In My Time

by Dick Cheney

  The Iranians were playing a deadly role, providing support to a number of the Shiite militias, including Muqtada al Sadr’s. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, sometimes in cooperation with Lebanese Hezbollah, trained and equipped the Jaysh al Mahdi as well as certain Shiite “special groups” loyal to Iran. They used these groups to smuggle all sorts of weapons, including rockets, mortars, sniper rifles, and explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, into Iraq. The EFPs, which used shaped charges, could pierce the armor of our vehicles and had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of our troops.

  Remnants of Saddam’s regime were still active and operating primarily out of Syria. Saddam’s Baathist elite had fled the country with countless millions in regime cash when bombs started to fall on Baghdad, and from their safe haven in Syria, these former regime elements used the money to fund and organize the insurgency.

  Foreign Arab fighters flowed into Iraq, primarily through Syria, to wage jihad. Many of these fighters flew into Damascus, where they boarded buses and were driven to the Syrian-Iraqi border. We had numerous internal discussions about the extent to which the Syrian government itself was aware of or facilitating this flow. My view was that given the nature of the Syrian regime, there was no way thousands of terrorists could be bused from Damascus to the Syrian border without the acquiescence of the Assad government. Once inside Iraq these young men hoping to die for Allah strapped on suicide vests and targeted American and Iraqi forces and Iraqi civilians. They set off explosions in markets, mosques, and schools, hoping to kill as many people as possible.

  Each of these different groups was attempting to prevent the establishment of a viable democratically elected Iraqi government by attacking American forces, the Iraqi people, and other targets, including the country’s energy infrastructure. By blowing up pipelines, for example, they hoped to create more chaos and deny Iraq the resources needed to get up and running again. This complex and adaptable enemy was determined to inflict a major strategic defeat on the United States by driving us out of Iraq and turning that country into a chaotic and violent safe haven for terror.

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  THERE WERE SOME WHO had come to think that victory was impossible. Congressman Jack Murtha, a powerful Democrat from Pennsylvania, declared that we had become “a catalyst for violence” and said that it was time to bring the troops home. So did Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who compared Iraq to Vietnam and said we could not win militarily. He drafted a proposal for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops by the end of 2006.

  I felt certain we could prevail and was convinced that our national security depended upon it. During the 1980s and 1990s, we had repeatedly responded weakly or not at all, and in some cases we had retreated, in the face of attack. The terrorists had come to believe that if you killed enough Americans, you could change American policy. Weakness and retreat invited further attack.

  But the course we were on wasn’t working. We were supposed to be training the Iraqi forces to stand up so that we could stand down, but the violence was increasing, most notably in Baghdad, and the Iraqis didn’t seem ready to stand on their own. When General Casey came to Washington in mid-July, having already withdrawn one brigade and with plans to take out four more before the end of the year, I was extremely doubtful. We could not simply hand off responsibility, walk away, and declare victory. We had to win first, or we risked the creation of an Iraq that would threaten the United States and our allies for years to come.

  About this time Henry Kissinger visited me in my office at the White House, as he had done with some regularity since I had become vice president. Our conversation covered a range of topics, including North Korea, Russia, and Europe, but Henry began with Iraq and warned about the political dynamics of withdrawing forces. “Once you start,” he said, recalling his experiences with Vietnam, “the Democrats’ demands for more will never end.” The issue would no longer be winning, but how fast we were withdrawing. “Withdrawals are like salted peanuts,” he said. “Once you start, you can’t stop.”

  During the violent summer of 2006, Iraqi and coalition forces conducted two military operations aimed at securing Baghdad.

  On a video conference at Camp David, with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Rice, as we discussed a change in strategy in Iraq in the summer of 2006. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

  Operation Together Forward I in June and Operation Together Forward II in August, both led by Iraqi forces with coalition troops in supporting roles, aimed to clear Baghdad’s most violent neighborhoods and keep the extremists out while building up essential services and infrastructure. On August 17 General Casey, using secure video hookup from Iraq, briefed the National Security Council. Most of the group gathered in the Roosevelt Room because renovations were under way in the White House Situation Room. I attended, using secure video hookup from Wyoming. Casey reported that the U.S. forces who had participated had been very effective and performed well and said that he thought we would see continued improvement in the Iraqi Security Forces. He said he would like to be able to turn over Baghdad security to the Iraqis by the end of 2006.

  I respected General Casey, but I couldn’t see a basis for his optimism. Violence was ongoing—and, in fact, in the months ahead it would escalate dramatically. The neighborhoods that had been cleared would be reinfiltrated, and Operations Together Forward would be widely regarded as failures. I asked what we could do to reduce the number of attacks and suggested we consider having U.S. forces take on a bigger role. This was a concept General Casey continued to resist, in large part because he and General Abizaid, as well as some in the Pentagon civilian leadership, assumed that U.S. forces were an irritant that inflamed the insurgency and made the violence worse. They continued to argue that the solution was to “take our hand off the bicycle seat” and put the Iraqis in charge as quickly as we could.

