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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  “Basra was a colossal failure in execution, but the decision to attack was a key step forward for the government of Iraq,” concluded Brig. Gen. Dan Allyn, Gen. Austin’s chief of staff at the American military headquarters for day-to-day operations in Iraq. “They chose to take on Shia militias for the first time. That was a courageous decision not properly prepared for.”

  MALIKI: FROM OVERWHELMED TO OVERCONFIDENT?

  One of the harsh lessons of the Iraq war, as well as earlier ones such as Vietnam, has been that a military victory doesn’t necessarily translate into a political gain—which is one reason that military operations can’t be judged just in tactical terms. The reverse can also be true, that a military stalemate can be a victory for one side. That is what happened to Maliki in Basra. In military terms, the outcome was ambiguous. “It was totally unclear who won or lost on the ground,” said Lemons, the Marine sergeant. But in political terms, Basra was a clear victory for Maliki and his army, he and others said. “Every Iraqi I have spoken to since then about how the prime minister did claims Maliki proved he is a strong leader willing to crack JAM.”

  Cooper, the British deputy to Petraeus, was more optimistic. “It was nip and tuck up” to the cease-fire, he said, but after that, “we got the sense that JAM had taken a pounding, and had their own logistical problems.”

  The operation’s political effects were clearer. “Iraqi politics were just muddling along,” said Maj. Rayburn. “Then there was this watershed: They were forced to make a choice between the prime minister and the Sadrists. After some quick deliberation, they all decided against the Sadrists.” Also, the quality of life improved for more than a million Iraqis who lived in Basra, which effectively rejoined Iraq.

  American officials came to see the operation as a psychological tipping point for both Maliki and his army. “He went into Basra an uncertain political leader with an uncertain future,” said Bell, the head of Petraeus’s think tank. “I think he emerged very different.”

  “It wasn’t tactically pretty but it was a decisive and strategic move,” concluded Col. Richard Daum, a top military planner in Iraq in 2008. Sitting in his blue cubbyhole amid an ocean of cubbyholes in the headquarters complex at Camp Victory, he said, “I think Basra will be looked at as an enormous turning point. It signaled that the government isn’t going after only Sunni insurgents, but also Shias. It also signaled to the Iranians that they needed to stop meddling. And it sent a signal to the moderate Arab states. The prime minister emerged with a lot more wasta.” In the wake of Basra, several Arab nations announced they would open embassies in Baghdad, after years of resisting American pressure to take that step. A few months later, King Abdullah of Jordan would become the first head of a Sunni Arab state to visit Iraq since the American invasion. Of course, what he was looking for was the kind of breaks on oil prices that Saddam Hussein had given Jordan. But that would be a small price for Maliki to be recognized as a peer by the Sunni Arab world. In September, Syria sent an ambassador to Iraq. In October, the Egyptian foreign minister visited, along with his country’s oil minister.

  “Six months ago, people were saying about Maliki, ‘He is a Shiite prime minister, he is an Iranian guy,”’ said Othman, who spent hours a day talking to Iraqi politicians. “Now, after Basra and Mosul, he is looked upon much more as an Iraqi.” The Americans were also pleased that upon his return to Baghdad, Maliki established a new government committee to gather intelligence on Iranian influence in Iraq.

  The Iraqi army had surprised the Americans and gained new respect, even deference. “The lesson of Basra is that the Iraqi army has come a long way,” said Flynn, who spent a total of six weeks in Basra assisting the operation. “I don’t think they could have done this a year ago. But they also have a long way to go.”

  Hammond, the commander of the 4th Infantry Division, described the battle of Basra as a transformative event for Iraqi troops. “Until then, they were a checkpoint-based security force, and that was kind of hit and miss,” he said. “It’s kind of like they found a whole new level of confidence. Even the checkpoints are different than they were a month ago—higher level of professionalism, greater pride, greater sense of purpose. I think they’ve tasted success, and they like it.”

