The Fourth Star (31 page)

At 7:30 a.m. on Saturday, December 12, 2004, Casey strode into the small auditorium for his morning briefing. Behind him about thirty staffers sat in five tiers of stadium-style seating. Each morning all his major subordinate commands updated Casey on the last twenty-four hours, their presentations projected on three large flat-panel screens at the front of the room. That morning Casey received the normal update on the security situation in major cities and towns, each of which was assigned a color grade—red, orange, yellow, or green—depending on the insurgency’s strength. Casey noticed that Fallujah was rated orange, which meant that the insurgent threat there was still significant. It had been nearly a month since a Marine-led force had essentially destroyed the city in ten days of
brutal house-to-house fighting. Although a few holdout insurgents still took occasional potshots, the city was essentially devoid of life, insurgent or otherwise. Casey asked his staff to reassess Fallujah to determine if it still belonged in the orange category. The next day the staff upgraded it to yellow.

Did anyone have a problem with revising the assessment? Casey asked. No one in the room protested. But Major Grant Doty, a slim, bespectacled strategist who was watching the briefing by live video from his desk elsewhere in the palace, was frustrated. “This is the most fucked-up thing in the world,” he thought. The staff had changed the color rating on Fallujah just to make Casey happy. He started typing an e-mail to the general, noting that he was “shocked and disappointed” by the change in the city’s status. “I think this is a mistake and was in response to the false perception that this is what you wanted, and they were going to give it to you,” he continued. It really didn’t matter whether Fallujah was rated yellow or orange, Doty thought. But changing it because the commander suggested doing so indicated a much larger problem. It all smacked of Vietnam, when officers inflated body counts so that headquarters could feel good about how the war was going.

Casey didn’t reply directly to the e-mail, but Doty noticed that in the weeks afterward he began getting invited to more meetings with the boss. When Casey would make day trips to units around the country, he started bringing along Doty, too. Doty wasn’t sure if his contrarian e-mail was the reason for his new access, but he thought it might be. Unlike many senior generals, Casey was open to second-guessing from his staff, even if he didn’t always act on it.

It wasn’t the first time Doty had approached Casey with advice. A few weeks earlier he’d sent Casey an e-mail critiquing the boss’s performance during a CNN interview. Casey needed to drive home an overall theme or message in his interviews with the national media, Doty had told him. A printout of the e-mail had come back with the words “exactly on!” written in Casey’s cursive scrawl at the top.

Doty, a former instructor in West Point’s Social Sciences Department with a master’s degree from Yale University, had arrived in August and was assigned to Casey’s “initiatives group,” a small team that was supposed to
come up with unconventional ideas for the commander. In twenty years in the Army, Doty had frequently felt like an outsider. He thought the war had been a mistake, but he had vowed to himself that he would do what he could to help. He resolved to make himself a bit of a pest, someone who questioned assumptions and fought bureaucratic tendencies.

Since Casey had arrived, the American officers in the palace had been telling themselves that they were figuring out how to win. They had constructed a strategy, dubbed it counterinsurgency, and thought they were on their way to victory. But Doty wasn’t convinced. The United States was in a brutal fight, unlike anything it had trained for, and yet people on the staff weren’t questioning and debating. The incident in the morning briefing with Fallujah proved it. He wanted Casey to be flexible and improvisational and to foster the same spirit in his officers. He advised Casey to go to the briefing early one day and ask people what they were reading. If it didn’t have something to do with Iraq or Arab culture, Casey should tell them to read something that did. He suggested building a library and stocking it with classic accounts of past counterinsurgency wars. He could start with David Galula’s dissection of the French army’s war in Algeria against Arab guerrillas or Bernard Fall’s
Street Without Joy
, which chronicled the debacle in Vietnam. Casey heard him out, but Doty left unsure what would come of his efforts. Casey was hard to decipher, and Doty hadn’t said everything he really thought—that the United States was settling into a delusion that it was winning.

Casey woke on January 30, the day of the elections, a little after 3:00
A.M.
He wanted to take a quick aerial tour of Baghdad and get to the Green Zone before the polls opened at 7:00 a.m. His helicopter lifted off in darkness from Al Faw Palace and made a few lazy loops over west Baghdad. It was a cold, wet morning, typical of January. He and Prime Minister Allawi had banned all vehicle traffic in Iraq’s major cities in an effort to prevent car bombs and limit the enemy’s movement. To keep the insurgents off balance, they had made the announcement one day prior to the balloting. Working furiously in the weeks before the election, U.S. special operations units also had captured some key insurgent leaders tied to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s
terrorist movement. But there was no way of telling whether it would be enough.

As the sun rose over Baghdad, Casey took in the city with his aide, his executive officer, and Doty. From the air the Iraqi capital looked almost deserted—no cars, no trucks, and, unusual even for that hour, almost no people on the streets. He had spent the previous seven months preparing for this moment. Now there was nothing left for him to do. “Is anyone going to show?” he wondered.

His helicopter touched down in the Green Zone around six-thirty, and Casey moved briskly to his office and turned on the BBC’s televised coverage. Around seven Ghazi al-Yawer, Iraq’s portly president, strode into a polling place in his crisp white dishdasha and with a flourish dropped his ballot into a box. Casey waited anxiously for the next two hours. Small numbers of people were turning out to vote, and he worried the election would be the disaster that the CIA was predicting. At 10:00 a.m. his division commanders, who were scattered around the country, updated him via video teleconference. Most were reporting a light turnout. The best news came from Baghdad, where Chiarelli reported that hundreds of people were walking to polling sites from Abu Ghraib, a Sunni enclave just west of the capital. A few minutes later, Chiarelli excitedly interrupted the briefing. “It’s not hundreds of people coming in from Abu Ghraib, it’s thousands of people,” he said. A cheer of joy, mixed with relief, went up from the dozens of people in the briefing room with Casey.

