by John McCain
Something else I noticed, too, even on that first trip. Iraq was a grimmer, more oppressive place than Afghanistan, where we had stopped before coming to Iraq. It didn’t feel liberated from tyranny so much as hungover from the experience, whereas with Afghans you generally had the sense that they were relieved to be out from under the Taliban. Afghans also appeared more disarming and open, whatever ulterior motives they might possess. Most Iraqis we met in an official capacity or in public encounters appeared reticent and suspicious, even angry. You never felt anyone trusted anyone else. Things were different in the north with the Kurds, who were more engaging and cooperative, and where I’ve managed to cultivate more than a few trusting relationships. But meetings in Baghdad and elsewhere with Shia or Sunnis could be dour affairs, and it was hard to get a sense of whom to trust.
The most impactful meeting I had on that first visit, the meeting that convinced me our strategy in Iraq was the opposite of what we needed there, was a briefing we received from British soldiers in Basra. Basra should have been friendly country for the U.S. and British liberating forces. This wasn’t the disenfranchised Sunni Triangle. It was our part of Iraq, the Shia south, oppressed and terrorized by Saddam and the Sunni minority, people who had longed for Saddam’s overthrow. It was a mess. Local government was completely ineffectual. Lawlessness was rampant. It was hotter than hell and water was scarce. There were frequent power outages. The sewage system wasn’t working. Canal beds were dry and filled with uncollected garbage. The Brits, who had authority over the place, were headquartered in a heavily barricaded base. But they would go out every day and engage the Shia population, wearing berets and no body armor. Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia militia leader, was starting to mobilize and had already denounced the CPA in Baghdad as imperialists. Although he wasn’t yet as powerful as he aspired to be, he had figured out that the way to win friends and influence people was to inveigh against Western imperialists. In Basra and throughout the south, the Shia population wasn’t in rebellion against the occupiers yet, but things were heading in that direction.
The British had a long history with Iraq, having occupied the country a century earlier. The British officers posted in Basra in the summer of 2003 had a sense of history and an acute appreciation for local attitudes and the broader challenges facing the coalition. One of them, a no-nonsense colonel, whose name I wish I could remember, took it upon himself to give us the unvarnished truth about our situation as he saw it. They met with us at the local airfield that had been built by the Germans. After introductions were made, the British colonel got down to business, prefacing his briefing by declaring, “I’m going to tell you the truth,” and his tone and demeanor instantly conveyed the impression that the truth was going to be distressing.
“No one with stars on their shoulders will tell you what I’m going to tell you. No one at CPA or the coalition headquarters. You’re in their chain of command. You’re not in mine. I probably won’t see any of you again. So, I’m going to tell you the truth.” He then proceeded to explain very frankly, brutally so, all the ways in which the occupation, and not just in the south, was failing. “We are not winning. These people are prepared to give us the benefit of the doubt for a limited period of time if we improve their lives. If we don’t, they’ll turn against us like they’ve turned against everybody else who’s occupied this country. They’re already starting to.”
He was emphatic that the key to turning things around was taking responsibility for protecting the security of local populations and improving their living conditions right now, essential counterinsurgency methods. They were objectives just as important if not more so as standing up a new Iraqi army, and measuring the metrics that went with it, how many units trained, how many enlistments, etc., that Washington was using as benchmarks to determine when we could get the hell out of there. “When they stand up, we stand down” went the mantra.
What this British colonel told us is that to prevent further chaos and curtail the growing insurgency, and prevent the entire country from turning against the occupation, we had to give people hope we could keep them safe, that infrastructure and commerce functioned well enough to support them, that their future would be better than their past. If you do that you’ll prevent the insurgency from catching fire, and the locals will help you defeat it. But you don’t encourage hopes by staying hunkered down on your base all day, while families sweltered in the heat without water, electricity, and plumbing or when your patrols raced through the city at night looking for doors to knock down, terrorists to kill, and arms caches to seize. “You have four to six months to turn this around,” he advised. “After that, you’ll lose.”
