The president announced his decisions on the surge in a nationwide television address on January 10. He would send five brigades to Baghdad and two battalions of Marines to Anbar. Condi Rice would surge civilian resources, as the chiefs had been asking. Maliki had provided assurances that our forces could operate freely and would say so publicly. My recommended increases in the size of the Army and Marine Corps would be adopted.
And then all hell broke loose.
In a span of forty-five years, serving eight presidents, I can recall only three instances in which, in my opinion, a president risked reputation, public esteem, credibility, political ruin, and the judgment of history on a single decision he believed was the right thing for our country: Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon, George H. W. Bush’s assent to the 1992 budget deal, and George W. Bush’s decision to surge in Iraq. In the first two cases, I think one can credibly suggest the decisions were good for the country but cost those two presidents reelection; in the latter case, the decision averted a potentially disastrous military defeat for the United States.
In making the decision to surge, Bush listened closely to his military commander in the field, his boss at Central Command, and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, giving them ample opportunities to express their views. Then he rejected their advice. He changed his secretary of defense and the field commanders and threw all his weight behind the new team and his new strategy. Like some of his most esteemed predecessors, at least in this instance, he trusted his own judgment more than that of his most senior professional military advisers.
Bush has been criticized by some, particularly in his own party, for his delay in acting to change course in Iraq until the end of the year. My view is that, given the strong opposition of most senior military leaders and commanders and others in the government to the surge right up to his decision in December, changing strategies earlier in 2006 would have been even more difficult and given the president pause. I am in no position to judge whether not acting earlier was influenced by the forthcoming midterm elections. But I do know that once Bush made his decision, I never saw him look back or have second thoughts.
THE WASHINGTON BATTLESPACE
In beginning a partnership with Dave Petraeus that would last nearly four and a half years in two wars, I would often tell him that Iraq was his battlespace and Washington was mine. We each knew who our enemy was. My enemy was time. There was a Washington “clock” and a Baghdad “clock,” and the two moved at very different speeds. Our forces needed time to make the surge and our broader plan work, and the Iraqis needed time for political reconciliation, but much of Congress, most of the media, and a growing majority of Americans had lost patience with the war in Iraq. The weeks and months to come were dominated in Washington by opponents of the war trying to impose deadlines on the Iraqis and timelines on us for withdrawal of our troops. My role was to figure out how to buy time, how to slow down the Washington clock, and how to speed up the Baghdad clock. I would repeatedly tell Petraeus that I believed he had the right strategy and, therefore, “I’ll get you as many troops as I can for as long as I can.”
All through December, the debate over a possible surge had raged in Washington, mainly in the media, since Congress was in recess. Naturally, the opposition of the Joint Chiefs and Casey to a troop increase leaked, as did debates within the administration and, especially, within the Department of Defense. A central theme of the press coverage of my initial visit to Iraq as secretary focused on the concerns expressed to me by commanders and even junior officers about a surge—about the size of the U.S. military footprint, about reducing pressure on the Iraqis to assume responsibility for security—concerns I openly acknowledged. It became increasingly apparent that within the Bush administration, the civilians favored the surge and most of the military did not. It was now being asked whether I could somehow bridge this divide. The criticism in December was just a warm-up for what was to come.
We knew we were in a precarious position with Congress. Everything depended on the Republican minority in the Senate holding firm in using that body’s rules to prevent legislative action by a now Democratic-controlled Congress to impose deadlines and timelines that would tie the president’s hands. Republican defections could be fatal to the new strategy.
To buy time, I developed a strategy in January for dealing with Congress that, at times, caused both the White House and Dave Petraeus heartburn. It was a three-pronged approach. The first was to publicly hold out hope that if the overall strategy worked—and we would know within months—we could begin to draw down troops toward the end of 2007. This caused a number of the strongest advocates of the surge, both within and outside the administration, to question whether my heart was really in the surge or if I understood that it needed time to work. They were looking at the Iraq battlefield, not the Washington battlefield. I believed the only way to buy time for the surge, ironically, was to hold out hope of beginning to end it.
The second part of my plan was to call for a review and report in September by Petraeus on our progress in Iraq and the effect of the surge. I calculated that I could counter calls from Congress for an immediate change in course with the very reasonable and I believed proper argument that we should be allowed to get all the surge troops into Iraq and then a few weeks later address whether they were making a difference. This would buy us at least until September. If the surge wasn’t working by then, the administration would need to reassess the strategy in any case. The September report would take on a life of its own and become a real watershed. (This tactic of using high-level reviews to buy time was one I would use often as secretary.)
The third element focused on the media and on Congress itself. I would continue to treat critics of the surge and our strategy in Iraq with respect and to acknowledge many of their concerns—especially about the Iraqis—as legitimate. So when members of Congress would demand that the Iraqis do more either militarily or in terms of key legislative actions to demonstrate that reconciliation was proceeding, I would say in testimony or to the press that I agreed. After all, that is exactly what I had called for in my e-mail to Baker and Hamilton in mid-October. Further, I would legitimize their criticism by saying that their pressure was useful to us in communicating the limited patience of the American people to the Iraqi government—although I steadfastly opposed as “a bad mistake” any legislated specific deadlines. I always tried to turn down the temperature of the debate.
