Petraeus said that a decision on going from fifteen to twelve BCTs would need to be made no later than March 2008. He went on to say that further drawdowns past July 2008 “will happen” but at a pace determined by assessments of factors “similar to those considered in developing these recommendations.”
So there it was. I met with the Joint Chiefs in the Tank on the twenty-ninth, and then Pace and I met the next day in the Oval Office with the president, vice president, White House chief of staff Josh Bolten, Steve Hadley, and Doug Lute. Pace presented Petraeus’s plan, as well as the views of Fallon and the chiefs. He said there was consensus among the military commanders and advisers on Petraeus’s recommendations, carefully noting that the chiefs and Fallon leaned toward more emphasis on speeding the transition to Iraqi security forces while Petraeus was still leaning more toward continued U.S. military emphasis on providing security for the Iraqi population.
I had organized the meeting to “prepare the ground” for the president’s meetings with Petraeus, Fallon, and others the next day. I wanted him to know beforehand what he would hear so he wouldn’t have to react on the spur of the moment; particularly on a subject as important as this, no president should ever have to do that, except in a dire emergency. I also wanted the president to be able to ask questions, including political ones, that might be less convenient (or inappropriate) to ask in the larger forum the next day. And as so often, he had a lot of questions. Was this recommendation driven by stress on the forces? Did this represent a change of mission? He was unhappy with the so-called “action-forcing” pressures on the Iraqis that suggested they could be “driven” to reconciliation, measures intended to bring pressure on the Iraqis to pass laws we (and Congress) believed necessary for reconciling the Shia, Kurds, and Sunnis. He thought the troop reductions must be explicitly “conditions-based.” He embraced the idea that a shift in strategy had been made possible by the success of the surge and conditions on the ground—not because of pressure from Congress, not because of stress on the fighting force, not as an effort to pressure the Iraqi government. I said that the changed situation on the ground enabled the beginning of a transition and noted that the surge brigades would not be the first to come out. Those would come from areas where the security situation was better, and the surge around Baghdad would be prolonged for a number of months. The vice president asked whether these steps put us on a path where we could not succeed. Pace responded, “No. They put us on a path where we can.” In the end, the president was comfortable with Petraeus’s recommendations. I think Cheney was reconciled but skeptical; I do not believe he would have approved the general’s recommendations had he been president.
On August 31, Condi and Fallon were to join the same group that had assembled the previous day in the White House. There was a hiccup before the meeting. Pace and I got calls from the White House about six-thirty a.m. raising hell over Fallon’s slides, which had been provided in advance and which stated that our presence in Iraq was a big part of the security problem there and created additional antagonism toward us in the region. He was focused strongly on the transition to Iraqi security control. Pace called Fallon and told him some of his slides didn’t square with views he had earlier expressed to us. Fallon removed a couple of slides, the tempest was quelled, and the meeting went forward at 8:35.
Bush spent nearly two hours in a Situation Room videoconference with Crocker and Petraeus in Baghdad. Petraeus again gave his overall assessment of the situation, including a number of encouraging political and economic developments not reflected in the Iraqis’ failure to pass key legislation advancing internal reconciliation. He went through his recommendations. Again, the president objected to what he called the “action-forcing” aspects. He said he didn’t believe the United States could force Iraqis to reconcile their long-standing internal hatreds. There was a lot of candid give-and-take. Crocker, Petraeus, and Fallon all directly disagreed with the president, saying that without U.S. pressure the Iraqis “just can’t act”; there wasn’t enough trust or confidence or experience. I said there was a difference between real reconciliation and making progress on issues. I thought our role was more like a mediator between a union and a company—we could help make them deal with issues and reach agreements; we didn’t need them to love one another. On troop levels, and particularly drawdowns between December and July, the president wanted to make sure that we couched them in terms of what we “expect” to happen versus what “will” happen, and that our decisions would be based on conditions on the ground. He wanted to proceed cautiously. Ironically, he was willing to be more aggressive with drawdowns after July. Fallon’s remarks were helpful, and he endorsed Petraeus’s recommendations.
That same afternoon the president met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Pace reviewed the chiefs’ assessment of nine different options on the way ahead in Iraq, from a further increase in troops to a faster drawdown. Pete told the president that the chiefs had independently come out where Petraeus and Fallon were.
The president asked the chiefs if they had been driven to those recommendations by strains on the force, about which there was considerable discussion. Pace said no, that the recommendations were “resource-informed” but not “resource-driven.” Bush asked, “Why do people join the military if they don’t want to fight and defend the country?” The vice president chimed in, “Are we close to a time when we have to make a choice between winning in Iraq and breaking the force?” And the president said, “Somebody has got to be risk averse in this process, and it better be you, because I’m sure not.” At the end, the president said, “I will do what Petraeus has recommended.”
The president made a brief statement to the press after the meeting. I had talked with Hadley and Ed Gillespie, the president’s counselor and communications guru, and suggested that a less strident tone than usual and more of an outstretched hand to the critics would be useful for the upcoming congressional hearings. They agreed and drafted such a statement. But the president got wound up and made a very tough statement, engaging his critics. Afterward I turned to Hadley and Gillespie and asked, “So this is his happy face?”