  ON AUGUST 24, 2006, I asked Colonel Derek Harvey, a retired army intelligence officer, to come to the Vice President’s Residence to brief me. Colonel Harvey was then working at the Defense Intelligence Agency and was one of the very best sources on the nature of the enemy we faced. He had spent a great deal of time working in Iraq, studying the insurgency and its networks. John Hannah, my national security advisor, kept in touch with Derek as he provided regular updates for me on the situation on the ground in Iraq. Derek had briefed me several times over the previous years and also provided his in-depth analysis to the National Security Council. As we looked for a way forward, I felt his assessment of the causes of the insurgency and the role played by former elements of Saddam’s regime was key to understanding how we might change our strategy to defeat the enemy.

  As I looked for alternatives to our current strategy, I kept hearing about Colonel H. R. McMaster, a veteran of the first Gulf War. He had been awarded a Silver Star for his leadership in the famed tank battle of 73 Easting in the southeastern desert of Iraq. McMaster and his unit had destroyed several Iraqi Revolutionary Guard units while suffering no casualties of their own. McMaster had also had a remarkable success in the war in which we were currently engaged. In 2005, in command of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, he had succeeded in bringing stability to the town of Tal Afar, where Sunnis had been kidnapping and killing Shia and Shia were leaving the beheaded corpses of Sunnis in the streets. McMaster, on his own initiative, had employed a classic counterinsurgency strategy, isolating the insurgents from the townspeople and providing security while helping the local population to establish political and economic institutions.

  I asked for a briefing from Colonel McMaster, and he came to the Vice President’s Residence on September 28, 2006. An accomplished soldier with a Ph.D. in history, McMaster joined me in the library on the main floor of the vice president’s house and gave me his assessment of where things stood in Iraq and what we needed to do to win.

  Despite the success of the enemy in inciting sectarian violence, he said, we could make tremendous progress—but not if we withdrew pre
maturely from critical areas. He urged that we avoid the trap of considering handoff to the Iraqis an end in itself. Instead, we should define the conditions we wanted to achieve before transitioning authority. These should include defeating the insurgency in any area we were handing over, so that economic and political development could move ahead, and ensuring that the Iraqi army and border police were capable of sustained independent security operations. The rule of law had to be established, and the Iraqi police had to be able to enforce it. It was also crucial that local governing authorities be capable of meeting the basic needs of the population.

  McMaster’s track record was encouraging, and his case was thoughtful and convincing. I also knew the strategy he described was being worked on by one of the brightest minds in the military. In January 2006, during a stop at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, I had visited with General David Petraeus, an army three-star with a Princeton Ph.D. Petraeus got highest marks from many people, including Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, then Rumsfeld’s deputy at the Defense Department. Petraeus had just returned from Iraq, where he had been in charge of training Iraqi security forces and was beginning work on revising the army’s counterinsurgency manual. After Petraeus completed his manual, I received a draft, and it was as clear and cogent as Petraeus himself. I realized that changing the mission in Iraq to emphasize counterinsurgency would require a greater American troop presence, but I thought the idea deserved serious consideration.

  Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Pete Pace had been impressed with Colonel McMaster’s work in Tal Afar and brought him and several other colonels back to Washington for a ninety-day assignment to do some creative thinking and make recommendations to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the way ahead in Iraq. The group came to be known as the Council of Colonels and worked inside the Pentagon to develop a strategy for victory.

  That fall, at least three other reviews of our policy were under way. At the direction of the president, Deputy National Security Advisor J. D. Crouch was overseeing a process for Steve Hadley that brought together senior officials from the State Department, Defense Department, the joint staff, the intelligence community, and the NSC to conduct a review to provide recommendations directly to the president.

  In one of our regular small group meetings in Steve Hadley’s office in the West Wing where we discussed our most important and sensitive national security policy matters during the second term, with Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Pete Pace; Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell; Deputy NSC Advisor, JD Crouch, and Secretary of State, Condi Rice. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

  John Hannah and Robert Karem represented my office in the process. Outside the government, retired four-star general and former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army Jack Keane and Fred Kagan, formerly a professor of military history at West Point, were working at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, on a proposal for a counterinsurgency strategy and troop surge. And the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, created by Congress, had been working since March to come up with a new approach.

  Not only was the increased violence in Iraq leading to real concern in Washington; it was also putting a strain on our relations with the new Iraqi government. Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki and other Iraqi Shiite leaders believed that the violence being caused by the Shiite militias was simply a response to Sunni attacks—which, he noted, the Americans had failed to prevent. I knew that many Iraqis viewed the Americans as powerful enough to do whatever we wanted, and so when we didn’t stop attacks, they suspected there was a reason. Was Maliki thinking we had bought into the Sunni idea that the Shia militias were the primary enemy in Iraq? Did he think we were turning our back on the Shia?