I divide the debate over Iraq during the last two years of the Bush administration into two phases. The first, from January 2007 until September 2007, continued to be about the war itself and, above all, the surge, and whether it made any sense. It was a bitter and nasty period. For the second phase, from September 2007 until the end of 2008, I changed my modus operandi, making the subject of the debate the pace of troop withdrawals so as to extend the surge as long as possible but also to try to defuse the Iraq debate as a major issue in the presidential election. Most of the Democratic presidential candidates at least tacitly acknowledged the need for a long-term—if dramatically reduced—U.S. presence in Iraq. My hope was that a new administration would proceed deliberately—not under pressure to take dramatic or precipitous action in terms of withdrawals—and thereby protect long-term U.S. interests both in Iraq and in the region.
The strategy largely worked, for a number of reasons, all dependent on the actions and steadfastness of others. The first was the spread of the “Awakening” movement led by Sheikh Sattar and his Sunnis in Anbar, together with the success of Petraeus and our troops in quickly beginning to change the conditions on the ground in Iraq for the better and in ways that within a few months became impossible to deny. We began to see signs that the surge was working as early as July. The second was the president’s firmness and his veto power. A third was that the Republican minority in the Senate, for the most part, stayed with us and prevented the passage of legislation mandating timelines and deadlines for withdrawal of our forces. A fourth was that in matters o
f national security, Congress absolutely hates to challenge the president directly in a way that would saddle them with clear and full responsibility if things went to hell. Finally, negotiations with the Iraqis during 2008 on a Strategic Framework Agreement placing an end date on our troop presence was critical in defusing the issue of withdrawal in the 2008 presidential election—and buying still more time.
But that was all still very much in the future when, on January 11 and 12, 2007, Condi testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the surge, and Pete Pace and I testified before the two Armed Services Committees. Although we all were grilled intensively, I think Condi had the more difficult session—mainly, I think, because she had been in the administration at the time the decision was made to invade Iraq and so was the target of members’ frustration about the entire course of the war. I suspect another reason she had a harder time was that at least four members of the Foreign Relations Committee were planning on running for president and saw the hearing as a platform. Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut accused the administration of using our soldiers as “cannon fodder,” Senator Joe Biden of Delaware said the new strategy was “a tragic mistake” and “more likely to make things worse,” and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois said, “The fundamental question that the American people—and, I think, every senator on this panel, Republican and Democrat—are having to face now is, at what point do we say ‘Enough’?” The Republicans weren’t particularly supportive either. Indeed, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said that the surge would be “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.”
Pace and I had a somewhat different experience, partly because the Republicans on the Armed Services Committees were generally more supportive of the president’s war policies, especially John McCain. There was still a lot of criticism from the Democrats and tough questions from Republicans. I may also have gotten off a little easier because it was my first hearing after confirmation, and I was not my predecessor. I also won broad support when I announced my proposal to expand the size of the Army and Marine Corps during the hearings. And I think I caught them (as well as the White House, Petraeus, and others) off guard when I indicated that I hoped we could begin drawing down troop levels by year’s end.
As is often the case, the members asked very few questions that we had not asked ourselves. There was broad skepticism about Maliki and the other Iraqi leaders delivering on their promises this time, unlike so often before; we wondered about this as well. This skepticism was only magnified by the fairly tepid support for the plan by Maliki and other Iraqi leaders in their public statements. Asked how long the surge would last, I went out on a limb in responding, “Months, not years.” Both Pace and I took questions on our military leaders’ apparent opposition to the plan.
All who testified had not expected a friendly environment, but I think Rice, Pace, and I—and the White House—were taken aback by the vehemence of the reaction and the criticism. It would not soon improve. There would be innumerable efforts to pass binding and nonbinding resolutions opposing the surge, to tie the size of the U.S. troop presence to the Iraqis’ passage of legislation, and to use funding bills to limit what the president could do or to force his hand. All would fail, but not before causing those of us in the administration a lot of anxiety and huge budgetary disruptions in the Pentagon as Congress dribbled out war funding to us a few months at a time throughout the year.
