by John McCain
Back in Washington, it was hard to ignore how badly Iraq was deteriorating. The news was full of it. The judgment was inescapable, and I began worrying that the situation might not be salvageable. In January 2005, Iraqis had elected a temporary government to write a new national constitution. Sunnis had mostly boycotted the vote. Still it was encouraging to see Iraqis want to take charge of their country’s future while facing down threats of violence, and to see them do it again at the end of the year when they elected a National Assembly, and the new Iraqi government formed with Nouri al-Maliki, a Shia, as prime minister and Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, as president. But what small ember of hope the election might have kindled would be mostly extinguished the following year, 2006. Al-Qaeda in Iraq bombed the al-Askari mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest Shia sites in Iraq, an atrocity that lit the growing sectarian conflict into a blazing conflagration. Shia death squads targeted Sunni clerics and civilians for assassination in retaliation, including the mass murder of nearly fifty Sunni civilians, the bodies heaped in a ditch, broadcast by the media to the world. Scores of Sunni mosques were attacked. Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda fighters returned the savagery. Within a week it looked like a religious civil war could destroy the U.S. effort there and leave the country worse off than it had been under Saddam and ignite sectarian violence throughout the Middle East, an intolerable defeat for U.S. interests and ideals. But by the end of the month, Shia leaders, including even Sadr, were calling for no further retaliations, and the lid was kept on the catastrophe just barely. Sectarian killings still occurred regularly, and the continuing persecution of minorities in certain Baghdad neighborhoods and elsewhere amounted to ethnic cleansing. The end times hadn’t quite arrived yet, but we had a glimpse of what it would be like when they did.
The new Iraqi government took office in May, and coalition forces, officially designated Multi-National Force-Iraq under General Casey, with U.S. ambassador Zal Khalilzad’s concurrence, began turning over the authority for entire provinces to the Iraqi government and army. No one took authority for Anbar Province, however, as it was effectively controlled by the Sunni insurgents. Al-Qaeda in Iraq had declared Ramadi the capital of its caliphate. The battle for Ramadi, involving the U.S. Marines, Army, and Navy SEALs, and Iraqi troops under the command of another innovative officer, Army Colonel Sean MacFarland, began in June and difficult house-to-house fighting continued most of the year. The streets of the nation’s capital, Baghdad, routinely echoed with explosions of IEDs and suicide bombers, the gunfire of death squads, and the cries of their victims. An assessment by the Marines’ chief intelligence officer in Iraq, Colonel Peter Devlin, had leaked in September. It concluded that “The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al Qaeda’s rising popularity there.”
I went twice that year to Iraq, in May and December, and the most important of those visits, the pivotal one from my perspective, was in December. Congressional elections that November had returned big Democratic majorities in both houses, a Republican defeat blamed almost entirely on public dissatisfaction with the war. The day after the election, President Bush accepted Secretary Rumsfeld’s resignation and announced his intention to nominate Bob Gates as his successor.
For two years, I’d been having regular discussions with critics of the Iraq strategy, principally, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman; retired Vice Army Chief of Staff General Jack Keane; two military historians, Fred Kagan and his wife, Kim; Ken Pollack, a former CIA Middle East analyst; and Andy Krepinevich, who authored an essay in Foreign Affairs that argued for the application in Iraq of counterinsurgency principles that had been employed in the latter years of the Vietnam War. I wanted to get an understanding of how a counterinsurgency could succeed in Iraq at this late date, and how big a force was needed to execute it. Jack Keane with other retired flag officers had been making the case to the White House for the surge, as had the Kagans, and a growing number of other prominent national security figures. Before his resignation, Rumsfeld had routinely managed to cut off all interagency debates about transitioning to a counterinsurgency and sending more troops to Iraq. Those discussions were happening now, and I was guardedly optimistic that the President would make the politically difficult but militarily necessary decision to change strategies and commanders in Iraq, and send enough troops to prevent what I believed was our looming defeat.
General Casey and his number two, the commander of U.S. ground troops in Iraq, Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, had devised a plan to consolidate U.S. forces in a few bases in Iraq, increase the numbers of Americans training and embedding with Iraqi units, and leave most combat to the Iraqis. As far as I was concerned the plan would have continued to reinforce failure and accelerate our defeat. I was traveling with Lindsey, Joe, and Susan. John Thune of South Dakota had joined us, as had several members of the House. As our C-130 landed at Baghdad International, we heard the first loud explosion, a bomb detonated somewhere in Baghdad. As we disembarked down the mobile staircase, we heard a second boom, and gunfire as well. We flew by helicopter to the city. We didn’t see any cars and very few people on the streets below. The only people who ventured out of their homes were those doing the shooting and bombing. No commerce, no security, nothing that appeared to indicate even a rudimentarily functioning society was visible. It was a bleak scene.
