Keane also had a laundry list for how to reconstitute the political and civil society in Iraq.
"We need to avoid triumphant rhetoric. It's caused credibility problemsóthe so-called Westmoreland 'light at the end of the tunnel.' Casey's been withdrawing forces twice now, based on successes. And what I'm telling you is obviously that hasn't worked, and what we have to do is increase forces. So if we're going to accept a change in strategy here, then as that strategy begins to work, which I think it will, we have to avoid being triumphant about it. Because the enemy has a vote here, and we've always underestimated our enemy."
Number 15 on Keane's list: "We have to win the battle of Baghdad. We have to absolutely stabilize Baghdad by control of the population, I know I've said that before, but I'm coming back to it for emphasis."
As if this were not enough, Keane had a reading assignment for Rumsfeld. "I think you and others should read, to understand this, a book called Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice by David Galula. It's only about 100
pages, and if you don't want to read the whole hundred pages, read the foreword and the introduction, and then read chapters four through seven, which is really execution."
Galula, a former French military officer, had argued in the 1964 book that insurgencies are revolutionary wars that are won or lost based on who wins the support of the local population.
The defense secretary had taken notes, asked questions and probed. But it was a scaled-down version of the old, fiery Rumsfeld. As Keane left, he realized that the atmosphere within the office seemed different. Every aspect of Rumsfeld, from the tired look on his face to his body language, signaled a sense of resignation. Nothing Keane had said should have come as a surprise to Rumsfeld, Keane thought, other than the fact that a friend was saying it all so directly.
But something had to change. Between 50 and 75 U.S. service members were being killed each month, and that number was rising sharply.
Chapter 14
Lieutenant General David Petraeus was a rising star in the Army and, in Jack Keane's view, the general most likely to solve the Iraq problem.
Petraeus also was like a little brother to Keane. They had first met back in the late 1980s, when Keane was a colonel at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, and Petraeus was a major working as an aide to Army Chief of Staff Carl Vuono.
They soon crossed paths again at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. By then, Petraeus was a lieutenant colonel serving as a battalion commander in the 101st Airborne. Keane, a brigadier general, was the assistant division commander.
One Saturday morning in September 1991, Petraeus and Keane were standing together watching an infantry squad practice assaulting a bunker with live grenades and ammunition. A soldier tripped and fell about 40 yards away and accidentally squeezed the trigger on his rifle. The M-16 round tore through the "A" over the name tag on the right side of Petraeus's chest and left a golf-ball-sized exit wound in his back. If it had hit above the "A" in "U.S. Army"
on his left side, he likely would have died on the spot.
"Dave, you've been shot," Keane said, as he leaned over his downed colleague. "You know what we're going to do here. First of all, you're going to make it, all right?" He kept talking to Petraeus, trying to keep him from slipping into shock. "I want you to stay focused," he said, clutching the lieutenant colonel's hand, aware that Petraeus was growing weaker.
"I'm gonna be okay. I'll stay with it," Petraeus said.
In the local emergency room, a trauma expert shoved a chest tube into Petraeusóan excruciating procedure that makes grown men scream and jolt off the table. Petraeus never moved and let out only a low grunt. "That is the toughest soldier I've ever had my hands on," the doctor told Keane.
A medevac helicopter flew Petraeus, with Keane by his side, 60 miles to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. Keane had called ahead and requested the best thoracic surgeon available. When they landed on the roof of the hospital, Keane saw a man waiting for them dressed in golf clothes.
"I'm Bill Frist," said the man who would become majority leader of the U.S. Senate a decade later. "I'm the chief of thoracic surgery here."
"Were you on a golf course?" Keane asked.
"Yeah, I got a call. I understand you've got a seriously wounded soldier here."
"Yeah, I do," Keane said. "He means a lot to us."
"Stop wasting time," a barely conscious Petraeus ordered Frist. "Open my chest this very minute if you need to."