One area that would truly test my patience was the senators’ focus on benchmarks, and their demands that the Iraqi Council of Representatives enact, by specific deadlines, legislation in key areas such as de-Baathification, the sharing of oil revenues, and provincial elections. This was an approach I also had recommended to Baker and Hamilton, but I had not fully understood then just how tough these actions would be for the Iraqis, precisely because they would fundamentally set the country’s political and economic course for the future. Remember, they had no experience with compromise in thousands of years of history. Indeed, politics in Iraq from time immemorial had been a kill-or-be-killed activity. I would listen with growing outrage as hypocritical and obtuse American senators made all these demands of Iraqi legislators and yet themselves could not even pass budgets or appropriations bills, not to mention deal with tough challenges like the budget deficit, Social Security, and entitlement reform. So many times I wanted to come right out of my chair at the witness table and scream, You guys have been in business for over two hundred years and can’t pass routine legislation. How can you be so impatient with a bunch of parliamentarians who’ve been at it a year after four thousand years of dictatorship? The discipline required to keep my mouth shut left me exhausted at the end of every hearing.
Almost immediately after the president’s January 10 announcement of the surge, both Republican and Democratic members of Congress began looking for ways to reverse it or at least express their disapproval. In the Senate, Republican John Warner put forward a bipartisan resolution opposing the surge but supporting the forces going after al Qaeda in Anbar province. The Democratic leadership supported Warner’s nonbinding resolution, believing that if they could get that passed, they could then move toward stronger steps, such as attaching conditions to war spending. But Warner could not rally the necessary sixty votes to prevent a filibuster, so the resolution quietly died. Too many senators just couldn’t bring themselves to support a bill that seemed to undercut the troops.
On the House side, Democrat Jack Murtha, chairman of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee and a wily old congressional operator, was more subtle. He proposed that units meet strict combat readiness criteria before deployment, a maneuver that Pace and I argued, in a hearing on February 6, 2007, would tie our hands and effectively cut the number of U.S. forces in Iraq by a third. Murtha’s plan was to offer an amendment to our wartime supplemental appropriation request of $93 billion, then on the Hill and in need of passage by April to avoid disruptions. We would wrestle with Murtha’s proposal and variants of it all through the spring as the Democrats turned to the spending bill as a vehicle to manifest their opposition to the surge.
Toward the end of January, the nominations of Casey to be Army chief of staff and Petraeus to be commander in Iraq were both before the Senate. As predicted, there was opposition to Casey, mostly among the Republicans. McCain was the most strongly opposed, as previewed, saying he thought Casey was the wrong man for the job. Warner was ambivalent. Senator Susan Collins of Maine was not supportive, saying Casey was too removed from the Army and that she had not seen anything positive in his record as commander in Iraq. Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia flipped from being supportive to opposing. Even some of those prepared to vote for Casey didn’t think he was the best candidate. While I had no chance of getting McCain to change his mind, he did tell me he would not try to organize opposition to Casey. I also talked to Warner and others. This was, of course, discouraging to George after all his service, and on January 20 I suggested to the president that he convey to Casey his ongoing support, and he quickly did so. I was especially concerned about Casey’s morale given that Petraeus was moving so fast toward confirmation in the Senate. I told Casey about the negative reactions but explained: “You’re in charge in Iraq, and they hate what’s going on there.” I reassured him that the president was “strong as horseradish” behind him, and so were Pace and I. I said I hoped he would be confirmed by February 9 or 10. Majority leader Harry Reid said he would get Casey confirmed, and he was, on February 8. Still, fourteen senators voted against him. There was not a single vote against Petraeus.
The president then, I think, made a mistake. Privately to Republicans and then publicly, he hammered the Democrats, asking how they could unanimously support Petraeus but oppose both the general’s plan and the resources needed to implement it. It was a logical argument but created huge resentment among Democrats. It would make them far more cautious in confirming senior officers in the months ahead for fear the same argument would be turned on them.
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Congressional maneuvering to use the war funding bill to force a change in strategy intensified in late February and March. On March 15, Murtha’s subcommittee set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of August 2008 and, as Murtha had foreshadowed, imposed requirements for unit readiness and deployment duration. On the same day, the Senate voted 50–48 against a binding resolution sponsored by Harry Reid that would have required a redeployment from Iraq to begin within 120 days of enactment of the bill, set a goal of completing the withdrawal of most troops by the end of March 2008, and limited the mission of the remaining troops to training, counterterrorism operations, and protecting U.S. assets. I pushed back hard for the first time both in private meetings with members of Congress and in the press on March 22, outlining the consequences, for the war effort and our troops, of legislative maneuvering that was bound to draw a presidential veto and thus delay funding for weeks. My warnings notwithstanding, the next day, March 23, the House voted 218–208 for the war funding but set a deadline for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq of August 31, 2008. On the twenty-sixth, the Senate passed the war funding bill with a deadline of completing troop withdrawals by March 31, 2008. On April 25 and 26 the House and Senate, respectively, approved the conference report calling for troop withdrawal to begin by October 1, 2007, and be completed 180 days later. The president vetoed the bill on May 1. We finally received the war funding on May 25 without any restrictive language, but congressional efforts to change the strategy would continue, as would our budgetary contortions caused by funding delays. I told members of Congress I was trying to steer the largest supertanker in the world through uncharted waters, and they were expecting me to maneuver it like a skiff.
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Page 7