The Iraq process came out pretty much as I had planned—and hoped for—early in the year and as the president and I had discussed privately months before. We would not finish drawing down to presurge troop levels until the summer of 2008. The president would continue to speak of “winning.” I was satisfied that our chances of failure and humiliating retreat had been vastly reduced. After all the earlier mistakes and miscalculations, maybe we would get the endgame right after all.
Two days later, on September 2, the president and Condi flew secretly to Al Asad Air Base in western Iraq to meet with Petraeus and Crocker, senior Iraqi government officials, and a number of the Sunni sheikhs who had played such a critical role in organizing resistance to al Qaeda and the insurgency in Anbar province. Pace went on his own. I flew separately in a C-17 and took Fallon with me.
Two conversations at Al Asad remain vivid for me. The first was between Crocker and the president. The president made the comment that the Iraqis’ struggle was akin to what we went through with civil rights. (I detected Condi’s influence in that analogy.) He then said to Crocker, “Where’s your head?” Ryan made clear he thought Iraq was very different and much worse than our civil rights struggle. He said it was important to understand what thirty-five years of Saddam had done to Iraq—he had “deconstructed” it. It was a country and a people who had been reduced to their fears, and they were sectarian. It was going to take time, and “the cycle of fear” had to be broken. The U.S. action in 2003 had not been regime change, Ryan said. “It was much more.… And there is no Nelson Mandela because Saddam killed them all.” “This is winnable,” he said, “but it will take U.S. commitment and a long time.” Ryan said there had been successes, but “if we walk away there will be a humanitarian disaster on the scale of Rwanda, it will open the way to al Qaeda to return to ungoverned spaces, and it will open the way for Iran
with consequences for all Arab states.” Crocker was as stark and plain-spoken to the president as possible.
The second conversation was with the sheikhs and the provincial governor. It was all about the locals wanting money from the capital for their pet projects, as if they were members of Congress.
The headline from the trip was the president’s statement to the press that “General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker tell me if the kind of success we are now seeing continues, it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces.”
A sad footnote to the Al Asad meeting was that a few days later, Sheikh Sattar, who had led the Anbar “Awakening” that played such an important role in the success of the surge, was assassinated.
The final hurdle was for Crocker and Petraeus to run the gauntlet on Capitol Hill on September 10 and 11. They testified over two long days against a backdrop of noisy protesters—the so-called Code Pink Ladies, a group of antiwar women dressed in pink clothes, some of whom had to be ejected from the hearing rooms. Crocker and Petraeus were in command of the facts, and they were brutally honest about the challenges in Iraq. Their caution and candor gave skeptics and critics plenty to chew on—and they did. There were some memorable lines. Crocker, in response to a question from Senator McCain about whether the Iraqis would do what we asked of them, said: “My level of confidence is under control.” Senator Clinton said to Petraeus: “The reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief.” “Buy time? For what?” said Senator Hagel. The Democrats were predictably furious that there had been so little progress on the political front in Iraq. Many Republicans, who had hoped for more positive testimony or indications of a dramatic change in strategy, were critical as well. Some of those who had been quietly supportive of the president’s war policies, like Senator Elizabeth Dole, called for “action-forcing” measures, while others called for a legislated change in mission.
The quiet competence and honesty of both Crocker and Petraeus had a big impact, especially as they were subjected to incredibly hostile questioning, especially in the Senate, as noted above. The Senate Republican leadership expressed renewed confidence after the hearings that they would be able to prevent Democratic legislation on the war from passing. Meanwhile a full-page ad by an antiwar group, MoveOn.org, accused Petraeus of distorting the facts to please the White House and was headlined, “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” I found it despicable and said so. Such an attack on a man who had devoted his life to defending the country infuriated the Republicans and embarrassed the Democrats and, in my view, made it harder for the critics to press their case. At the end of the two days, it was pretty clear that while few members of Congress were happy, the Democrats did not have the votes to change the war strategy. In that respect, Pace’s and my testimony on the twelfth and the president’s speech on the thirteenth announcing the drawdowns—the “return on success”—were anticlimactic.
All year long I had deliberately played my cards very close. As one journalist had written in August, “Even in his private meetings with lawmakers, top aides and his own senior commanders … he has avoided showing his hand.… He is the … administration official whose views are the least understood.” I believed that I would maintain maximum leverage in the process, especially with Congress, if the other players did not know exactly what approach I supported. The only person to know, outside my immediate staff and Pace, was the president. I acknowledged all this in a press conference on September 14: “As the debate here in Washington proceeded in recent months and, more importantly, as we considered future U.S. actions in Iraq, I have kept a fairly low public profile in the belief I could thereby be more effective inside the Pentagon, in working with my National Security Council colleagues, in advising the president and in dealing with the Congress.”