Frist operated on Petraeus for more than five hours. Petraeus recovered at the Fort Campbell hospital and drove the hospital commander crazy trying to persuade the doctors to discharge him. "I am not the norm," he told them. He pulled tubes out of his arm. He hopped out of bed and did 50 push-ups. Finally, they let him go home.
The incident marked a formative moment in Petraeus's life and his military career. Afterward, Petraeus would joke that he had taken the bullet for Keane. "It took fast reflexes to save you that day, General Keane," he would say. But he never forgot that Keane had been there holding his hand as he felt his life begin to ebb away. It sealed a bond between the two men. They became friends and confidants, remaining close years later as Keane rose to vice chief of staff of the Army and Petraeus led the 101st Airborne during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
* * *
On September 19, the same day Keane went to see Rumsfeld, the president met privately with Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq, a ceremonial but important post under the new Iraqi constitution. He was a large, grandfatherly figure with glasses and a mustache, an outgoing man who spoke fluent English. Bush said that the Shia militias and their death squads were among the key problems.
A Kurd who believed in local autonomy, Talabani disagreed strongly. Let the local areas and local forces liberate themselves, as was happening in Anbar province, he said. Iraq did not need more U.S. troops. It needed fewer. A big problem, he said, was that the United States was not supplying the Iraqi forces with enough advanced weapons to fight the terrorists and extremists. The Iraqi defense minister had a list. Talabani said he knew the Americans didn't always trust the Iraqis, especially the police, and worried that the weapons would end up in the hands of the terrorists. But he wanted to give assurances.
Bush said the United States would try to do better.
It was one of the inconsistencies in the U.S. policy. While the overarching strategy was to train and prepare the Iraqi forces to fight and be self-sufficient, the Bush administration would not supply the weaponry that the Iraqis needed.
For example, during a State Department meeting the next day, September 20, Jim Jeffrey, Rice's Iraq coordinator, said the resources being given to the Iraqi army were so low, "It makes you want to cry."
Just three weeks earlier, Sadr's Mahdi Army, or JAM, had executed a dozen Iraqi soldiers who had run out of ammunition.
"JAM has more firepower than the Iraqi army," Jeffrey said. "Anybody has more firepower. The Washington SWAT
team has more firepower than the Iraqi army, because we did not give them mortars, antitank weapons other than a few RPGs, and that took a lot of squeezing. And we still haven't gotten significant numbers of armored Humvees."
* * *
That same day, September 20, Rumsfeld received a sensitive intelligence document on Iraq: TOP SECRETóHUMINT-COMINT CHANNELS DEFENSE ANALYSIS REPORT: IRAQ POTENTIAL FOR FRACTURE INCREASING.
It was a grim report, detailing a virtual sectarian collapse among Shia, Sunni and Kurd. The government was not providing sufficient infrastructure services and, most important, not providing security for its own people.
The report was based on human sources (HUMINT) recruited by the CIA and communications intercepts (COMINT) gathered by the National Security Agency. It showed that the lack of political progress by Maliki and other Iraqi politicians was due in part to their settling into sectarian camps rather than trying to come together.
Later, when I asked the president about this September 20 document and its warning that th
e potential for fracture in Iraq was increasing, he said, "What Condi has told me, they're now telling me. 'We'd better do something different.' I mean, it's just another data point." He added, "I'm not so sure that that's a relevant document. Just because you've got it doesn't mean it's relevant."
But apparently Rumsfeld had thought it was relevant. He forwarded copies of the report to Generals Abizaid, Pace and Casey. "Let's have a discussion about it at the earliest possible time," he wrote.
When they did, they asked the usual questions: Is Maliki the right guy? Was he going to make it? Would he survive?
Their conclusion was a version of the old notion that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Maliki was about as good as they were going to getóat least for the moment.
* * *
On September 22, three days after his meeting with Rumsfeld, General Keane went to see JCS Chairman Pete Pace. Pace, who had sat in on the earlier meeting, had asked Keane to come by his office for a private chat.
