Someone said that the rest of Iraq wasn't as tenuous as Baghdad.
"But it's the capital city that looks chaotic," the president said. "And when your capital city looks chaotic, it's hard to sustain your position, whether at home or abroad." In closing, he said, "The speech won't be tomorrow. But let's use the time to work with Maliki."
* * *
General Abizaid was scheduled to leave his post as CentCom commander in about three months, March 2007, and Casey was planning to leave sometime in the months after that, later in the spring or summer. "You're going to be leaving" sooner than scheduled, Abizaid warned Casey.
* * *
That night, December 12, Rice and Gates had dinner at the Watergate Hotel. It had been a decade and a half since they had worked together at the NSC for Bush senior. "Bob," she said, "this doesn't work the way it did when we were here. It doesn't work that the president gets options from the Pentagon. What he gets is a fable, a story about what's going on," overconfident briefings that skirted the real problems. "They don't come in and let him deep-dive into what's really happening on the ground. And that's what he's hungry to do." The result, she said, was that "He doesn't have answers about how to fix this." And frankly, she said, the basic questions had not been answered for her. What was to be done? If they added force, what was the mission? What would two, five, even 10 brigades do that was different?
Gates said he'd be taking stock, talking to lots of people. And as soon as he was sworn in, his first priority would be to get to Iraq to see for himself.
Gates, who seemed a little shocked to find himself defense secretary, said he was already thinking about new generals who knew counterinsurgency. He planned to empower them.
Rice and Gates agreed that, as the heads of the two key departments, they had to level with each other, support each other, be totally honest and try to help turn the NSC into a functioning war council.
* * *
Bush and Hadley were more convinced than ever that they needed a surge. "How can we get a process that will cause the military to come to these conclusions?" Hadley asked. He was pushing for the kind of consensus that would allow him to say, "Mr. President, we're all on the same page. Some people less, but we're all on the same boat, heading the same direction."
* * *
General Pace was facing every JCS chairman's nightmareóa potential revolt of the other chiefs. The heads of the four services were increasingly frustrated. Their work with the Council of Colonels was being marginalized, and now, they suspected, their opinions were being ignored by the White House. "Why isn't this getting any traction over there, Pete?" General Schoomaker, the Army chief, asked at one tank meeting. Was the president being briefed?
"I can only get part of it before him," Pace said, "and I'm not getting any feedback."
How much was the president seeing?
"It's really hard to get this before him," Pace said.
In several tank meetings, Admiral Michael Mullen, chief of naval operations for nearly 18 months, voiced concern that the politicians were going to find a way to place the blame for Iraq on the military. "They're orchestrating this to dump in our laps," Mullen said. The generals would wind up responsible for all the problems, and the military would take the fall. Mullen raised the point so many times that Schoomaker thought the Navy leader sounded "almost paranoid."
Schoomaker was outraged when he saw news coverage that Jack Keane, the former vice chief of the Army, had been to the White House to brief the president on the new Iraq strategy proposed by the American Enterprise Institute.
"When does AEI start trumping the Joint Chiefs of Staff on this stuff?" Schoomaker asked at a chiefs meeting.
Pace, normally given to concealing his opinions, let down the veil slightly and gave a little sigh. But he didn't answer.
"Do you realize how serious this is?" Schoomaker asked. He thought Pace was too much of a gentleman to be effective in a business where forcefulness and a willingness to get in people's faces were survival skills. "They weren't listening to what Pete [Pace] was saying," Schoomaker said later in private. "Or Pete wasn't carrying the mail, or he was carrying it incompletely." Under the law, the chairman was the principal military adviser to the president. But the service chiefs, also advisers, could take the extraordinary step of communicating their views to the president themselves.
The chiefs' frustration level got so high that Pace told Bush, "You need to sit down with them, Mr. President, and hear from them directly."
Hadley saw this as an opportunity. He arranged for Bush and Cheney to go to the tank on December 13. The president would come armed with what Hadley called "sweeteners"ómore budget money and a promise to increase the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps. It also was a symbolic visit, important to the chiefs because the president would be on their territory. Rumsfeld had rarely met with them in the tank in recent years, but now he and Gates were in attendance.
The president, Cheney and Hadley took the short ride across the Potomac River in the presidential limousine. The vice president suggested orchestrating a series of questions that would make it clear that the U.S. military wasn't on top of the security situation in Iraq and that the Iraqis were even less on top of it. None of the chiefs could disagree with that.
"Mr. President, if you'd like," Cheney said, "I'd be happy to ask probing questions at the outset."
"Sure," Bush said, "Go right ahead."
As they gathered in the tank, Cheney asked the chiefs: Do we want to bet the farm by dumping it all on the Iraqis now, particularly in Baghdad? And do we want to make that big bet without knowing that the Maliki government can be nonsectarian and function?
The chiefs suggested that the president test the Iraqis. Make them prove they can reconcile, and only then make the bet of adding more force.