It was a pretty bracing presentation, very different from what we had received at coalition headquarters and the CPA. It added to my concerns that however astute prewar planning had been for the invasion, there had been little thought, and far too few resources, men and material, devoted to postwar needs. That deficiency had been mandated from the top, from Rumsfeld, and it was the first of many mistakes in judgment the defense secretary would make.
When we returned to the States, I began reading and meeting with strategists who were calling for changing our strategy and tactics in Iraq. Some experienced observers worried that the Iraqification of the conflict, giving hastily trained Iraqi militias and the Iraqi army we were building from scratch the main responsibility for suppressing the insurgency, was doomed to fail. They began advocating for a coalition-led, sufficiently resourced counterinsurgency, which meant sending more U.S. troops to Iraq, not drawing down the force in place now. I was convinced that our plan to transfer military responsibilities to the Iraqis was too hasty while our plan to return political control of the country to them was too attenuated, and I began saying so in speeches and interviews. I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post just after we had returned to the States, echoing the dire prediction of the outspoken British colonel. “Having liberated Iraq, we must demonstrate the tangible benefits of occupation, which the Iraqi silent majority will tolerate if it successfully delivers services, law and order and a transition to Iraqi rule,” I argued.
The danger is that our failure to improve daily life, security, and Iraqis’ participation in their own governance will erode their patience and fuel insurrection. We do not have time to spare. If we do not meaningfully improve services and security in Iraq over the next few months, it may be too late. We will risk an irreversible loss of Iraqi confidence and reinforce the efforts of extremists who seek our defeat and threaten Iraq’s democratic future.
I recounted our briefing from the British colonel to almost everyone I met with to discuss Iraq. Word must have gotten back to Baghdad that there was a British officer in Basra who was decidedly off script, and causing consternation among visiting congressional delegations. I heard later that the colonel’s tour was abbreviated and he had gone home, and that Bremer or Sanchez or someone in Baghdad had issued an unwritten edict forbidding future British briefings of American politicians.
In November, I wrote another piece for the Post that specifically called for a U.S.-led counterinsurgency in the Sunni Triangle. Noting that attacks on coalition forces had doubled since we had been there, and were increasingly lethal, I warned against accelerating the timetable for training an Iraqi army in order to shift the burden of defeating the insurgency to Iraqis before they were ready to do it. We had to do it, I argued. We had accepted the responsibility for securing the country when we invaded. Deluding ourselves into believing the Iraqis could be ready right then to defeat an insurgency was an evasion of that responsibility. “The number of American forces in Iraq has not increased,” I objected. “Our overall troop level in Iraq doesn’t reflect a careful assessment of what it takes to achieve victory. It reflects the number of forces who were in Iraq when the war ended.” Then I got to the point that was anathema to Secretary Rumsfeld and the commander of coalition forces in Iraq.
I believe we must deploy at least another full division, giving us t
he necessary manpower to conduct a focused counterinsurgency campaign across the Sunni Triangle that seals off enemy operating areas, conducts search-and-destroy missions and holds territory.
I criticized the reluctance of the CPA to transfer political authority to Iraqis quickly. “The United States is treated as an occupying force in Iraq,” I argued, “partly because we are not treating Iraqis as a liberated people.”
Little of my criticism made a favorable impression on the most senior officials running the war. Those like Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld loyalists who presumably included his White House sponsor, Vice President Cheney, persisted in doubting the insurgency was anything more than the last gasp of a dead regime, and adamantly refused to entertain the idea that the “they stand up, we stand down” formula was contributing to the spreading insecurity and instability. I wasn’t certain that General Sanchez was in that camp. He had seemed to me to be mindful that his force level could be overwhelmed by the proliferating challenges in Iraq. But his successor, General George Casey, was as adamant as Rumsfeld. He never once, as far as I know, in his nearly four years in the job, felt he needed more forces in country, despite it all going to hell over the course of his tenure. Others could see the strategy was failing, but wanted to preserve it as a pretext to get out of there sooner rather than later. And there were those who didn’t know what to believe or what to do. But there was a growing number of people who believed that only a counterinsurgency that took and held territory, and maintained security and law and order for the affected populations, had a chance of rescuing victory from the trajectory of defeat. And that would take more troops, not fewer. American troops. We looked to the example of innovative officers in Iraq who, more or less on their own, had employed counterinsurgency tactics in their area of responsibility, including a colonel in Tal Afar, H. R. McMaster, and a two-star general in Mosul, David Petraeus, whose focus on the local population’s security, governance, and reconstruction would be the template for all of Iraq in 2007. In 2005, when Petraeus headed the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, he and another enterprising general officer, Marine Lieutenant General James Amos, worked with a team of officers, international development assistance experts, human rights advocates, journalists, and others to produce Counterinsurgency, the Army field manual that explained the fundamental principles of counterinsurgency.
