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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  There were still plenty of problems—a huge bombing of the Yezidi people, an obscure sect in the north; the assassination of two Shiite governors in the south; the deterioration of Basra, the biggest city in the south and a vital center of commerce, into gangland warfare over control of oil exports and other sources of revenue. A study by the International Crisis Group found that city plagued by “the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors.” A new phenomenon occurred there as religious extremists began killing women who appeared without the head scarf called the hijab.

  But even some of the violence helped American aims. In August a day of Shiite-on-Shiite violence in the holy city of Karbala killed 49 people. Moqtada al-Sadr apparently was embarrassed by the incident, which had pitted his Mahdi Army against fighters from the the Badr Corps, the other major Shiite militia. He announced that he was putting a “freeze” on his militia’s operations for six months, a period he later expanded. Sadr was taking a gamble of his own, that he could survive as a political power without having a fielded force to protect his turf and generate revenue from various forms of racketeering, extortion, and property seizures.

  On the hot, dusty day of August 10, 2007, Petraeus and Rapp were flying from the U.S. base at Taji back to the capital. Rapp, who accompanied Petraeus to most of the general’s meetings, often used the time in flight to talk through new ideas. As they wheeled over the Abu Ghraib area, west of the city, Rapp turned to Petraeus and offered what he thought the next step in the war might be. “The violent way is the short way, and the peaceful way is the long way,” he said over the Black Hawk’s intercom. “Sir, if we want this competition in Iraq for resources to be resolved peacefully, then we have to prepare people for a long, drawn-out process.”

  Petraeus liked the idea coming through the headphones. “You know, that’s really good,” he replied. He asked Rapp to write a memo on this thought. Over the following four weeks, it would become the core idea of his congressional testimony.

  The bottom line, as Charlie Miller, who also worked on the testimony, thought of it, was: “This is going to be a long-term effort, it isn’t going to be easy, but if we keep plugging away, it just might work.”

  That notion also would lead to more conflict with Adm. Fallon, because it argued that looking for a quick exit likely would lead to a replay of the violence of 2006. The long view “wasn’t exactly what Admiral Fallon wanted to hear,” Rapp said. “He had a shorter timeline than the CG’s”—that is, the commanding general’s.

  As Petraeus came to think of it, the point he would make to Congress was that in late 2006, there was an average of more than 50 murders a day in Baghdad. “If you didn’t like where Iraq was then, you’d hate it if we just let it go,” he thought.

  But he was still running into strong internal opposition from above in his chain of command. On a Saturday in late August, Col. Rapp recalled, Fallon flew to Baghdad to try to talk Petraeus out of the recommendations he was planning to deliver to Congress the following month. Petraeus planned to say, recalled Rapp, that “we have the right strategy, the surge is showing initial results, and we need to stay the course. And if you’re looking for a drawdown, it isn’t going to happen.” By contrast, Rapp said, at the meeting at Camp Victory, Fallon pushed for an accelerated transition to Iraqi forces, with faster training of them. “What Fallon wanted was a change of mission.” (In an interview, Petraeus said he didn’t recollect that meeting, saying only, “There were constant conversations during that period.” But Rapp’s memory of the day is so precise that it suggests Petraeus was just being discreet.)

  A few days later, President Bush approved Petraeus’s mission statement, which called for security while transitioning—that is, continue the mission to protect the people, and keep the troops necessary to carry that out.

  Fallon’s emphasis not only added to the friction with Petraeus, but also made officers in Iraq chary of talking about progress, for fear that it would be used against them. “Centcom is seizing any good news from Iraq to call for a quicker drawdown,” Miller said “I still think he [Adm. Fallon] sees it as his role to draw down in Iraq as quickly as possible. He seems to be operating out of the old playbook.”

  Miller thought Fallon was a hypocrite. “He’ll be in public applauding the efforts in Iraq, but behind the scenes, it’s ‘cut, cut, cut.’”

  PETRAEUS VS. THE CONGRESS

  The third and most significant battle Gen. David Petraeus fought in 2007 took place more than 6,000 miles from Iraq. His two days of hearings on Capitol Hill in September of that year altered the course of the war, both in domestic political terms and in how it was viewed on the ground in Iraq. His approach to the hearings was adversarial, and it worked.

  For months, Democrats had expected the September hearings to be decisive, even a conclusive point in the war. For example, Representative James P. Moran Jr., a Northern Virginia Democrat, had said in May, “If we don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, September is going to be a very bleak month for this administration.” Some Republican allies of the president agreed that the Iraq strategy was doomed. Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said the same month that “the handwriting is on the wall that we are going in a different direction in the fall, and I expect the president to lead it.” His counterpart in the House, John Boehner of Ohio, said, “By the time we get to September, October, members are going to want to know how well this is working, and if it isn’t, what’s Plan B.”

  Listening to such comments, Iraqis began calculating not only that the surge would end soon, but that Americans would be heading to the exits in six months or so. “You saw them hardening their positions, because they thought we were going to leave,” Odierno observed.

