Well, yeah, Petraeus responded, I was leading a counterattack. “When you go on the offensive, you have tough fighting.”
The Democrats were beginning to sense that the sessions were going to have a far different result than they had expected. “General Petraeus, you indicate that hopefully within ten months, we will be able to get our troop levels down to one hundred thirty thousand, which is where we started, which is no troop reduction,” said Benjamin Cardin of Maryland. “We’re back to where we were before the surge, which doesn’t seem to be the goal we set out last January.” Petraeus wasn’t given time to answer, but there was almost no need. The fact of the matter was dawning on the Democrats—yes, that was indeed all that he was offering. As one officer at Centcom gleefully summarized it, “It was like doing a fifty percent markup, and then offering a half-off sale.”
Two exchanges that day lingered in Petraeus’s mind. The first came with Senator Obama, who took seven minutes—the entire period allotted him for questions and answers—to cast doubt on the strategy and pose a series of questions. “How do we clean up the mess and make the best out of a situation in where there are no good options, there are bad options and worse options?” he asked. If Petraeus and Crocker had been given time to answer, they likely would have said a polite version of, Well, duh—welcome to our lives. “How long will this take? And at what point do we say enough?” Obama continued. “[Y]ou said . . . the Iraqi people understand that the patience of the American people is not limitless. But that appears to be exactly what you’re asking for in this testimony.” Obama had put his finger on the Democrats’ dilemma. But he didn’t appear to have a way out of it. By the time he finishing posing his questions, time was up, and Petraeus didn’t get a chance to respond to any of it. The Illinois Democrat was not at his best that day.
Obama said nothing that day about the scurrilous MoveOn advertisement, but his political skills should never be underestimated. Nine months later, as he was preparing to visit Iraq as the Democratic presidential nominee, he would use a speech on patriotism to revisit the issue. “All too often our politics still seems trapped in these old, threadbare arguments,” he said, “a fact most evident during our recent debates about the war in Iraq, when those who opposed administration policy were tagged by some as unpatriotic, and a general providing his best counsel on how to move forward in Iraq was accused of betrayal.” It was a smart fence-mending move to make before going to visit Petraeus in Baghdad.
The comment that would irk Petraeus most that day came from Hillary Clinton. He was surprised when, late in the proceedings, she came at him swinging. “You have been made the de facto spokesman for what many of us believe to be a failed policy,” she chided. “I think the reports that you provide us really require the willing suspension of disbelief.”
Those last four words were powerful. As one friend of Petraeus’s later commented, “You’re either calling him dishonest or stupid.”
Gen. Keane felt a personal sense of duplicity. He had encouraged Petraeus to spend hours with her, explaining the war and his approach to it. Now she was attacking him personally, following the MoveOn course. “I knew she would ask tough questions, but”—here he paused—“well, I talked to Dave about it at his house [the next day], and he was disappointed by her comment and in general with the entire hearing. He was emotionally and psychologically wounded. He knew he was sitting in a chair where his predecessors had lost credibility. The fact that he was in uniform and got attacked in terms of his character was something he wasn’t prepared for.”
Many generals possess a strong sense of honor and a long memory, and Petraeus probably does more than most. He also has the ability to veil his emotions well. He responded in a neutral but essentially unhelpful manner. “As you know, this policy is a national policy that results from policies put forward at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, with the advice and consent and resources provided at the other,” he said, offering the senator, and former first lady and law professor, an introduction to the Constitution. He didn’t show it publicly, but he was furious, friends said. Not only did Petraeus feel that his integrity had been questioned, he also felt a sense of betrayal, because he had given Clinton a lot of his time. Also, he respected her intelligence.
There was one other notable exchange that day. John Warner of Virginia asked if Petraeus’s campaign in Iraq made Americans any safer.
The murder board hadn’t prepped Petraeus for that one. “Sir, I don’t know, actually,” he said. This was probably as close as he came during the hearings to breaking with the Bush administration. Nothing was said at the time, but seven months later, the president would state in a speech delivered, notably, at the Pentagon that “because we acted, the world is better and the United States of America is safer.”
Petraeus also may have gotten out ahead of the administration on the issue of how long American forces might have to fight in Iraq. David Kilcullen, his sometime adviser on counterinsurgency, went over to the White House a few days after the hearings and came away thinking that “there’s still a fundamental reluctance to ’fess up to the American people what the costs are, and what the duration is.”
Capt. McNally watched it all a little wide eyed. It was the first congressional hearing she had ever attended, and she was surprised to see that the senators—“these are important people”—each had only seven minutes in which to pose their questions. “I’m one of those dorks who enjoys watching C-SPAN. I was thinking, this is democracy at work.”
Crocker and Petraeus were less pleased. The general’s conclusion was that he had underestimated the depth of anti-war feeling in the United States, which he termed “industrial strength.” But he also seemed to understand that he had prevailed.
The ambassador looked back on it as “one of the least pleasant experiences of my professional life”—this from a man who was blown against a wall at the U.S. embassy in Beirut when it was bombed in April 1983, killing 64 of his friends and colleagues. On September 12, as the two left the public television studio where they had appeared on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Crocker turned to Petraeus and muttered, “I am not doing this again.”
