In My Time (70 page)

The Shia refused to be dragged into sectarian violence for over two years. Then at dawn on February 6, 2006, explosions destroyed the golden dome of the Askariya Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest sites for Shiite Islam. Planned by Zarqawi, the bombing had the effect he intended, inflaming the Shia and plunging the country into a deeper sectarian conflict. Understanding that Iraq was the central front in the War on Terror, al Qaeda was intent on victory. We had to decide whether we would stick with a strategy that emphasized transferring responsibility to Iraqis and getting our troops out, or whether we, too, would fight to win.

I
left my home in St. Michaels, Maryland, early on Monday, June 12, 2006, for the fifty-minute helicopter flight to Camp David. The national security team was gathering for a review of our Iraq war strategy, and as the Camp David landing zone came into sight, I thought through some of the questions we needed to address: Is there more we could be doing to defeat the insurgency? Do we need more troops? Are the Iraqis convinced that we’ll see this through? What does it take to win?

In the conference room at Laurel Lodge we all sat on one side of the table facing the video monitors on the wall, where Generals John Abizaid and George Casey and Ambassador Zal Khalilzad began the brief with an update of our operations on the ground in Iraq. We’d had a major success on June 7, when American forces located and killed Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. General Stan McChrystal had built a top-notch special operations unit that had been tracking senior al Qaeda operatives and taking down terrorist networks. McChrystal’s men had been tracking Zarqawi for some time when they received confirmation he was staying in a house near Baqubah, Iraq.
An F-16 dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs on the house, killing Zarqawi. After the attack, U.S. forces raided seventeen other locations in and around Baghdad, where they found valuable intelligence information.

This was good news. Zarqawi, who had found refuge in Iraq after 9/11, had led a campaign of violence in Iraq—kidnappings, suicide bombings, public beheadings—and with the bombing of the mosque at Samarra, he had launched a frenzy of sectarian bloodletting. Killing him was an important achievement, but as I listened to Abizaid and Casey brief on our operations, I had a nagging concern. They were carrying out a strategy that defined success based on turnover of responsibility to the Iraqis, and there was a danger, in a setting that had grown so violent, of withdrawing prematurely—before Iraqi military and police were capable of defending and securing their own sovereign territory.

We were confronting an extraordinarily complex set of forces inside Iraq. At the heart of much of the bloodshed was al Qaeda’s strategy, which was to kill as many Shia and Americans as possible—and the more ruthlessly the better, so that the Shia would strike back and we would respond to the mayhem by leaving. Disaffected Sunnis, fearful of their future in an Iraq run by a coalition government of Shia and Kurds and worried that Shia were using their power in the new government to exact sectarian revenge, filled the ranks of the insurgency. They joined in the killing of American and Iraqi security forces, as well as Iraqi civilians. As the violence dragged on, Shiite militia and death squads became increasingly active, targeting Sunnis and battling one another for power. Tens of thousands had become part of the Jaysh al Mahdi militia, which was controlled by Muqtada al Sadr, a radical anti-American Shiite leader. Our forces had seriously degraded the capabilities of Sadr’s militia in engagements in Najaf and Karbala in 2004, but particularly after the dome of the Askariya mosque was reduced to rubble, he and his army contributed significantly to the violence in Iraq.

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 prematurely 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.