"Having a stable, secure Iraq is achievable," Keane said. "A government that is aligned with the United Statesóthis is now an achievable end for us. We could not have visualized that in 2006, and we could not have visualized that in 2007. Our opponents who disagree with us say that the war costs too much." He recited statistics about how the United States had spent much higher percentages of its gross domestic product on past wars than it was spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said they needed an active campaign to counter the arguments of the war critics.
Most important: "Assign Petraeus to CentCom." Delay the assignment until the fall. Make Odierno the new Iraq commander. He said that Odierno, as the corps commander, was the unsung hero of the Iraq strategy. "When he arrived and started taking his responsibility in November [2006], he started to change the strategy and put together plans to do that and immediately ran into an obstacle called General Casey."
Odierno had both intellect and moral courage, Keane said. After Petraeus had taken over in February 2007, he had gone to Iraq and looked at the situation in detail, realizing that Odierno needed eight to 10 surge brigades rather than the five he was getting. Of course, there were no more brigades, so Odierno had improvised.
But most important, Odierno realized the opportunity of the turnaround in Anbar province. According to Keane, Odierno had told his staff, "What's happening in Anbar can happen all around Iraq. We've got to understand how powerful this is." He instructed part of his staff to do nothing but find Sunnis or former insurgents willing to help the U.S. forces. "He can see things clearly that others cannot," Keane said. "He is in a class by himself.
"Let's be frank about what's happening here. We are going to have a new administration. Do we want these policies continued or not? Do we want the best guys in there who were involved in these policies, who were advocates for them? Let's assume we have a Democratic administration and they want to pull this thing out quickly, and now they have to deal with General Petraeus and General Odierno. There will be a price to be paid to override them."
* * *
On April 8, Petraeus and Crocker were back before Congress to offer an update. "We haven't turned any corners," Petraeus said. "We haven't seen any lights at the end of the tunnel. The champagne bottle's been pushed to the back of the refrigerator." There had been progress, but it was "fragile and reversible," he said.
But in mid-May, Petraeus sounded a note of hope in an e-mail to a friend back in the United States. He said he was coming closer to answering the question he had posed five years earlier on the windswept desert during the first week of the invasion: "Tell me how this ends."
"Had the lowest level of security incidents last week since Iraq blew up in April 2004," he wrote. "Nothing's easy, but I can, on some days, very vaguely see how this might end."
* * *
Gates knew that Petraeus was the natural choice to replace Fallon. No other commander was more familiar wih Iraq, and he had worked closely and effectively with Odierno. Two weeks later, on April 23, Gates called a press conference. "With the concurrence of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I have recommended and the president has approved and will nominate General David Petraeus as the new commander of Central Command. We will withdraw the nomination of Lieutenant General Ray Odierno to be the Army vice chief of staff and nominate him to return to Baghdad as the new Multinational Force Iraq commander, replacing General Petraeus."
Gates said Petraeus would likely stay in Iraq through the late summer or fall. Odierno had been home barely two months and needed the break between tours.
"This arrangement probably preserves the likelihood of continued momentum and progress," Gates said. Asked by a reporter whether the move marked a "stay-the-course approach" for the administration, the secretary answered, "I think that the course, certainly, that General Petraeus has set has been a successful course. So frankly, I think staying that course is not a bad idea."
* * *
By early May 2008, the U.S. intelligence agencies viewed Maliki in a slightly better light than they had in the past, but plenty of problems remained. "He is no longer willing to take direction," said one of the most experienced senior intelligence officials in the U.S. government. "He's his own man." But his governing skills remained weak. "He is still sectarian and he hasn't changed his spots. In his heart of hearts, he hates Sunnis. He has no use for Kurds," the official said. Making political progress still depended on reconciliation. "And he gets an 'F' as far as that goes." A month later, after watching Maliki undertake operations against the Shia militias, the same official said he would raise Maliki's grade to "a solid B."
* * *
By the summer of 2008, Cheney was getting ready to move on. After four decades in government, he believed he had had quite a run. He felt the invasion of Iraq had been the right decision. They had planted a democratically elected government in the heart of the Middle East and, he maintained, administered a major defeat to al Qaeda. The Bush antiterrorist policies, in his view, were sound. The Terrorist Surveillance Program, which authorized the National Security Agency to listen in on suspected terrorists in the United States without court-ordered warrants, had been necessary. After all the debate, Congress had finally authorized its essential elements. Despite the controversy and allegations of torture, he believed that the administration had established an effective and necessary interrogation program for high-value detainees, even though harsh techniques such as sleep deprivation and waterboarding, or simulated drowning, had been used against multiple detainees. Cheney was convinced that the heart and soul of the 2008 presidential campaign would get down to national securityóthe Iraq War and the aggressive antiterrorism programs. He thought McCain would continue them and that Obama wouldn't.
