Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

by Gates, Robert M

  I complained to Jones that afternoon that the NSS decision paper for the president was trying to place precise caps on troop numbers, particularly the 10 percent flexibility the president had given me. I told him they should write it just as the president and I had agreed. I then raised the additional 4,500 enablers I had discussed with the president. Jones said he thought the president had just forgotten about them when meeting with “the acolytes” on Friday. He went on to say that “those guys—Emanuel, Axelrod, Donilon, and McDonough—were really deeply involved and stirring the pot.” He said he was isolated in the meetings.

  I received word that same afternoon that the Sunday meeting with the president had been changed to nine-thirty a.m., thus requiring me to fly all night from the West Coast to make it. I saw the handiwork of the NSS in this and told my staff, “Tell them to go fuck themselves. The president and I agreed on five and that’s when I’ll be there. If they go at nine-thirty, they’ll do it without the secretary of defense.” The meeting was changed back to five.

  The meeting was unlike any I ever attended in the Oval Office. Obama, Biden, Mullen, Cartwright, Petraeus, Emanuel, Jones, and I were there. Obama said he had gathered the group principally to go through his decisions one more time to determine whether Mullen and Petraeus were on board and fully committed. He said that if not, he would go back to McChrystal’s option of 10,000 troops, the option favored by most of his civilian White House advisers. He then went around the room. Mullen and Petraeus said what he wanted to hear. Emanuel—no surprise—stressed the political lift on the Hill and the danger of any daylight between the president and the military. Jones and Cartwright were supportive. I, of course, was pleased to hear my proposal being adopted.

  Then there was an exchange that’s been seared into my memory. Joe Biden said he had argued for a different approach and was ready to move forward, but the military “should consider the president’s decision as an order.” “I am giving an order,” Obama quickly said. I was shocked. I had never heard a president explicitly frame a decision as a direct order. With the American military, it is completely unnecessary. As secretary of defense, I had never issued an “order” to get something done; nor had I heard any commander do so. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, in his book It Worked for Me, writes, “In my thirty-five years of service, I don’t ever recall telling anyone, ‘That’s an order.’ And now that I think about it, I don’t think I ever heard anyone else say it.” Obama’s “order,” at Biden’s urging, demonstrated, in my view, the complete unfamiliarity of both men with the American military culture. That order was unnecessary and insulting, proof positive of the depth of the Obama White House’s distrust of the nation’s military leadership.

  The president announced the troop surge, at West Point on December 1. Clinton, Mullen, Jones, and I accompanied him.

  In the end, I felt this major national security debate had been driven more by the White House staff and by domestic politics than any other in my entire experience. The president’s political operatives wanted to make sure that everyone knew the Pentagon wouldn’t get its way. Jones had told me David Axelrod was backgrounding the press to that effect. I thought Obama did the right things on national security, but everything came across as politically calculated.

  After the president’s announcement, I wrote a note to myself: “I’m really disgusted with this process, I’m tired of politics overriding the national interest, the White House staff outweighing the national security team, and NSS (Donilon and Lute) micromanagement. May 2010 is looking a lot more likely than January 2011 [in terms of when I would leave]. I’m fed up.” When I wrote that, I was frustrated with a valuable process that had gone on way too long.

  To be fair, though, national interest had trumped politics, as the president made a tough decision that was contrary to the advice of all his political advisers and almost certainly the least popular of the options before him in terms of his political constituents.

  On reflection, I believe that all of us at the senior-most level did not serve the president well in this process. Our “team of rivals” let personal feelings and distrust cloud our perceptions and recommendations. I believe, for example, that my view of a geographically limited counterinsurgency, combined with aggressive counterterrorism and disruptive Special Forces attacks on Taliban leaders, emphasizing expansion and training of the Afghan security forces, was actually pretty close to what Biden had in mind. The difference between his recommendation for increased troops and mine was the difference in total force between 83,000 to 85,000 troops and 98,000 troops. His number was far above what was required for counterterrorism, and mine was far too small for a fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy. The aggressive, suspicious, and sometimes condescending and insulting questioning of our military leaders—especially by Donilon, Lute, and others at the White House—made them overly defensive, hardening their unwillingness to compromise. White House distrust and dislike of Holbrooke, and Lute’s preoccupation with the military side of the equation, contributed to inadequate attention to the civilian component of the Afghan effort. Contending teams presented alternatives to the president that were considerably more black and white than warranted. A more collegial process, one that tried to identify points of agreement rather than sharpen differences, would have had a more harmonious conclusion and done less damage to the relationship between the military and the commander in chief.

  Responsibility for finding the common ground and shaping the deliberations accordingly would normally fall to the national security adviser, Jim Jones. The National Security Staff is supposed to be the “honest broker” in the policy-making process. That was not the case in the Afghan debate. Jones’s views, and the even stronger opinions of his deputy, Tom Donilon, and Lute, made the NSS an advocate rather than a neutral party, contributing to a damaging split in the government, with the White House and NSS on one side and the Defense and State Departments on the other.

