The Fourth Star (21 page)

Fitzgerald wrote a note to himself that he’d need to move with greater urgency to rebuild the Iraqi army and police in particular. Like Abizaid, he wasn’t sure how to do it without running afoul of Bremer and Pentagon policy makers.

Fitzgerald and his fellow planners could see Abizaid’s frustration building with each passing day. The CPA order disbanding the army and purging Baath Party members from the government had infuriated him. He’d slashed through both with a red pen and scribbled in the margins. “By the time Abizaid was finished, they looked as though someone had spilled a can of tomato soup on them,” Fitzgerald recalled. He had passed them on to General Franks, the head of Central Command, who was the top commander in the Middle East and the senior officer overseeing the war effort. Abizaid was Franks’s three-star deputy and didn’t have a direct line to Rumsfeld or President Bush. There was little he could do beyond register his disapproval and move on.

Although Franks was set to retire and his job was coming open, it wasn’t clear that Abizaid would be staying in the Middle East. Rumsfeld had wanted to make him Army chief of staff. Even though the job would mean a fourth star, Abizaid wasn’t interested. He couldn’t stand the
thought of being stuck in the Pentagon fighting over the defense budget while real wars were going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’d never particularly liked serving in Washington.

Before he turned down the chief of staff job, he called his friend Major General Karl Eikenberry, who was running the training mission in Afghanistan. Eikenberry and Abizaid had been roommates at West Point, trading assignments with other cadets so they could stay together. After West Point the two officers had led remarkably similar careers, alternating assignments in the Rangers with sojourns that took them far away from the military mainstream. While Abizaid was studying at the University of Jordan, Eikenberry had mastered Mandarin Chinese at Nanjing University. In the mid-1980s they overlapped at Harvard. If anyone would understand his desire to stay in the Middle East, it would be Eikenberry.

Over a static-filled satellite phone line, Abizaid said he was struggling to figure out where he could have the most impact. Eikenberry advised taking the chief of staff job. Iraq had become so politicized that it would be almost impossible for him to succeed. “Tommy Franks got to host the banquet in Iraq, and you are going to be the one who is going to have to clean it up,” he said. “It is going to be messy and you are going to get an enormous amount of unwanted help. Knowing the personalities in Washington, wouldn’t you be better off as chief of staff?”

Abizaid had always had deep doubts about invading Iraq. The first time he had heard a senior Bush administration official raise the possibility was the day after the September 11 terrorist attacks. He was flying back from Europe with Doug Feith, the senior policy official in the Pentagon. Abizaid, a general on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff at the time, had been visiting his counterparts in Ukraine. Feith and a handful of other senior Bush administration officials were returning from Russia. With U.S. airspace still closed to commercial traffic, the head of European Command had arranged for them to fly back in a KC-135 Air Force tanker.

In the hour or so before boarding the plane, Abizaid had made repeated calls to Washington to check on Eikenberry, whose office was in the section of the Pentagon that had been struck by the hijacked passenger jet. The last word he got as he took off was that his best friend was still missing.

Huddling in the tanker’s dimly lit cargo area, the group of senior officers and Defense Department officials began discussing the response to the attacks. There was agreement on the need to strike hard where Al Qaeda had been able to establish nodes or safe havens. The discussion then turned to other targets, and Feith raised the possibility of toppling Saddam Hussein, a course he and his fellow neoconservatives had been advocating for years. Abizaid cut him off. “Not Iraq. There is not a connection with Al Qaeda,” he said. Feith refused to let it go. Abizaid wouldn’t back down, either. “I never thought Iraq was at the center of the problem. I didn’t see it as a threat to the vital security of the United States,” he said later.

As the six-hour flight dragged on, Abizaid sat by himself and started composing the eulogy he planned to deliver for Eikenberry. The plane flew over the remains of the World Trade Center towers on its way to Washington, and Abizaid lay on his stomach looking out a small window in the tail at the smoking ruins. As soon as the plane had landed, he called the Pentagon to ask about his friend and was told Eikenberry had narrowly escaped. He tore up the unfinished eulogy.

