The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (36 page)

Perhaps the two most prominent proponents, within the active military, of the Casey-Abizaid approach were Generals Shoemaker (chief of staff of the Army) and Lute (chief of operations on the Joint Chiefs). The former Special Forces officer and influential consultant Michael Vickers pointed out that the Casey-Abizaid small imprint strategy was actually the key to counterinsurgency: a “less is often more” profile would curb anti-Americanism and force greater responsibility on the part of the Iraqis. In contrast, the idea of sending a few thousand more troops into the Iraq quagmire was not one shared by many top-ranking generals other than the maverick David Petraeus and his own small circle of advisers.
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If the first choice was politically untenable, the second would be strategically disastrous. Yet the status quo was clearly not working. That again left this fourth and final option of surging between twenty thousand and thirty thousand troops. At the same time, a group of dissident officers also advocated an accompanying change in tactics from the current counterterrorism (going after known terrorist insurgents) to one of counterinsurgency (protecting the civilians to deny insurgents necessary support and sanctuary). The surge was not to be considered a Vietnam-like escalation (that tarnished word was deliberately avoided), since it would be small and declared temporary, but would still be just enough of a push to allow a window of calm to reenergize the Iraqis to craft their own defense while American tactics and strategy radically shifted. The metaphor was often one of a small push to send the Iraq reconstruction to the summit, after which it could coast downhill on its own.

Who, then, thought up the strategy, planned its details, and won over President Bush in the latter months of 2006—contrary to public opinion and without necessarily the early support of the secretary of defense, the senior American ground commander in Iraq, the supreme commander in the Middle East, and most of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? The advocacy group was informal and ad hoc. It was composed of civilians, a few sympathetic administration officials, and some active officers and retired military officials. The common tie was shared support for David Petraeus’s insistence on more American boots on the ground in Iraq, and more emphasis on undermining the appeal of insurgents than on protecting
U.S. forces or simply hunting down and killing terrorists. Petraeus became a symbol of doubt both about the pessimistic conclusions of the Iraq Study Group and about the incremental changes in the current status quo offered by other critics such as General Pete Chiarelli.
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Petraeus had earlier enjoyed some success in quieting violence as a two-star general in charge of the 101st Airborne Division’s occupation of the Mosul region of Iraq between 2003 and 2004. In fact, he had developed a sort of cult status—both among local Iraqis and the Western media—in distributing vast amounts of reconstruction money to bypass the fossilized occupation bureaucracy. In the process, Petraeus earned from Iraqi beneficiaries the nickname “King David” for his singular discretionary authority in the region. That epithet, however, was also cited by American critics as proof of his unchecked ego and ambition—and of his near constant need for media attention. It did not help matters when Petraeus later told reporters for the
Washington Post
that his role in Mosul had been “a combination of being the president and pope.”

In April 2004, General Petraeus returned to Washington, where he gave a largely upbeat review (“Iraq appears much more manageable on the ground than it does from afar”) to the Washington Institute about his success in Iraq, highlighting his earlier efforts at reconstruction, counter-insurgency, and training the new Iraqi army. But whether he knew it or not, such high-profile positive assessments back in Washington were not widely believed by the media. To the degree that Petraeus sounded credible, his emphases on adaptation and constantly changing strategies seemed to confirm that American postwar plans had been from the start innately flawed and in need of constant reassessment.
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After being promoted to lieutenant general in charge of the Multi-National Security Transition Command and given chief responsibility by Secretary Rumsfeld for training a new Iraqi army, Petraeus had almost immediately discovered that the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer had made little progress in creating an effective new Iraqi military. Petraeus would have to begin from scratch by finding scores of new Iraqi officers whose loyalty transcended their tribal affiliations. He was not shy about describing these challenges in a series of essays and interviews detailing how his own successful efforts in Mosul at nation building and counterinsurgency might serve as an exemplar for all of Iraq.

The high profile of Petraeus as a freelance thinker had won over several correspondents in Iraq and even some media critics of the war back
home. After all, support for the reformer Petraeus seemed to square the circle of being against the war and the administration that waged it without being against the troops or the idea that Iraq could still be calmed. In July 2004,
Newsweek
ran a cover story on Petraeus entitled “Can This Man Save Iraq?” written with almost gushing praise: “His fans believe he’s a new-style officer for a new type of warfare, where battles can be won with superior technology and firepower, but true victories can be secured only by good peacemaking and politics.” At the same time, the attention raised eyebrows among Petraeus’s military superiors that he was stealthily feeding journalists criticisms of the status quo at their own expense, if not angling for supreme command itself. General Sanchez, the supreme commander at the time of Petraeus’s selection to oversee the training of the Iraqi army, later expressed resentment of the latter’s supposed political grandstanding: “The administration was spinning the event to make it look like Petraeus was coming to Iraq to salvage a failed military effort. It was all political maneuvering ahead of the upcoming presidential election.” It apparently never occurred to General Sanchez that his cynical appraisal of Petraeus’s politicking in 2004 could be both true and yet irrelevant, given the latter’s far greater appreciation of what had gone wrong in Iraq.
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By 2006, supporters of General Petraeus were determined to save Iraq by going around the Joint Chiefs and top administration officials. In their favor, they were largely exempt from the normal media disdain accorded supporters of the war. While surging was unpopular to most critics, the change in strategy was also clearly a rebuke to George Bush and the status quo. Whether Petraeus knew it or not, his own advocacy had found a media seam. Journalists hostile to the Bush administration could focus on Petraeus’s critique of the war, even if their eventual antiwar aims were quite different from his.

