I reported the results of my meetings with Petraeus to the president at Camp David on April 27. In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee some two weeks later, in response to questions, I showed a little leg on the possibility that the September evaluation might open the way to reducing forces in Iraq. Because the full surge was not yet on the ground in Iraq, this led to a minor firestorm in the press. It was said that I was on a different page from the president and the rest of the administration, that I was ready “to throw in the towel” if we could not see the surge working by September. In fact, this was what the president, Condi, Steve Hadley, Pace, I, and the commanders had been working on for weeks. It was consistent with my approach of holding out the carrot of possible troop reductions to get us at least through September and, hopefully, into the spring of 2008 with much of the surge still in place. Most outside observers and “military experts”—even the vice president—seemed to have no idea of how thin a thread the entire operation hung by in Congress through the spring and summer. George W. Bush understood.
The president once again came to the Pentagon on May 10 to meet with the chiefs and me in the Tank, which is actually a rather plain, utilitarian conference room. When the chiefs meet, the chairman and vice chairman sit at the head of a large blond-wood table, the heads of the Army and Navy sit on the side to their left, and the commandant of the Marine Corps and chief of staff of the Air Force to their right. The flags of the services hang behind the chairman, video screens are at the other end of the room, and on the wall to the chairman’s left hangs a picture of President Lincoln and his generals. To the chairman’s right and up a step is a long narrow table for staff. When the president visited, he and the other civilians—including the secretary—would sit with Lincoln at their backs, with the chiefs at one end and on the other side of the table.
That day in the Tank, the president was very candid and reflective. He told the group assembled, “Many people have a horizon of an inch; my job is to have one that is a mile.” He went on to say, “We’re dealing with a group of Republicans that don’t want to be engaged. They think democracy in the Middle East is a pipe dream. We are dealing with Democrats who do not want to use military force.” He said that the psychology of the Middle East was “in a bad place,” and we needed to assure everyone that we were going to stay. He was concerned that drawing down to ten brigade combat teams in Iraq—about 50,000 troops—might be excessive, and we should look at the implications before September. Bush observed that “many in Congress don’t understand the military.”
The same day I met with Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, to see if he would have any problem supporting Pace for a second two-year term as chairman, historically a routine matter. While Pete’s first term wouldn’t be over until the end of September, senior military nominations are complicated at Defense and the White House, and in Congress, so we tried to get them on track months in advance. I wanted Pace to continue for a second term. We worked very well together, I trusted his judgment, and he was always candid with me. It was a good partnership. But my call on Levin turned out to be anything but routine. He told me he would make no commitment to support Pace and that renominating him was not a good idea. He said there was likely to be opposition; he would check around among the Democrats on the committee. I was stunned.
The next day I talked to John Warner, the ranking Republican on the committee. He was unenthusiastic and said the reconfirmation could be a problem; he would check around among the Republicans. The same day I talked to John McCain. He said someone new was needed, but he would not lead the opposition fight. Warner called back on the fifteenth to tell me that he had talked to Saxby Chambliss and Lindsay Graham, and all three of them thought putting Pace up again was a bad idea. Levin called the next day and told me Pete was highly regarded personally, but he was considered too closely tied to past decisions. Levin also told me that Democrats had been furious when the president used their confirmation of Petraeus against them. Indeed, Levin was explicit about this publicly: “A vote for or against Pace then becomes a metaphor for where do you stand on the way the war is handled.”
I then talked with Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate. He thought that Pace’s nomination would lead to a further erosion of Republican support on subsequent votes to change course on Iraq. More and more Republicans were feeling “quiet anger” that Bush was letting Iraq “sink the entire government.” His bottom line: if the Republican leadership of the Armed Services Committee was against Pace’s renomination, we probably ought to listen to them.
A week later Lindsay Graham told me that Pace’s confirmation hearing would be backward-looking; it would become a trial of Rumsfeld, Casey, Abizaid, and Pace—a rehash of every decision over the previous six years. The focus would be on mistakes made, and the process would probably weaken support for the surge. A new person could avoid all that.
I had kept Pete informed of everything I was doing and everything I was hearing. He was predictably stoic, but I could tell he was disappointed that people in the Senate who he had thought were friends and supporters were, in fact, not. (I reminded him of Harry Truman’s line that if you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.) That said, he wanted to fight. I had two concerns with going forward. The first was for Pete personally. From firsthand experience, I knew better than most just how nasty a confirmation hearing could get. And based on what I was hearing from both Republicans and Democrats on the committee, there was at least a fifty-fifty chance Pete would be defeated for a second term after a long and bloody destruction of his reputation. I felt strongly that Pete should end a distinguished career with flags flying, reputation intact, and the gratitude of the nation. Iraq had become so polarizing that the reconfirmation process would very likely take down this good man. My second concern was that a bitter confirmation fight in the middle of the surge could jeopardize our entire strategy, given how thin support was on the Hill. Senator McConnell’s warning had struck home.