Cheney recognized the argument. It was one the Democrats, as well as Rumsfeld and Casey, had been making: Force the Iraqis to step up. But he felt they weren't yet capable.
Cheney could see that the president was not about to move off course. He knew where he wanted to go.
"You can't ask them to reconcile in this security situation," the president said. "Don't we have to make our bet to get the security situation in hand before, in some sense, it's fair to put them to the test?"
As they went around the table, the chiefs made three points: The Iraqis would have to execute a security plan in a nonsectarian way; Maliki needed an Iraqi army commander who would have unfettered authority to go anywhere, even Sadr City, where Maliki was blocking operations; and there could be no more safe havens for al Qaeda.
"All right," the president said. He would get those commitments from Maliki.
Several concerns were raised about Maliki himself. Even if he wasn't controlled by Iran, was he too close to the Iranians?
The president said he was totally behind Maliki.
"Mr. President," Schoomaker began, turning to the real issueóa proposed surge of five brigades. "You know that five brigades is really 15." Schoomaker was in charge of generating the force for the Army. To send five additional brigades to Iraq, they would need to accelerate the deployment of those five. Another five would have to take their place in line, and if the surge were to be sustained, it would take yet another five. This could not be done without calling up more National Guard and Reserves units or extending the 12-month tours in Iraq. The Army, he said, had hoped to go the other direction and cut tours to nine months. Just to level with you, Mr. President, Schoomaker said, the force is not available without a radical change to the Army's 12-month rotation policy or to how it utilizes the Reserves. Besides, he asked, would a surge really bring violence down? Would it transform the situation? If not, he asked, why do it? "I don't think that you have the time to surge and generate enough forces for this thing to continue to go," Schoomaker said.
"Pete, I'm the president," Bush said. "And I've got the time."
"Fine, Mr. President," Schoomaker said. "You're the president."
Several of the chiefs noted that the five brigades were effectively the strategic reserve of the United States military, the forces on hand in case of flare-ups elsewhere in the world. There was no telling what new crisis might occur that would require sizable ground forces. It had happened before. Surprise was a way of international life. Should the strategic reserve of the United States be committed, leaving the last superpower unprepared for a big crisis? The president had always made the point that it was a dangerous world. Did he want to leave the United States in the position of not being able to deal with the next manifestation of that danger?
The president disagreed, saying, "I'm not worried about a North Korean invasion of South Korea at this point. That's a potential hypothetical, might someday happen. We've got a war on our hands and we've got to win the war we've got."
But would the rest of the government step up, the chiefs asked. They worried that the civilians wouldn't do their part.
The president said he would ensure that they would and that the State Department's Provincial Reconstruction Teams would be expanded.
Bush turned again to Schoomaker. "Pete, you don't agree with me, do you?"
"No, I don't agree with you," Schoomaker said. "I just don't see it. I just don't. But I know right now that it's going to be 15 brigades. And how we're going to get those 15 brigades, I don't know. This is going to require more than we can generate. You're stressing the force, Mr. President, and these kids just see deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan for the indefinite future."
"We have to send a signal," Bush said, promising to make requests to Congress to expand both the Army and the Marine Corps.
Gates had said nothing during the meeting.
* * *
Bush and the chiefs met with reporters at 2:45 P.M. They revealed no details of their discussion, though the president said, "The enemy has also suffered. Offensive operations by Iraqi and coalition forces against terrorists and insurgents and death squad leaders have yielded positive results." If no one else would give the body count, he would. "In the months of October, November and the first week of December, we have killed or captured nearly 5,900 of the enemy." He said he had been on a secure videoconference with General Casey the previous day, discussing all that was being done "to defeat these enemies." Of course, Casey had also presented his arguments against the surge. In the face of what should have been a serious analysis of strategy, the president's insistence on publicly reporting the 5,900 "killed or captured"óa useless statisticówas additional proof for Casey that the president did not understand the war.
Schoomaker never shook his fear that a surge would be a ticking time bomb for Army policy. He and the other chiefs left unsatisfied, but at least they had had their say. Rejected advice was not grounds for a revolt.
"The chiefs and I had reservations," Pace later reported to Hadley. "They have been addressed in the new strategy, and I am now comfortable with the new strategy."
Hadley was delighted.
Cheney thought it had been quite effective. Bush hadn't summoned the chiefs to the Oval Office, sat them down, chewed them out and said, "I'm damn unhappy. This isn't working. I want a change. I want a new strategy." Instead, he had heard them out and then made clear that he was going to do what he wanted to do.
"The tank meeting was a very important meeting," Bush told me later in an interview. "In my own mind, I'm sure I didn't want to walk in with my mind made up and not give these military leaders the benefit of a discussion about a big decision." He said that if he were just pretending to be open-minded, "you get sniffed out. And there'd be nothing worse than the president getting ready to make a decision relative to the military and these commanders, these Joint Chiefs and all the other people in the room who are watching like a hawk, not think that I was genuinely interested.
And so I might have been leaning, but my mind was open enough to be able to absorb their advice. And so it could be that I made that decision right after that."
