Now, as I sat in the Oval with the President, I suggested that the report might give us a chance for a “reset” in Iraq. I knew Steve agreed. But the President wasn’t going to give anyone a blank check on Iraq policy. He wouldn’t reject the findings—many of which would turn out to be in line with his own thinking—but he made clear that he would find his own way to move forward. “I am still the commander in chief,” he asserted. The phrase hung in the air.
As we left the Oval, I asked Steve if he thought the President was capable of acknowledging how deep a hole we were in. We agreed that he did—but he is “one tough hombre,” Steve said. “That he is,” I agreed.
Throughout the summer, the President’s top security advisors and their agencies had continued their reviews of the situation in Iraq. Steve and I called our teams together in mid-October for a no-holds-barred debate of our options. The NSC staff—guided ably by J. D. Crouch, Meghan O’Sullivan, William Luti, Peter Feaver, and Brett McGurk—had coalesced around an option to “surge” U.S. forces and reorient the military toward a “counterinsurgency” posture. In a densely urban environment such as Baghdad, where plainclothed insurgents appeared virtually indistinguishable from innocent civilians, the military’s use of heavy firepower to eliminate enemies risked civilian casualties. Such collateral damage had in the past inflamed local citizens and undermined their support for our forces. By contrast, counterinsurgency would emphasize securing the Iraqi population, not just gunning down insurgents, as the military’s strategy for defeating the enemy. By patrolling the streets of major cities and remote provinces and securing reconstruction projects, U.S. forces would be able to demonstrate their commitment to Iraq and hopefully convince the Iraqis to invest in their own future as well by laying down their arms.
Such an approach would force our troops to make tough choices and take on greater risk to themselves by venturing out of secure areas. The doctrine would expect them to restrain their fire at times, even if under attack, to avoid shooting into crowded marketplaces, for instance.
I had come to believe that counterinsurgency was the right approach for the complex battlefield in Iraq. In June I had passed along a memo to Steve that recommended a “selective counterinsurgency” option that would essentially implement this doctrine in key regions of the country. Developed by Phil Zelikow and Iraq coordinator Jim Jeffrey, the proposal had called for a temporary infusion of U.S. forces to execute such a strategy. But after the dreadful summer of unrelenting sectarian violence, I was no longer convinced that conditions were ripe—either in the Pentagon or in Baghdad—for this new strategy to succeed.
The successful implementation of this counterinsurgency doctrine depended heavily on the military’s ability to adapt to its tenets. Change within such a massive organization is difficult to accomplish even in times of peace, let alone in the middle of a conflict. I worried that the Pentagon leadership was not prepared to implement this new strategy.
More importantly, as I’ve previously noted, I wasn’t sure of the commitment of the Iraqis themselves. Because they lacked either the capacity or the will, the Iraqis were not doing their part in quelling sectarian violence. If it was a lack of capacity on the part of their security forces, maybe an infusion of troops would help in the short term. But if it was a lack of will on the part of the Shia-led government to crack down on the violence—a suspicion I worried might be true—it seemed ill advised to put more U.S. forces in the middle of the slaughter.
It was obvious that Steve favored a “surge” of U.S. forces to stem the violence and give the Iraqis a chance to practice politics. I continued to be skeptical. Our staffs went back and forth, with Phil Zelikow developing a different plan to scale back U.S. involvement. In its baldest incarnation, the emerging proposal from the State Department would seek to reinforce the current balance of power among the Iraqis to stabilize the country and condition our continued engagement on the government’s ability to rein in sectarian feuds. According to this proposal, if the government continued to support sectarian killings or even organized its own program of ethnic cleansing, the United States would announce and execute a pullback of its forces out of the cities. The hope was that the credibility of this threat would give us leverage and put the onus squarely on the Iraqis themselves to stop killing one another. I was not convinced that this would work—but I wasn’t sure that surging more U.S. forces would work either. At least this way, fewer Americans would die.
Then, a few days before the midterm elections, the President called to ask me a question that began to reset my own thinking. “What do you think about Bob Gates as secretary of defense?”
I could barely contain my joy. “That would be great,” I replied. “Why didn’t we think of it before?” Gates and I had a long-standing friendship going back to the heady days of the end of the Cold War in the George H. W. Bush administration. We’d remained friends as he took on academic roles at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M. He ultimately became the university’s president.
I’d been careful not to involve myself in the decision about Don Rumsfeld’s fate. There was something unseemly about one secretary, no matter how close to the President, appearing in any way to be trying to vanquish another. The President knew how I felt. The closest I’d come to an opinion about Don had been in our initial conversation at Camp David when the President had asked me to be secretary of state. “I don’t intend to spend my energy sparring with Don,” I’d said. “I’m going to lead U.S. foreign policy, and I don’t need his input.” The President had simply acknowledged the statement, a little taken aback, I think, by the sharpness of the comment. Again, it was nothing personal with Don. I just wanted him out of the diplomatic lane.