I shared this thinking with Pete and with the president, and the latter reluctantly agreed with me. And so, in one of the hardest decisions I would make, I recommended to Bush that he not renominate Pete. Pete and I agreed that the new candidate should be Admiral Mike Mullen, the chief of naval operations. In my announcement on June 8, I said, “I am no stranger to contentious confirmations, and I do not shrink from them. However, I have decided that at this moment in history, the nation, our men and women in uniform, and General Pace himself would not be well-served by a divisive ordeal in selecting the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” Although I never said as much to President Bush or anyone else, in my heart I knew I had, for all practical purposes, sacrificed Pete Pace to save the surge. I was not proud of that.
There would be stories later that I had fired Pete and the vice chairman, Admiral Ed Giambastiani. The Wall Street Journal editorialized that I had ceded the secretary’s job to Senator Levin. In truth, it was the lack of Republican support for Pace and their weakening support for the surge and the war that worried me most. I had asked Giambastiani to stay on as vice chairman for another year, on the assumption that Pace would be confirmed for a second term. When I had to turn to Mullen, Ed had to give up his job because by law the chairman and vice chairman cannot be from the same service. I hated to lose Ed from the team, so I asked him if he would be interested in becoming the commander of Strategic Command. He declined and proceeded to retire.
In my job interview, I had raised with the president the need for stronger coordination of the civilian and military efforts in the war, and for the empowerment of someone in Washington to identify bureaucratic obstacles to those efforts and force action. I saw this person as an overall coordinator on war-related issues, someone who could call a cabinet secretary in the name of the president if his or her department was not delivering what had been promised. I told the press on April 11, “This czar term is, I think, kind of silly. The person is better described as a coordi
nator and a facilitator … what Steve Hadley would do if Steve Hadley had the time—but he doesn’t have the time to do it full-time.”
Hadley had come to the same conclusion and agreed with me that a coordinator was needed. The president, Cheney, and Rice were initially quite skeptical, but Hadley was able to bring them around. He offered the job to several retired senior military officers. All of them turned him down, one saying publicly that the White House didn’t know what it was doing on Iraq. Steve then asked Pace and me for an active duty senior military officer to fill the role. Pete and I twisted the arm of Lieutenant General Doug Lute of the Joint Staff to take the job. I felt we owed him big-time when he reluctantly said yes. Doug would prove an important asset in the Bush administration (though a real problem for Mullen and me in the Obama administration).
During late May and early June, Fox Fallon began to make waves. I had heard indirectly that he and his staff were second-guessing and demanding detailed analyses of many of the requests coming in from Petraeus. Fox believed the drawdown could go faster than Dave was proposing. Fallon made the mistake of taking a reporter, Michael Gordon of The New York Times, into a meeting with Maliki. I thought it was bizarre; it made Condi furious. On June 11, I received the “upraised eyebrow” treatment from the president when the subject came up, which I always read as What in the hell is going on over there? He wanted to know what action was being taken with Fallon. Subsequently, the president read that Fallon was talking about reconciliation in Iraq, a matter he told me was only Crocker’s business. I asked Pace to have a cautionary conversation with Fallon. Bush—and Obama—were very open to candid, even critical comments in private from senior officers. Neither had much patience for admirals and generals speaking out in public, however, particularly on matters that were considerably broader than their responsibilities. This episode of public outspokenness by a senior officer provoking a White House response would be the first of many I would have to confront.
I visited Iraq again in mid-June to discuss strategy with Petraeus, to visit the troops, and to meet with the Iraqi leaders. I again urged action on key Iraqi legislation and pushed Maliki not to allow the Council of Representatives to take a monthlong holiday. I was as blunt with him as I would ever be. During that visit, I told Petraeus that we would lose the support of moderate Republicans in September and that he needed to begin to transition “to something” in October. He outlined an operational rationale for a drawdown: the population security objectives had been met; there had been success in Anbar; Iraqis wanted a drawdown; Iraqis were assuming more responsibility for security (thirteen of eighteen provinces); and the Iraqi security force was improved. He asked me about starting the drawdown with a nonsurge brigade, and I told him that that decision was his to make.
I believe Petraeus knew what I was trying to do in terms of buying more time for the surge, and that he agreed with it, but I may have pushed a little too hard during that visit. We in the administration knew the initiative in September would need to come from Dave. For some reason, he felt compelled to tell me with half a chuckle, “You know, I could make your life miserable.” I have a pretty good poker face—all those hours testifying in front of Congress required it—so I don’t think Dave knew how taken aback I was by what I interpreted as a threat. At the same time, I understood he had been given an enormous task, the pressures on him for success were huge, and like any great general, he wanted all the troops he felt he needed for as long as he needed them. Fortunately for all of us, Dave was also politically realistic enough to know he needed to show some flexibility in the fall or potentially lose everything to an impatient Congress. But he didn’t have to like it. He had just told me as much.