"I forgot how direct and frank you are," Pace said, flattering Keane for his blistering report card on Iraq. "I would like you to give me an assessment of how you think I'm doing as chairman after one year on the job."
Keane was surprised. On one hand, he thought, the gesture might reflect an unusual degree of self-confidence from Pace, a sign that the chairman wanted to get the straight story from a truth teller. On the other hand, it might reflect some insecurity, that there was an underground view of him that he had not heard. In the Pentagon, such "how do you think I'm doing" requests usually mean "flatter me."
"I would give you a failing grade," Keane said softly.
"Why?" Pace asked, pain evident on his Boy Scout face.
"Well, Pete, here's the answer. The number one priority facing the country is the war in Afghanistan and Iraqóparticularly Iraq because it's not going the way we expected. It's the number one priority, therefore, under the Department of Defense. I'm a part-time guy working on the Defense Policy Board, and quite frankly, I know more about this than you do. You're not in this day in and day out. You are not intellectually, emotionally and passionately committed to this thing. The guys that are briefing me should be briefing you. I've seen what they send to you, which is trend analysis. It's somewhat superficial."
"What do you think I should be doing?" Pace asked.
"First of all, you should be immersed in this every day. Intellectually immersed in it," Keane said, adding that he was well aware that the chairman had other obligations. "There's congressional testimony. You have to think about the future of the military. You go into meetings and do all of that, and they're easier to go to because they have a predictability and a routine to them. And they're not that challenging. They're the bureaucratic process that it takes to do business." But Keane believed the chairman was drowning in the soothing, paint-by-numbers leadership, in which simply meeting a grueling daily schedule can make you feel as if you are accomplishing a great deal.
"But the real defining work of what you're here for as a four-star, and what Secretary Rumsfeld is here for, is to win this war," Keane said. "That's what the American people expect. They expect us to win this thing and continue to protect them as a result of it.
"What the chairman should be doing is taking the Joint Chiefs, rising them up over their service parochialism."
General Casey needed help desperately, Keane said. "George Casey is at this 24/7. He has nothing to nurture his life.
He is completely immersed and isolated by one thing and only one thing. That's this war. It has completely captured everything he does. His capacity at times to see clearly is always going to be limited and defined by his day-in, day-out experience and the fatigue he suffers."
Keane said he thought the obsessive work ethic of the senior military men was self-defeating. "Our generals fight wars today almost at a frenetic pace that is counterproductive," he said. Compare that to World War II General Douglas MacArthur, who watched a movie every night, Keane said, or Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, who went home every night at a reasonable hour and "rode a horse, for crying out loud, and sometimes took a nap for an hour and a half during the day. And these guys were doing big, important things. You know what our guys are like?
They're at their desks at 6:30 in the morning, and they stay up till midnight."
It was a manhood issue, Keane thought. Because the soldiers were out there 24/7, the generals thought they better do the same. But the core issue was fresh, clear thinking about the tasks of war. What you need to do is take the Joint Staff and the Joint Chiefs, and what you should be doing is challenging the premises and assumptions of both Casey and Abizaid, he said. "If there are things that are not working right, which I think we are aware of, we should be looking at alternative strategies. Not to run into your boss"óRumsfeld or the president or the National Security Counciló"but to help George and John. That's what you can be doing. You have this enormously talented Joint Staff here that's all handpicked, smart peopleÖand they're rubber-stamping what George and John do. Why are they doing that? Because you want them to do it, implicitly, because you don't challenge it." Pace and the chiefs and the staff were not doing their job, Keane said, and "that's why I think this is a failing grade."
Keane said that Pace should meet with Derek Harvey, the intelligence analyst, and listen to him very closely. Harvey had understood the war from the very beginning. The CIA, the DIA and the chairman's own intelligence directorate, the J-2, had fought him but had now come around, Keane said.