  We discussed this issue at length in our October 21 secure videoconference with our team in Baghdad. If we were going to get the Iraqis into the fight and help them stand up and take responsibility for governance and their own security, we had to avoid a rift with the Maliki government.

  In Baghdad with the new Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Gamal Helal. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

  We needed to be working hand in glove with them, as we trained their forces and helped them carry out what should be a coordinated effort. General Casey agreed that we needed to continue to manage the relationship with the Shia very carefully.

  TEN DAYS LATER, ON October 31, 2006, after the president and I had finished our morning briefings in the Oval Office, he said, “Dick, can I talk to you for a second?” We went down the small hallway that leads to the private dining room where we held our weekly lunches. “I’ve decided to make a change at Defense,” the president said, “and I’m looking at Bob Gates to replace Rumsfeld.” He was informing me of his decision, not soliciting my views. He already knew them, since twice before I had argued against replacing Rumsfeld. Just after the 2004 election, when he reviewed the entire cabinet and decided to move Powell out at State, he also considered moving Rumsfeld out at Defense. I made the case that Rumsfeld was doing a tremendous job, that he was carrying out administration policy, and that replacing him would signal dissatisfaction with the strategy the president himself had set. I’d made the same arguments in 2005 when the issue came up again.

  This time the president didn’t wait around after he told me he had made up his mind. He turned and was out the door fast. He knew I’d be opposed, and I suspect he didn’t want to hear the arguments he knew I’d make.

  In my view Don Rumsfeld was a formidable secretary of defense. He engaged more directly in managing the building than any before or since. He got things done. Maybe he didn’t have the best bedside manner in the world, but he is one of the most competent people I’ve ever met. He brought vast experience, endless energy, and total loyalty to the president to the job. He would argue passionately for what he believed in, but once the president made a decision, he would salute smartly and make it happen.

  But it was clear that the president thought it was time for a fresh set of eyes on the situation in Iraq, and I didn’t think Don would disagree. He had come to see me in March 2006 to make sure I knew that he would do whatever he could to help ensure our success in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was very specific with me—he was prepared, he said, to step down anytime the president believed he should.

  On Sunday, November 5, I was working in the upstairs family room at the Vice President’s Residence when I took a call from the president. He said he’d offered the secretary of defense job to Bob Gates, and Gates had accepted. “Dick, would you like to be the one to tell Don, or should I ask Josh Bolten to make the call?” he asked. “I’ll do it, Mr. President,” I said. “I owe Don an awful lot and he should hear the news from me.”

  When I reached him and told him that the president had decided he wanted to make a change at Defense, Don handled it like the consummate professional he is. “Okay. I got it,” he said. Then he repeated something he’d told me before, that he had been giving serious thought to resigning if the Democrats managed to take the House or the Senate in the upcoming election. “I’m just too much of a target,” he said. He worried that if Democrats won a majority in either house, he would be forced to spend all his time testifying and justifying the decisions of the last five and a half years, rather than focusing on the challenges we still faced. We had critically important work to do, and Don was concerned his staying on could diminish our ability to do it.

  LATE IN THE AFTERNOON of November 9, the president, Steve Hadley, Secretary Rice, and I met in the White House residence for an in-depth discussion about the way forward in Iraq. We had a wide-ranging conversation that covered the global implications for the United States and our allies if we failed to see things through. Two days earlier, on November 7, we had lost our Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate, and we also talked about the U.S. political environment and the message being sent by the public debates about the war and the ongoing deliberations of the Iraq Study Group.


  I went through a series of recent events I feared might signal to the Iraqis that the Americans had lost the will to see this through. The press was portraying the Republican loss in the midterms as a referendum on Iraq policy. The new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and the new majority leader of the Senate, Harry Reid, had been very clear that they would push for withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. Senator Joe Lieberman had essentially been purged from Democratic ranks because of his support for the war. U.S. public opinion polls had gone south on Iraq and were now pretty consistently showing a majority opposed to continued military action there. And the president had announced Don Rumsfeld’s departure. All these events were giving an overall impression to anyone paying attention that the Americans might well be getting ready to bail on Iraq. I was very concerned, especially about how all this would be read by Iraqis who wanted the United States to stand with them to secure their country. I maintained contact with a number of Iraqis, and increasingly they were voicing concern to me about the security situation and America’s will to prevail.

  The next morning, when we had our weekly secure videoconference with our military commanders and our ambassador in Iraq, the president asked Ambassador Khalilzad what the mood was there. Zal said people were worried that America was getting ready to leave. He confirmed some of my worst concerns about the situation.