I told him that, based on my reporting, some of the chiefs thought he had already decided, that they had sniffed him out.
"I am trying to get them to be in a position where they fire back on an idea," the president said, noting the chiefs had felt free to express themselves. "They may have thought I was leaning, and I probably was. But the door wasn't shut."
Still, Bush fully understood the power of his office.
"Generally," the president said, "when the commander in chief walks in and says, 'Done deal,' they say, 'Yes sir, Mr.
President.'"
Chapter 29
On December 15, Bush and Maliki talked by secure video. The president asked the prime minister to approve additional U.S. forces. "View our coalition troops as troops that can help you do the hard work until yours are ready to go," Bush said. "Use our troops to generate calm in Baghdad."
Maliki mentioned he was speaking at a national reconciliation conference the next day and he would announce his approval publicly. When the translated text of Maliki's speech arrived the next day, there was no mention of approval.
The president was furious. Intelligence reporting indicated that Maliki had lost confidence in U.S. troopsóthey had not solved the violence problem. Maliki was saying: Why would I want more of the ineffective forces that will cause me only more problems?
* * *
Rice remained deeply skeptical of a surge, but she couldn't ignore the admonition of the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gulf states. The administration could not even appear to be pulling back from Iraq. For her, that killed the carefully drafted idea of stepping back, what she called the "Zelikow option." In a subsequent meeting of the NSC, Rice was in a challenging mood. "Mr. President," she said, "I know you're going to get tired of hearing me say this, but I don't believe that the circumstances will permit a success based either just on a continuation of the status quo or just a surge in forces. You can surge all the forces you want, but [suppose]
the Iraqis don't do what they're supposed to do?" She said Maliki's Shia government had to be willing to take on their own peopleóthe Shia militias. "How are you going to make American forces deal with sectarian violence if the Iraqis won't?"
"I want to make clear what I see as the options here," Bush said finally. "We can hold steady. None of you say it is working. We can redeploy for failure"óhe looked over at Riceó"that's your option, Condi." Or, he added, "We can surge for success."
"That's not what I'm saying," Rice replied, realizing that she had set Bush off. "But what are you going to surge them for, is what I'm saying. It is also possible to surge for failure if we don't know what the additional troops are going to do." It was one of the most direct challenges Rice had ever made to the president, and she persisted. She said the Ministry of Interior was still practically overseeing death squads and a hundred bodies a day were still showing up in Baghdad. "We have got to determine whether or not this is a case of will" or a case of "capability" on the part of the Iraqis, she said. "If it's capability, then 20,000 American soldiers will make a difference. If it's will, they won't."
Rice refused to back down from her question about what more U.S. forces would do. "Tell me how that's supposed to improve security? And if they go in and just train more Iraqis in the way we have been training them, where half of them don't show up, that's actually not going to improve security."
* * *
Casey felt strongly they could never bring the levels of sectarian violence down in Baghdadóno matter how many U.S. forces were put inóunless the Iraqis embraced political reconciliation. Otherwise, Baghdad was indeed a "troop sump."
He didn't think much of the pressure from Bush to get the Iraqis to sign off on a surge of U.S. forces. Instead, he was spending a lot of time trying to get Maliki to stop interfering with the military and start permitting operations against the Shia militias.
"We have an opportunity now to accelerate the transition of the security to the Iraqis," Casey said during his next briefing to Bush. That wa
s what they had agreed to two weeks earlier on November 30 in Amman. There was still no question in Casey's mind that sending in more American troops would have only a temporary, local impact. He agreed that two brigades should be added because General Fil had said he needed them, but otherwise they needed to continue with the strategy they had. Of course, without political progress on reconciliation between the Shia and Sunnis, the transition to Iraqi-led security would not happen and the Iraqi security forces would likely collapse.
* * *
On December 19, his first full day in office, Gates asked Lieutenant General David Petraeus to come to Washington from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was overseeing the writing of the military's new counterinsurgency manual. Petraeus was on everyone's list to take Casey's place as Iraq commander. Petraeus does not fill the stereotype of an Army general. Given the nickname "Peaches" as a youth because of his lack of facial hair and because people had trouble pronouncing his name, he was no roaring George Patton. But he had successfully led the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles, in the initial Iraq invasion of 2003, and posed an intellectually tantalizing question to Rick Atkinson, a Washington Post reporter, who had embedded with the division: "Tell me how this ends."
It was a question no one had come close to answering. Though the 101st had seen more than 60 of its soldiers killed, it had initially brought some semblance of order to Mosul in northern Iraq. In 2004ñ05, Petraeus had spearheaded the Multi-National Security Transition CommandóIraqóMNSTC-I, nicknamed "Minsticky"óa newly created command responsible for training, equipping and mentoring Iraq's security forces and infrastructure. Tens of thousands of new Iraqi soldiers had been trained during his tenure, though the effort had produced mixed results.
Now he sat in Gates's new office.
"I'm going to Iraq," Gates said. He was leaving later that day. "What is it I should look for?"
The War Within Page 30