The U.S. command reported a record number of attacks on the day of the elections, but the vast majority of them were minor or ineffective. U.S. forces stayed largely out of sight, leaving security duties around the polling stations in Baghdad and other big cities to Iraqi army and police units. By late afternoon cable news outlets were beaming back to the United States pictures of long lines of ecstatic Iraqis holding up their purple-stained fingers to prove that they had cast votes in the country’s first free election in more than three decades. Later that afternoon Casey took off in his helicopter for a two-hour tour of Baghdad and the neighboring cities. Throngs of people filled Baghdad’s streets. Many of them were lined up outside polling sites, playing soccer, or celebrating. Casey asked his pilots to fly out to Fallujah. There the scene was different. The streets were mostly empty.
In all of Anbar Province, the heart of the Sunni insurgency, only about 2,000 people voted.

Around 6:00 p.m. Casey was preparing to meet with his staff when Rumsfeld called. “George, when the eyes of the world were on you, you stood and delivered,” the defense secretary told him. “Thank you, Mr. Secretary,” Casey replied. “I’ll pass that on to everybody.” Petraeus telephoned Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who had been one of the leading advocates for the invasion. More than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen had turned out to help guard polling places, he said. For the first time since the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi tanks were out on the capital city’s streets. Given the past month’s failures, this was great news. Wolfowitz asked Petraeus to send photos of soldiers and tanks. He wanted to show the American people that the Iraqis were finally taking responsibility for their own country.

As the day drew to a close Casey stood and addressed his staff. “What a historic day,” he said as the applause welled up from his men. He then returned to his quarters and called Sheila, who was crying tears of joy and relief for him. When he hung up, Casey and his aide, Major Tony Hale, walked out onto the patio behind his quarters at Camp Victory and smoked cigars. Hale brought out a bottle of grappa, an Italian brandy, and they toasted their success. “From then on, I thought, ‘This will work,’” Casey recalled years later.

The next morning Casey spoke with Abizaid by phone. The two friends chatted amiably while Casey’s staff listened: “Yeah, John, I know. Great outcome, great outcome,” Casey said. In the Pentagon’s daily summary of U.S. press clippings there wasn’t a single negative article, he noted. Doty, sitting on the black leather couch in Casey’s small Green Zone office, couldn’t resist puncturing the euphoria a bit. Turning to Casey, he recalled the end of the movie
Patton
. World War II is over. Patton, played by the actor George C. Scott, walks his dog. He is only a few months from his death. In the background, Scott’s deep, rough voice recalls that when victorious Roman generals returned from war they were honored with a parade. The conquering general would ride in a triumphal chariot. Just behind him stood a slave who would whisper in his ear, “All glory is fleeting. All glory is fleeting.”

“Maybe I should be the slave at the end of
Patton
whispering, ‘All glory is fleeting,’” Doty said.

Casey shot Doty an annoyed look. He knew the elections weren’t going to solve all of Iraq’s problems. Only the Shiites and Kurds had really turned out to vote. Most Sunnis, who made up the bulk of the insurgency, had boycotted the elections and would almost certainly continue to fight. But after seven exhausting, frustrating months, he needed a moment to savor his victory.

D
efense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was furious. “I am not sure I am ready to move this forward to the president,” he growled at Casey over the video hookup from the Pentagon. Rumsfeld was referring to Casey’s strategy to accelerate the training of Iraqi army and police forces so that U.S. troops could start coming home. Casey had been briefing the defense secretary on the plan since January.

The idea was relatively straightforward. The tough fighting in the fall of 2004 had shown that Iraqi units operating with small teams of embedded U.S. advisors performed better than Iraqi units fighting alone. Casey was proposing to expand the teams to every brigade and battalion in the Iraqi army and as many police units as possible. With such close partnership, the Iraqis would progress faster and soon take over the lead in fighting the insurgency. The initial concept was from Abizaid, but he’d also warned Rumsfeld in an earlier e-mail that it would bring significant new risks: U.S. advisors would be living with Iraqi troops in “isolated and exposed
places.” To make it work, the teams would have to be filled with tough, resourceful soldiers.

Rumsfeld’s problem wasn’t with the strategy. He was angry at what he considered a grave bureaucratic sin. Casey had shared a version of his plan with the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. His instinct was to work closely with the ambassador and his staff. The ambassador, in turn, had informed the State Department, and somehow Rumsfeld had found out about it. “Please explain how this happens, that the world gets papered with a military proposal from Embassy Baghdad that hasn’t been considered or approved at our level, despite the fact that the president has repeatedly said that he wanted to be involved in it,” Rumsfeld had written in an e-mail to Casey and Abizaid two days before the videoconference. Whenever Casey opened his mouth Rumsfeld cut him off. “You act like the whole world started with you and Petraeus,” he scolded at one point. Casey kept his cool. The best way to handle an angry Rumsfeld was to let him vent.

The defense secretary wasn’t much of a counterinsurgency strategist, but he was an expert bureaucratic infighter who wanted to control the flow of information to the president. He didn’t want the State Department to see the plan until it was shown to Bush. By that point, it would be too late for Condoleezza Rice and her aides to muck around with it. Working for Rumsfeld was a mixed blessing. He defended his subordinates from meddling by other agencies like an angry pit bull. He was frequently warm, charitable, and funny. But his rabid defense of his bureaucratic turf was also isolating. It would cut Casey off from the growing frustration in the White House and the State Department as violence rose and the president began to lose confidence in his leadership. It also prevented Casey from getting feedback that might have exposed the flaws in his plan.