The Fourth Star (27 page)

On August 3 Chiarelli had perhaps his best day in Iraq. He and Kirk Day put 18,000 people to work in Sadr City building a landfill and laying PVC pipe to begin removing the ankle-deep sewage that usually collected in the sprawling neighborhood’s streets. Five months had passed since his troops fought the pitched battle with Sadr’s militia. Now the slum was quiet. A jubilant Chiarelli toured the area and talked with the laborers who filled street after street. “I have these pictures of 18,000 people at work,” he’d recall years later. “Sadr City was moving in our direction.” For at least that one day he was sure he was winning the war.

O
kay, who’s my counterinsurgency expert?” asked General George Casey, sounding impatient. It was his first day in command and his first meeting with the staff he had inherited from General Sanchez, who had left Iraq for good that morning. A dozen Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine officers sent to Iraq from posts around the world stared at him, stumped by his question. Finally Air Force Major General Steve Sargeant spoke up. He had spent his career flying jets, an experience that was largely irrelevant to a fight against low-tech Iraqi guerrillas. “I guess that must be me, sir,” said the general, who was in charge of strategic plans at headquarters. The Air Force officer’s hesitant answer drove home to Casey how little progress the military had made during its first year in coming to grips with the kind of war it was fighting.

In the four years prior to his arrival in Iraq, Casey had held some of the most critical jobs in the U.S. military, overseeing U.S. Army forces in Kosovo in 2000 and serving on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He had managed to be well liked by Clinton administration
officials and by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In many ways, Casey was the model Pentagon general: steady, apolitical, and hardworking. He didn’t make bold decisions or draw attention to himself. He was an efficient manager who knew how to make big bureaucracies run and how to anticipate problems.

He’d been only occasionally involved in the Iraq war before arriving in Baghdad. In the lead-up to the invasion, Rumsfeld’s insistence that the Iraqis would have to take charge of rebuilding their country had stifled most serious postwar reconstruction planning. From his position on the Joint Staff, Casey sensed that there was going to be a need for the U.S. military to oversee the rebuilding effort. Just three months before the invasion he assembled a small group of active and retired officers that was rushed to the Middle East to deal with electricity generation, clean water, and other expected postwar problems. The small pickup team consisted of only fifty-eight people and was better suited to a relatively peaceful mission than to the chaos in Iraq. But with Rumsfeld’s aversion to nation building, it was probably the best anyone could do.

After the 2003 invasion, Rumsfeld selected Casey to be the Army’s vice chief of staff, a job that came with a promotion to four stars. He sat through hundreds of hours of meetings focused on troop rotation schedules for Iraq, plans to start bringing soldiers home, and the hurried push to buy more armor for the thin-skinned Humvees that were being shredded by insurgents’ bombs. To Casey initially the occupation didn’t seem all that different from the 1990s peacekeeping operations. The two missions had much in common. But in the Balkans the military had pressed the Clinton administration to ensure that its aims in the war-torn country were limited. Its job was to enforce a peace agreement between warring parties. In Iraq the task was far tougher. The military was essentially being asked to rebuild a society and defeat a ruthless armed resistance.

It wasn’t until he arrived in Iraq that Casey started to understand the huge challenge he faced. Casey’s headquarters at Al Faw Palace were located on the western outskirts of Baghdad. On the morning he took command, his palace office was mostly empty except for a few pictures of his wife, sons, and grandchildren. Video screens, flags, and maps covered the
walls. A chandelier dangled from the elaborately carved, pastel-colored woodwork on the ceiling.

Saddam Hussein had built the palace in 1992 as a present to himself following the 1991 Gulf War. When Baghdad fell a dozen years later, the U.S. military moved into the sprawling building and its surrounding grounds. The hulking stone structure sat in the middle of a weed-choked lake. The only approach to its heavy wooden doors was a two-lane bridge. In the first year of the war the Army had remade the complex into a version of the military bases it had left behind in the United States. To house the 50,000 soldiers who lived and worked at Victory, it bought thousands of small trailers, which the Army called “containerized housing units,” and arranged them in neat rows. Troops dined on leathery steaks and Baskin-Robbins sundaes in dining halls the size of airplane hangars, each decorated with sports memorabilia shipped from back home. They could shop in large post exchanges, stocked with luxuries such as flat-screen television sets, DVD players, and the latest video games.

Inside the palace, staff officers worked in modular cubicles in marble ballrooms and former bedroom suites. Fluorescent lights were nailed to the walls to augment the glow from crystal chandeliers. Outside the palace the smell of fuel and raw sewage hung in the air. Generators droned, tank and Humvee engines roared, and helicopters thumped. The massive base violated just about every rule of counterinsurgency strategy, which preaches the importance of small groups of soldiers living among the people and providing security. But the Army didn’t know much about counterinsurgency when it built Victory Base Complex in 2003. It built what it knew.

On his way into Iraq, Casey had been told by officers in Kuwait that if he wanted to understand the enemy he needed to seek out a colonel in the palace named Derek Harvey. Harvey was a forty-nine-year-old intelligence officer who spoke Arabic and had an advanced degree in Islamic political thought. For months he’d been interviewing prisoners, poring over interrogation transcripts, and meeting with Sunni tribal leaders. Almost no one seemed interested in his work when Sanchez was in charge, which the short-tempered Harvey considered astounding. A couple of days after Casey arrived in Baghdad, he invited Harvey to step outside on one of the
balconies at his new palace headquarters. “Do you smoke?” Casey asked, holding up two cigars. Harvey nodded, and they walked out onto a stone balcony overlooking the palace’s man-made lakes.

