by Leon Panetta
Michèle Flournoy did her best to press that position, which reflected not just my views but also those of the military commanders in the region and the Joint Chiefs. But the president’s team at the White House pushed back, and the differences occasionally became heated. Flournoy argued our case, and those on our side of the debate viewed the White House as so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to withdraw rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and interests.
We debated with Maliki even as we debated among ourselves, with time running out. The clock wound down in December, and Ash Carter continued to argue our case, extending the deadline for the Iraqis to act, hoping that we might pull out a last-minute agreement and recognizing that once our forces left it would be essentially impossible for them to turn around and return. To my frustration, the White House coordinated the negotiations but never really led them. Officials there seemed content to endorse an agreement if State and Defense could reach one, but without the president’s active advocacy, Maliki was allowed to slip away. The deal never materialized. To this day, I believe that a small, focused U.S. troop presence in Iraq could have effectively advised the Iraqi military on how to deal with Al Qaeda’s resurgence and the sectarian violence that has engulfed the country.
Over the course of the following two and a half years, the situation in Iraq slowly deteriorated. Maliki was responsible, as he exacerbated the deep sectarian issues polarizing his country. Meanwhile, with the conflict in Syria raging, an Al Qaeda offshoot—ISIS, or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria—gained strength. Using Syria as its base, it began to move into Iraq in 2014, grabbing power in towns and villages across Iraq’s north, including Mosul and Tal Afar. These were strategically important cities that U.S. forces had fought and died to secure for the Iraqi people. Perhaps most distressing, Iraqi military units cut and ran, unable or unwilling to defend their own country from this new Sunni extremist element.
I watched these events from the safe distance of Monterey, but the news from Iraq bothered me to no end. In my view, the ISIS offensive in 2014 greatly increases the risk that Iraq will become Al Qaeda’s next safe haven. That is exactly what they had in Afghanistan pre-9/11. They then reestablished a base in western Pakistan in the mid-2000s. After all we have done to decimate Al Qaeda’s senior leadership and its core, those efforts will be for naught if we allow it to rebuild a base of operations in the Middle East.
As of this writing, each option for the United States is filled with risk. Nobody wants to see us back in a full-scale war in Iraq. That said, I do not believe America can afford to sit idly by. If we don’t prevent these Sunni extremists from taking over large swaths of territory in the Middle East, it will be only a matter of time before they turn their sights on us.
• • •
Although our new defense strategy was still being crafted that fall, I shared the general themes of it with allies in Asia, where the proposed “rebalance” would have the most noticeable impact. In October, I visited Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea, three important American partners in that region. Each stop featured reminders of America’s important role in the region, and of the range and necessity of our military capacity.
In all three countries, I met with the head of state and minister of defense—sometimes together, sometimes separately—and discussed the particular issues of our bilateral relationship. Indonesia’s geography, for instance, places it astride many important sea lanes, and protecting them is a major concern for both our nations. While in Indonesia, I also attended a meeting of the ASEAN defense ministers, who were trying to organize their countries to fight terrorism and create a counterweight to China’s growing muscularity in the Pacific. I was there to lend my support to that effort, a gesture much appreciated by the participating countries.
In Japan, our long-standing role in that country’s military defense includes bases on the Japanese islands; their future concerns both Japan and the United States. Moreover, Japan was still recovering from the earthquake and tsunami in March, an emergency that American military forces helped respond to—another example of the diverse uses of American power and presence.
And in Korea, the looming and erratic North Korean regime overshadows all other security worries. We discussed North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs and reaffirmed our long-standing defense agreements, including our promise to defend South Korea from the North’s aggression, and if necessary to do so with nuclear weapons.
The highlight of that stop for me was social: My South Korean counterpart, Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin, invited me for dinner at his home. He had somehow arranged for four vocalists in the South Korean military to learn some popular Italian songs, which they performed for me after dinner. Despite being native Korean speakers, their rendition of “O Sole Mio” was spot-on; I could have closed my eyes and been in Rome.
Beyond the topics singular to each of the countries was one overriding and unifying concern: that the efforts to cut spending at home would result in a diminished U.S. presence in the region, opening the way for China to exert greater influence at the expense of America’s friends. Over and over, I assured them we were not going anywhere. President Obama and I shared the conviction that “the Pacific will remain a key priority for the United States, that we will maintain our force projection in this area, that we will maintain a presence in this area, that we will remain a Pacific power, and that we will do whatever we can to try to work with the nations of this area to develop a strong security and cooperative relationship.”
To bring it home, I reminded my hosts that I grew up in a fishing town in California, looking out on the same ocean that they did. A commitment to the Pacific came naturally to me. I would not, could not lead America away from the Pacific Rim.