I then shared my view on the multiple objectives that the next steps in Iraq had to address. Above all, we had to maximize the opportunity created by the surge to achieve our long-term goals and avoid even the appearance of American failure or defeat in Iraq. We would need to reassure our friends and allies in the region—and signal potential adversaries—that we would remain the most significant outside power there for the long term. We had to reinforce to the Iraqis that they had to assume ever-greater responsibility for their own governance and security. And at home, we had to work toward winning broad, bipartisan support for a sustainable U.S. policy in Iraq that would protect long-term American national interests there and in the region. We had one further objective: to preserve the gains made possible by our men and women in uniform and thus reassure them that their service and sacrifice truly mattered.
I concluded, “Some say the Petraeus strategy brings our forces out too slowly, that we must withdraw faster. I believe that, whatever one may think about how we got to this point in time in Iraq, getting the next part right—and understanding the consequences of getting it wrong—is critical for America. I believe our military leadership, including a brilliant field commander, is best able and qualified to help us get it right.”
Knowing that the next face-off would come in March, I decided at that press conference to dangle another carrot. I said that I “hoped” that Petraeus would be able to say in March “that he thinks the pace of drawdowns can continue at the same rate in the second half of the year as in the first half of the year.” I wanted to underscore that the trend line on troops would remain downward and, as I had hoped early in 2007, make the debate in 2008 about the pacing of drawdowns and a long-term security relationship with Iraq rather than about the war itself or our strategy. I believed strongly this approach would be in the long-term best interest of the United States, and I hoped that it would be reflected in the presidential campaign.
A last gasp of those who wanted to change the strategy came in mid-September, with renewed interest in proposed legislation by Senator Jim Webb that would require troops to spend as much time at home as on their most recent tours overseas before being redeployed. This was another way to force the president to accelerate the troop withdrawals. In practical terms, because the amendment focused on individual soldiers instead of units, actually making it work would have been nearly impossible. I said in my September 14 press conference that such an amendment might require extending tours of units already in Iraq, calling up additional National Guard and Reserve troops, and would further stress the force and reduce its combat effectiveness. Pace and I pointed out that the amendment would require us to examine the deployment record of each individual soldier to ensure that he or she had been home long enough—and that could force the breakup of units with some soldiers who met the time limit and others who did not. This amendment had attracted fifty-six votes in the Senate in July and only four more were needed for passage. I worked the phones hard, as determined on this issue as I had been on anything since becoming secretary. After I gave a speech in Williamsburg, Virginia, on the seventeenth, I offered Senator John Warner a helicopter lift back to Washington. I used our time together to explain to the former secretary of the Navy the impossibility of managing what Webb was proposing. He agreed not to support it, which was important given Warner’s seniority on the Armed Services Committee and status as Webb’s partner in the Senate from Virginia.
That same day I told some journalists that the critics of the war were moving the goalposts on the president: they had asked for a troop drawdown, and now that was happening; they had asked for a date for the drawdown to begin, and now they had one; they had wanted a timetable for continued drawdowns, and Petraeus had provided one; and they had wanted a change of mission, and the president had announced one. I said that I thought it was in the interest of the critics to let the president get the situation in Iraq in the best possible shape so the new president would not be handed a mess there. I didn’t make much of an impact.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited me to breakfast on the eighteenth. Five days before, she had issued a news release saying, “The president�
��s strategy in Iraq has failed,” and “The choice is between a Democratic plan for responsible redeployment and the president’s plan for an endless war in Iraq.” With those comments as backdrop, at the breakfast I urged her to pass the defense appropriations bill before October and to pass the War Supplemental in total, not to mete it out a few weeks or months at a time. I reminded her that the president had approved Petraeus’s recommendation for a change of mission in December and told her that Petraeus and Crocker had recommended a sustainable path forward that deserved broad bipartisan support. She politely made clear she wasn’t interested. I wasn’t surprised. After all, one wouldn’t want facts and reality—not to mention the national interest—to intrude upon partisan politics, would one?
I had just concluded a very hard eight-month fight with Congress, “improvising on the edge of catastrophe,” to paraphrase the historian Joseph Ellis. But I had gotten what I wanted. On September 21, Congress failed to pass a single one of the amendments to change our strategy.
Pace and I were to testify together one last time on September 26 before the Senate Appropriations Committee. Before the hearing that afternoon, I had breakfast with the Democratic majority leader in the House, Steny Hoyer, and a number of Democratic members. I then had lunch with the Senate Democratic Policy Group, led by Majority Leader Harry Reid. Both sessions were friendly, serious, and thoughtful.
The contrast with the hearing that afternoon could not have been more dramatic: it was the wildest hearing I experienced in my entire professional life. The Pink Ladies and others were out in force, and the huge hearing room was rowdy and noisy. An ancient and frail Senator Robert Byrd was in the chair. The hearing, supposedly about the defense budget, was basically one more opportunity for the Democrats to vent on Iraq. Byrd took it to a whole new level. Like an evangelical tent preacher, he played to the crowd, engaged them, and enraged them, virtually encouraging the protesters to heckle Pete and me. Byrd would shout rhetorical questions at us, like “Are we really seeking progress toward a stable, secure Iraq?” The crowd would respond in unison, “No!” When he referred to the “nefarious, infernal war in Iraq,” the protesters shouted back, “Thank you. Thank you.” He strung out his words for dramatic effect—the war had cost a “trillllunnn” dollars, and so on.
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War Page 10