Harvey gave his new commander a tutorial on the insurgency, interrupted only by the drone of helicopters and the lapping of greenish water against the palace walls. The insurgency was being led by former Saddam loyalists who were well organized and had access to lots of money and ammunition. Their forces were being augmented by foreign jihadists whose numbers were on the rise following the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and the failed Fallujah assault. To win, the United States had to kill former Saddamists. But it also had to co-opt more moderate Baathists and win over the Sunni tribal leaders whom Saddam had pacified with bribes.

They talked for almost three hours. Casey peppered him with questions about the Sunni-Shiite split and the relationships between the foreign fighters and the Sunni tribes. Before parting, Harvey told Casey that the war was very different from the peacekeeping missions that Casey had overseen in the 1990s. “We don’t understand the fight we’re in,” he warned his new boss.

The enormous mess he’d inherited didn’t fully hit Casey until he started to read some of the awards for valor given to soldiers and Marines who had fought in the spring battles in Sadr City, Fallujah, and Najaf. In the Pentagon he had pored over the classified accounts of the uprisings. But the dry reports didn’t capture how close some units, such as the soldiers from Chiarelli’s 1st Cav Division, had come to being overrun. Casey was a fifty-six-year-old general who had never been in combat, taking command of a foundering war effort. He knew he’d have to learn fast.

He had not planned on going to Iraq. Six months earlier, on Christmas Eve 2003, he and his thirty-one-year-old son, Ryan, had rushed out to do some last-minute Christmas shopping at the Pentagon City shopping mall, just across the river from the White House. Casey’s relentless work ethic had helped him vault ahead of other Pentagon generals. Like most Washington workaholics, he typically put off his Christmas shopping to the last possible minute. As he wandered through Ann Taylor, sorting through the
racks of women’s sweaters, he spotted General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who waved him over. Myers mentioned a new idea to deal with the worsening situation in Iraq. Abizaid had cornered him on a recent trip to Iraq and suggested putting a four-star general in Baghdad to command the overall military effort. “We really need it. We just can’t be cheap here,” Abizaid insisted. The new four-star wouldn’t replace the overwhelmed Sanchez, who was a three-star. Instead he and his staff would focus on crafting a long-term counterinsurgency strategy and working with political leaders. Beneath him, Sanchez’s headquarters would handle the day-to-day military operations and troop movements.

Ryan stood just out of earshot as Casey talked to Myers, who was surrounded by the chairman’s plainclothes bodyguards. When they were finished Casey mentioned to his son that they were looking to send a new general to Iraq. “Are you interested?” Ryan asked him.

“I already have a job,” he replied wistfully. He’d just been sworn in as vice chief a few months earlier, but Ryan could tell that his father would much rather be leading troops than overseeing bureaucracies and waging budget wars. “That’s the difference between you and Wes Clark,” he said, referring to the hyperambitious former general who had been an early mentor to Casey and was now weighing a run for president. “Clark would say he wanted the job and push for it. You would just wait for someone to offer it to you.” They quickly dropped the conversation and went back to the sweater racks.

A couple of months later Casey was told to put together a short list of candidates for the Iraq job. On a warm spring evening he went over to Quarters One and handed the names to General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief. They sat on the veranda in rocking chairs, with the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial in view.

“Your name’s not on here,” Schoomaker said after a moment.

“I thought you wanted me to stay here,” Casey replied.

“This may be more important,” the chief said. “Could you do it?”

“Yeah, absolutely.”

Casey’s name went on the list. Rumsfeld initially wanted his military aide for the job. But with the Abu Ghraib scandal in all the newspapers, anyone who was that close to the defense secretary had little chance of
Senate confirmation. Abizaid also had considered taking the job himself. When he learned that Casey was in the mix, he quickly latched on to him as the best choice.

Since their time together in Bosnia, Abizaid and Casey had remained close. They both commanded 15,000-soldier divisions in Germany in 2000. When Abizaid’s unit was deployed in Kosovo, Casey called him from the bleachers at Fenway Park. “Hey, John, guess what I’m doing right now?” he said, holding the phone up so Abizaid could hear the crowd noise. A few months later, when Casey’s troops were in Kosovo, Abizaid made sure to phone Casey from the stands of the brand-new ballpark in San Francisco, where he was watching his beloved Giants. In 2001 and 2003, when Abizaid twice left positions on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, Casey was selected as his replacement both times. Although Casey was a few years older than Abizaid, he looked to his friend almost as a mentor. Abizaid was smart and witty and had a reputation as a big strategic thinker. A part of Casey wanted to be seen by his Army peers in the same light.

Rumsfeld had dealt with Casey on the Joint Staff and liked him. Bush went along with the consensus, and Abizaid quickly called Casey with the good news.

When he arrived home at eight-thirty that evening, Sheila was on the third floor, unpacking boxes at their home at Fort McNair. Although he had been in the vice chief job for several months, the Caseys’ move into the stately, century-old residence that came with the job had been delayed by renovations to the house. “Honey, we need to talk,” he said, motioning her toward a chair. He hadn’t even told his wife that he was being considered for the position. Not sure how to break the news, he blurted it out: “I’m going to Iraq.” He might be leaving in only a few days. Sheila burst into tears. Why hadn’t he told her he was up for the job? she asked as they embraced. “It happened pretty quickly,” he explained.

“I don’t have a good feeling about this, George. It brings back memories of your dad,” she told him.

“I know.”

His father’s death was not something Casey talked much about, even with his wife. After the Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened on the National Mall, it had taken Casey some time before he felt ready to see it. When they
found his father’s name, George had been overcome, unable to speak more than a few words until he and Sheila returned to the car. As they drove home, he told Sheila that visiting the wall had been the most emotionally wrenching moment of his life.