Back in the Pentagon he was shocked at how quickly the administration shifted from Afghanistan to the invasion of Iraq. “I thought there would be a lot more debate about it. All the reasons that we didn’t go into Iraq in 1991 still prevailed,” he recalled. But almost no one discussed them. In the fall of 2002 Abizaid pushed to assign a separate military headquarters staff, augmented by large numbers of State Department experts, to focus exclusively on planning the occupation of Iraq, which he warned was going to be a mess. “Iraq has three very distinct minority groups that will be at each other’s throats immediately,” he told Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Feith. Abizaid had seen the country’s problems up close just ten years earlier in northern Iraq. The response he got from senior Bush administration officials was that the postwar planning was under control. There was a group of exiles ready to parachute into a liberated Iraq and run the country, and there was going to be no long-term occupation. Abizaid was incensed. “I have had enough of Washington,” he complained to a former officer involved in the postwar planning weeks before the war started. “They have no idea what they are doing. I may just pack it in.”

He didn’t want to be Army chief. With General Franks set to retire, there was only one job left in the military that Abizaid coveted: the head of Central Command, overseeing the Middle East and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Abizaid sent word to Rumsfeld that he would retire if he didn’t get the job; Rumsfeld eventually agreed to give him the position. “It was one of the few times in my career that I really fought for a job,” he recalled.

On July 7, 2003, Abizaid pinned on his fourth star and took over Central Command from Franks at a ceremony held in Tampa’s largest indoor sports arena, home of the National Hockey League’s Lightning franchise. Franks’s send-off was the sort befitting a conquering hero. Crooner Wayne Newton stopped by en route to Las Vegas. So too did a tuxedo-clad Robert De Niro and country music performer Neal McCoy, who serenaded the general with the song “I’m Your Biggest Fan.”

Franks, a lanky jug-eared general from west Texas, had enlisted in 1967 when his poor grades forced him to leave the University of Texas. After earning a commission through Officer Candidate School, he spent a year in Vietnam, earned his college degree, and then rose quickly in the 1980s and 1990s. He was a savvy technician whose expertise at melding airpower, artillery, and tanks on the battlefield had vaulted him to the top of his profession. In Iraq, he told himself, it was his job to destroy Saddam Hussein’s military and topple his regime. What came afterward wasn’t his problem. In that regard, he was a perfect match for Rumsfeld, who also had little interest in postwar reconstruction.

Before he bade farewell, Franks practically dared the growing resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan to take its best shot. “Twenty-two months ago the United States of America, in fact the free world, looked into the face of evil,” Franks said in his west Texas twang. “We came on that day to recognize our vulnerability. And the world came to recognize America with attitude. As President Bush said recently, ‘Bring it on!’” He had no idea his great military victory was coming apart.

Among those in the crowd was Michael Krause, Abizaid’s old history professor from West Point. As a cadet, Abizaid had been deeply impressed with Krause, who spoke fluent French and German. Krause had nominated
Abizaid for the scholarship program that sent him to Jordan. Though they hadn’t seen each other in years, he had come to Tampa for the ceremony at Abizaid’s invitation.

Abizaid’s new job running Central Command was the most coveted in the military. He was technically one of five American commanders who divided up responsibility for the entire globe, but as the general in charge of the greater Middle East, Abizaid was by far the most important. His turbulent area encompassed two dozen countries, including Iraq and Afghanistan, where American troops were fighting. It wasn’t his job to direct those wars, but he stood watch over the commanders who did. The job came with every imaginable amenity, including a Boeing jet to take him anywhere at a moment’s notice. A CIA analyst traveled with him for updates each morning on the latest intelligence. An ambassador from the State Department was on his staff to advise him on regional politics. All told, Abizaid was in charge of more than 200,000 troops. When Krause caught up with his former student in a small room inside the arena, he congratulated Abizaid on his new position. Abizaid smiled and shrugged. “Boy, what a mess I have gotten myself into,” he replied.