I traveled to Iraq at least twice a year between 2004 and 2007, and watched with growing distress what can only be described as a persistently reinforced failure of leadership caused for the most part by a refusal to face facts and abandon a strategy that wasn’t working and couldn’t work. Sunni insurgents launched an offensive in the spring of 2004, involving secular and religious extremist elements, native Iraqi and foreign fighters. Marines attempted to pacify Fallujah, an insurgent stronghold in Anbar Province, in early April. News accounts of the difficult urban fighting and high civilian casualties brought protests from Iraqi leaders and the public, and necessitated a cease-fire after five days of fighting, disrupted repeatedly over the next several weeks by attacks on the Marines, and air strikes called in response, until the Marines withdrew in early May. At the same time, we were engaged with Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army in Baghdad’s Sadr City, in Najaf, and in other Shia strongholds. Insurgents took advantage of the situation, and launched attacks against U.S. forces in a dozen or more Anbar cities and villages, including Ramadi, Anbar’s capital, and in Samarra and other cities located in the Sunni Triangle. We turned over peacekeeping duties in Fallujah to an Iraqi army brigade, which promptly switched sides to join the insurgents. By the summer, insurgents effectively controlled most of Anbar and much of the Sunni Triangle.
In November, U.S., British, and Iraqi forces fought a second, even bloodier battle for Fallujah, which ended with its liberation, for lack of a better word, at the cost of high casualties on all sides and the city in ruins. At the same time in the north, we fought to clear Mosul of insurgents. The CPA had turned over governing authority to an interim Iraqi government in June, and Paul Bremer went home. In December, General Casey ordered coalition forces to concentrate on training the Iraqi security forces, and leave more of the fighting to them. The insurgents were happy to oblige, and concentrate more of their attacks on Iraqi troops. Two thousand four was also the year that the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib were revealed, which provided more fuel for the insurgency. As I sat in Washington reading news accounts of the fighting, it seemed that in most engagements with insurgents the Iraqi forces broke first, an impression that persisted for years. By December of that year, I was certain we would fail in Iraq unless we changed strategies and changed the military and civilian leaders who had orchestrated the failure. I repeatedly volunteered that I had “no confidence” in Secretary Rumsfeld, hoping others would publicly and in the White House privately join the choir. His tenure would continue for another two years, as would General Casey’s command.
I went less often to Afghanistan during those years. The situation there wasn’t as dire as it was in Iraq. The smaller force we had there and the less attention it received from the media reflected the lower priority it was accorded while Iraq was descending into a dystopian nightmare. In comparison, Afghanistan, blessedly, seemed somewhat anticlimactic. By 2005, I had become single-minded in my advocacy of a revised strategy in Iraq, and a big increase in the number of troops there. I knew what that meant for Afghanistan. We would have to maintain our position there with less force than desirable. That wasn’t fair to the soldiers who were holding the line in Afghanistan. But there wasn’t much of a choice. As tough as it was there, it wasn’t as bad as Iraq. We would have to muddle through until we had salvaged the disaster that Iraq had become.
