by Jim Mattis
DURING MY THREE YEARS AT CENTCOM, American policy errors compounded the turmoil in the Middle East, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan.
After investing seven years of blood and treasure in Iraq, the American-led war effort had by 2010 at last succeeded in establishing a fragile stability. Large-scale combat had ended. Thanks to Secretary Gates’s keeping the bulk of our forces there as long as possible, we had driven AQI to its knees. Now, with the end of combat operations, Al Qaeda was on the run or in hiding, and the Sunni-Shiite civil war had died down. In my view, Iraq had entered a post-conflict, pre-reconciliation phase of stability. But the passions unleashed in the civil war still smoldered.
The question was: what to do now? If we pulled out abruptly, intelligence reports warned, Iraq would fall back into civil war, allowing the jihadist terrorists to regenerate. The residual American force was the glue holding Iraq together and helping prevent terrorist resurgence. American advisers still circulated at every level inside the Iraqi police and army. Our officers and troops were the trusted intermediaries among competing factions.
Retaining some U.S. troops required the Iraqi government’s agreement. At the same time, the incumbent prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, was fighting to stay in power, though his party had garnered fewer votes than the opposition in the elections of 2010. The National Security staff in the White House believed that Maliki offered a continuity that, in their minds, would facilitate the withdrawal of U.S. troops. I was opposed to that logic. I increasingly considered sectarian Maliki the politician least capable of unifying Iraq and continuing the process of reconciliation.
In the late summer of 2010, I flew to Baghdad for a change of command. General Lloyd Austin was taking over from General Ray Odierno. Ray had given Secretary Gates and me a carefully calculated plan to leave a residual force of eighteen thousand troops. We met privately to discuss the key issue: Who would be the next Iraqi prime minister, and how would that choice affect U.S. troop withdrawals and stability inside the country? President Obama had said we would maintain a residual force “to advise and assist” the Iraqis. Generals Austin and Odierno and I assumed this would be a sufficient number to hold the gains we had achieved at great cost, a number we’d reduce as Iraqi capabilities increased.
After the change of command ceremony concluded, on a hot Baghdad day, Ambassador Jim Jeffrey invited Vice President Joe Biden, White House staffers, and the American generals to dinner. Jeffrey was one of those diplomats bred for tough times, and he encouraged a frank exchange of views around the table. During and after the dinner, I reminded the others that Maliki had not received the most votes. I was reviewing in my mind reports of Maliki striking candidates’ names off election rolls and slow-rolling government formation for months, subverting the Iraqi constitution.
“Prime Minister Maliki is highly untrustworthy, Mr. Vice President,” I said. “He looks at our ambassadors and military advisers as impediments to his anti-Sunni agenda. Leaders across the region have warned me that he is set on disenfranchising the Sunnis. He wants to purge or marginalize Sunnis and Kurds from the government. He’s devious when he talks to us.”
I was thinking of the training wheels on a bicycle: We shouldn’t suddenly pull off those wheels. We should slowly inch the wheels up, allowing the Iraqis to wobble but not crash as they slowly pedaled down the path to self-sufficiency. If we pulled out too early, I noted, we would have to bring our troops back in. I argued that we had to stay and emphasized what our intelligence community assessed: our progress was not yet ingrained, and it was “reversible” if we didn’t stay. At this point, our casualties were very low. While political considerations rightly guide strategic decisions, political decisions are unsustainable when they deny military reality. Properly aligned, political considerations and strategic decisions are the keys to a better peace.
Vice President Biden and his assistants listened politely. But as we spoke, I sensed I was making no headway in convincing the administration officials not to support Maliki. It was like talking to people who lived in wooden houses but saw no need for a fire department. I saw that the die was already cast. I could understand that I was viewed as a military man, perhaps not attuned to political subtleties, but frankly I was dumbfounded that our diplomats also seemed totally outside of the decision-making loop. The open exchange of views encouraged by Ambassador Jeffrey turned awkward and then trailed off.
“Maliki wants us to stick around, because he does not see a future in Iraq otherwise,” Biden said. “I’ll bet you my vice presidency.”
I liked the Vice President. After dinner, he kidded me about my command. “Know why you’re at CENTCOM?” he teased. “Because no one else was dumb enough to take the job.” I found him an admirable and amiable man. But he was past the point where he was willing to entertain a “good idea.” He didn’t want to hear more; he wanted our forces out of Iraq. Whatever path led there fastest, he favored. He exuded the confidence of a man whose mind was made up, perhaps even indifferent to considering the consequences were he judging the situation incorrectly.
Over the following months, messages from my Iraqi and regional contacts and our own intelligence reports were ominous. Maliki was stepping up the purge of Sunnis from all government posts, degrading the military in the process. Each time Maliki grossly overreached, anxious Iraqi officials complained to our advisers as if they were a court of appeals. In 1994, after the collapse of the apartheid government, Nelson Mandela had exercised his wise, calming authority to reconcile the people of South Africa. But Maliki was no Mandela. In my view, a sufficient number of U.S. military simply had to stay in order to sustain our gains.