  On the American side, this led to a new readiness to defer to Iraqi officers. “I do think there is more of a willingness to engage Iraqi counterparts in a serious way, a greater willingness to see problems through Iraqi eyes, to take their advice even if it doesn’t seem to make sense,” said Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, who in 2008 was on his third tour in Iraq.

  When Emma Sky, Odierno’s erstwhile politcal adviser, got back to Iraq to prepare for the change of command from Petraeus to Odierno, she headed down to Basra, where she went on patrol with Iraqi troops. “They had a terrific esprit de corps—‘This is where we fought this battle.’ It was like a glimpse into the future. It’s not the way we’d do it, but it is an Iraqi way.” She also was impressed by the new confidence she saw in the way Maliki talked and moved. “I’ve not seen him for four months, and he’s a different man. He’s growing into power.”

  Other American advisers agreed that Basra fight illuminated the pathway for Iraqi forces and their American allies. Iraqi forces would lead the way, and their generals would make the big decisions—but the Americans would stand ready to provide support in key areas, such as close air support, medical evacuation, intelligence and surveillance, and communications. That was a recipe, the Americans believed, for big U.S. troop drawdowns in 2009—but also for a smaller, long-term presence built around those advisory and enabling missions. “To me, the big lesson learned is, that’s the way forward,” said Barbero.

  Later in the spring, the fighting in Sadr City in eastern Baghdad was resolved in a similar way to Basra. Iraqi officials did it their way, and despite American apprehensions, it worked. At first U.S. forces were intensely involved as they bit off an arc of southern Sadr City, targeting the portion that had been the launching point for most of the rockets and mortar shells that were raining down on the Green Zone. In several weeks of combat, at least 200 Mahdi Army fighters were killed, many of them members of the launching teams. But in mid-May, Maliki’s government cut another deal with Sadr. Rather than conduct a joint U.S.-Iraq assault on the heart of Sadr City, the Iraqi forces negotiated their entry, and went in alone, slowly and with permission. It was a sharp contrast to 2006, when Maliki had ordered the Americans to stop raiding into Sadr City or even to put up checkpoints at its entryways. Apparently under orders from Sadr, residents greeted them with flowers and Korans—an ironic echo of the Bush administration’s view that American troops would be met with bouquets in 2003. Hammond, the division commander, said he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the negotiated entry, but said, “They’re doing it their way. They’re not looking for my approval.” He said he wasn’t issuing orders to Iraqi commanders, but instead advising them—and often seeing his advice rejected. “More often, I have to fight for my point of view,” he said. His forces played an overwatch role, establishing Joint Security Stations on all four sides of the city. Two aerostat balloons were lofted alongside the city to provide 24-hour surveillance. In addition, said Hammond, at any given time, five Predator and Shadow drone aircraft and four Apache attack helicopters were orbiting above the city, ready to fire missiles at any rocket or mortar teams that emerged.

  By June a new Sons of Iraq program began in the huge slum. But Sadr’s men continued to fight in quiet ways. In June Brig. Gen. Jabar Musaid, who had been head of Basra’s military intelligence operations during the crackdown there, was shot to death in east Baghdad.

  In June 2008, Austin, the new corps commander, noted that, “For the first time, the government has positive control of the three strategic nodes—Basra, Mosul, and Baghdad.” It was indeed an accomplishment, even if it came during the sixth year of the war. At Umm Qasr, Iraq’s only port, just south of Basra, the amount of cargo arriving daily tripled from the spring to the summer.

/>   By the summer of 2008, the American military actually was ahead of its schedule. “Where we are now is where we thought we’d be in January of next year,” said Col. Bell. That is, the security situation was about what they had hoped to be able to turn over to the next American president. Petraeus winced when he heard such open talk of timetables, but others confirmed that they were indeed ahead of their secret plan at that point.