I went to Iraq and Afghanistan in February 2005 with Lindsey and Senators Russ Feingold, Susan Collins, and Hillary Clinton. It was my second experience traveling with Hillary, whose company I enjoyed very much. She was a hardworking and intelligent senator, which wouldn’t surprise anyone to learn. But she is also, contrary to the negative public image promoted by her detractors, very warm, engaging, and considerate in person, and fun. I had traveled with her for the first time the year before on a trip to the Baltics and Norway, and she had been a valuable addition to the delegation and good company. That was the trip that saw a pleasant evening’s repast become an urban legend that recounted a vodka-drinking competition she and I are alleged to have had in Tallinn. I don’t drink very much, and I never have. I have one or two drinks on the weekend or when I’m out to dinner with friends, and my drink of choice is vodka. We did go out to dinner in Tallinn, Hillary, Lindsey, Susan, and I, and we did have vodka. But the rumored multiple-bottle contest, in which Hillary is reported to have drunk me under the table, is fiction. There was a bottle on the table that we did not finish. She and I had a few glasses. Lindsey, who I suspect is the author of the legend, was furtively emptying his glass into a vase or some other handy receptacle. We had a pleasant evening, and we left the table no worse for wear, steady on our feet, and in good shape to keep our busy schedule the next day. As I said, I suspect my friend from South Carolina had a hand in turning an enjoyable evening into a more colorful experience than it had been. He’s a good storyteller, old Lindsey, and stretching the truth a little in the service of a funny tale is no crime in his book or mine.
Hillary is also a very diligent person, who pays close attention to detail. We had arranged in Afghanistan to be briefed by the minister in charge of counter-narcotics. He was former mujahedeen, and had lost a leg fighting the Soviets. He was probably a fascinating guy. Unfortunately, his wasn’t the most fascinating briefing I’d ever received. Someone must have advised him that Americans like PowerPoint presentations (personally, I hate them). He had prepared maybe the longest PowerPoint in the history of PowerPoints, with slide after slide after slide on the structure and legal framework of the government’s counter-narcotics policies, on the progress of the poppy crop eradication effort, and various prosecutions the government had brough
t. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an important subject. But, my God, the presentation was just interminable, an hour and a half at minimum. That’s far too long and detailed for a bunch of generalists, which describes most senators, except, perhaps, the senator from New York. She was positively riveted. Our schedule had been exhausting. After twenty minutes, I was struggling to stay awake. I turned to my aide, Richard Fontaine, and whispered that I thought I was going to die, and asked him to figure out some way to get us out of there. As he pondered how, the minister carried on, and I continued to wilt. But not Hillary. She was gathering strength with every slide, asking lots and lots of questions, referring back to earlier slides, and extending the experience beyond my limits of endurance. Finally, mercifully, the briefing sputtered to its end. I turned again to Fontaine to whisper that it had been, without doubt, the worst PowerPoint of all time, just as Hillary volunteered to the gratified minister that it had been one of the best briefings she had ever received, and might she have a hard copy to take back to the Senate to share with colleagues?
I met David Petraeus on that 2005 Iraq trip. He and the 101st Airborne Division he commanded in Mosul had returned to the States in early 2004. They had been replaced by a Stryker brigade, a much smaller force that did not continue their predecessors’ population-focused policies, and were seen as occupiers. As the Sunni insurgency gained strength, things fell apart in Mosul as they had in Tikrit, Fallujah, and elsewhere in the Sunni Triangle. Petraeus had been ordered back to Iraq in the summer of 2004 to take command of setting up and training Iraq’s security forces. It was in that capacity that he briefed our delegation during that February 2005 trip. He’s a good briefer, insightful and well-spoken, and he had a lot of encouraging statistics for how many Iraqis had been trained and how many more coalition forces were involved in their training. But even then, and even with an innovator like Dave Petraeus, whom I admire immensely, I was frustrated with the emphasis placed on building an Iraqi army rather than the deteriorating security situation facing our troops and the Iraqi people. “General,” I interjected, “I’d like to know when you think the violence will go down, not when the trainees and trainers will go up, but when will the violence go down.” I know he appreciated the question, because I know that was the question his tactics as a field commander were most concerned with addressing. But as the commander overseeing the building of the Iraqi army, it wasn’t his job to second-guess General Casey and the Pentagon to a U.S. senator asking a subversive question. He hemmed and hawed a little. “Best guess?” I asked again. “How long will it take to get the violence down? A day? A week? A month? Six months? A year? A century? What do you think is closest to the right answer?” He relented, and said he thought the violence would come down by the end of the year. But it didn’t. It got worse.