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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Crocker’s message was even starker. He used the hearings to raise concern about what he termed the “Lebanonization” of Iraq—this is, the weakening of the government, the division of the people into sectarian groups, and the rise of militias that rival the government in reliable firepower. Also, in both Lebanon and Iraq, Iran played an active role, supplying and training certain armed groups. “Iran is pursuing a Lebanonization strategy,” Crocker said. And if the U.S. left Iraq quickly, he added, “Iran would just push that much harder.”

  The evocation of Lebanonization raised the haunting possibility of the American war in the Middle East continuing for decades. A generation of Arab fighters had taken on the United States presence in Iraq, and some had survived to go back home, reported the Washington Post’s Anthony Shadid. “Iraq is a badge of honor for every Arab and Muslim to fight the American vampire,” he was told by Abu Haritha, the nom de guerre of a man who was wounded while fighting in Fallujah and then returned home to his home in Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city. Crocker’s warning was effectively dismissed by the members of Congress quizzing him and Petraeus, despite the ambassador’s persistence and his familiarity with both Lebanon and Iraq. It was as if no one even wanted to hear it.

  After the hearings, I asked Petraeus over a lunch why he hadn’t taken more risks and simply laid it out plainly, saying something like this: Look, the best case scenario is we’re going to be there a minimum of another three or four years, though I think with about half the troops we have there now, and with fairly steadily declining casualties. This isn’t a lead-pipe cinch, but I think it is plausible, and it sure beats any alternative I can see. He responded that he thought he had said that, more or less.

  I didn’t think he had made that clear. But some military professionals disagreed, saying that they had heard that message. This didn’t necessarily make them hopeful. Retired Marine Col. Robert Work, an insightful former adviser to the secretary of the Navy, observed that Petraeus subtly had shifted from a conditions-based strategy to a time-based one:

  We have given up on having a shining beacon of democracy in Iraq. We want a nation that is relatively stable, not a threat to its neighbors, and can protect its borders. We have also largely given up on sectarian reconciliation; we now simply hope for some type of sectarian accommodation that will reduce the likelihood of widespread sectarian conflict when we leave. Crocker and Petraeus cannot describe the conditions for this except that it will take time. Every gain is potentially reversible, for far into the future. Our condition for leaving is now simply: We’ll wait and hope that through the passage of time for bottom up accommodation and the formation of a functioning state. We’ve planted the seeds and will know the time to leave when the flower blooms. Unfortunately, we cannot tell the American people how long this particular flower takes to bloom. In the meantime, as part of our time-based strategy, we will expend the majority of our time, money, blood, sweat, and tears building up Iraqi security forces, not the government or the society. We leave that for natural development; it is funded and resourced in a relatively paltry fashion. This seems to me to be a highly risky strategy. It is arming all three of the major sectarian groups to the teeth.

  Retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales Jr., a former commandant of the Army War College, thought the strategy was even riskier than Work did. Petraeus was caught in a fundamental contradiction, he thought: Petraeus had the correct strategy, but was on thin ice because time was running out on it. “The counterinsurgency strategy implemented by Petraeus is the right one and cannot be substantially altered,” Scales said. But, he continued, “The crucible of patience among the American people is emptying at a prodigious rate and very little short of a complete shift in conditions on the ground is likely to refill it.” On top of that, by early 2008 the Iraq war had cost roughly $650 billion, at minimum. That price tag would grow even more significant as the U.S. economy slipped into a recession and a burgeoning financial crisis.

  It appeared that Obama might be the person who would have to address the contradiction. After securing the Democratic nomination in early June, he used part of his victory speech to talk about Iraq, beginning with a comment that echoed Kilcullen’s crack that just because you invade a country stupidly doesn’t mean you should leave it that way. “We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in,” Obama said. “ But start leaving, we must. It’s time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future.”

  Bush certainly understood the point Petraeus had been making. The two had breakfast after the April hearings, along with Crocker. “I’ve told him he’ll have all the time he needs,” the president said afterward.

  DRAWDOWN

  Before he moved to his new post at Central Command, Petraeus had to continue to plan in Iraq. In June 2008, his strategic planners began working on the following year. He told them to begin thinking about a transition from a mission of “securing the population” to one of “sustainable security.” They already could see four hurdles ahead. The Muslim holy month of Ramadan would start this year in September, and in every year of the war it had brought a spike in violence. Second, the better security was in Baghdad, the more refugees would return home from Jordan and Syria, where many of them were running out of money. Their homecomings promised to provoke sectarian fighting and test Iraqi forces as Sunnis returned to neighborhoods that had been cleansed by Shiite militias that had taken possession of Sunni houses. Provincial elections almost certainly would increase violence. The planners also knew, finally, that the American election would be closely watched in Iraq, and that there might be violence intended to influence American voters. That election could go a long way toward determining the future U.S. mission in Iraq: Under Obama it would be to reduce the presence, while under McCain it would be to prevail and help confront Iran.