  Col. Steve Boylan, Petraeus’s communications adviser, calculated that the key to the hearings was understanding that it was not Petraeus but congressional Democrats who were in a bind. “My feeling was that Congress wouldn’t be able to put together enough votes to override a presidential veto, because then they’d own it,” he said. Here he put his finger on a basic dilemma the Democrats hadn’t been able to resolve: how to end the war without being blamed for how it ended.

  Fastabend, Petraeus’s strategic adviser at this time, offered similar counsel: If you can put together enough small victories, you can demonstrate that defeat is not inevitable—and so he wrote to Petraeus “that the ‘bring ’em home’ crowd risked snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.” What’s more, he noted, “they risked incurring the blame.”

  It would indeed turn out to be the anti-war Democrats who ended September feeling forlorn. Before the hearings, the dominant political question had been how to get out of Iraq with the least damage. After them, the question would become how to find the least damaging way to stay in Iraq.

  Petraeus and Crocker knew that after four years of consistently overoptimistic reports, the credibility of American officials remained low with the American people and especially with congressional Democrats. They were determined to deliver a sober, evenhanded assessment that wouldn’t leave them open to the same charge.

  Petraeus laid the groundwork for that approach in the letter he issued to the troops as he left Iraq. While the initiative had been retaken, he expressed disappointment about the political state of Iraq. “Many of us had hoped this summer would be a time of tangible political progress at the national level,” he wrote. “One of the justifications for the surge, after all, was that it would help create the space for Iraqi leaders to tackle the tough questions and agree on key pieces of ‘national reconciliation’ legislation. It has not worked out as we had hoped.” It would be hard to charge that he was being rosy about Iraq.

  As they ran together on Sunday mornings during the summer of 2007, Petraeus and Crocker had talked about how they would handle Congress in September. P
etraeus’s calculation was that the debate back in the United States was stalemated, especially in considering the consequences of a pullout. “My job is not to make it easy on people back in Washington,” he said in his office over a cup of coffee in a 101ST AIRBORNE coffee mug. “Some of the debate has lacked a full discussion of the implications of various courses of action.”

  On the Friday before the hearings, Petraeus gave Capt. Liz McNally, his staff writer, a printout of the statement he planned to deliver at the outset. She and Col. Mansoor cut it by about one quarter.

  At the Pentagon, Boylan set up a “murder board” to rehearse Petraeus over the weekend. “The questions asked in our rehearsal were tougher than anyone asked” at the hearings later that week, Boylan said.

  “Is it worth it, given the strains on the military and the divisions in the United States?” asked Charlie Miller. His suggested response was that only time would tell, but that it “definitely won’t be worth it if we fail due to a precipitous withdrawal.” As for divisions in the U.S., he advised, that was for the political system to sort out, not a general.

  Boylan’s most pointed question in the Sunday rehearsal was, “Sir, explain to me why we have to lose one more American life in Iraq.”

  Petraeus responded, “Okay, what’s your answer?” Boylan didn’t have one, but he wanted Petraeus to think about it.

  On the day the hearings began, MoveOn.org, an anti-war group influential in the Democratic Party, ran a full-page advertisement in the New York Times that mocked Petraeus as “General Betray Us.” Petraeus, it charged, was “at war with the facts.” And the facts, as MoveOn saw them, were that “the surge strategy has failed.” In addition, it said, “General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war.”

  In a narrow sense, the advertisement was understandable. For 15 years, beginning with the endorsement of candidate Bill Clinton in 1992 by former Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. William Crowe, senior retired military officers, some of them fresh from active duty, had been acting in a more politicized manner. Powell, the most political of active-duty generals, had written an op-ed on the eve of that election. In subsequent campaigns, candidates scrambled to line up slates of retired generals and admirals as endorsers. At the 2004 and 2008 Democratic conventions, old flag officers would parade on the stage in scenes oddly evocative of a beauty pageant. In the MoveOn advertisement, Petraeus was reaping what all those politicized generals and admirals had sowed: If generals wanted to influence politics, then they would be treated as part of the political arena.

  Yet with regard to Petraeus, the attack was deeply unfair, as there was no evidence that he had been part of that trend toward politicization. True, he had been a Republican—registered in rural New Hampshire, where he owned some land west of the tiny town of New London—but he had kept that quiet, and thought he had been careful to avoid intruding on politics. He felt he had been a professional soldier doing his duty. “I’ve been deployed three of the last five years,” he said later that week. “My family has given a lot.” He was puzzled by the attack. (The Times’ ombudsman later would criticize the newspaper for giving MoveOn a discount, and also for violating its policy of not allowing personal attacks in advertisements.)

  On the morning the advertisement ran, Rapp rode with Petraeus in a car from Fort Belvoir, Virginia, near George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, to the Capitol. “Petraeus did a good job of not showing it, but I know it stung,” he said. “He was just a little quieter than usual.”

  Nor did he mention it later. “But I think he was personally affected” by it, said Charlie Miller, who noted that Petraeus grew up in Cornwall, New York, reading the New York Times, and continued to take it at West Point. Likewise, Capt. McNally, who had always read the newspaper, talked to her parents that night about the advertisement. Her father told her it was just “free speech,” but she was angry. “There was this institution I’ve always admired, so it was really disappointing.”

