* * *
Rumsfeld always worried about surprisesó"unknown unknowns," he called them. On October 11, 2005, he dashed off a SECRET snowflake to Pace, Abizaid and Casey, titled, "Intel piece on Iraq." He had read a CIA report discussing ways to preempt a possible Tet-like offensive by insurgents in Iraq. The January 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam had been a military defeat for communist forces but had provided an overwhelming psychological victory that shocked the American public and marked a major turning point in the war.
"What do you think?" Rumsfeld asked in a one-paragraph memo to General Casey. Could insurgents in Iraq pull off a similar attack?
Casey replied, "I believe this came from work I asked CIA to do on an Iraqi Tet. The conclusion was this insurgency couldn't mount a Tet. They don't have the organization or military formations, but they don't have to. They could create the perception of a Tet with far smaller numbers because of the increased media presence."
* * *
Congress was demanding a description of what the strategy was supposed to be. Rice made it the core of her testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on October 19, 2005. "Our political-military strategy," she said, "has to be clear, hold and build: to clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely and then build durable Iraqi institutions." "What the hell is that?" asked Casey. He called Abizaid.
"I don't know," the central commander said.
"Did you agree to that?"
"No, I didn't agree to that."
When Rice next came to Iraq, Casey asked for a private meeting with her and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.
"Excuse me, ma'am, what's 'clear, hold, build'?"
Rice looked a little surprised. "George, that's your strategy."
"Ma'am, if it's my strategy, don't you think someone should have had the courtesy to talk to me about it before you went public with it?"
"Oh, well, we told General Odierno." A bald, towering three-star general, Raymond T. Odierno had commanded the 4th Infantry Division during the invasion and now traveled with Rice as the liaison between the military and the State Department.
"Look, ma'am, as hard as I've worked to support the State Department in this thing, the fact that that went forward without anybody talking to me, I consider a foul."
Rice repeated that she had told General Odierno, and later she apologized to Casey.
To Casey, it wasn't a simple matter of miscommunication. He didn't see "clear, hold and build" as a viable strategy. It was a bumper sticker. His main goal was to build up all Iraqi institutions so American soldiers could go home. He called Rumsfeld.
"Mr. Secretary, what's this clear, hold and build thing?"
"Oh, goddamn State DepartmentÖ" he grumbled.
Casey spoke with Zelikow. This was about more than just a slogan. "Look, Phil," he said, "this isn't professional.
This is personal. I opened this up to you. You owed me the courtesy of a call."
"WellÖ" Zelikow began.
"Bullshit! This is man-to-man. We were dealing with each other as individuals here. You owed me a call."
"George," Zelikow replied, "how could I have called you?" They both knew how paranoid Rumsfeld would be.
Rice's testimony had been sent to the Pentagon in advance and had been signed off on. But it had never found its way to Casey.
Casey's response to Zelikow was simple: "You can trust me."
Soon after Rice's statement of the strategy, Rumsfeld saw "clear, hold and build" in a draft of a speech that the president was going to give. He called Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, about a half hour before Bush was to speak.
"Take it out," he insisted. "Take it out." The "clear" was fine because that was what the U.S. military was doing. "It's up to the Iraqis to hold. And the State Department's got to work with somebody on the build."
Rumsfeld lost. The president said in a speech on October 25, "As Secretary Rice explained last week, our strategy is to clear, hold and build."
* * *
Months earlier, Casey had commissioned a report to study counterinsurgency practices and how they were, or were not, being implemented across Iraq. On November 12, he forwarded a 15-page summary to Rumsfeld. The third page laid out traits of both successful and unsuccessful counterinsurgencies. Successful ones, Casey noted, last an average of nine years. Unsuccessful ones average 13 years.
The characteristics of a successful counterinsurgency included an emphasis on intelligence, a focus on the needs and security of citizens, an ability to deny safe haven to insurgents and isolate them from the population, and a competent local police force.
It had become increasingly clear that the efforts in Iraq had too many characteristics of a failing counterinsurgency.
* * *
As Casey was trying to quell the insurgency and al Qaeda in Iraq, Rumsfeld was in his third-floor Pentagon office, trying to control the world through his snowflakes. One minute he'd expound on issues as large as the war strategy; the next might inspire a memo on grammar. No detail was too large, and none was too small.
"I also note that on page two," Rumsfeld wrote to Pace in a SECRET memo November 17 about Iraqi security forces, "the third set of asterisks has four instead of three in the note, and that should be fixed.
"I particularly want to know why we cannot get any improvement at all between December 15 and June 1 in terms of color codingÖ"
* * *
On December 2, 2005, a snowflake came from Rumsfeld to Casey and Abizaid. "Subject: Insurgent infiltration in Anbar province." Rumsfeld had seen a CIA intelligence paper assessing insurgent infiltration of Iraqi army units in that part of the country. The paper, which claimed to be based on multiple sources of human intelligence and other reporting, found that terrorists and foreign fighters "are active in western Iraq and have infiltrated some elements of the Iraqi army in al-Anbar province."
The secretary wanted answers.