* * *
During Cheney's years in the Bush administration, the official vice presidential residence at the Naval Observatory in northwest Washington had been transformed into a kind of fortress with a hardened bunker in case of another terrorist attack. Armed security guards, multiple barriers, explosive-sniffing dogs, and two fences protected the house, a stately but weathered 19th-century Queen Anne mansion on a hill. In the summer of 2008, the house needed work. The light-colored carpets and furniture were visibly worn. There was a barren feel to the first-floor rooms, as if the moving out had already commenced. Cheney was proud of his three-foot-long shelf of well-read leather-bound fly-fishing books, many of them classics. He loved to hunt and fly-fish, and after nearly eight years in office, the summer home he and his wife Lynne owned near the winding Snake River in Wyoming beckoned. But a decade earlier they had bought a lot in McLean, the toniest of the Virginia suburbs, and were overseeing the construction of a new house. Come 2009, they would move there. He might prefer just heading back to the Snake River, but Lynne wanted to stay near Washington. They had spent decades in the capital, and their two daughters and six grandchildren lived in the area.
Cheney knew that for much of America, he had become the Darth Vader of his generation, a dark and shadowy villain. He claimed he didn't worry about it, said he had developed a pretty thick skin and just rolled with the punches. He could have settled for the more traditional role, a vice presidency with duties at state funerals and fund-raisers. He had attended more than his share of fund-raisers, where he was always a big draw for red-meat Republicans. But early on, he had set out to make his vice presidency a consequential one. He had been at the center of the action, shaping policy and working to strengthen presidential powers.
Everything had its price. If his chosen path meant leaving office as a symbol of belligerency and excess, he was willing to pay.
Cheney's hard-nosed approach to the vice presidency mirrored his view of the presidency itself. In 2005, I interviewed Cheney in his West Wing office about President Gerald Ford. He had served as Ford's chief of staff and remained a great admirer of the former president. At the end of the interview, I asked a more general question. It was a softball really, an attempt to glean how he viewed the pres
idency after seeing it up close for three decades.
"What's the definition of the job of president?" I asked. "My definition is to determine what the next stage of good is for the majority of people in the countryÖand then develop a plan to carry it out, and then carry it out."
"That's not the way I think about it," Cheney replied. "I tend to think about it more in terms of there are certain things the nation has to do, things that have to get done. Sometimes very unpleasant things. Sometimes committing troops to combat, going to war. And the president of the United States is the one who's charged with that responsibilityÖ
"The stuff you need the president for is the hard stuff. And not everything they have is hard. They do a lot of things that are symbolic, and the symbolic aspects of the presidency are important. And they can inspire, they can set goals and objectivesó'Let's go to the moon'óbut when they earn their pay is when they have to sit down and make those really tough decisions that in effect are life-and-death decisions that affect the safety and security and survival of the nation, and most especially those people that we send into harm's way to guarantee that we can defeat our enemies, support our friends, and protect the nation.
"That's the way I think of it."
* * *
By July 2008, Gates felt that Iraq was better off than he could have dreamed 18 months earlier, when he had moved into the secretary's office. The main problem now was Iraqi overconfidence. Prime Minister Maliki thought he was on a roll after months of waning violence. But Gates realized the entire endeavor remained fragile. As the presidential election loomed just four months away, Gates felt that if the election somehow became a referendum on Iraq, the American public would still want to end the war faster than he thought would be wise for the long-term position of the United States. For the moment, it looked like the real issue in the campaign, as far as the war was concerned, was not going to be whether to draw down, but rather how quickly. Gates hoped that in their new positions, Petraeus and Odierno would be able to determine the pace of withdrawal as they saw fit. Better to let them dictate the terms than the politics of the moment. In a sense, the two generals could hold public opinion at bay.
When Gates talked privately about the war with both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, he warned, "For those of you who were critical that nobody paid enough attention to the generals at the beginning of the war, has it occurred to you that you don't want to make that mistake at the end of the war?"
* * *
Hadley was hopeful by July 2008 that real political progress was taking shape in Iraq. For the first time, the Shia and Sunnis seemed to be working things out nonviolently, though still at a painfully slow pace. The sectarian violence that had raged two years earlier, reaching a peak of more than 2,000 "ethno-sectarian deaths" a month, had now dropped to almost none, according to General Petraeus. Overall, violent attacks were down to about 200 a week from the peak of 1,550. That was nearly 30 a dayóstill a lot, but Hadley found the reduction a real measure of success. He went so far as to say that al Qaeda had done the United States and Iraq a favor. Its brutal tactics and violent, oppressive rule over many local communities had given the Iraqi population a reason to unify against it. Hadley believed that the United States' invasion in 2003 had liberated Iraq, but also had been a humiliation to its citizens. He was convinced that people ultimately had to win their own fightó"self-liberation," as he called it. Al Qaeda had given the Iraqis the opportunity to win their own freedom and construct their own narrative of triumph.
Hadley even handed out copies of a June 28, 2008, Thomas Friedman column in The New York Times that discussed the psychological importance of "self-liberation" in the Middle East. But Friedman, who had initially supported the war but later became of strong critic of its management, had ended his column with a warning.