  For years, the U.S. military had fretted about “mission creep.” Beginning with the Somalia operation in 1992-93, top commanders worried that once U.S. forces were committed to a situation, the tasks assigned them would continually expand, from security to providing a variety of services to standing up a government, until they were mired in what was derogated as “nation building.” Many in the military had listened with relief with George W. Bush had denounced this tendency during the 2000 presidential election campaign, saying it was not a proper use of the armed forces. “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation building,” he said during a debate with Al Gore, the Democratic candidate. “I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war.” Then, of course, he went on to invade Iraq and inadvertently launch perhaps the most ambitious and expensive nation-building effort in the history of the United States.

  In Iraq in 2008, the U.S. military would face a new variant of the mission creep problem. As the 5 brigades sent for the surge began to go home, commanders were facing “force shrinkage.” That is, the mission would remain the same—ensuring that Iraq was developing sustainable security—but there would be fewer and fewer U.S. troops available to carry that out. The key would be to “hold” (under “clear, hold, and build”) with less combat power. But to make that happen, Iraqi forces would have to shoulder more of the burden. Always wanting to take it slowly, Petraeus recommended holding the troop level in Iraq to about 15 combat brigades until it was clear how provincial elections were going to play out. Pushed by the Joint Chiefs, he ultimately agreed to a compromise under which one brigade would leave in January 2009 without being replaced, but another one would be on tap to replace it if needed.

  11.

  AFTER THE SURGE

  (Summer 2008)

  As the surge ended in mid-2008, with the last of the five additional combat brigades heading home, Baghdad felt distinctly better. Kebab stands and coffee shops had reopened across the city, and many ordinary Iraqis felt safe enough to venture out of their homes at night, in part because stores were remaining open to evening shoppers. Some women discarded the head scarves that Islamic extremists had ins
isted they wear, with violators being attacked. Even as Iraq’s factions remained murderously divided, violence was at its lowest level of the entire war, with only a dozen American soldiers dying in July 2008. Contrary to expectation, the holy month of Ramadan didn’t bring a major spike in violence, as it had in the previous five years. Some 39,000 displaced families safely returned to Baghdad.

  Some optimists, such as Fred Kagan, pronounced that Iraqi politics were moving forward smartly and that the war was all but over. But that assessment confused starting to win with having won. There was no question that under Petraeus, the U.S. military had regained the strategic initiative, an extraordinary achievement. “He has pulled off something that is unparalleled, really, and without much support from Washington or Centcom, and with active hampering from the Joint Chiefs,” said David Kilcullen. Yet most of the basic questions about the long-term direction of Iraq remained unanswered. It is striking that of the predictions General Fastabend made in his 2007 essay written for Petraeus about “How All This Ends,” many of the military ones came true while the political ones didn’t. As Fastabend had urged, the U.S. government was indeed able to arrive at cease-fires with tribes, to turn former insurgents and put them on the payroll, and even to chip away at the power of Sadr’s militia. But on the political side, Fastabend had predicted that Maliki would be ousted from power by January 2008 and then disappear a few months later while traveling in Iran. He saw provincial elections rolling across Iraq in 2008, another event that didn’t happen. (He did make one good call on the political side: foreseeing that the Republicans would lose the White House in the November 2008 elections.)

  Iraqi politics felt stuck, and American officials were beginning to fear that an entire generation of embittered, distrustful former exiles would have to pass from the scene before genuine and lasting progress could occur. This struck me especially one day late in 2008, when Maj. Gen. Guy Swan, Odierno’s director of strategic operations, told me in his Green Zone office that “with the security gains, there is a window of opportunity. . . . Only they can do it. We have set the conditions for them. They have an opportunity to pursue their own destiny.” Almost exactly a year earlier, Gen. Odierno had said almost exactly the same thing to me. A window of opportunity had opened for the government to reach out to its former foes, he had explained then, but said “it’s unclear how long that window is going to be open.”

  Analyzing the lack of progress in Iraqi politics one day late in 2008, Emma Sky recalled Petraeus’s image of “the Mesopotamian Stampede.” “We’ve stopped the stallion from running off the cliff, but then it runs off in another direction,” she said. “Right now it is frantically running around in circles.” By that she meant that the existential questions that faced the country before the surge—and indeed since the day the Americans invaded—were still hanging out there.

  What, then, had the surge accomplished?

  THE SURGE FALLS SHORT

  The surge was the right step to take, or more precisely, the least wrong move in a misconceived war. Petraeus’s final letter to his troops, dated September 15, 2008, stated that “your great work, sacrifice, courage and skill have helped reverse a downward spiral toward civil war and wrest the initiative from the enemies of the new Iraq.” That assessment captured what the surge and associated moves did, but not what they didn’t do.

