The day's session was to focus on the so-called long war against terrorism. Was the goal spreading democracy or simply stabilizing a country or a region like the Middle East? First up from the colonels was "Issue 1: Stability vs.
Democratization," an indirect shot at President Bush, the most outspoken advocate for spreading democracy around the globe.
The chiefs took the bait.
"Some folks are frenetic about us shoving Jeffersonian democracy down people's throats," said Air Force Chief of Staff General Michael Moseley, who had joined the Air Force in 1971 during the height of the Vietnam War.
Pace said he had told the president that "'democracy' is not as effective a term or concept as 'representative government.'"
Admiral Michael Mullen, the chief of naval operations, a 1968 graduate of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, cautiously inquired, "How far beyond military advice can we go on this point?"
"Can't avoid it," said General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, noting that they had to examine all elements of national powerónot just the military but diplomacy, and the economic and financial impact.
"I am comfortable taking anything to the president that negatively impacts our troops on the ground," Pace said.
The agenda then called for a discussion of America's "strategic vulnerability."
"We should be looking at how our current preoccupation with insurgents and terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq reduces our ability to deter other potential hostile actors," General Schoomaker said.
"We have forgotten how to use the other elements of national power except for the military," complained General Moseley. "We have at least one arm tied behind our back. That is why we are losing groundÖand our military is coming apart."
"We are not overstretched," Pace shot back testily. "Only a fraction of the nation has been mobilized, if thatÖGeneral Moseley, what do you mean we are coming apart?"
"By all standards of measurement we have lost standing in the world," Moseley replied. "Politically, our reputation and stature, the national treasure we are spending on the warÖall of itÖwe are in a downward spiral. I attended a NATO conference recently where they questioned our ability to sustain the fight and meet our global commitments."
Then he added, trying to lighten the mood, "On the bright side, I think the Poles are with us."
There were a few muted chuckles.
"Our ground forces are stretched to the breaking point," Schoomaker added.
"We must be a learning organization," Pace said, falling back on an old military clichÈ. They needed to adapt, he said, and the American public would adjust. "We need to help them turn the corner. They are waiting for us to do this."
Some of the colonels were dismayed by the aimless discussion. Here were the senior military advisers to the president, in the middle of wartime, more or less adrift. It was clear the chiefs were angry and shockingly disconnected from policy making. Worse, they had no plan of their own and no unified voice. It resembled a late night barroom chat.
Colonel Greenwood turned to Colonel McMaster at one point. "Doesn't this make you think no one read your first book?" he asked.
"Yeah," McMaster said.
* * *
At 10:45 A.M. on October 10, Rumsfeld dispatched a SECRET snowflake to Pace and Eric Edelman, his policy undersecretary. The subject was "New construct for Iraq." "Two months ago I told you I wanted to change the construct for Iraq," he wrote. His proposal was not radical:
"Establish a public plan (benchmarks) to turn over responsibility for governance and security to the Iraqis and thereby permit reduction of Coalition forces." He said the president agreed with his proposal. Rumsfeld claimed this would be a "forecast," not a rigid "timetable," that could be carefully qualified by saying "we don't know if the Iraqis can meet the targets." It was little more than a public relations baby step.
But Rice saw it as something more. To her, it was Rumsfeld's way of speeding up a drawdown and shifting blame and responsibility to the State Department.
"I'm sick of hearing this line from the DOD," she told colleagues in private. "I'm sick of hearing that State's not in the fight, civilians aren't in the fight. I'm sick of hearing it. That's just wrong."
* * *
Meanwhile, Bill Luti on the NSC staff had spent 11 intense days working on the new operational concept for Iraq that Hadley wanted. Three months earlier, he had been to Iraq with Rumsfeld and noticed what he called "a subterranean burning." The Shia militias had launched their bloody campaign of reprisals, changing the nature of the war. The Abizaid-Casey strategy of turning the war over to the Iraqis might work if Americans were patient. But there was no more patience, Luti concluded. On October 11, Luti took his new operational concept to Hadley's deputy, J. D. Crouch. He was proposing a giant step. His 10 classified slides, titled "Changing the Dynamic in Iraq," recommended a "surge" in U.S. forces to
"secure and hold" and "to provide enhanced security in Baghdad and other insurgent" hotspots such as Anbar and Diyala. Luti urged greater reliance on the Iraqi army rather than on the police force. One slide urged a near doubling of the size of the Iraqi army, from 10 to 18 divisions. The military operations should emphasize eradicating the Shia militias as much as al Qaeda, with a new effort to quell Iranian meddling. To mollify the U.S. military, Luti also recommended increasing the overall size of the Army and Marine Corps.
Crouch accepted Luti's ideas and gave a copy to Hadley.
So while in mid-October the secretary of defense was advocating a plan that would accelerate America's departure from Iraq, a lone NSC staffer was proposing a surge that would recommit the country to the war.
* * *
The Luti paper presented a couple of problems for Hadley. First, he hadn't told O'Sullivan that he had requested it. Second, he knew that the White House and the NSC staff were not supposed to undertake military planning strategies. So Hadley decided, more or less, to hide it in plain sight. He called in General Pace.