  My anger and frustration with the White House staff and the NSS during the process led me to become more protective of the military and a stronger advocate for its position than I should have been. In retrospect, I could have done more to bridge the differences. Fairly early in the process, after I had talked about a narrower Afghan mission in a principals meeting, Biden wrote me a note at the table saying, “What you outlined is what I’ve been trying to say.” We had breakfast together once that fall at his residence to discuss things, but I could have reached out privately to him more often to find common ground. I don’t think we would have agreed on the number of additional troops, but I believe we could have come pretty close on the strategy; that alone would have helped avoid a lot of acrimonious debate.

  The rift on Afghan policy would linger for the rest of my tenure as secretary. Biden, Lute, and others in the White House who had opposed the decision would gather every negative bit of information about developments in Afghanistan and use them to try to convince the president that they had been right and the military wrong. That began before the first surge soldier set foot in Afghanistan.

  In the middle of our debates over Afghanistan, a tragedy at home was a vivid reminder of the complex dangers we were facing. On November 5, Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan turned on his fellow soldiers, murdering thirteen people and wounding twenty-nine others in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas. It was the worst such attack ever on a military base in the United States. Hasan had expressed extremist Islamic views and had been in contact with Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, an advocate of extremist violence residing in Yemen. Hasan’s attack on fellow soldiers was a wake-up call for the military to look closely at its own ranks and especially to question why Hasan’s expression of extremist views had drawn little scrutiny. The president spoke eloquently at the memorial service at Fort Hood.

  Before the service, I met separately with each of the families to express my sympathy and condolences. The father of one victim, Specialist Frederick Greene, invited me to attend his son’s funeral
in Mountain City, Tennessee. I had wanted to attend the funerals of fallen heroes in their hometowns since becoming secretary, but I had not done so out of concern that my presence would be a distraction and intrude on the privacy of families. I decided to accept Mr. Greene’s invitation. Mountain City, a town of about 2,400, is in the far northeastern corner of the state. The nearest airport is near Bristol, Tennessee, about an hour’s flight from Washington. I flew there on November 18 with two military assistants (and the always-present security team). I took no staff, no press. We drove across three mountain ridges to get to the remote town. Flags seemed to be hanging from every building. There were many signs acknowledging the life and sacrifice of Specialist Greene. We drove through Mountain City into the countryside to Baker’s Gap Baptist Church, a simple but picturesque country church. It was windy, cold, and rainy. The service was at the church cemetery on an adjacent hill. I met with the family privately in the church and then took my seat at graveside under the funeral tent. Fred Greene’s wife and two young daughters sat immediately in front of me. As the service proceeded, I could see in my mind’s eye other cemeteries in numberless small towns across America, where families and friends had buried local sons who had risked everything and lost everything. When the service ended, I shook hands with the members of the Army honor guard and made the long drive back to the airport.

  A little over two weeks later, as I signed the deployment order sending the first 17,000 troops of the surge to Afghanistan, my thoughts returned to that bleak hillside in Mountain City.

  CHAPTER 11

  Difficult Foes, Difficult Friends

  As strange as it may sound, Afghanistan was not an all-consuming issue for the president and his administration in the latter part of 2009; it just seemed so for those of us in the national security arena. Preoccupied at home with a politically troubled health care initiative and the continuing economic crisis, Obama also faced challenges with China, Russia, North Korea, the Arab Middle East and Israel, terrorism—and especially Iran. Unlike Afghanistan, there were generally no serious divisions within the administration on these issues during 2009 and 2010.

  By 2009, Iran had become a kind of national security black hole, directly or indirectly pulling into its gravitational force our relationships with Europe, Russia, China, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states. Each key issue related to Iran’s nuclear program—preventing the enrichment and weaponization of its nuclear material, imposing sanctions to accomplish that objective, and using missile defense to protect against its potential capabilities—affected multiple countries in different ways. It was like a great web; when we touched one part of the periphery, others would reverberate.

  The stakes could not have been higher. Israel’s leaders were itching to launch a military attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. If they did so, we were almost certain to be drawn in to finish the job or to deal with Iranian retaliatory attacks against Israel, our friends in the region—and probably against the United States as well. The war drums were beating once again. Likely the only way to prevent a third war in the region within a decade—a war possibly more widespread and terrible than those in Iraq and Afghanistan—was to bring enough economic pressure to bear such that Iran’s leaders would abandon their aspiration for nuclear weapons.

  No relationship is more important to Israel than the one with the U.S. president and leaders of Congress. In that respect, Obama’s outreach both to Iran and to the Islamic world more broadly, early in his presidency, scared the hell out of the Israelis. On February 20, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu had again become prime minister, leading a right-wing coalition. I first met Netanyahu during the Bush 41 administration, when I was deputy national security adviser and Bibi, as Israel’s deputy foreign minister, called on me in my tiny West Wing office. I was offended by his glibness and his criticisms of U.S. policy—not to mention his arrogance and outlandish ambition—and I told national security adviser Brent Scowcroft that Bibi ought not be allowed back on White House grounds.

