In My Time (71 page)

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.

I was also worried about the message we were sending to our troops and their families. They were the constituency that mattered more than any other, and this was the first time since we’d created the all-volunteer force that our soldiers had been committed in an unpopular war. Their morale and that of their families was crucial, and as criticism mounted, we had to be absolutely clear, internally and publicly, that we would not compromise our fundamental mission for political reasons. There is a sacred trust between our soldiers and their civilian leaders, and no matter how loudly we were being criticized in the press or how vehemently the Democrats were attacking us, we had to remember what mattered—giving our troops a mission they could carry out to fight and win in Iraq.

With troops in Iraq during one of my last visits as vice president. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

BY THE FALL OF 2006 we had lost over 2,500 brave Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq. If we adopted a counterinsurgency strategy and surged more forces, our troops would be going into the enemy’s strongholds, moving out of their forward operating bases. Increased contact with the enemy was the only way to win, but our generals had been clear—this new strategy would likely bring more casualties, at least in the near term. Sending American troops into harm’s way is the toughest decision that a commander in chief has to make, and as I thought about a surge, which George W. Bush might be deciding on soon, I thought about our soldiers and their families and the deep gratitude our nation owes them. Over the course of my vice presidency, I met many families of the fallen. Most often, through their unimaginable pain, their message to me was, Don’t let our son have died in vain. Finish the job.

Our soldiers understand, sometimes better than the politicians in Washington, why they are fighting. I remember the wife of a member of one of our special operations units telling me that on every one of his missions, her husband carried with him a patch from the New York City Fire Department—he was fighting for those who had died on 9/11. Her husband’s missions were secret, and he couldn’t talk about them, but she said she wished she could somehow reach out to the wives and loved ones of the firefighters and policemen and all those who were killed on
9/11 and tell them her husband and thousands of others were hunting down the terrorists responsible for those attacks.