A few days later Abizaid addressed the media for the first time as the top commander in the Middle East, and immediately made clear he would be a different commander from the uncurious and smug Franks. “So what’s the situation in Iraq?” he asked rhetorically. The enemy had organized itself into cells and was “conducting a classical guerrilla-type campaign,” he said. The phrase captivated the reporters sitting in front of him, because it directly contradicted Rumsfeld, who only a couple of weeks earlier had proclaimed, “I guess I don’t use the phrase ‘guerrilla war’ because there isn’t one.” As Abizaid left the briefing room, the head of Army public affairs, who also happened to be an old friend from his days in the Rangers, pulled him aside. “You are really in for it now. This briefing room hasn’t seen that kind of candor in a long time,” he told him.

Soon Abizaid was receiving rambling memos from the defense secretary telling him to keep quiet. One memo, which drew guffaws from the Central Command staff, arrived with an underlined excerpt from Che Guevara’s biography, intended by Rumsfeld to prove that the violence in Iraq
wasn’t a guerrilla war. “It was unbelievable. It was painful,” Abizaid recalled. “But it didn’t change my mind.” The internal debate, consisting of back-and-forth memos from D.C. to Qatar, continued for several more weeks. Publicly, the general’s short statement settled it. The conflict became an insurgency. The exchange showed the influence Abizaid wielded as a four-star commander and acknowledged expert on the Arab world. He’d be very careful about how he used it.

His biggest problem in his new job was the command arrangement in Iraq. Shortly before he retired, Franks handed responsibility for military operations in the country to the Army’s V Corps, which was led by Lieutenant General Richard Sanchez. The move had shocked Abizaid. Sanchez, a newly promoted three-star, had been given command of the corps only a few days earlier. He’d come to Iraq thinking that he was going to be one of a half-dozen division commanders in the country. Now he was in charge of the entire military effort in the country. “The burden I felt was unimaginable,” he wrote in his 2008 autobiography. Abizaid told Franks the move didn’t make any sense. “That’s the decision,” Franks replied.

It soon became clear Sanchez and his small staff, which was desperately short of intelligence specialists, logisticians, and strategists, couldn’t handle the job. In early July, Abizaid got a call from General Jack Keane, the acting chief of staff of the Army. He had just returned from a visit to Baghdad and was deeply concerned about Sanchez’s ability to handle the war effort. “Listen, this thing is over his head,” he told Abizaid.

“Who do you think should take his place?” Abizaid asked. Keane suggested Petraeus. He had first met Petraeus when he was an assistant division commander in the 101st Airborne Division and Petraeus was one of his battalion commanders. When Petraeus was shot, Keane had helped control the bleeding and flew with him to the hospital. In the years since the shooting Keane, a garrulous New Yorker, had become an avid supporter and mentor, filling the role played previously by Galvin and Vuono. “We can find another division commander. Petraeus is the best guy we got,” Keane insisted. Abizaid asked for time to think it over. Sanchez had served under him in Kosovo in the late 1990s, and Abizaid trusted and liked him. Franks had put Sanchez in a grossly unfair position, and Abizaid didn’t want to fire him. He believed that he could help Sanchez get the specialists
that he needed to succeed from the Army staff in the Pentagon, and that in the interim his Central Command staff could fill in the holes. He called Keane a few days later and said he was going to stick with his friend.

For most of his tenure, Sanchez had only about half of the staff that he needed. Some of the blame for this failure lay with senior officials in the Pentagon who were slow to fill slots because they assumed the war was over and that U.S. troops would soon be coming home. Abizaid, however, also bore some responsibility. He saw himself as a grand strategist whose job was to help shape the military’s overall approach to Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader Middle East, and he often ignored thankless but critical tasks such as pounding away at the Pentagon bureaucracy to cough up more personnel to help his overwhelmed commander.