In Washington, the debate swirled throughout 2011 about how many, if any, U.S. troops should remain in Iraq. Central Command, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the new Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, who had replaced Bob Gates, continued to recommend to the White House retaining a residual force, as did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Pentagon Under Secretary Michèle Flournoy—thinking strategically—fought long and hard for the department’s position. But she was talking to the wind. Beginning with President Bush and continuing through the Obama administration, the White House was set on a total troop withdrawal, for political reasons. The National Security staff put no stock in our forecast that if we pulled out, the enemy would resurrect. They dealt with Iraq as a “one-off,” as if the pullout of our troops there would have no regional implications, reinforcing our allies’ fears that we were abandoning them. I argued strongly that any vacuum left in our wake would be filled by Sunni terrorists and Iran.
From Syria, on Iraq’s western border, Bashar al-Assad’s Baathist regime was facilitating the recruitment and training of Al Qaeda and Sunni terrorists. From the eastern border, Iran was supporting the Shiite militias and death squads. The mullahs in charge of Iran intended to draw Iraq into their orbit as an obedient client state. Iran was playing the long game. In my judgment, regardless of where one stood on the decision to invade Iraq back in 2003, securing the gains of seven years of war would require keeping troops and diplomatic engagement in Iraq.
On one of my trips to Iraq, officials repeatedly told me they needed us there to help them “avoid the suffocating embrace of Iran.” At the level below Maliki, I heard this same quote often enough to recognize an agreed-on “talking point”: senior Iraqi officials wanted us to stay, even if their fractious parliament could not say so publicly, for domestic political reasons.
In White House meetings, we constantly quibbled about numbers, seldom delving into the alternate end states and what was realistically needed to achieve them. The National Security staff would ask why I needed 150 troops to guard an embassy in a stressed Middle East country, or ninety troops to provide logistics at a base outside Baghdad. I would respond that the numbers were based on the specific tasks those troops had to carry out. But this was a kabuki dance. The discussions were designed to give the appearance o
f consultation, but they were not genuine. I was having none of it. As I was leaving the White House Situation Room one day, I spoke bluntly to a high-ranking National Security staffer.
“Those of us in uniform earnestly want to know,” I said. “What do you want us to do?”
I received no answer. I had no issue about obeying orders from the Commander in Chief elected by the American people (no one had elected me), but agreeing that this precipitous withdrawal was a wise course of action was a wholly different matter. After studying the issue, General Austin agreed with Odierno, who was recommending that we retain eighteen thousand troops. I carefully reviewed the numbers and the advisory tasks, knowing that Secretary Panetta needed my independent assessment of the tasks and the troop strength necessary. I told the secretary that I agreed with General Austin. From the perspective of America’s strategic interest, I saw no viable alternative.
But instead of eighteen thousand troops, the White House half-heartedly offered a token presence of 3,500 (a number with no analytic basis that I knew of), provided that the Iraqi parliament voted for strict terms protecting our forces from Iraqi judicial prosecution. That proviso was a poison pill. The White House knew that the fractious Iraqi parliament could never unite and agree to those terms. We had other legal ways of protecting American troops from such prosecution. But that made no difference. In October 2011, Prime Minister Maliki and President Obama agreed that all U.S. forces would leave at the end of the year.
“Today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home,” the President said. “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq.”
The words “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant” had never been used by the Pentagon or the State Department, and I had never seen them in any intelligence report. After all we went through and all the casualties we suffered, I thought, surely we were not just giving up.
“You know I say what I mean and I mean what I say,” Obama said in the fall of 2012. “I said I’d end the war in Iraq. I ended it.”
Rhetoric doesn’t end conflicts. With America’s influence effectively gone, Prime Minister Maliki imprisoned numerous Sunnis, drove their representatives from government, and refused to send funds to Sunni districts, virtually disenfranchising a third of his country. Iraq slipped back into escalating violence. It was like watching a car wreck in slow motion. Soon the Sunnis were in full revolt and the Iraqi Army was a hollow, powerless shell, allowing the terrorists to return like a barbarian horde, exactly as the CIA had predicted. In the summer of 2014, the medieval scourge called ISIS rose like a phoenix and swept across western Iraq and eastern Syria, routing the Iraqi Army and establishing its murderous caliphate. It would take many years and tens of thousands of casualties, plus untold misery for millions of innocents, to break ISIS’s geographic hold. All of this was predicted—and preventable.
Supporting a sectarian Iraqi prime minister and withdrawing all U.S. troops were catastrophic decisions, based on the conditions at the time. I had seen this same dynamic—ignoring reality—in 2001 when we allowed Al Qaeda and bin Laden to escape into Pakistan, and again in Fallujah in 2003, when we were stopped midway in the attack. Now I was seeing it again. This wasn’t a military-versus-civilian flaw, or a Democrat-versus-Republican error. It went deeper. At the top, then as now, there was an aura of omniscience. The assessments of the intelligence community, our diplomats, and our military had been excluded from the decision-making circle.
After the fact, some political leaders called it an intelligence failure; that was scapegoating, because we had been warned that an Al Qaeda–aligned terror group would come again. That assessment was ignored. It’s frustrating to listen to any leader blame his predecessor, especially a political leader regarding a situation that he knew existed when he ran for office. A wise leader must deal with reality and state what he intends, and what level of commitment he is willing to invest in achieving that end. He then has to trust that his subordinates know how to carry that out. Wise leadership requires collaboration; otherwise it will lead to failure.