Most prominent among the advocates of the surge strategy were Dr. Fred Kagan, a historian and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, military analyst Dr. Kimberly Kagan, retired General Jack Keane, National Security Advisor Steven Hadley and many of his staff subordinates, and the so-called COINdinistas—military officers and Pentagon consultants who had long argued for the need for organizing civilians to oppose insurgents rather than merely going after them without due regard to the consequences on the larger civilian environment. These were highly educated and battle-tested colonels and lieutenant
colonels associated with Petraeus such as Sean MacFarland, H. R. Mc-Master, Michael Meese, Peter Mansoor, Bill Rapp, and other officers including Derek Harvey and Mark Martins. Whether formally part of the official Joint Strategic Assessment Team or not, many of these Petraeus protégés had Ph.D.s and had taught at West Point—and informally as early as September 2006 had originated the idea of surging and changing completely U.S. strategy. They enlisted other outside advisers and consultants such as John Nagl and David Kilcullen, who had long written about quelling insurgencies. And while they all could be credited with helping Petraeus to craft the details of the new strategy, their advice would have remained largely academic without a charismatic supreme leader like Petraeus to ensure theories became fact.

Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff became prominent inside advocates of Fred Kagan’s and Jack Keane’s initial AEI surge lobby, and the vice president’s staff all along did much to help win the president over during December 2006. Bush himself soon became a vocal supporter of a change in strategy—in direct opposition to most in his own State Department and Department of Defense and many of the Joint Chiefs, with the exception of the chairman, Marine General Peter Pace. The former secretary of state, retired General Colin Powell, was an outspoken opponent of the surge. Well before the Bush formal announcement of the reinforcements, in a wide-ranging December 2006 interview with
Face the Nation,
Powell flatly declared that America was “losing in Iraq” and a “surge cannot be sustained.” He went on to declare, “It’s very difficult to see how the American Army can impose its will in this sort of conflict.”
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Even before the surge was fully implemented, many of Bush’s staunchest supporters and former hawks publicly voiced consternation over the escalating violence and saw no hope that a surge or anything else would save Iraq. In November 2006, on the eve of the surge, some of the most prominent supporters of the war—Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and Richard Perle—voiced pessimism and blamed the incompetence of George Bush (a “failure at the center”). A little over a month after the announcement of the surge, the former ambassador and consultant to the Kurdish government, Peter Galbraith, flatly announced, “President Bush’s plan has no chance of actually working. At this late stage, 21,500 additional troops cannot make a difference. U.S. troops are ill prepared to do the policing that is needed to secure Baghdad . . . At best, Bush’s new strategy will be a costly postponement of the day of reckoning with failure.” While Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld were not initially vocal opponents of the surge, they evidently believed, albeit for different reasons, that the Casey-Abizaid strategy of a light footprint might still be the least risky proposition.
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The three elements of the surge advocacy group in redirecting U.S. strategy—to be summarized in an American Enterprise Institute formal report on Iraq—were, first, to deploy twenty to thirty thousand troops as reinforcements. The second was to secure supreme command of the Iraqi coalition for General Petraeus. And third, the reformers wanted to supplant many of the existing methods of fighting the war—as well as the military and, if need be, civilian overseers of the current Iraq policy of reconstruction. Retired General Keane served as an informal three-way liaison between those outside government, the active military, and the Bush administration. The catalyst that suddenly had empowered the unlikely group of outsiders was the election rebuke of November 2006 that pushed a desperate President Bush to reexamine the current strategy. While the advocates of the surge conceded that the public was weary of the war, they nevertheless believed that most Americans would come to support an escalation if it offered any hope of victory.
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Years after both the invasion of Iraq and the decision in late 2006 to send a small reinforcement of twenty to thirty thousand, it is almost impossible now to reconstruct precisely the support for, and opposition to, such a radical decision. In the culture of Washington, those who were for the war often claimed they were against it when casualties mounted, and those who were not early advocates of the surge later claimed its patrimony after it worked. Finally, positions were often changed a third time as Iraq was either considered won or still not worth the price—an argument that continues to this day. Nonetheless, all factions agreed on one fact. By early 2007, General David Petraeus had assumed responsibility for either saving or abandoning the lost war in Iraq. He was not merely the highest-ranking military officer on the ground in Iraq, but was now looked to by both the administration and the nation at large as the last hope for avoiding a catastrophic American defeat.

On January 10, 2007—nearly four years after the invasion of Iraq—President George Bush formally decided to back the Petraeus group. He outlined a new strategy known as “The New Way Forward,” the official
title of the program. In a nationally broadcast television address, Bush promised that at least five additional army brigades and two marine battalions (that is, about twenty thousand troops, with additional personnel such as military police, engineers, and aviation units that would bring the total closer to thirty thousand) would be sent right away to Iraq, to be stationed mostly in and around Bagdad and Anbar Province. “So America will change our strategy to help the Iraqis carry out their campaign to put down sectarian violence and bring security to the people of Baghdad. This will require increasing American force levels. So I have committed more than twenty thousand additional American troops to Iraq.” At that moment in the polls, the president enjoyed an average 28 percent approval rating. Only Harry Truman and Richard Nixon at their lowest points had been more unpopular sitting presidents. Over 66 percent of Americans opposed sending any more troops to Iraq.
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That additional manpower was to facilitate a new effort at securing neighborhoods, protecting the population, and expanding basic services. Bush promised security for Iraqis to participate in their new democracy and to revive the economy—in contrast to the prior strategy of stationing American troops in fortified compounds from which they ventured forth to patrol neighborhoods and attack terrorist suspects. Up to now the mission had been mostly “force protection” (not losing American soldiers in battle) and “counterterrorism” (killing anyone who was trying to kill our own). But now, in Ridgway fashion, there were six new talking points that summed up the Petraeus strategy: “Let the Iraqis lead. Help Iraqis protect the population. Isolate extremists. Create space for political progress. Diversify political and economic efforts. Situate the strategy in a regional approach.”
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