  By June a new worry began to grow about Maliki: that he was overconfident and didn’t fathom just how much essential support he was getting from the Americans, especially from the nightly Special Operations raids that were keeping al Qaeda in Iraq from reforming and being able to launch a new wave of attacks in Baghdad. During June and July 2008, the terrorist organization, still on its heels, suffered a new round of losses from a series of raids along the Tigris River Valley. In one operation near Tikrit, U.S. forces not only captured several people but also found suicide vests and a readied car bomb. In nearby Bayji they captured the man who housed incoming foreign fighters. In Mosul, they killed a leading figure and captured more than $100,000 and more suicide vests.

  Maliki, feeling his oats, began to distance himself from the Americans, and especially from the Bush administration. In midsummer he appeared to endorse Senator Obama’s plan to get American combat forces out of Iraq within a year or two.

  “It’s been a good thing and a bad thing,” Gen. Odierno said later in 2008 of Maliki’s victory in Basra. The benefit, of course, was that the side allied with the Americans won. “The bad point is, it’s a bit of an overestimation by Maliki of how it happened.” Odierno eventually put together a briefing for the prime minister to teach him just how much the United States had helped win the battle of Basra and continued to support Maliki in hundreds of ways every day.

  ROUND II WITH CONGRESS: NO WAY OUT

  “Nothing succeeds with the American public like success,” Petraeus had written in his 1987 doctoral dissertation at Princeton, about the influence of the Vietnam War on the thinking of the U.S. military leaders about how to use force.

  But in his second round of congressional testimony, in April 2008, he would find that limited success doesn’t sell as well. In September 2007, he had been able to testify that the war was being turned around, and so had stymied Democrats advocating a swift pullout. Seven months later, as far as Washington was concerned, the tactical gains of the surge were old news. Now it would be the turn of congressional Republicans to feel frustrated. They had given him time, and now they wanted to hear more about how that success was going to get the United States out of Iraq. He had little for them in that regard. Instead, he was looking to freeze the U.S. military presence near the level of 130,000, where it had been in 2006, before the surge began. On top of that, he was telling Republicans that the light at the end of the tunnel wouldn’t be the bright beacon of democracy that the Bush administration originally envisioned as the payoff for invading Iraq. Reflecting the lowered goals of the U.S. effort in Iraq, Petraeus pointedly called himself a “minimalist.”

  Unlike the previous September, this time members of Congress knew from the outset what they would be getting. Even before the hearings began, Senator Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican, posed the basic question: “How do we get out of this mess?” The answer, of course, was: We don’t. This was not something they wanted to hear.

  Lawmakers must have sensed Petraeus wasn’t going to be of much help in assuring them that the American commitment to Iraq wasn’t open-ended, because they gnawed at the issue throughout the hearings. “I still have a hard time seeing the big picture and what constitutes success,” fretted Republican Representative Jeff Flake of Arizona. “That’s not just one side of the aisle with those kind of concerns. Many on this side of the aisle have that as well.”

  “The people of the United States have paid an awful price,” noted Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California. “It’s time for the Iraqis to pay that price for their own protection.”

  Senate Republicans were no happier. Bob Corker of Tennessee said, “I think people want a sense of what the end is going to look like.”

  “Where do we go from here?” asked Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican but a longtime skeptic of the war.

  Senator George Voinovich of Ohio said, “The American people have had it up to here.”

  “We’re a generous people,” said Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, another new Republican, “but our patience is not unlimited.”

  Welcome to the club, Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, seemed to say. Petraeus’s plans to draw down U.S. troops to pre-surge levels, he asserted, were “just the next page in a war plan with no exit strategy.” He was more or less correct: While there was an exit strategy, the exit was years away, in fact so far in the future that it was hard to discern.

  As for presidential candidates, McCain seemed most detached from reality, essentially not listening to Petraeus and instead laying out a concept for an ending that seemed unreachable. The day before the hearings began, he described Iraq in terms that were eerily similar to how the Bush administration had described it on the eve of the invasion, as a country that the Americans would transform and turn into an engine of change for the entire region. “The fact is, we now have a great opportunity, not only to bring stability and freedom to Iraq but to make Iraq a pillar of our future strategy for the entire region of the Greater Middle East,” he had told the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “If we seize the opportunity before us, we stand to gain a strong, stable, democratic ally against terrorism and a strong ally against an aggressive and radical Iran.”