I was back in the United States for November—and made it with Sylvia, President Obama, and Vice President Biden to the Army-Navy game in early December. There, I joined the president on the field for the pregame ceremonies and with him switched sides from the midshipmen to the cadets at halftime. It was a moving experience to sit with them as groups were rotated to be close to me and the president. It gave us an opportunity to make small talk with the next generation of American leaders, and allowed us a glimpse of the nation’s future officer corps.
After the game, I headed home and packed for one more overseas voyage in 2011, this time a trip that encapsulated many of the achievements and disappointments of my still-brief tenure as defense secretary. My first stop was Djibouti, where I’d never been before and which is the home to the largest U.S. military installation in Africa. The joint operations task force based there, at Camp Lemonnier, was a model of interservice cooperation, and was playing an integral role in the fight against Al Qaeda and Al Shabaab in nearby Somalia (we would call on them in just a few weeks to execute a dramatic rescue operation). In a town hall meeting with about two hundred service members, I complimented our troops for their fine efforts, and expected to talk with them about Al Qaeda and international terrorism. We did discuss those subjects, but another one was on many of their minds. It fell to a master sergeant to ask the question: Would budget cuts endanger military retirement pensions? I assured him they would be protected. But his question did raise the specter that the Pentagon would soon have to grapple with: how to save on the personnel costs and benefits for retirees and their families, which were eating into the funds available for readiness and training.
Djibouti represented the morphing campaign against international terrorism, and my next stop was a return to the heart of that battle: Afghanistan. There I conferred with General Allen and President Karzai and was generally pleased at the progress they described. The Afghan army was assuming a greater share of responsibility for security, the economy was gradually expanding, and education was reaching more and more children, including girls. The Taliban remained a presence, but our efforts against it—special operations forces were conducting seven or eight mi
ssions every night—were taking a toll on its leadership and dramatically degrading Al Qaeda. Noting the courage of those men and other troops fighting this long war, I was honored to present twelve Purple Hearts to soldiers who had been wounded in battle.
That’s not to say the war was won or that the end was even in sight. Corruption continued to hamper the Karzai regime, and it remained unclear whether the Afghan economy could ever grow and diversify to the point that it could sustain the cost of the security apparatus we were helping to construct. But my feeling was that our presence was constructive and that as long as we were willing to remain engaged we could continue to make headway.
At the end of the trip, Karzai and I held a press conference, which was more memorable for the conditions under which it was held than for anything we said. It was late at night, in an unheated garden house on the grounds of the presidential palace. There was a small pond in the center of the house, and it was freezing. As I was taking questions, I could see members of our delegation and the press literally hopping up and down to keep warm. One of the reporters, the estimable Thom Shanker of the New York Times, accidentally hopped right into the shallow pool. He was soaked from his knees down, but he kept right on taking notes. He later shivered his way back to the press van.
In his dispatch from Kabul, Shanker, as well as other reporters, seemed surprised that my take on the security situation wasn’t more negative. Shanker, for instance, described my assessment as “unexpectedly upbeat.”10
The same could not be said for Iraq, where I headed next. Anytime the United States concludes a military mission, the end of the enterprise is marked by a formal ceremony in which the flag is lowered, “cased,” and returned to Washington. As secretary of defense, it fell to me to perform that ceremony and to bring America’s military presence in Iraq to an end.
It was no secret that I had fought to keep it from ending this way, and it was thus with profoundly mixed emotions that I arrived at Sather Air Base, an American installation at the edge of the Baghdad International Airport. I was proud of the work and sacrifices our men and women had made over the long course of the Iraq war, but I would have been lying had I tried to argue that it had ended in triumph. Instead, I spoke guardedly and heavily, praising the effort if not the result. “Your nation is deeply indebted to you,” I told the soldiers who attended the ceremony. “You have done everything your nation asked you to do and more.”
At the height of the Iraq war, the United States had 170,000 soldiers in that country, stationed at more than five hundred bases. By the end of 2011, we were down to about 4,000 at three bases, and those were shutting down. The premises of the war—that Iraq was a haven for Al Qaeda and that Saddam Hussein had amassed weapons of mass destruction—had turned out to be false. We had made a commitment to leave behind a country that could govern and secure itself. That was still an open question. As I spoke that day, helicopters flew overhead to provide security; other base closures had drawn insurgent fire, evidence that our attempts to leave a stable nation were at best incomplete.
At the end of my remarks to a smaller group of troops, one young serviceman asked me whether the United States was prepared to come back in force if Iraq needed help. I tried to be reassuring. “We may be ending the war,” I told him, “but we are not walking away from our responsibilities.” That was an expression of hope rather than fact. I cased the flag, said a silent prayer for those who had done the hard work of this war, and walked away.
• • •
After leaving Iraq, I stopped in Turkey to discuss the Arab Spring and forward deployment of radar to support NATO’s missile defense system, and then traveled to Libya, becoming the first American secretary of defense ever to visit that country. Accompanied by my son Jimmy, I was confronted with the moving evidence of America’s long presence in Libya.
