them would be that the U.S. government recognizes their concerns, which are legitimate, and will work with you, as long as you don’t use violence against us. Finally, they decided that the key indicator of progress in security was Iraqi civilian casualties, not those inflicted on the American and Iraqi militaries.

  Odierno also discussed with Keane what do to about Sadr City, the Bronx-sized slum in eastern Baghdad dominated by Moqtada al-Sadr. Keane and he concluded that “we should avoid Sadr City,” and try to deal with it later politically, instead of engaging in another round of block-to-block fighting in a huge neighborhood of hostile Iraqis.

  They also decided that there was a hole or a gap in the middle of Iraqi society. The people had needs, especially for security, but the Iraqi government couldn’t provide it, so that opening was being filled by militias. “We need to step into that gap,” Odierno ordered. The way to do that, he said to his advisers, was “to get back out into Baghdad—I want to get my people out there.” In effect, they had reversed the American policy of the previous three years.

  In April 2007, Maj. Gen. Fastabend, Petraeus’s strategic adviser, composed a twenty-page essay, “How All This Ends”—that is, the answer to the question Petraeus had posed four years earlier—that captured the revamped approach: The United States, he wrote, needed “to settle for far less than the vision that drove it to Baghdad.”

  ... AND BIGGER RISKS

  The other shoe, Fastabend continued, was to take far bigger risks. He subtitled his essay “It’s Fourth and Long, Go Deep.” In the essay, which isn’t classified but has been held so closely that its existence hasn’t previously been disclosed, he employed the literary device of having Petraeus look back from the future—2009—to recount how he had turned around the situation in Iraq. Never one to waste a moment of his time, Petraeus kept a copy of Fastabend’s essay next to the toilet in his private bathroom, taking it out occasionally to refresh his thinking.

  It can end well, Fastabend explained, if the U.S. government would take more risks. But to take risks, we have to think seriously, he continued. Few anti-war critics were as scathing of the conduct of the Iraq war as are members of Petraeus’s staff, such as Fastabend, his chief of strategy. “As a sole superpower, we thought we didn’t have to make hard choices. We thought we could just come here, without thinking about the opportunity costs. When you just write conditions, and never have to say who does what by when—then you don’t make choices and decisions. All you get is conditions: Close the border, end corruption, change the culture.”

  It was time, he told Petraeus, “to take some risk—not the ones you’re comfortable with, but gut-wrenching, hold-your-balls risks.”

  He recommended six major departures:

  • Get rid of extremists by working with them. We had been fighting them for four years, he said, “whacking and stacking them”—but with little to show for all that blood, sweat, and tears. Maybe, he suggested, it was time to replicate the example of Ramadi and cut some deals with tribal leaders and other insurgent organizations. Tell them they aren’t militias, they are neighborhood watches. Parole insurgents to them. “Commanders will object—‘catch and release.’ There will be letters from mothers and fathers—‘They killed Americans.’ You’ll have to take some heat. Make a choice!” Fastabend even called for large-scale detainee releases, which would be considered but eventually was shelved. “Petraeus was comfortable with it, but division commanders weren’t,” Col. Rapp explained. Petraeus agreed to drop the idea because of their concern that it would damage troop morale. But he would go on to implement the idea of local cease-fires with former insurgents.

/>   • Another major risk Fastabend recommended taking was alienating our own allies, the Shiite-dominated central government. Push Maliki hard. And don’t let him shut down the deals with former insurgents. Like Odierno, Petraeus was ready to go further there. In the following months, American commanders would sign up tens of thousands of former insurgents to become local militias, first called Concerned Local Citizens and then later, Sons of Iraq.

  • Third was reaching out to Moqtada al-Sadr. Part of these negotiations were even about whether to talk to each other. “They said, we want a date for your exit,” recalled Kilcullen, who was briefed on the initial exchange with Sadr’s representative.

  “We can’t do that,” the Americans replied.

  “Well, forget it then,” a Sadrist politician replied.

  But the Americans were curious. “What date did you have in mind?”

  “Well, December 2012,” the Sadrist said. That brought private grins to the Americans—promising to stay in Iraq until then was a position that would have drawn protests from many in the U.S. Congress.

  • Fourth was beginning to emphasize reconciliation at the local level, among Sunis and Shiites in towns and provinces, rather than a deal among national leaders, which had hit a dead end. Petraeus and Crocker would go along with this.

  • Also, he argued, put the brakes on the transition to Iraq control, stopping the cycle of rushing to failure. “Casey was all about transition,” said Fastabend. “Petraeus has slowed it down.” One risk that surprised Fastabend was how dangerous it was to deal with the Iraqi government. While scheduling appointments, Americans had to worry about whether the government official who was being met would tip off the insurgents to set up an ambush.