  Crocker, the lifelong diplomat, took a less emotional approach. Upon first seeing the advertisement, he thought he was reading it incorrectly. “I couldn’t believe it, I thought I didn’t see this, that it can’t be what I thought it was.” He read it again and shook his head. As he read it through, his disbelief gave way to outrage, and then a grim smile. “They’ve screwed themselves.” His calculation was that he knew what Petraeus planned to say, and that it would amount to a “word-by-word rebuttal of that allegation.”

  Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, began his panel’s session. The president had said that the purpose of the surge was to buy time for a political breakthrough, he noted, and that hadn’t happened. “It’s time to turn the corner, in my view, gentlemen,” he said, “We should stop the surge and start bringing our troops home. We should end a political strategy in Iraq that cannot succeed and begin one that can.”

  Petraeus was conscious that one of the senators facing him that day—Barack Obama, McCain, Clinton, and Biden—likely would become his commander in chief in just over a year. “The cameras on these people were astonishing,” he recalled later. “When Biden went and sat down next to Obama, there was an explosion of clicks.”

  While Petraeus and Crocker testified for almost two full days, on September 10 and 11, crouched in small chairs, being both berated and slimed with praise, their lower backs began to ache. “Those witness tables are diabolically designed to get you at just the wrong angle, and you sit at one for eleven hours or whatever it was, it’s a physical endurance test,” Crocker said.

  In Petraeus’s case, it was especially painful because the effects of a recreational skydiving accident make it difficult for him to sit in chairs that don’t offer strong back support. One day in the autumn of 2000, he was above the Raeford Drop Zone, near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, descending well and making his final approach, when his parachute failed and he plummeted to the ground. “Basically, the nose collapsed about eighty feet off the ground going through what’s called dirty air,” he recalled. Even as he worked the chute to get back some lift, “I could tell I was going in for a hard landing.” The accident smashed his pelvis, which is now held together by seven screws and one large flat metal plate. He also emerged from the hospital a quarter inch shorter on his left side than on his right. What pained him almost as much was that to ease the strain on his mending pelvis, he had to sell his old manual-shifting Volkswagen Golf and buy a car with an automatic transmission—as it happened, a BMW. During breaks from the hearing, Petraeus gobbled Motrin pain-relief pills, taking 1,600 milligrams on the second day.

  Crocker said later that he understood why the hearings had to occur. “It was important that that happened, and I can understand all the reasons for it, but if you are the one that’s sitting there over eighteen hours for two days, it’s less than fun, particularly the tone of some of the questions, which gets repeated and repeated and repeated. You can tell yourself look this is a part of politics and that’s the American system—but if you are the guys who are out there doing everything you can to make this work under pretty tough circumstances, when you get that kind of personal edge to it, that gets kind of tiresome.” He would find it growing a bit heavy. “There is some kind of mental deadening process sets in.”

  Petraeus offered very little in his opening statement. He began by establishing his independence. “I wrote this myself and did not clear it with anyone in the Pentagon, the White House or Congress,” he said. The military aspects of the surge were going fairly well, he asserted. “The security situation in Iraq is improving, and Iraqi elements are slowly taking on more of the responsibility for protecting their citizens.” If both those trends continued, he thought that by mid-2008, he could reduce his combat forces to the pre-surge level. That was it. He made no promises whatsoever—keeping a vow he had made to himself. He and Ambassador Crocker essentially said that they thought it was possible that there might be a light at the end of the tunnel, but they co
uldn’t say how long the tunnel was, or how much time it would take to get through it, or actually where it led us.

  “This is a sober assessment, but it should not be a disheartening one,” Crocker said in his own opening statement.

  John McCain used his own time to break another set of Democratic arrows. While a strong supporter of the war, he took the lead in criticizing how it had been handled for the first four years. “The American people are saddened, frustrated, and angry over our past failures in Iraq,” he said. “I, too, have been made sick at heart by the terrible price we’ve paid for nearly four years of mismanaged war. Some of us from the beginning have warned against the Rumsfeld strategy of too few troops, insufficient resources, and a plan predicated on hope rather than on the difficult business of stabilization and counterinsurgency.” Now, he asserted, we were finally “getting it right, because we finally have in place a strategy that can succeed.”

  That left Democrats little running room, but Russell Feingold of Wisconsin tried to find an opening. How could Petraeus claim progress when the first six months of 2007 had brought higher numbers of deaths than the first half of the previous year? “So, to suggest that there was some decline in the number in June and July, versus other months, does not address the fact that the number of troops’ deaths has greatly increased.” What Feingold couldn’t know was what troops on the streets of Baghdad had been sensing in various ways in recent months, that there was indeed a major change in the feeling of the place. Between June and December, the number of bomb, rifle, mortar, and grenade attacks in Iraq would decrease by some 60 percent, from an all-time high of 1,600 a week in June to below 600 a week by year’s end. Some 44 car bombs were detonated in Baghdad in February, killing 253 and wounding another 654, while there would be only 5 in December, killing 12 and wounding 40.