All around we could see craters from the recent NATO bombings that had helped to topple Qaddafi. And then we were taken back in time to 1804, to a modest cemetery overlooking the Mediterranean. There, around an olive tree, were more than two dozen headstones, marking the remains of American sailors and marines who died in America’s first foreign military action. (In the Marine Corps song, the line “to the shores of Tripoli” refers to those battles, waged against the Barbary pirates.) For more than two centuries, across the tense years of Qaddafi’s rule and the campaign to remove him, Libyans had cared for those American graves.
I left a wreath and one of my personal coins and headed home with a lump in my throat.
• • •
We completed our reexamination of America’s defense strategy just as 2011 turned to 2012. President Obama signaled his satisfaction by making an extraordinary trip to the Pentagon to join me, Dempsey, and others as we unveiled it for the first time. It was apparently the first time any president had appeared in the Pentagon press briefing room, and it caused quite a stir among the regular Defense Department press corps.
The president opened with a brief recitation of where the nation stood in military terms. The war in Iraq was over, Qaddafi was gone, Al Qaeda was “on the path to defeat,” its leader eliminated, American troops were returning from Afghanistan, which was gradually taking over responsibility for its own security. It was a remarkable and underappreciated record of achievement, having taken office amid two broken wars, a thriving Al Qaeda, and an elusive bin Laden. As the president noted, “the tide of war” was receding. 11
But achievements cannot allow leaders to become complacent. Yes, our wars were receding, but the threats to national security were multiplying and morphing. A new military, leaner, more nimble, and more technologically advanced, was needed for a new century. That’s what we tried to construct.
SIXTEEN
“In Together, Out Together”
On the night of the State of the Union address in 2012, I was in the House chamber, seated next to Hillary Clinton and across the aisle from members of the Supreme Court. As is customary, the president entered to applause and then slowly worked his way from the back of the chamber to the front, greeting members of Congress, the administration, the Joint Chiefs, and the Court. He shook my hand, swung in the direction of Justice Anthony Kennedy, then abruptly turned back and said to me, “Good job tonight. Good job tonight.” He waved his finger emphatically as he said it, and I beamed. The network microphones caught the president’s comment. Within minutes, the media were trying to decipher it.
On October 25, 2011, Somali kidnappers seized two humanitarian aid workers, American Jessica Buchanan and Poul Hagen Thisted, her Danish colleague. Kidnapping for ransom is a common enterprise in Somalia and the waters off its coast, and as a result, American forces in the region are sometimes called upon to respond—the dramatic 2009 raid on the pirates who took the Maersk Alabama and then fled in a lifeboat with its captain became the basis for the movie Captain Phillips. Bill McRaven, who operated with such calm and distinction during the bin Laden operation, oversaw that one too.
In this case, we could not dispatch a rescue team to Somalia because the hostages were being moved frequently and we could not pinpoint their location. Also, negotiations between the kidnappers and the hostages’ employer for their release were under way, and we hoped for a peaceful resolution to the kidnapping. As the weeks dragged on, however, the negotiations grew fruitless—the kidnappers asked for $45 million—and we began to fear for Jessica’s health; our intelligence indicated that she was suffering from an infection, and it seemed to be worsening. At about the same time, we were able to pinpoint the location of Jessica and Poul through sophisticated technology and ascertain that they were at a rough encampment under the control of a group of nine men, all armed, hundreds of miles from where they were first captured.
In the days immediately before the State of the Union, our military came up with a plan. General Dempsey and Admiral Winnefeld brought the information to me about Jessica’s location and condition, and proposed the rescue. We knew this
might be our only and last chance to save her. We briefed John Brennan and Tom Donilon at the White House, and then reviewed the particulars of the operation with the president. A special operations team from the United States would fly to Djibouti, to the small U.S. base in the northeast corner of Africa that I had recently visited. The plan was for our forces to parachute into the area, then hike to the camp and wrest the hostages from their captors. The intent was not to kill the kidnappers, merely to rescue Jessica and Poul. But our forces would not hesitate to use their weapons if they needed to.
President Obama, as he had during the bin Laden planning, listened carefully, asked questions, and weighed the proposal, recognizing that it posed risks to the hostages and our forces. Ultimately he approved, clearing the raid on the morning of January 23 because that’s when conditions would be ideal. The next afternoon in Washington, night in Somalia, I made my way over to the White House with Dempsey, where we monitored the mission from the Situation Room before heading to the Capitol for the State of the Union.
At the camp, the captors put up resistance, an unwise decision when confronted with an American military team. All nine were killed. Jessica and Poul were unharmed, and were whisked away within minutes of the firefight. Before leaving the scene, one American soldier recovered Jessica’s shoes and a small medical bag.1 President Obama concluded his State of the Union and then retired to a room in the Capitol with a phone. He called Jessica’s father with the news that she was safe.