  At the hearing, McCain summarized his view: “We can now look ahead to the genuine prospect of success. Success, the establishment of a peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic state that poses no threats to its neighbors and contributes to the defeat of terrorists, this success is within reach.”

  McCain’s grand vision was not only at odds with the more restrained goals in Petraeus’s campaign plan—simply of “sustainable security”—but verged on fantasy. It resembled President Bush’s 2003 rhetoric, but flew in the face of five additional years of painful evidence about the imprudence of that grandiose approach. It was unlikely that Iraq would wind up a strong or genuinely democratic nation, with not only elections but also rule of law and respect for the rights of its minorities. There was even less chance that Iraq would be an ally against Iran, given that the Shiite politicians that the United States had helped to power had taken refuge in Iran during Saddam’s time, and had maintained close ties even during the U.S. occupation. Rather, the best case scenario was that in the long run, Iraq would calm down, be mildly authoritarian, and probably become an ally of Iran, but, with luck, not one that threatened the rest of the Arab world.

  Senator Clinton asked sharp questions that underscored the vagueness of Petraeus’s answers. You keep on saying that your decisions will be based not on time but on conditions, she said, so please describe those conditions. Petraeus didn’t, instead describing how he would measure the situation. His response is worth quoting at length for its masterful evasiveness:

  With respect to the conditions, Senator, what we have is a number of factors that we will consider by area as we look at where we can make recommendations for further reductions beyond the reduction of the surge forces that will be complete in July. These factors are fairly clear. There’s obviously an enemy situation factor. There’s a friendly situation factor with respect to Iraqi forces, local governance, even economic and political dynamics, all of which are considered as the factors in making recommendations on further reductions. Having said that, I have to say that again it’s not a mathematical exercise. There is not an equation in which you have coefficients in front of each of these factors. It’s not as mechanical as that. At the end of the day, it really involves commanders sitting down, also with their Iraqi counterparts and leaders in a particular area, and assessing where it is that you can reduce you
r forces so that you can again make a recommendation to make further reductions. And that’s the process. Again, there is this issue, in a sense, this term of battlefield geometry. And as I mentioned, together with Ambassador Crocker and Iraqi political leaders, there’s even sort of a political-military calculus that you have to consider, again, in establishing where the conditions are met to make further reductions.

  It was as if, after being ambushed by Clinton in the September hearings, Petraeus had crossed her off his list. He wasn’t prepared to engage with her except at an unhelpful, arm’s-length distance. Mess me around, he seemed to be saying, and all you’ll get from me is empty but correct answers. (Meanwhile, Senator Roger Wicker, a new Republican from Mississippi, managed to get in a subtle dig at Clinton, throwing back at her that loaded phrase from last September. “There is no question that the situation is better now,” he lectured. “It’s better than when the surge began and it’s better than in September. It would take a major suspension of disbelief to conclude otherwise, to conclude that things are not much improved.”)

  Senator Obama was much more focused in his questions than in the September hearing, when he had rambled. Obama this time seemed to be thinking like someone who might have to make real decisions in a year’s time. He wanted to know two things: If we are never going to totally eliminate support for al Qaeda in Iraq and we are never going to totally eliminate Iranian influence, then what are we really trying to do with those two issues? Or, he asked, are we going to try to stay there for two or three decades, until everything is really solved? “I’m trying to get to an end point,” Obama said. “That’s what all of us are trying to get to.”

  Obama’s bottom line wasn’t really much different from that of Petraeus and Crocker. If we wanted to entirely eliminate al Qaeda and have a solid Iraqi state, we’d be there for decades. “If on the other hand,” he said, “our criteria is a messy, sloppy status quo, but there’s not, you know, huge outbreaks of violence; there’s still corruption, but the country’s struggling along but it’s not a threat to its neighbors and it’s not an al Qaeda base; that seems, to me, an achievable goal within a measurable time frame.” That was what the campaign plan called “sustainable security.”