"These are ideas from our staff," Hadley said, handing Pace a copy of Luti's paper. "You're the military planners.
You're running your own process"óthe Council of Colonels. "All I'd ask is to consider this in your process."
"Thank you very much," Pace said.
The result, Hadley hoped, was that the military would pitch the surge as its own idea. Though he felt a surge was the best option, he believed it was important that he not become an advocate too early and openly.
* * *
At 11 A.M. on October 11, the same day Luti took his surge paper to Crouch, the president held a news conference in the Rose Garden. He had just met with Casey in Washington. "The situation is difficult in Iraq, no question about it," Bush acknowledged. Americans were seeing "unspeakable violence" on their television screens. The president said that attacks and casualties were up because U.S. and Iraqi forces "are confronting the enemy," engaging illegal militias. "The reason I bring this up is that we're on the move.
We're taking action."
Steve Holland of Reuters asked: "Senator Warner says Iraq appears to be drifting sideways, and James Baker says a change in strategy may be needed. Are you willing to acknowledge that a change may be needed?"
"Steve, we're constantly changing tactics to achieve a strategic goal," the president said, dodging the question. "Our strategic goal is a country which can defend itself, sustain itself, and govern itself. The strategic goal is to help this young democracy succeed in a world in which extremists are trying to intimidate rational people in order to topple moderate governments and to extend a caliphate."
He added, "And I appreciate Senator Warner going over there and taking a look. I want you to notice, what he did say is, if the plan is now not workingóthe plan that's in place isn't workingóAmerica needs to adjust. I completely agree. That's what I talked to General Casey about. I said, 'General, the Baghdad security plan is in its early implementation. I support you strongly, but if you come into this office and say we need to do something d
ifferently, I support you. If you need more troops, I support you. If you're going to devise a new strategy, we're with you,'
because I trust General Casey."
But behind the scenes, the Iraq strategy reviews were gaining steam, and Casey wasn't included.
* * *
That same day, Rice held a private meeting by secure video with Satterfield, Zelikow, Jeffrey and Khalilzad in Baghdad. Satterfield reported that the number of deaths had increased since the Baghdad security plan had gone into effect. "How can this plan be a success when the number of people dying is greater?" he asked. That wasn't a sign of success. That was a sign of failure. "What does that tell us about the Baghdad security plan?" Rice asked rhetorically.
Khalilzad said U.S. military officials were saying they did not have enough forces to do the job.
"Can the Iraqi army beat the JAM?" Rice asked, referring to Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.
No way, Jim Jeffrey thought.
"It's not working, Zal," Rice said. "Baghdad seems to have descended into mob rule."
* * *
Pace requested a private meeting with Rice. On October 12 at 2:45 P.M., he arrived on the seventh floor of the State Department and was ushered into her small inner office, with a desk in one corner, a couch and a handful of chairs arranged around a small, low coffee table.
The two had shared a cordial relationship dating to the early days of the Bush administration but had rarely met one-on-one.
Pace, even-keeled and rarely dramatic, seemed unsettled. He had brought along two classified charts to show the secretary. One was a version of the chart Hadley kept in his "GWB" file, showing the number of attacks in Iraq going up and up. The second showed the number of Iraqi security forcesóarmy and policeóa figure that also kept rising steadily. Together, they revealed a disheartening paradox.
"How do you explain this to people?" Pace asked. "The number of forces in the country is clearly going up, and the violence is still going up."
"Yeah, that isn't a very pretty picture, is it?" Rice replied. She didn't know what more she could say. Both security and the training of the Iraqi forces fell under his purview.
Pace explained that he had set up the Council of Colonels. He said that along with the chiefs, the group would be asking some fundamental questions about the current strategy.
Rice had heard about it "through the ether," as she liked to sayómeaning from Hadley. She said she too had her staff conducting a similar examination of the overall mission and what they were trying to accomplish politically.
Rice saw no way she and Pace could join their efforts at the moment, because it might leak and generate "hothouse"
news stories about an administration second-guessing its strategy. It would reveal a secret debate inconsistent with the president's public assurances that the United States was winning.
* * *
The Council of Colonels met with the Joint Chiefs again on Friday, October 13. "The immediate center of gravity is the U.S. public," Pace said at one point, suggesting that the problem was a failure to make an adequate public relations case. Referring to General Casey, he said, "George had a four-year timeline, and the American people are going to give us about 90 days." They needed "to articulate that 'the U.S. is coming home' does not mean that 'the war stops.' If not Iraq, then Afghanistan or somewhere else."
"What is the long war?" Schoomaker asked. "Is it 30 years? How do we set up for reasonable expectations and deal with a 30-year problem while keeping flare-ups in the box?ÖThe enemy won't quit after two years."
"How do we prepare the American people for the long haul?" Admiral Mullen asked.
"We don't," said General Michael Hagee, the Marine Corps commandant. "They continue to be spectators unwilling to change their habits."
"The American public," Schoomaker added, "does not want to do anything different."
"Their end state is: The troops simply come home," Hagee said.