“HEY, WE WON!”
Petraeus and Odierno had opponents in places besides Iraq and Capitol Hill. Their boss at Central Command, Adm. Fallon, and some others inside the national security establishment, still wanted to see the number of troops in Iraq come down quickly.
To wrap up the impact of the hearings, the president was giving a nationally televised speech on the evening of September 13. Late that day, the White House sent a late draft of the speech to Rapp. Scanning it, he saw immediately that “the mission wording had been changed to what Fallon wanted,” Rapp recalled. He was told that the Iraq staffers at the White House had made the change. He showed the draft to Petraeus, who then made a telephone call to get the wording changed back, Rapp recalled. (Petraeus remembers this moment differently, saying the wording change was just the work of White House speechwriters “who weren’t sensitive to the balance between security and transition,” and that the fix was made by e-mail, not by phone.)
That night the president told the nation that the mission in Iraq would change eventually, but not now. “Over time, our troops will shift from leading operations, to partnering with Iraqi forces, and eventually to overwatching those forces,” he said. “As this transition in our mission takes place, our troops will focus on a more limited set of tasks, including counterterrorism operations and training, equipping, and supporting Iraqi forces.”
Fallon’s influence was waning. A few weeks after the hearings, Adm. Michael Mullen succeeded Gen. Pace as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Mullen would prove to be a more effective chairman than the Marine general. Perhaps more important for Petraeus, the admiral was a longtime friend of Fallon’s, and was able to reduce friction between Petraeus and Fallon. Indeed, word in Iraq was that Defense Secretary Gates had told the new chairman to get Fallon off Petraeus’s back. “He has played a calming role,” L
t. Col. Miller said appreciatively a few months later.
But Mullen also seemed determined to reduce the traffic between Petraeus and the White House, a pattern that under Pace had effectively cut the chairman of the Joint Chiefs out of the decision loop. The chairman officially is the president’s principal adviser on military affairs, but even if he participated in Petraeus’s meetings with the president, he still couldn’t know what Keane was quietly cooking up with Cheney’s staff. As Bob Woodward first reported, the new chairman told colleagues that he felt Keane, by stepping into policy making, had diminished the office of chairman of the Joint Chiefs. This was an inaccurate assessment by Mullen, because it was Pace and his predecessor, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, who had reduced the office and created the vacuum into which Keane had stepped. It also was a politically naive step for the new chairman to take. Keane, a career Army officer, had more credibility on ground warfare than did Mullen, a career Navy officer. More significant, Keane had been encouraged in his role by the White House, even to the point of Cheney’s asking Keane to take command in Iraq.
“You really don’t want me to help Petraeus?” Keane asked Mullen.
“No,” the chairman said, “I don’t want to take the chance.” Once more, the leaders of the American military establishment had shown a tendency to avoid risks, and to prefer following established ways of doing business rather than take difficult but necessary steps to become more effective. Keane went back to the White House and got the chairman’s roadblock removed.
Two Mondays after the hearing, in a video teleconference, President Bush brought up the MoveOn advertisement with Petraeus. “On behalf of all Americans, I want to apologize to you for that,” Bush said, according to people who were present at the meeting. “No public servant should have to endure that.” He also told Petraeus that his performance before Congress had altered the domestic political debate on the war.
Crocker had the same sense that something fundamental had shifted in the politics of the war at home. “We kind of saw the air go out of the whole thing,” he said. “I still kind of wonder if maybe it really wasn’t so much what we said but simply that we said it. . . . [T]his thing had been hyped as the event of the decade, and then, ‘Well they came, they testified, they left, so now what?”
The congressional Democrats were stumped. As Senator Webb later put it, “There are a couple of problems with the Democrats and Iraq. One is that there is a wide divergence of opinion inside the party, and the other is that the Democrats are a very fragile majority, and in fact aren’t a majority in the Senate because Lieberman always votes with the Republicans.”
That said, something had changed in the way Democrats talked about the war. On September 26, two days after the president’s apology to Petraeus, the Democratic presidential candidates debated in Hanover, New Hampshire. None of the top candidates would promise to have the U.S. military out of Iraq by January 2013, more than five years later. “I think it would be irresponsible” to state that, said Senator Obama.
“It is very difficult to know what we’re going to be inheriting,” added Senator Clinton.
Seeing those comments, Boylan exclaimed to himself, “Hey, we won!” He had been right. The hearings were supposed to have been climactic. They were, but instead of seizing control of policy, the Democrats essentially had yielded. They hadn’t quite endorsed Bush’s position, but they had conceded much in agreeing to go along with Petraeus’s approach. They were resigned.
From Kilcullen’s point of view, the September hearings were a kind of a parallel to the battle that didn’t happen in Samarra in midsummer. Just as Iraqis had looked at the possibility of a full-blown civil war and turned away, he said, so too the U.S. public had considered a leap into the unknown—and declined to take it. “America,” he said, “has taken a deep breath, looked into the abyss of pulling out, and decided, ‘Let’s not do it yet.’”