"I am in general agreement with the thrust of the paper," Casey replied. "We are aware that insurgents and militia have infiltrated Iraqi security forces on a generally local basis with corruption [rather than] ideology as the primary motivation. The impact on the Iraqi army is low, but I remain concerned about the loyalty of some Iraqi police elements to a central government."
* * *
"Attached is a worrisome DIA report on coalition detention facilities and insurgent networks," Rumsfeld wrote on December 12 to Casey, Abizaid and Ambassador Zal Khalilzad.
The attached five-page SECRET report from the Defense Intelligence Agency brought more disturbing news from Iraq, suggesting that the aggressive detention program was creating more terrorists.
"Insurgents and terrorists use coalition detention facilities to trade information on successful tactics and techniques, teach detainees insurgent and terrorist skills, preach radical Islam and recruit new members into the insurgency," it stated.
At one detention facility, the report stated, detainees had an insurgent training program to prepare detainees for their release, in which they taught new recruits how to become suicide bombers, use IEDsóimprovised explosive devicesóand carry out kidnappings and torture.
That was especially troubling, considering that more than 75 percent of detainees were released within six months of their capture, including a substantial number of insurgents and terrorists.
"Many detainees are determined to be innocent of any involvement in the insurgency," the report continued.
"Insurgent recruiters, however, exploit their feelings of humiliation, anger and fear to entice them to join the insurgency while in coalition custody or immediately after release."
The report concluded, "insurgents, terrorists, foreign fighters and insurgent leaders captured and released by coalition forces may be more dangerous than they were before being detained."
* * *
On Wednesday morning, February 22, 2006, Casey got a call from his second in command, Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli. A bomb had gone off at a mo
sque in Samarra, a city on the Tigris River about 65 miles north of Baghdad. Pictures began coming in showing that the golden dome of al-Askari Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam, had been obliterated. With the help of the embassy, Casey had put together a list of possible catastrophic events, but the Samarra mosque hadn't been included and had been left unguarded.
Intelligence indicated that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the Sunni-based organization al Qaeda in Iraq, was behind the attack. It was a clear attempt to stoke sectarian tensions, and Casey realized right away it was one of the
"unknown unknowns" that Rumsfeld so dreaded.
Within hours, Shia militias, particularly those associated with cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, poured into the streets, firing grenades and machine guns into dozens of Sunni mosques in Baghdad. Three Sunni imams were killed, and a fourth was kidnapped. Tens of thousands rioted. A daytime curfew was imposed in Baghdad. Bodies began turning up the next morning by the score.
Iraqi officials denounced the attack, and President Bush appealed for restraint. An anxious calm settled over the country after several days, and it seemed that perhaps the worst had passed.
"The interesting point here is what conclusions the communities draw from this difficult week. They've stared into the abyss a bit," Hadley said during a Sunday, February 26, appearance on CBS's Face the Nation. "And I think they've all concluded that further violence, further tension between the communities is not in their interest."
But to some, it now seemed more likely than ever that Iraq was on the brink of civil war.
* * *
On March 20, the president drew attention to the work of one of the most high-profile colonels in the U.S. Army. "I'm going to tell you the story of a northern Iraqi city called Tall Afar," he said, "which was once a key base of operations for al Qaeda and is today a free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq."
He explained how the 5,300 soldiers of the Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, led by Colonel H. R. McMaster, had arrived the previous May in Tall Afar, 250 miles from Baghdad near the Syrian border. Insurgents and al Qaeda fighters had choked the life out of the city and filled its quarter million residents with fear of savage attacks against anyone who didn't cooperate. But over the coming months, McMaster and his regiment had methodically driven insurgents first from surrounding villages and later from Tall Afar itself. They had then begun to rebuild and restore basic services, reform the local police force, and establish a local government. The city had come back to life.
It had been a clear departure from so many past operations in Iraq, where American forces would sweep into an area, kicking in doors and rounding up many young Iraqis with no ties to the insurgency before moving on again, leaving no one to prevent insurgents from returning to terrorize the population. McMaster's focus on economic and political improvements in addition to the military operations, as well as providing basic public services to the people, had paid huge dividends.
McMaster was 43, a small, stout man at 5-foot-9 and 190 poundsóbald-headed, green-eyed and barrel-chested, a blur of energy and intensity. A 1984 West Point graduate, he was a bona fide combat hero of the first Gulf War, where in February 1991, he had led his soldiers in a decisive tank battle against an Iraqi Republican Guard brigade and earned a Silver Star for his leadership. Beyond the battlefield, he had forged a reputation as one of the Army's most outspoken and dynamic thinkers. Some superiors saw him as a handful, a renegade who too often did things his own way. But few questioned his competence and ingenuity.
McMaster spoke more like a surfer, or even a rock 'n' roll roadie, inserting the word "man" or sometimes "dude" into his profanity-laced sentences. After his Gulf War experience, he had earned a Ph.D. in military history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he researched and wrote a groundbreaking dissertation that became the 1997 book Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.