Our first meeting was with General Chiarelli, who had spent the last two years in Iraq, and his newly arrived replacement, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, who would assume the command later that day. It was a coincidence of timing that revealed the wide gulf between their opposing philosophies. I began as I began most discussions with military commanders in Iraq by noting that they needed more troops. Chiarelli insisted he did not, and another frustrating exchange commenced as I noted rising levels of violence and the fact that large swaths of the country were under insurgent control. Chiarelli, echoing the views of General Casey, maintained that we shouldn’t do what Iraqis could do for themselves. The mission of the U.S. was to train more, not fight more. When more Iraqi units are trained, the violence will go down. “I doubt that, General,” I responded. “They’re fighting now, and the violence is worse.” I asked Odierno what he thought, expecting him to repeat Chiarelli’s argument. To my surprise, he did not.
“I think we need more troops in this country,” he acknowledged. “If I had five more brigades, I’d send two to Baghdad, two to the Baghdad Belt, and one to Anbar Province.” Clearly General Odierno had been doing a little planning in the hope that the President would decide to surge troops to Iraq. He had contradicted about as directly as possible the officer he was succeeding, and his boss, General Casey, who would leave Iraq early the following year to become chief of staff of the Army. He did it without blinking an eye. An officer who worked for Odierno later told Richard Fontaine that they knew Casey would kill any proposal they presented for more troops, and Odierno had been so blunt with me knowing that when I got back to Washington I would make the case for the additional brigades, and be certain to repeat what he had told me.
We met with Casey after my meeting with Chiarelli and Odierno. He and I had had quite a few back-and-forths over the last few years. This one was the most frustrating, and I got pretty heated. Casey had just made a statement proclaiming we were winning, and my first question to him was how he could say that. He repeated, “We are winning in Iraq.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked incredulously. “There’s like a thousand bodies showing up every week on the streets of Baghdad. There’s no political activity, no economic activity. People are afraid to leave their homes. Our guys are getting killed every day.” To which Casey replied, “Every day we’re taking steps to meet our strategic objective, which is to turn control of this country over to the Iraqi security forces, and we’re doing that because every day we are training more units and doing more operations with them.” Casey’s strategic sense of the U.S. military’s mission in Iraq was to hold the line until the coun
try’s politics matured and its leaders made the compromises necessary to end the violence. The view of counterinsurgency advocates was the opposite. We had to protect the population and get the violence under control before genuine political progress could occur.
I asked Casey for the most recent casualty figures for our troops. “I’ve got them here somewhere,” he responded, and made a brief show of looking for them without actually producing them. “We’re not winning, General,” I concluded. “We’re losing.” While we were meeting, there was another suicide bombing in the city, killing over sixty people. We were told about it as we left Casey’s headquarters. “This is winning,” I said to Lindsey and Joe.
We had arranged to meet with an assortment of people who had been in country awhile and were outside the bubble of official dogma, including a guy who ran a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Basra, and some German diplomats. They all had the same message: “Don’t leave.” They argued that the U.S. was the only authority capable of imposing any order in this country. If we left it would be chaos and killing all the time.
I had been relieved to learn Odierno’s view of the situation was the same as mine, but the most encouraging experience I had on that trip was a visit to Ramadi the next day, and a meeting with the resourceful American in charge there, Sean MacFarland. Ramadi was quite a scene. It had been the heart of the insurgency, and the battle for the city had lasted nearly seven months. All told, about fifty-five hundred Americans had fought there, Army, Marines, Navy, infantry, armored, Special Forces, and two Iraqi brigades. MacFarland had established outposts around the perimeter and inside the city, little Fort Apaches, surrounded by enemies. He ordered constant patrols of the city, showing the population this wouldn’t be one big show of force that ended with Americans returning to a base somewhere else. Americans were there to stay. They were going to take control of the city, destroy anyone who fought them, and protect those who didn’t want to fight. They cleared Ramadi one building at a time. It had been a very violent, deadly enterprise. Casualties on both sides were high. The heaviest fighting had ended the month before our visit. Many insurgents had fled the city by December, but a good many were entrenched in central Ramadi, and sporadic fighting still occurred there and outside the city.
As MacFarland briefed us on his operations, it became clear he had done, mostly if not entirely on his own initiative, what I and others had been arguing was necessary for all of Iraq. He had run a counterinsurgency and he had a big enough force to do it successfully. I had been to the country often enough and talked to enough junior officers and enlisted soldiers to have gained a ground-up understanding that what we were doing wasn’t working. Our forces were confined to large bases. They would dash out to fight somebody, kill some people, and dash back, while the population stayed in their homes in fear of their lives. But the transition to a counterinsurgency was still a theoretical framework. I hadn’t seen it tried until I went to Ramadi. I wanted to understand exactly how dangerous counterinsurgency operations would be, and how costly. And so I pressed MacFarland about the forward deployment of his forces and the constant patrols he ordered to protect the population. I told him what he was doing was admirable, and that the force under his command was fighting bravely and effectively. “But you’re holding memorial services every day.” I remember his response almost word for word. “This is what our country decided we needed to do in Iraq,” he began, “and this is the only way we have a chance of doing it.” Then he ran the numbers for us. American and Iraqi forces had taken a lot of casualties in the beginning and for a number of months after, but they had come down as they had reclaimed more of the city. Insurgent activity was down, violent incidents down, dislocated civilians were returning to their homes. It was the first validation I had that counterinsurgency tactics worked in Iraq. I was relieved and so impressed with MacFarland and the Americans and Iraqis he commanded. He had tested them and his ideas without asking permission from Baghdad and they proved successful.