AMERICA TUNES OUT THE WAR
The American public had heard all it needed to hear. The people might not have liked what Petraeus was offering, but it was better than anyone else was proposing. They understood that the United States was stuck in Iraq. But that didn’t mean they had to like it. So they would let him continue—but they also would tune it out.
The best evidence for that new hands-off attitude was the sharp decline in news coverage of the war in the weeks and months after the September hearings. In the first half of 2007, the Iraq war was the top running story almost every week on television networks’ evening news broadcasts. After the September hearings, its ranking declined rapidly, from taking up 25 percent of coverage at the time of the hearings to just 3 percent in mid-2008. Starting a month after the hearings, the network broadcasts began consistently to devote more time to presidential campaign politics and the state of the economy. The broadcast networks’ evening news shows are the most sensitive to demand, because they have only about 22 minutes to use every night, roughly equivalent to the number of words a broad-sheet newspaper typically carries on its front page. In the spring of 2008, networks would begin to cut back on their staffs covering the war. CBS no longer kept a correspondent in Baghdad, and it was widely expected that other organizations would follow suit after the U.S. presidential election later that year.
Meanwhile, newspaper coverage of the war declined by about half between early 2007 and early 2008. “It seems like a bad dream, and the public’s not interested in revisiting it unless there is a major development,” Hunter George, the executive editor of the Birmingham (Ala.) News, told the American Journalism Review in early 2008. “If I’m outside the newsroom and Iraq comes up, I hear groans.”
A series of anti-war movies bombed, despite having high-power actors and directors: In the Valley of Elah, directed by Paul Haggis and starring Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron; Lions for Lambs, with Robert Redford, Tom Cruise, and Meryl Streep; Brian De Palma’s Redacted; and Grace Is Gone, featuring John Cusack. Hollywood wasn’t telling moviegoers anything they didn’t know already. The best movies to come out of Iraq were documentaries, such as Baghdad Diary and Deborah Scranton’s innovative The War Tapes, which was filmed by giving video cameras to deploying National Guardsmen.
When the fifth anniversary of the war arrived in March 2008, the anti-war demonstrations were tiny. In Washington, D.C., where anti-war marches during the Vietnam era brought out at least 250,000 or more, there appeared fewer than 1,000 souls. In San Francisco, where an estimated 150,000 people had turned out against the war in 2003, just 500 protestors showed up in 2008.
“I think the debate has moved on,” Secretary Gates said. He was right. Iraq was just part of the national wallpaper, always kind of there, but not particularly noticed.
Hadi al-Amari, the head of the Badr Corps, the militia of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the largest Shiite party, told Gen. Barbero that Petraeus returned to Iraq with much more wasta. “He went there, he went into the teeth of the opposition, and he came out with his plan intact,” the militia commander explained.
Sadi Othman noticed a similar effect in the rest of the Middle East. “That was huge,” Othman he said. “The hearings in the States [changed] the debate on Iraq in the Middle East and around the world.”
But it is axiomatic in military affairs that every strength carries its own weakness. Petraeus now “owned” the war—that is, he has made it his. He had implemented the changes he wanted to make, and had some tactical success to show for it. But the surge hadn’t led to national political reconciliation. That left Petraeus in the position of just keeping his fingers crossed, hoping against hope for a political breakthrough in Iraq. His predicament left him in the same position as Rodney King, who famously pleaded for an end to the 1992 riots in Los Angeles: “Can we all get along?” The answer from many Iraqi factional leaders was negative.
PART THREE
WAR WITHOUT END
9.
THE TWILIGHT ZONE
(Winter 2007-8)
At the turn of the year, Lt. Free
ze, the reconnaissance platoon leader in Diyala who on Independence Day had despaired for Iraq, revised his characterization of the country. The one word to summarize it now, he thought, would be “progress.”
That was a distinctly relative term. Baghdad was more secure, but still far from safe. Violence had decreased to the level of 2005, which at the time had seemed nightmarish, but now, coming after the horror of 2006, felt like a welcome relief. Civilian deaths were plummeting. The bloodshed that did occur now seemed to resonate less, especially because there was a new air of desperate improvisation in al Qaeda’s attacks. “None of ’em add up to anything particular,” Brig. Gen. Anderson, Odierno’s chief of staff, said of that winter’s car bombings. Baghdad had moved from the seventh circle of Hell, which Dante reserved for the violent, to the fifth, the destination of those overcome with anger and sullenness, or as the poet put it in Canto VII, “those who swallow mud.” It was a notable improvement, and it was in the right direction—but it was still a version of Hell. Al Qaeda’s usual methods of bomb delivery—cars or young men—were deterred by a proliferation of checkpoints, so it began using bicycles, women, and preteen boys to bomb Iraqis. Eventually it would perversely turn to mentally handicapped or disabled girls. In a sign of how much checkpoints run by the turned militias were impeding its operations, al Qaeda fighters also began launching sophisticated ambushes against them, in one instance wearing Iraqi police uniforms so they could get near. U.S. military operations continued, with large offensives in Diyala and Nineveh Provinces, but they had a desultory feeling of mopping up.
Iraq still was far from a functioning state. “We had a much better government in Vietnam than we do in Iraq right now,” one colonel warned ominously.
The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq Page 34