But the public, Pace protested, holds the key to future success. "We need to better articulate the long war," he said.
"Ask them to sacrifice."
"The problem is in this building," Schoomaker said, pointing up at the ceiling, toward Rumsfeld's third-floor office.
The Marine commandant had a suggestion that President Bush would not have liked. "We should have asked the American people to sacrifice by imposing a 5-cent gas tax on every gallon of gas or something like that right after 9/11," Hagee said.
"The nation needs to mobilize," Schoomaker agreed. "Most of the country is in spectator mode."
They turned to the Israeli-Palestinian situation and the peace process.
"U.S. policy is naturally biased toward Israel," Pace said.
Admiral Mullen said that the United States needed more active, visible diplomacy on the issue. "Poll after poll cites this as the central problem unifying the world against America."
"Almost anything would be better than what we have now," Moseley said, then summed up his sentiments about the Israelis and Palestinians. "Pack of assholes on both sides!" he declared.
* * *
Though Hadley was almost eight years older than Rice, he had served as her deputy in the White House for the first Bush term. Now, in the second term, he had taken over her old job as national security adviser when she moved to the State Department. They had formed a genuine friendship and exchanged all information freely. They spoke many times each dayóin person at the White House, before and after meetings, on the secure phone, and on the regular phone. One day, Rice raised the question of the various reviews being conducted in what she called an "atomized fashion."
"We've got to pull this together now," Hadley said. "We've got to do it under the radar screen because the electoral season is so hot, but we've got to pull this together now and start to give the president some options."
They needed to cross-fertilize, she agreed, though she wasn't necessarily ready to begin listing options.
Hadley said he would put Meghan O'Sullivan in charge along with several of her most trusted assistants from the NSC staff, and Rice said she would add her Iraq coordinator Satterfield to the group. No one from the military or intelligence communities was asked to participate in the White House reviewómost notably Casey, the man Bush had publicly declared he trusted on strategy.
* * *
On the Sunday, October 15, television talk shows, two prominent RepublicansóSenator John Warner of Virginia, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Chuck Hagel of Nebraskaósaid that U.S. policy would have to change if the Iraqis did not restore some kind of order. Warner said the administration should wait no longer than two to three months to change direction. At 7:40 the next morning, President Bush spoke with Prime Minister Maliki by secure telephone, according to a SECRET summary of the conversation.
The president stressed that the prime minister should not pay attention to the political rhetoric in the American press in the run-up to the November election because he himself did not. Know that you have my confidence, he said.
I am confident of your support, Maliki replied, but public comments by some in and out of the administration were playing poorly in Iraq, harming his government. He had heard rumors that the United States was giving him a two-month ultimatum to stop the violence. Also, he said, discussions about the partitioning of Iraq were emboldening the terrorists and extremists. A book titled The End of Iraq by Peter W. Galbraith, an expert with two decades of experience on Iraq, claimed that partition was inevitable. Maliki said he hoped the president would make a public statement that there was no two-month ultimatum and that he supported Maliki and had no intention of recommending that Iraq be broken up.
A committee to find proposals to end the militia problem had been set up, the prime minister said. We need "to prepare the law enforcement agencies to confront militias and terrorism."
Bush reiterated his support for Maliki and promised that he would not let Iraq be torn apart. Don't let rumors and criticism consume you,
the president counseled, but rather lead in the face of them. In the United States, Bush said, he did that all the time. He said it was important for Maliki to make a commitment before the end of Ramadan to resolve the political issues by a definite date in the futureóthe kind of deadline that he himself almost religiously avoided. Nonetheless, such a deadline, Bush claimed, would help stem the political rumors. The president also asked Maliki to take a personal interest in the investigation into the murder of Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi's brother, a Sunni. It would help demonstrate that he was the prime minister for all Iraqis, not just the Shia.
I'm fully committed to doing this, Maliki replied.
Bush expressed concern about Baghdad. Bring your political and security efforts into alignment, he said, in order to quiet down the capital. Tough decisions had to be made for this purpose, he said. Many innocent Iraqis were relying on Maliki to do this.
Maliki launched into a long response, claiming he would not hesitate to make sure the situation was brought under control. "There are still problems in Baghdad," he said, "but there are efforts, planning and political initiatives under way for achieving national reconciliation, and we will see the result. We are determined to combat terrorism and isolate the militia. There will be an agreement with Zal and Casey regarding the reform of the Ministry of Interior.
My message is that we need to end [sectarian] activities. We will try all options, but in the end we are prepared to use force."
The president and the prime minister agreed to speak every two weeks.
Chapter 18
Meghan O'Sullivan was increasingly fixated on the approach to Iraq. Though she never really bought into the idea of accelerating a transfer to the Iraqis, in her view it was at least an acceptable strategy in 2005. But by mid-2006, she believed, it was indefensible. It flew in the face of the facts. If there was one abiding lesson from her years of work in war and conflictsówriting her doctorate on the Sri Lankan civil war and working on the Northern Ireland peace processóit was that only a neutral party could resolve the enmity and contain sectarian violence. The U.S.
The War Within Page 18