The Fourth Star (28 page)

Several years later, when he was promoted to four-star general, Casey’s family gathered at Fort Myer, where he was living at the time, for his promotion ceremony. After the party, his brother and sisters all walked down to their father’s grave, retracing the steps they had taken on the day he was buried thirty-three years earlier. George and his mother held back. The next morning they made their own quiet pilgrimage to the grave site. They could only imagine how overjoyed the elder Casey would have been to see his son rise to four-star rank.

Now George was off to war. Sheila could have told him no and, despite how badly he wanted the job, he would have turned it down. He had walked away from Delta Force without bitterness, and he had always promised Sheila that anytime she wanted to leave the Army all she had to do was tell him and they would be out. But she didn’t. This was the life they had made for themselves, and she knew the assignment was one he had yearned for all these years. Soon they moved to the kitchen and talked for hours, not about whether he would go but about everything that needed to be done beforehand. One of the first things, she reminded him, was to telephone their two grown sons. Sheila didn’t want them hearing about it on the nightly news. And, she reminded him, he had to talk to his mom, knowing that telling her was the kind of difficult conversation her taciturn husband might avoid.

“Did you call your mom?” she asked the next day.

Yes, but there had been no answer, Casey replied, so he had left a vague message on her answering machine.

“George, you have to tell her it’s important or she’ll never call!” Sheila chided.

When his mother did finally telephone from her house in Massachusetts, it was Sheila who answered. George was out. “I might as well tell you,” she said. “George is going to Iraq.”

“Okay,” his mother replied, with no trace of emotion in her voice. She rushed down that weekend to see him off. Later Casey found out he
wouldn’t be leaving until July. There was too much preparation to do, and the Senate wasn’t going to vote on his new assignment for several weeks.

Unexpected as it all was, Casey wasn’t daunted by the new assignment. He wasn’t an Arabist who had prepared his whole career for a job in the Middle East, but Abizaid was, and he would help. Casey had never been in combat, but he did have experience running big organizations and was confident that he could come up with a winning war strategy. He told himself he had more experience with the political and military problems of reconstructing war-ravaged countries than most Army officers. In Kosovo he’d even dealt with a tiny insurgent uprising in which some of the Kosovar Albanian rebels in the Presevo Valley region of the province launched a series of covert attacks on the Serbian police. He had dealt with it by sealing off the valley and negotiating with the local mullahs, who helped him secure the surrender of the head of the Albanian rebel group.

He hadn’t interviewed with either Rumsfeld or Bush before being chosen. No one asked him for his ideas about what needed to be done, and he hadn’t thought about it very much. Schoomaker had given him a book entitled
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam
that had been written by a young officer from the Sosh department. It was the first book Casey had read on guerrilla war. His new assignment required Senate confirmation, but he was uncontroversial, the compromise choice everyone could support. Senator Hillary Clinton pronounced him boring. “Boring is good, General Casey, and I applaud you on that,” she told him. “Clearly, you’re a master at it. And it goes to the heart of your success.”

“I’m going to have to think about that for a minute,” he replied, drawing chuckles from the half-empty hearing room. The only nervous moment came when Casey was asked how long it would be until the 140,000 American troops were home. The Army was proceeding on the assumption that it could be in Iraq another three years, until early 2007, he said in an answer that he had prepared ahead of time, but he stressed that was only an estimate, not a prediction. There was no real way of knowing how much longer the war would last. It was a safe response, and the lawmakers moved on to other topics. That evening, the Senate voted unanimously to confirm him.

His sole meeting with Rumsfeld before leaving lasted just twenty minutes. The seventy-one-year-old defense secretary greeted Casey warmly and offered him a seat at the small round table in his third-floor Pentagon office. A military aide served coffee in white and gold Pentagon china. Although President Bush was still giving triumphal speeches about bringing democracy to the Muslim world, Rumsfeld made it clear he wasn’t particularly interested in remaking Iraq. Like the senators from the confirmation hearing, he wanted Casey to figure out a way to bring American troops home soon. Take a few weeks to assess the situation before reporting back, he told Casey. But there was one parting order he did want to pass along: to resist the temptation to do too much. Military officers thought they could fix everything, Rumsfeld warned, and the more the United States tried to do for the Iraqis, the less they would do for themselves and the longer U.S. forces would be stuck there.

“I understand, Mr. Secretary,” Casey replied. He told the story of his attempt to arrange the return of Muslim refugees to the villages of Dugi Dio and Jusici while serving in Bosnia, a six-week experiment that collapsed when weapons were found in the homes of the deputy mayor. The experience had taught him that can-do Americans can’t want peace more than the people they are trying to help. Rumsfeld seemed satisfied that they understood each other. Casey thought so, too, but he didn’t want to forget their conversation. He jotted the word
attitude
in the green notebook he carried. It was a small reminder not to disregard what he had learned in Bosnia—not to fall into the trap of thinking he could fix everything wrong with Iraq.

He departed from Andrews Air Force Base a few days later, without talking to Bush. Casey and Sheila had gone to the White House for a private dinner with the president and Laura Bush, but that had been a social occasion, with no real discussion of Iraq. Bush had told himself he would not micromanage his generals, the way Lyndon Johnson had done. Just as some parts of the Army had vowed never to refight Vietnam, so too had the president. But Bush took his own maxim to the extreme, leaving his commanders without any real instructions except for the advice they got from Rumsfeld. While the president was insisting that the United States was in a life-or-death struggle to change the Middle East, Rumsfeld was essentially telling his top commander that he shouldn’t try too hard.