  Soon after I became CIA director in 1991, I met Ehud Barak, then a lieutenant general and chief of the Israeli general staff. After thirty-five years in the Israeli army, Barak entered politics, became prime minister for a time at the end of the 1990s, and in June 2007 became minister of defense under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Barak retained his position when Netanyahu became prime minister in early 2009, so we were both holdover ministers. By the time Bibi took office, my nearly twenty-yearlong acquaintance with Barak had become a very good, even close, relationship. We had spoken and met often during my time as Bush’s defense secretary and would do so even more frequently during my tenure under President Obama. Barak would travel to Washington to see me about every two months. It was not by accident that even though the political and diplomatic relationship between the Obama administration and Netanyahu remained frosty between 2009 and 2012, the defense relationship remained strong and in every dimension would reach unprecedented levels of cooperation.

  Netanyahu’s first visit to Washington in his latest incarnation as prime minister, in mid-May 2009, included a meeting and lunch at the White House and a working lunch with me at the Pentagon. He and I focused on military cooperation and a broad discussion of Iran and its nuclear program. Our first no-punches-pulled discussion of Iran came during my visit to Israel in late July, when images of the rigged Iranian election and subsequent repression of the Green Revolution in June were still fresh. Bibi was convinced the Iranian regime was extremely fragile and that a strike on their nuclear facilities very likely would trigger the regime’s overthrow by the Iranian people. I strongly disagreed, convinced that a foreign military attack would instead rally the Iranian people behind their government. Netanyahu also believed Iranian retaliation after a strike would be pro forma, perhaps the launch of a few dozen missiles at Israel and some rocket salvos from Lebanese-based Hizballah. He argued that the Iranians were realists and would not want to provoke a larger military attack by the United States by going after American targets—especially our ships in the Gulf—or by attacking other countries’ oil facilities. Closing the Gulf to oil exports, he said, would cut the Iranians’ own economic throats. Again I disagreed, telling him he was misled by the lack of an Iraqi response to Israel’s destruction of their Osirak reactor in 1981 and the absence of any Syrian reaction to destruction of their reactor in 2007. I said the Iranians—the Persians—were very different from Iraqis and Syrians. He was assuming a lot in anticipating a mild Iranian reaction, and if he was wrong, an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities would spark a war in the region, I said.

  These two lines of argumentation would dominate the U.S.-Israeli dialogue over Iran for the rest of my tenure as secretary, though there was not much difference in our intelligence assessments of how far along the Iranians were in their nuclear program, nor in our views of the consequences of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. Whether (and when) to act militarily and the consequences of an attack would remain contentious.

  The last gasp of Obama’s engagement strategy with Iran was an ingenious proposal, developed by the United States in consultation with our allies in October 2009, that Iran ship about 80 percent of its known 1.5 metric tons of low-enriched uranium to Russia, where it would be enriched, then sent to France for conversion into fuel rods, and finally sent back to Iran for medical research use in the Tehran Research Reactor. According to the experts, once used in the research reactor, the uranium would be extremely difficult to convert for other purposes—such as nuclear weapons. The proposal was seen as a way to get most of the low-enriched uranium out of the country and rendered useless for weapons, while acknowledging Iran’s right to use nuclear reactors for peaceful purposes. France, Britain, China, Germany, Russia, and the United States supported the proposal, and tentative agreement was reached with Iranian negotiators in Europe on October 22. Iran backed out the next day, having second thoughts about giving up its big bargaining chip—the low-enriched uranium—without, in their view, gaining any strategic ben
efit. Given French president Sarkozy’s open loathing of the Iranian regime, I believe the Iranians also had no intention of putting their uranium in French hands.

  The failure to make a deal had significant international consequences. The Obama administration, including me, had seen the deal as a way to get the low-enriched uranium out of Iran and thus buy more time for a longer-term solution. Ironically, but as I had believed it would, the diplomatic effort to reach out to Iran was critical to our success in finding more willing partners in a new, tougher approach.

  Central to the new approach would be getting international agreement. The Deputies Committee had met several times in early November and agreed that the United States should first pursue a UN Security Council resolution imposing new economic sanctions on Iran, then widen the net of pressure. The president chaired a National Security Council meeting on November 11—just preceding the important NSC session on Afghanistan—to consider next steps. He said we had to pivot from engagement to pressure as a result of the Iranian rejection of the Tehran Research Reactor initiative, the Iranians’ lack of full cooperation with the IAEA inspection of the Qom enrichment facility (a secret facility, the existence of which we revealed to put Iran on its heels and to build support for more sanctions), and their unwillingness to pursue negotiations with the six big powers (France, Germany, Britain, Russia, China, and the United States).

  The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, felt we were unlikely to get a strong new resolution out of the Security Council. I said that the clock was ticking on both the progress of the Iranian nuclear program and Jerusalem’s patience. We needed a new resolution as a foundation for stronger sanctions, and because we didn’t expect much anyway, I thought we should accept a diluted resolution if we could get it passed quickly. Then we could develop additional sanctions and other punitive actions beyond the strict terms of the resolution. Militarily, I thought we needed to prepare for a possible Israeli attack and Iranian retaliation and figure out a way to use our actions to send the Iranians a message in parallel to economic pressures.