Pace said he would get briefed by Harvey, and he added, "I should put together a task force of guys, pull them out of the staff, smart guys, people you can trust, people who are not going to run to the media," he said, "and have them validate what is working and what's not working in Iraq."
And to examine alternative strategies, Keane said.
"Who would you recommend for that?" Pace asked.
"Colonel H. R. McMaster," Keane said. McMaster, who had led the recent Tall Afar success, had accompanied Keane on two trips to Iraq earlier in the year.
"Anybody else?" Pace asked.
Not off the top of his head, Keane said, but McMaster was keyóa handful, but essential. He also said that if the strategy was going to change, it was pretty obvious that the leaders had to change.
"Who should lead in Iraq?" Pace asked.
"Dave Petraeus," Keane said. "Unequivocally, there is no other candidate that would be as good." If Pace shopped around, there would probably be universal agreement that Petraeus was the general for the job, Keane maintained.
"There's some negative feedback about Dave out there," Pace noted. When Petraeus had been the executive officer for General Hugh Shelton in the 1990s, he had been tough to deal withóhad worn his boss's stars and been a self-promoter. Some of the generals thought he was a "schemer." And when Petraeus had been appointed to head the training of Iraqis, he had appeared on the cover of Newsweek in July 2004 under the headline "Can This Man Save Iraq?" Rumsfeld and others in the Pentagon and Army resented what looked like a giant ego engaged in self-promotion.
"Yeah," Keane said. Ambitious, sure. Excessively, no. Ambitious generals were nothing new. "It shouldn't bother you. This is a very, very talented guy."
"Who should go to CentCom?" Pace inquired. Who should replace Abizaid?
"Fallon," Keane said, referring to Admiral William J. Fallon, the commander of U.S. Pacific Command.
"Fox Fallon?" Pace said with some surprise, using the admiral's nickname.
"He's smart and tough-minded. This command deserves somebody who has experience. He already has been out managing Pacific Command, the second most troubled neighborhood we have in the world." Fallon had been dealing with heads of state in the Pacific, defense ministers, and was "used to dealing with the congressional leadership in Washington, the administration and all the influencers."
"Boy," Pace said, "that's an interesting idea."
Fallon wasn't just a Navy guy, Keane said. Several years
back, when Keane had been the vice chief of the Army, some whiz-bang Army electronic program had come up for approval before the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, one of the numerous layers that decide on Pentagon programs and budgets. Though it was small and not that expensive, everyone was dumping all over it. Fallon piped up, "Ground forces win wars. The rest of us support these ground guys. Give them their program, will you?"
The ground guysóPace and Keaneófound that very appealing.
* * *
The next day, Petraeus, head of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, called Keane to report that he had received a call from the Army chief's office. "They want to put together some smart guys to look at the strategy and what's working and what's not working in Iraq," Petraeus said. Keane knew, of course. He called Admiral Fallon. "Fox, I've got to tell you something. I recommended you to become the CentCom commander."
"Goddamn it, Jack," Fallon said, coming through the phone loud and angry. "What are you doing to me?"
Chapter 15
The same day that Keane met with Pace, Ken Adelman arrived in Rumsfeld's office for a 2:30 P.M. appointment.
When a Rumsfeld aide had called a few days earlier to say the secretary wanted to meet, Adelman had wavered on whether to return the call. In the end, he decided he needed to face his old friend.
Adelman, an outspoken hawk with a Ph.D. in political theory, was 14 years Rumsfeld's junior. But the two men had a close political and personal relationship. Adelman had first worked for Rumsfeld 36 years earlier, in 1970, when Rumsfeld headed the Office of Economic Opportunity under President Nixon. He'd also served as Rumsfeld's civilian special assistant during his first tour as secretary of defense under President Gerald Ford. In 1986, when Rumsfeld briefly contemplated running for president, he made clear he would have wanted Adelman as campaign manager.
The War Within Page 15