I promised to call Bob and tell him how much I would welcome his appointment at Defense. Bob had kindly told the President that working with me would be easy and productive. More important, I was confident that the Pentagon might now face the challenge in Iraq head-on and creatively. In November 2006, the day after the midterm elections, President Bush announced that he would nominate Bob to serve as the next secretary of defense. My faith in a new start was reinforced when I later learned that Bob intended to appoint David Petraeus to succeed George Casey.
Still, I had reservations about the surge option and continued to press the President to consider alternatives. Steve thought that we might involve Hank Paulson in the discussion—not to draw on his expertise as treasury secretary but to get “fresh eyes” on the problem. It was a great idea. On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the national security team gathered in the White House solarium with the President. Don was there—continuing to act as secretary of defense until Gates could be confirmed—along with the Vice President, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace, Paulson, Hadley, and his deputy, J. D. Crouch. I was struck by the fact that in six years I’d never been in that particular room.
Surrounded by windows that bathed the room in sunlight during the day, the solarium had been host to a meeting where President Dwight Eisenhower had launched a strategic review of Cold War policy in the light of the early gains by the Soviet Union. I don’t know whether the room had been selected for our Iraq review with that historical precedent in mind or if the President was just looking for a change of venue. Either way, I hoped that we might channel the thinking of our predecessors more than fifty years later. We would need all the help we could get.
At one point, J.D. suggested what we all knew: the NSC staff favored a troop surge. I questioned again what the troops would do. “Improve population security,” he said. I challenged, “So are we now responsible for the security of the Iraqi population or is that the job of their government?” I probed the issue of Maliki’s commitment to his own people. I argued that we could not allow the Iraqi leader to take the presence of U.S. troops for granted. The discussion was raucous and intense but led to no final resolution.
The next day, I departed with the President for the Baltics and a NATO Summit in Latv
ia. Who would have dreamed that a U.S. President would one day attend a NATO summit in Riga? I wondered. It was another chance to reflect on history’s long arc—and offered reassurance that tough decisions can ultimately change that arc’s direction.
The chance to test that proposition came into full relief two days later when we met with Maliki in Amman, Jordan. The President spent more than an hour with the Iraqi one-on-one. While the two men were meeting, Steve, Zal Khalilzad, and I talked with the prime minister’s advisors, including his national security advisor, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie. I was stunned when Rubaie suggested that government-sanctioned Shia violence against the Sunnis simply didn’t exist. I exploded at him: “Either you’re lying to us, or someone is lying to you.” Steve and Zal intervened with supporting but less direct comments. I’m glad they did, because even though I really liked and respected Mowaffaq, I wanted to punch him at that moment. When are these people going to get a grip on the problem? I asked myself. Right about then we were called back into the room.
Maliki had given the President his own plan for stemming the violence in Baghdad. The President told him that if he was ready to step up, the United States was prepared to put in more forces. “I’ll put in tens of thousands if that’s what’s needed. But you have to be ready to do difficult things.” The President gave him a long list—related mostly to even-handedness in regard to sectarian violence. He’s going to surge our forces, I thought. But before he does, the military had better know they have to change course on the ground. Bob Gates will figure this out. We’ll be okay. God willing.
I separated from the President and went on to Jericho and Jerusalem to give another push to the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks. But my mind was not on that conflict—we were going to stand or fall on what happened in Iraq.
That became even clearer when I met with the foreign ministers of the Gulf Cooperation Council plus Egypt and Jordan (GCC+2). The findings of the Iraq Study Group report had begun to leak out, and it looked to all the world as though the recommendation would support withdrawal—not a precipitous one but withdrawal nonetheless. The best that could be said was that there was some room for one more push before the United States left—but the goal was clearly to get out, one way or another. The GCC+2 foreign ministers were terrified that we were about to leave Iraq and abandon the Sunnis. “It hurts me as an Arab to say this,” the Egyptian said, “but you need to increase your presence and finish the job. We will all be done if you don’t.”
The foreign ministers were unsettled too by the buzz around the report’s insistence on a new diplomatic push that would involve talking to Iran—a kind of regional solution to the Iraq problem. They were rightly suspicious that the Iranians would use their enhanced diplomatic perch that would come with U.S. consultations to further their influence in the region, and the ministers wanted a promise that the United States was not about to sell out to Tehran to end the war in Iraq. “We’re not in a position of strength right now,” I acknowledged. “But we’re not that weak either. We have no intention of inviting Iran into the Middle East.”
Several of my GCC colleagues countered, “They [the Iranians] are fishing in troubled Arab waters. They smell blood. You have got to be stronger in confronting them.”
We then issued a public statement that said nothing about Iran. The Middle East was a place of contradictions and fictions. Yet my fellow ministers were right; it was no time to let Tehran sense wavering on the part of the United States. That was the lesson that I took from those conversations, and it started to change my view of the surge.