  The surge campaign was effective in many ways, but the best grade it can be given is a solid incomplete. It succeeded tactically but fell short strategically. There is no question that the surge was an important contributor to the reduction in violence in Iraq and perhaps the main cause of that improvement. But its larger purpose had been to create a breathing space that would then enable Iraqi politicians to find a way forward and that hadn’t happened. As 2008 proceeded, not only were some top Iraqi officials not seizing the opportunity, some were regressing, Odierno worried one day as he sat in the Green Zone office he recently had inherited from Petraeus. Iraqi politicians had found that they didn’t necessarily have to move forward, he said. “What we’re finding is that as Iraq has become more secure, they’ve . . . moved backwards, in some cases, to their hard-line positions, whether it be a Kurdish position, an Arab position, a Sunni position, a Shi’a position, a Da’wa position, an ISCI position”—these last two being the two major Shiia parties.

  Odierno argued that progress was being made politically. But the analysis he then offered of Iraqi politics seemed instead to support the argument that the breathing space given Iraqi leaders had enabled them to retreat from reconciliation and dodge tough problems. “Security is good enough where I worry about them going back,” he explained. “They’re not going back to solve the old problems which we’ve pushed. They’ve continued to delay the tough ones, like the problem with land up in the north with the Kurds, the problems with the Peshmerga, oil, Kirkuk.” Nor had international actors, most notably Iran, agreed to back off and let Iraq solve its problems by itself. Indeed, a senior U.S. intelligence officer in Iraq told a reporter that there were four locations in Iran at which Iraqi Shiites were being trained to assassinate Iraqi judges and other officials.

  Marine Col. Tom Greenwood, who had been a member of the critical “council of colonels” that in the fall of 2006 had pushed the Pentagon toward recognizing some hard truths about Iraq, said the surge essentially had papered over the problems of Iraq without solving them. “I still think that the Maliki government is riddled with sectarianism and is dysfunctional,” he said in mid-2008, and “that we have de facto partition between the Kurds, Shia and Sunni, that Iraq is little more than an Iranian proxy, that we have destabilized the region worse than Saddam Hussein ever did, that the downward trend in U.S. casualties will be short-lived.”

  What’s more, some of the country’s political tensions were worsening, most notably between Arabs and Kurds over oil and the status of Kirkuk. “As Nouri al-Maliki has become more capable and more confident, he’s actually become less inclined to reach out to those he most needs to reconcile with,” said Colin Kahl of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank. Masoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish region, charged the Baghdad government with forgetting its commitments and acting like “a totalitarian regime.”

  Violence had declined much less in Kirkuk than in Baghdad, added Michael Knights, an expert on Middle East defense issues, who dubbed the disputed city “the land the surge forgot.”

  One White House official worried aloud that there were signs that the axis of the Iraq war was shifting from Sunnis versus Shiites to Arabs versus Kurds. After visiting Iraq in late 2008, Gen. Barry McCaffrey agreed, saying that “the war waiting in the wings is the war of the Kurds and the Arabs.” The Kurds also were causing friction in Mosul, where much of the Iraqi army is Kurdish but the majority of the population is Arabic. Significantly, that city, the largest in the north, was the last redoubt of al Qaeda in Iraq, which was able to play on anti-Kurdish feeling with the locals.

  Judging by the frustrated mood of officials in Baghdad, it wouldn’t be surprising in an Arab-Kurd showdown to see an American “tilt” in favor of the Arabs. “The Kurds have gotten away with everything for the last five years, taking more than they should,” Emma Sky, Odierno’s political adviser, said that same month. “I think the Kurds overplayed their hand, and we helped them do it.”

  In August, Maliki seemed to redirect an offensive in Diyala Province, making it less against Sunni insurgents and more against the Kurds. Iraqi troops pushed Kurdish military units northward, provoking the Kurds’ Barzani to issue an ultimatum that the Kurds would never give up Kirkuk. “The Iraqi army’s campaign in Diyala, ostensibly directed against al Qaeda in Iraq, has turned against Maliki’s’s ruling coalition partner, the Kurds,” reported one veteran observer, Joost Hilterman of the International Crisis Group. Baghdad’s forces also raided government offices in Diyala, arresting a provincial council member and a university president, a Shiite who was led away in a hood and handcuffs.

 
The lack of a breakthrough meant that after the last of the surge troops went home, the U.S. military faced essentially the same set of missions, but had fewer troops to carry them out. Some analysts worried that the first task to be curtailed would be the most important one: protecting the population, which also required the greatest use of troops. “I can’t see them having all the same missions with less people,” said Joel Armstrong, the retired Army officer who helped plan the surge. “All the training and security missions are still there.” So, he worried, Iraq would backslide into “a downward spiral.” American officials insisted that Iraqi forces could step into the void. That assertion will be tested in 2009, as American troop numbers begin to fall below pre-surge levels.

  The surge, while making short-term security gains, also may have carried hidden long-term costs that will only become fully apparent when Obama is president. “The surge may have bought transitory successes . . . but it has done so by stoking the three forces that have traditionally threatened the stability of Middle Eastern states: tribalism, warlordism, and sectarianism,” argued Steven Simon, a Council of Foreign Relations expert on the Middle East. If continued, he predicted, the U.S. support for tribes, local militias, and other centrifugal forces will undermine central authority and lead to a divided, dysfunctional sate “that suffers from the same instability and violence as Yemen and Pakistan.”