"Iraq is miles away from being healthy," he wrote. "And now that Iraqi's Shiite and Sunni communities are taking more responsibility for their own country, you are also going to see an intense power struggle over who dominates within each community. With oil dollars piling up, there is a lot to fight over. But if we're lucky, this struggle will play out primarily in the political arena. If we're not lucky? Well, let's just hope we're lucky."
* * *
"I have believed from day one that Iraq was going to change the face of the Middle East. I've never stopped believing that," Rice said during a meeting at the State Department in May 2008. She acknowledged that, "There were times in '06 when I wondered if it was going to change the face of the Middle East for the better or not."
During those difficult days, when the violence had kept rising and the very fabric of Iraqi society was rending, Rice had thought often about the early days of the Cold War in the late 1940s, and she drew comparisons to that conflict and the present one. Back then, the future of Europe remained uncertain. The United States had undertaken the Marshall Plan to help rebuild countries devastated by World War II, and President Harry Truman had enunciated his doctrine to protect Greece and Turkey, all in the name of stopping the spread of communism. The Soviets exploded a nuclear weapon years before expected, and the communists took over China. The Korean War broke out and became increasingly unpopular.
Despite all that, the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1991, and the Cold War had ended without a shot being fired.
"The long view helps," Rice said. "That's where I went for repose. And I think that's where the president did, too."
Rice rejected the notion that the Middle East had been stable and that the Bush administration had come along and disturbed it by invading Iraq. Anyone who felt that way simply didn't know what they were talking about. "What stability? Saddam Hussein shooting at our aircraft and attacking his neighbors and seeking WMD and starting a war every few years? Syrian forces, 30 years in Lebanon? Yasser Arafat stealing the Palestinian people blind and refusing to have peace?" No, it had been anything but stable, she said, and the malignant politics prevalent in the radical mosques had helped produced al Qaeda. Sure, al Qaeda was now threatening to gain a foothold in Southeast Asia and the Horn of Africa, but the real battleground lay in the Middle East, Rice maintained. "If you defeat them in the Middle East, they can't win.
"There's nothing that I'm prouder of than the liberation of Iraq," she said without hesitation. "Did we screw up parts of it? Sure. It was a big, historical episode, and a lot of it wasn't handled very well. I'd be the first to say that."
But Rice largely absolved herself of accountability for the problems with the war during its first 20 months, when she had been Bush's national security adviser. "It wasn't my responsibility to manage Iraq," she said. "Look, the fact of the matter is, as national security adviser you have a lot of responsibility and no authority."
Rice maintained that one result of the war was a better U.S. posture in the Middle East. Yes, Iran had escalated its involvement in what she called "troubled Arab waters," including backing Hezbollah in Lebanon and increasing its influence in the Palestinian territories. But "on the heels of Iraq, you can structure a Middle East in which Iran is kept at bay," she insisted.
Rice considered the war nothing less than "the realignment of the Middle East. On one side you've got Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states" supporting nonextremists. "At the other side, you've got the Iranians, Hezbollah, Hamas," with Syria shifting sides, she said. She felt there had never been a greater cohesion of American allies in the Middle East, even if those countries didn't want to be on the front lines supporting the United States publicly.
On Iran, she said, "We're not going to let them use negotiations as a cover while they continued to improve their nuclear capabilityÖ. Iran is a challenge to our interests because they essentially want to become the dominant regional player. We're not going to sit and talk to them about how they become the other great superpower in the Middle East, which is what they would like.
"You can't let them acquire nuclear capability because that emboldens and strengthens their claim to great-power status in
the region." She said the history of the Soviet Union is instructive. "The Soviet Union became nuclear before it became powerful," she said. It had tested the first nuclear weapon on April 29, 1949. "And the fact that it became nuclear made it powerful. And I don't want that to happen with Iran, which is why if I could get them out of that business, we'll have time.
"There is an image of diplomacy that is making deals to stabilize the situation. That set of deals that stabilize the Middle East has now broken down, and good riddance. Now, before we restabilize the Middle East, let's be careful that we don't just lock in bad deals. A month ago, Jaish al-Mahdi [JAM] was holding Basra. Jaish al-Mahdi is no longer holding Basra. Tactically, I would much rather have a conversation with the Iranians today about Iraq than a month ago."
Rice said that a Palestinian state would deprive Iran of chances to meddle. "A strong Iraq, I think, is going to turn out to be their worst nightmare," she added.
"I don't want to make a grand bargain with the Ayatollah Khamenei and [President] Ahmadinejad because that grand bargain is going to be a kind of least-common-denominator view of what the Middle East ought to look like." She again turned to the Soviet model. Maybe in Iran the "revolutionary fervor" would start to burn out and diminish what she called Iranian "expansionist" goals.
"Let's say that we have to live with the Iranian revolutionary state for some time," she said. "Would I rather live with the Iranian revolutionary state with American forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf and Central Asia? You bet. When I hear that the Iranians are just sitting pretty, I think, well, how does their neighborhood look to them? What has really happened is that starting with Gulf War I [in 1991], but really after 9/11, the center of American power has moved." Following World War II, the United States had moved the epicenter of its military power to Europe, but it had taken four decades for the Soviet Union to collapse. Now American power had shifted to the Middle East.
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