At the end of June, Fallon came to my office to offer his view of what the next steps ahead should be for Iraq. As he sat at the little round table that had belonged to Jefferson Davis when he was secretary of war and went through his slides, it became clear he was in a very different place than Petraeus was, and, I thought, a very dangerous place for our strategy and success in Iraq, as well as a precarious place politically for himself. He said there had been no progress on reconciliation despite constant promises; the central government was inexperienced, corrupt, and complicit in interfering in security operations to the advantage of Shia factions; the cycle of violence continued unabated, with more than one hundred U.S. soldiers being killed every month; insurgents and terrorists were targeting U.S. political resolve; the Iraqi forces were growing slowly but faced shortcomings in training, logistics, and intelligence; and finally, the U.S. ability to respond to crises elsewhere in the world was foreclosed because our ground forces were completely committed in Iraq. Therefore, he concluded, a fundamental change in Iraq policy was necessary, and “acting now” would avoid a contentious debate in September. He called for the United States to shift its mission to training and enabling, with a gradual removal of U.S. forces from the front line. Fallon recommended reducing our brigade combat teams from twenty to fifteen by April 2008, to ten by the beginning of December 2008, and to five by the beginning of March 2009.
I knew his recommendations would never fly with the president, and I disagreed with them as well, as I told him. But I could not disagree with Fox’s assessment of the situation on the ground. And while there would be rumors about differences between Fox and Petraeus on the way forward, I give Fox a lot of credit for the fact that his proposals of June 29 never leaked. Had they, there would have been a political firestorm, both in the White House and on Capitol Hill.
The rest of the summer I was largely focused on trying to retain what congressional support we had and to keep Congress from tying our hands in Iraq. The president’s veto of the war funding bill setting a deadline for troop withdrawals did not deter the Democratic leadership in both Houses from continuing to try to legislate a change in Iraq strategy. Once again their approach was to focus on our military’s readiness and the amount of time troops spent at home. Another approach, which appealed to moderate Republicans such as Lamar Alexander, was to try to legislate the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, such as ending the combat mission and shifting to supporting, equipping, and training the Iraqis within a year. (The president saw the ISG recommendations as a strategy for withdrawing from Iraq rather than a strategy for achieving success there.)
By early July, our ability to stave off congressional action had weakened even further, with Senate Republicans such as Pete Domenici breaking with the president. The situation became so dicey that I canceled a planned trip to Central and South America in July so I could stay in Washington to meet with members of Congress and work the phones. My strongest argument, especially with the Republicans, was the need to wait at least until Petraeus and Crocker could report in September. As I had hoped early in the year, that bought us time. It was hard to argue that after all we had been through in Iraq, we couldn’t wait another six weeks to hear how the president’s new strategy was going. I also started using the line that it seemed odd to me that critics of the war who had complained so vehemently that Bush had ignored the advice of some of his generals at the outset of the war were now themselves prepared to ignore—or not even wait for—the generals’ advice on the endgame.
That summer I was also focused on orchestrating how the Department of Defense would formulate and communicate its recommendations to the president in September on the next steps in Iraq, drawdowns in particular. I felt very strongly that the president should hear face to face from all of his senior military commanders and advisers. I believed that no single general should have to bear the entire weight of such a consequential recommendation; I also did not want the president to be captive to that person’s views. I hoped that the process I designed would have the added benefit of minimizing whatever differences there were among the senior military leadership, differences I knew Congress would learn about and exploit.
In the middle of all this, typical of Washington, I had to deal on a continuing basis with personality-based journalism and
rumors. For example, a reporter with a reputation for having good sources in the military wrote that the president was setting up Petraeus to be the scapegoat if the surge strategy failed. It was totally untrue and made the president furious. Then I was told that “folks in the White House” were hearing that Fallon was undercutting Petraeus and that retired Army vice chief of staff (and strong surge supporter) Jack Keane was saying Fallon was “bad-mouthing” Petraeus to the chiefs.
On August 27, Petraeus and Fallon began briefing the chiefs and me on their views of the way ahead in Iraq. This was where the rubber met the road. Petraeus said that there had been progress in security, but national reconciliation had been slower than we had hoped for, that the government was inexperienced and struggling to provide basic services, and that the regional picture was very difficult. In July, there had been a record number of security incidents—more than 1,700 per week. But civilian casualties were down 17 percent from the previous December, all deaths were down 48 percent, and all murders were down 64 percent. Attacks in Anbar had dropped from more than 1,300 in October 2006 to just over 200 in August 2007.
Dave recommended that in December 2007, we begin to transition from surge operations and gradually transfer responsibility for population security to the Iraqi forces. Specifically, Petraeus said he expected to redeploy U.S. forces from Iraq beginning in September 2007, bringing out the Marine Expeditionary Unit by September 16 and a total of five brigade combat teams (BCTs) and two Marine battalions between December 2007 and July 2008, and withdrawing combat support and service units as soon as feasible. That would bring U.S. forces in Iraq down to the presurge fifteen BCTs. He called for the United States to exploit progress in security with aggressive action on the diplomatic, political, and economic fronts. He proposed providing, no later than mid-March 2008, another assessment of mission progress and his recommendation for further force reductions beyond July 2008.
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Page 9