The book laid bare the culpability of military leaders for the failure in Vietnam. McMaster argued that the Joint Chiefsóthe "five silent men," as he called themóhad failed to adequately voice their reservations about the war. He concluded that the chiefs were weak and had failed to establish the essential personal rapport with the civilian leaders so they could speak their minds. The work struck a chord within the generation of military brass who had served in Vietnam and offered an enduring lesson about the responsibilities of leadership and candor.
Dereliction of Duty was in essence a field manual for avoiding another Vietnam, and it became required reading throughout the military. Even President Bush said he had read the book. It established McMaster as the voice of a new generation of military officers who were determined not to be silent or passive, especially before and during a war. McMaster had become a kind of barometer of the military's moral conscience and the fortitude of the officer corps to speak out.
His success in Tall Afar cemented his status.
"Tall Afar shows that when Iraqis can count on a basic level of safety and security, they can live together peacefully," Bush said during his March 20 speech. "The people of Tall Afar have shown why spreading liberty and democracy is at the heart of our strategy to defeat the terrorists." He added, "The strategy that worked so well in Tall Afar did not emerge overnight. It came only after much trial and error. It took time to understand and adjust to the brutality of the enemy in Iraq. Yet the strategy is working."
What Bush did not make clear that afternoon was that McMaster's success in Tall Afar wasn't part of a broader strategy, but rather a freelanced, almost rebellious undertaking by one Army colonel and his unit. It was further evidence that the greatest accomplishments in Iraq had come despite the administration's strategy, not because of it.
* * *
The next day, March 21, a SECRET CIA report stated that al Qaeda in Iraq was continuing to grow, undermining security and preventing legitimate political and economic development. The report asserted that even if the minority Sunnis were given a role in the Iraqi government, "It is likely that AQIZ [al Qaeda in Iraq] will continue to wage war against the Iraqi government for years to come." Within days, Rumsfeld sent a snowflake down the chain of command. "Attached is a field commentary from CIA on al-Qaeda. I found it interesting," he wrote in perfect understatement. "If it is true, I wonder if we are properly focused on the al-Qaeda operations. I would like to discuss it with all of you."
* * *
It wasn't long before another disturbing CIA report crossed Rumsfeld's desk. Dated April 16, the SECRET report stated, "As of early April 2006, the Karbala Iraq chief of police, Brigadier General Razzaq Abid Ali al-Tai, hosted a meeting at his residence in Karbala to discuss forming an alliance between the Iraqi police major crimes unit, JAM"óthe Jaish al Mahdi or Mahdi Army, a paramilitary force created by the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadró"and the Iraqi national guard force in Karbala to fight the U.S. military if they attacked JAM forces. The meeting concluded after all parties agreed to fight jointly should U.S. military initiate an attack on Jaysh al-Mahdi."
The report went on to state that General Ali had provided JAM members with Iraqi police identification cards to allow them to travel in closer proximity to U.S. forces and to attack and inflict a greater number of casualties.
On April 17, the inevitable snowflake went out from Rumsfeld to Abizaid, Pace and Casey, with the CIA report attached. Though he didn't say so directly, the secretary seemed to realize the Catch-22 nature of speeding up transition to the Iraqis.
"The attached is worrisome," he wrote. "If it is true, we may want to think about the pace at which we equip and train the units that could be a problem in the future."
* * *
At a National Security Council meeting on May 5, with Rice, Rumsfeld, Khalilzad and others present, Bush wanted to know about Maliki, the man who had been selected as the new prime minister. "How's he doing?" the president asked. "What's your broad assessment?"
"He know
s what he wants," Khalilzad replied. "He's not so eloquent."
"Lay off that eloquence thing!" the president joked.
"He wants room to appoint good people," the ambassador continued. "Securing Baghdad, getting electricity from Baji to Baghdad using Ministry of Defense assets."
Rice, who had drawn up the agenda for the day, argued that three new efforts were necessaryóa political launch, a security launch and a launch for an international compact. It was another in a line of down-in-the-weeds discussions of oil production, electricity and other infrastructure issues.
Bush said he wanted no action on the part of the United States that would cause disunity. "You want to avoid contention if things are going well," he said. "We don't want to trigger yet another Iraqi election."
* * *
On May 8, Rumsfeld composed a short SECRET snowflake to Hadley. The subject: "U.S. Casualties." The defense secretary noted that between the elections in December and the beginning of May, there had been "197 killed in action; 1,701 wounded." "I think at some point, if you are working with the Iraqi leadership and you need an argument," Rumsfeld wrote,
"you could tell them that the longer it takes them to get a government and the longer it takes them to start providing leadership, the more people are going to be killed. There has to be a limit."
For his part, Casey had a terrible feeling in the months after the elections as he watched "the air go out of the balloon as they negotiated on the government."
* * *
On May 17, the NSC convened again with the president and vice president. In just three days, the new Iraqi government under Maliki would formally be introduced at a ceremony in Baghdad. But the discussion turned to the deteriorating security situation. On video, Casey acknowledged that the situation in much of Iraq was "turbulent," particularly in Baghdad. Attacks linked to sectarian violence were high and getting higher. He ticked off names and numbers of recent executions, and the president's face flashed with distress.
The War Within Page 4