…
I RETURNED to Washington in time for the release of the Iraq Study Group report, confining my own reaction to the suggestion in the report of a “diplomatic offensive” toward the Israeli-Palestine negotiations and high-level talks with Iran and Syria. We were deeply engaged in the first, so I eagerly embraced that idea. But as to Tehran and Damascus, I made it clear that it was a nonstarter. “If they have an interest in a stable Iraq, they will do it anyway.” My own view was that it was worth probing them—particularly Syria—but I was not going to petition these hostile regimes on bended knee to help us in Iraq.
Two days after the Iraq Study Group report was released, we met with the President for yet another NSC strategy session on Iraq. I pushed again on the question of Maliki’s commitment but as before didn’t single out the prime minister. “They’re all at fault,” I said. “This isn’t just about Maliki. It is about Talabani and Hashimi and Hakim—all of them.” I said bluntly that they might have to kill one another for a while before they got the point. If they didn’t want to secure their own populations, why would the United States be able to do it for them? Without their commitment the surge wouldn’t work.
“So what’s your plan, Condi?” The President was suddenly edgy and annoyed. “We’ll just let them kill each other, and we’ll stand by and try to pick up the pieces?”
I was furious at the implication that I cared less about winning in Iraq than those supporting the surge. “No, Mr. President,” I said, trying to stay calm. “We just can’t win by putting our forces in the middle of their blood feud. If they want to have a civil war we’re going to have to let them.” There was a lot of shifting of feet around the table. The President and I were on the edge of a confrontation right then and there—something we’d never had in the company of others.
Thankfully the meeting ended shortly after that. I followed the President into the Oval. “You know that’s not what I mean,” I said. “No one has been more committed to winning in Iraq than I have.”
“I know,” he said softly. “I know.” I felt terrible. His pain was so visible, but he was determined to find a way out and prepared to put everything on the line.
I called Bob Gates and asked when we could spend some time together. We met for dinner on December 12 and talked about the options before us. He clearly favored a surge but shared a lot of my concerns. He told me at that time that he wanted Dave Petraeus to assume the command of the coalition forces in Iraq, replacing George Casey whom he would promote to be army chief of staff. I’d known Petraeus from the earliest days of the war and respected him enormously for his intelligence and his strategic sense. He’d participated in the drafting of the Army and Marine Corps’s new counterinsurgency field manual, so I was confident that he would be able to carry out exactly the kind of change in strategy that needed to accompany an influx of troops. I was feeling a lot better about the prospects for the surge, but I had to make one last call. Ray Odierno had been my Joint Staff liaison and was now a lead commander in Iraq. I always tried to respect the chain of command, but this decision was too important to stand on ceremony. “Ray,” I said after apologizing for calling him directly, “do you favor more troops? Can you use them to reinforce the Anbar Awakening?” He told me that he did and that he could. That sealed it for me.
AFTER CHRISTMAS, the NSC team gathered at the ranch to review the Iraq strategy one last time. I drove up to the President’s house and found him on the back porch, looking out over the lake and the great expanse of the ranch. “You’re going to do it, and it’s the right thing to do,” I said, not even having to say the word “surge.” “I’m there, and I’ll do everything I can to support it. But, Mr. President, this is your last card. It had better work,” I concluded and walked away.
The United States was about to take a monumental gamble and double down in Iraq. We had a fighting chance; there was new leadership in the Pentagon; there would be additional manpower and a new strategy. And we would signal to both the region and the world our commitment to finish the job in Iraq. Still, the surge was a risky strategy because it depended on the Iraqis to deliver their end of the bargain. But it was our best option—and probably our last one.
Thus we could leave no stone unturned to make it work, and as secretary of state that meant bringing civilian support to the military effort. Every obstacle had to be removed; business as usual and State Department processes had to get out of the way.
I called my closest staff together and told them that I was pretty sure the President had decided in favor of a surge—leaving just a little ambiguity so as not to preempt the announcement. “I want the best team in Iraq and Provincial Reconstruction Teams that are fully staffed with experienced people. I will direct people to serve if they don’t volunteer,” I said. “I want Ryan Crocker to be the ambassador. He knows how to work with the military,” I continued, alluding to his effective service in Pakistan. “Tell the D Committee to give me the recommendation,” referencing the process that the department’s deputy led to generate a recommendation for the ambassador. “And I want to see Ryan myself to convince him to do it. He’s going to get everything he asks for—directly from me.”
On December 30 Saddam Hussein was executed. The political slate had been wiped clean, and the monster of Baghdad had been brought to justice. But the demons beneath his horrific regime hadn’t been vanquished—sectarian violence and terrorism were threatening to control Iraq’s destiny. The President of the United States was determined to fight them and chart a different path. I hope to God the Iraqis are ready to lay claim to a democratic future, I thought. One way or another, the die is cast.
40
A DIPLOMATIC SURGE
SO HOW DID IT GO?” the President asked. It was the day after his January 10, 2007, announcement of the “surge” of more than 20,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq, and I’d come directly to the White House from my testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 65