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After the dinner with the Vice President, I flew on to Kabul. We had been fighting that war for ten years, with little sign of lasting progress. In the decade after Al Qaeda had escaped from Tora Bora into Pakistan, the Taliban had regained control over swaths of southern and eastern Afghanistan. Under the command of General Dave Petraeus, 32,000 Americans troops and 17,000 allies were heavily engaged, alongside 150,000 Afghan soldiers. I wanted CENTCOM to do all it could to help the war effort.
In short order, Dave called me with a disturbing report.
“Jim, you’re not going to believe this,” he said. “We have sound rules of engagement. But every lower echelon of command has tightened them. The troops going on patrol are discouraged. They think the rules prevent them from firing back. So I’m putting out the word that I establish the rules of engagement and no subordinate command can add additional restrictions. The press may write that I’m not protecting civilians, so I’m giving you a heads-up.”
I immediately understood his problem. In the infantry, Dave and I had grown up in an environment where, if the corporal on point shouted back that he needed fire support, he got it. Now the corporal faced a convoluted decision cycle. When I had direct command of those going into battle, my touchstones set the conditions for the use of force: Engage your mind before your trigger finger. First, do no harm to the innocent. Identify your target before you shoot. In the rare cases, like Haditha, where poor judgment had occurred, I made my decisions public, ensuring that every grunt would know how I came to conclusions, which reinforced the ethical stance I expected from my disciplined troops.
But now, every complaint about a civilian casualty, however vague, was investigated. The enemy had learned fast how to make spurious allegations, and they grew accordingly. Investigations required interviews by lawyers and investigators and resulted in disruptions to our operations, bringing tension into our ranks. Having been investigated myself, I knew it was no small matter for those involved. Lawyers reached conclusions and wrote instructions. Various Afghan officials, including the mercurial President, Hamid Karzai, railed about civilian injuries, both those that were real and those put forward in Taliban propaganda. Rules to restrict our firepower grew, even when our troops were attacked by the enemy. These one-size-fits-all restrictions did not accord with the reality faced by our grunts.
Rules of engagement are what separate principled militaries from barbarians and terrorists. At the same time, a democracy, no matter how high-minded, has a moral obligation to ensure that its soldiers are permitted—no, encouraged—to effectively carry out their appointed task of closing with and destroying the enemy. The Geneva Protocol codified the application of lethal military force, stipulating that destruction be proportionate to the situation and that diligent efforts be taken to protect noncombatants. Having seen our troops up close in repeated fights, I doubt any military in history could match their efforts to avoid injuring the innocent.
Increasingly stringent rules had evolved gradually, over several years. I believed that, lacking coherent policy objectives, and in the face of growing criticism over a long and inconclusive war, in the field we had tightened our rules of engagement to fight “the right way.” These tightened rules were imposed in a vain effort to compensate for the lack of a sound strategy that could show progress. Instead of straightening out the strategy, we tried to remove any criticism of the manner in which we were fighting. In doing so, we were hobbling ourselves militarily, losing the confidence of our troops in the process. Dave Petraeus was aligning military necessity with the absolute need to protect the innocent.
We cannot have our grunts look upon their seniors as setting rules that in effect hamstring our troops while seemingly giving the enemy the advantage of a “fair fight.” Our commanders must be the coaches and team captai
ns for our own team, building trust with the grunts in the fight. When the brass lose influence over their troops because their rules are out of touch, the discipline that binds all ranks together is undercut. Discipline, in turn, protects the innocents caught up on the battlefield, which must also be seen as a humanitarian field. We must sustain trust, from the general to the private, as the most effective route to winning battles with the lowest cost to noncombatants.
We have a moral imperative to protect our troops. I unreservedly supported Dave’s decision to fix the rules of engagement, necessarily giving more authority to those directly engaged. These rules should not be written by lawyers; they must be written by commanders, with the advice of lawyers schooled in the law of war, not humanitarian issues alone. The rules of engagement must be reflexive, not reflective, so that troops can react swiftly and legitimately when time is of the essence. If a democracy does not trust its troops, then it shouldn’t go to war.
Even with sensible rules of engagement, where was the engine of war headed? What was our policy end state, and the strategy for getting there? Ends, ways, and means would be critical. President Bush had declared, “Our goal in Afghanistan is to…establish a stable, moderate, and democratic state.” That expansive policy goal proved unattainable during his eight-year presidency.
President Obama, however reluctantly, agreed to send in more troops in 2010. “It is in our vital national interest to send an additional thirty thousand U.S. troops to Afghanistan,” he said. “After eighteen months, our troops will begin to come home.” In his first sentence, the President raised the hopes of the anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan; in the second sentence, he raised the hopes of the Taliban by giving them our departure date. After President Obama’s speech, I asked my Pakistani military liaison officer what he understood to be the message. He was quick to say, “You’re pulling out.” As Dr. Kissinger had taught me years before, we should never tell our adversary what we will not do.