When Casey sat down to compose a quick e-mail to Abizaid after his first month in command, much seemed possible. “There is a strategic opportunity for success,” he wrote in early August 2004. No one had given him a mission statement, so he and John Negroponte, the new ambassador, had composed one in Casey’s Pentagon office before they left. The goal was to leave behind an “Iraq built on the principles of representative government, respectful of the rights of its citizens and the rule of law, able to maintain order at home, defend its borders, and establish peaceful relations with its neighbors.” To get there Casey and Negroponte spent their first month sketching out a campaign plan that had been decided on quickly, without exploring a lot of alternatives. Classic counterinsurgency theory held that to defeat insurgents, military forces had to win the trust and support of the people. “I came at it a little differently,” Casey recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, it’s the people, but the way we’re going to get to the people is through a legitimate Iraqi government.’” And the key to producing a legitimate government, he assumed, was the national elections scheduled for January. The voting would channel the insurgents into politics; every effort should be made to ensure they happened on time, he insisted. The assumption that fair elections would blunt the insurgency was widely held among senior U.S. officials at the time. Unfortunately, it was completely wrong.

There was a bit of the Jesuit in Casey, probably the product of his Catholic education at Boston College High School and Georgetown. He enjoyed hashing out ideas and turning them over in his mind—or, even better, puzzling out his thoughts on paper. He’d set glasses on top of his head, pull out a red pen, and revise documents word by word for hours. “I can’t help myself,” he muttered when at the end of a long day one of his subordinates suggested that a general must have better things to do than editing a PowerPoint slide.

Rumsfeld’s parting instructions had been to take a few weeks to study the situation, but after only seven days in Iraq, he was in his first video session
with the defense secretary, who directed him to begin a major assessment of the effort to rebuild the Iraqi police and army. Four days later they spoke by phone, followed by another videoconference and another phone call several days after that. In all, Casey participated in twenty-three phone conversations or video meetings with Rumsfeld during his first two months, an average of one every three days. Rumsfeld was a stickler for chain of command. When Casey was scheduled to update Bush, Rumsfeld required a prebrief so that he could approve any information that went to the president. Sometimes it seemed Casey’s staff was doing little more than churning out briefing slides for Washington.

After one videoconference, Casey’s senior aide, Colonel Jim Barclay, got a call from General Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “The secretary liked the briefing,” he said, referring to Rumsfeld. “But he wants Casey to stop saying
um
so much when he’s talking.”

“Sir, I can’t tell him that,” Barclay protested. “But hold on. He’s right here.”

He transferred the call into Casey’s Green Zone office, and Pace told Casey himself. After hanging up, Casey and Barclay shook their heads. Like everyone else who worked with Rumsfeld, Casey received periodic one- or two-sentence notes—known as “snowflakes”—on issues that caught the defense secretary’s attention. Sometimes Rumsfeld would wonder why it seemed to take so long to plan a raid and arrest a particular insurgent target. Casey rarely worried about individual raids and was puzzled how such picayune details were bubbling up to the secretary’s level. One of the first snowflakes asked that Casey start training Iraqis to replace the relatively small number of U.S. special operations troops acting as bodyguards for senior ministers, who were prime assassination targets. The lesson was unmistakable: no part of the U.S. effort was too small to escape Rumsfeld’s green-eyeshade mentality on troops.

Beneath Casey were two deputy commanders. One was Lieutenant General Tom Metz, who oversaw daily military operations. Shortly after Casey took command, he had identified sixteen key cities that U.S. troops had to clear of insurgents prior to the January elections. Metz’s job was to direct those battles, while Casey crafted the overall strategy and made sure the newly sovereign interim government didn’t interfere. The two men had
been close friends since they were twenty-two-year-old lieutenants in Germany.

The other was Petraeus. Casey’s relationship with him was more complicated. The same week Casey arrived,
Newsweek
featured Petraeus on the cover in full battle gear underneath a headline that asked “Can This Man Save Iraq?” Only a couple of months after he had returned home from Mosul, Petraeus had been promoted and sent back to Iraq to oversee the training and equipping of the army and police. “General Petraeus … is the closest thing to an exit strategy the United States now has,” the
Newsweek
article enthused. Casey was annoyed, though not surprised. Rumsfeld was angry. During a stopover in Ireland shortly after the article appeared, his top aide stuffed the offending
Newsweek
behind other magazines in the airport gift shop so that the secretary wouldn’t see them again. Casey quickly got orders to shut down the Petraeus publicity machine. “From now on, I’m your PAO,” he told Petraeus, using the military acronym for public affairs officer.

For several months their relationship remained strained. Their leadership styles were completely different. Casey was cautious, often to the point of inaction. “Almost nothing has to be done right now,” he counseled subordinates. “When you are talking about a major policy initiative, it needs to be thoughtful and deliberate. Hasty decisions in this type of environment will generally be wrong.” In contrast, Petraeus believed that the United States had a narrow window of opportunity that was rapidly closing. It was better to take risks than do nothing.

Casey typically attended meetings with senior Iraqi officials alone or with one aide. Petraeus went everywhere with an entourage of smart young officers that included two Rhodes scholars and a Columbia University Ph.D. His energy, knowledge, and eagerness to fix Iraq shone through in just about every meeting. “Sir, if I could,” he’d often interject before launching into a discourse on the problem of the day. It was hard for the new Iraqi leaders to tell whether Casey or Petraeus was in charge.