MacFarland also informed us of an unexpected political development in Anbar. In August, he had received a call from a local sheikh, Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, who explained that he and other Sunni sheikhs in the area wished to break with al-Qaeda. They couldn’t bear any longer the foreign jihadis’ religious fanaticism, oppressive rule, and terror tactics, and they were willing to risk their lives to side with the coalition against al-Qaeda and the insurgency if the U.S. would give them some protection. MacFarland hung up the phone and immediately dispatched a tank to the sheikh’s house. The Anbar Awakening had begun. Abu Risha would be assassinated by al-Qaeda less than a year after his fateful call to MacFarland, but it was too late by then to curtail the movement he had started. The growing support of Anbar tribal leaders not only helped defeat the insurgents in Ramadi, but would prove critical to the success of the surge, which President Bush would announce a few weeks later.
A month before, the Iraq Study Group, authorized by Congress and chaired by two respected statesmen, former secretary of state Jim Baker and retired congressman Lee Hamilton, had announced its recommendations for Iraq: accelerate Iraqi military and police training and begin the phased withdrawal of coalition forces. President Bush had decided to do the opposite at a point of widespread public and congressional opposition to the war. I believe it was the finest moment of his presidency, and it included two of the best appointments he had made. He selected David Petraeus, the man who wrote the book on counterinsurgency, as the new commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, an extraordinarily talented career diplomat, as the new U.S. ambassador there. As it turned out, the size of the surge and its distribution would closely approximate General Odierno’s prescription; five combat brigades and supporting troops, and four thousand Marines in Anbar had their tours extended. The coming months would be the deadliest of the war for our forces.
As I discussed in an earlier chapter, I was running for President at the time, and not doing particularly well at it as I was closely identified with the unpopular war. I won’t reiterate that saga here, except to say that Iraq was always on my mind every day of that campaign. I went three times to Iraq in 2007 to see the surge’s progress for myself, and once in 2008 after I had effectively won the nomination. The first trip was in March 2007, very early days, of course, but even then you could see signs of encouragement that the surge was working, which both Petraeus and Crocker were quick to point out. Petraeus wanted to take us to a market area of downtown Baghdad, where we couldn’t have gone the previous December. We would have come under fire, and there weren’t any merchants doing business there anyway. By March, economic activity had returned to the area. People felt safe enough to shop there. I was impressed by the progress, and said so. But because we were wearing Kevlar vests and were protected by soldiers and helicopter gunships, I was criticized by a CNN reporter in Baghdad, and by pundits at home. I didn’t like it, but I should have seen it coming.
For weeks afterward, I swore I would insist on my next trip that I be allowed to wander the area in my shirtsleeves and without a security detail. That was never going to happen. Even my own staff didn’t take me seriously. The point that got lost in the attention accorded me was that while I had extra protection, the shopkeepers working there and their customers did not. They were there because the surge had begun to improve security in Baghdad, and they felt safer going about their business. We all knew there was a long, hard road ahead, and that as our forces engaged more of the enemy in more places, our casualties would increase. But even less than two months into the surge, there was evidence that the theory might prove correct in practice. That judgment would have to wait for more evidence, of course, to substantiate it. But there was good reason to hope. There was at least that. And hope had been in very scarce supply in Iraq the last few years.
Petreus and Crocker returned to Washington in September to testify before Congress after issuing a progress report on the situation in Iraq. They appeared before committees in the House and the Senate, includin
g mine, the Senate Armed Services Committee. “The military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met,” Petraeus claimed, and he had the statistics to back it up. Sectarian violence had declined, as had al-Qaeda attacks. Coalition forces were reestablishing their authority in the most dangerous parts of the country. He was confident that MNF-I could return to pre-surge levels by the summer, and it would. Crocker maintained that “a secure, stable, democratic Iraq at peace with its neighbors is attainable.” Both were cautious in their presentation, acknowledging, in Crocker’s words, “the process will not be quick, it will be uneven, punctuated by setbacks as well as achievement, and it will require substantial U.S. resolve and commitment.” It was an impressive performance, and encouraging. I was already aware of the progress, and determined to use my statement and questions at the hearing to emphasize it. Many of the Democrats, especially those who were, like me, running for President at the time, were equally determined to dispute it. Hillary, who was a member of the committee, said about Petraeus’s testimony that it required “a willing suspension of disbelief.” Obama’s campaign dismissed it as illogical. Harry Reid and others insisted the presentation had been dictated by the White House though Petraeus and Crocker protested otherwise. The leftist activist group MoveOn.org bought an ad in the New York Times, accusing Petraeus of “cooking the books,” and labeled him “General Betray Us.” The offensiveness of that accusation and the stupidity of the people who had dreamed it up hurt their side’s argument more than mine. But it outraged me just the same.