The Fourth Star (32 page)

After barking at Casey, Rumsfeld dropped his objections and arranged for him to brief the president. Casey and a few key aides sat in the secure videoconference room at Al Faw. Abizaid joined in from Qatar. Bush participated from the White House. The average counterinsurgency war lasted between nine and thirteen years, Casey explained to Bush. There was no way that U.S. forces were going to be in Iraq for that long. Therefore they had to train Iraqis to take over by increasing the number of
advisory teams. As Iraqi troops took on more responsibility U.S. troops could pull back, reducing the stigma of the American occupation and bolstering the legitimacy of the government.

The president had reservations. The new approach seemed to focus more on shifting the fight to the Iraqis than on defeating the insurgency. “George, we’re not playing for a tie. I want to make sure we understand this, don’t we?” Bush said. He had grand visions for Iraq. He still wanted to transform it into a model democracy and, in contrast to Rumsfeld, was in no rush to hand it off to a bunch of incompetent Iraqi troops.

Bush’s critique not only caught Casey by surprise but stung him. “Mr. President, we are not playing for a tie,” Casey shot back with a rare edge to his voice. “I just can’t accept that. We are playing to win.” He was used to hostile questions from Rumsfeld. But this was different. The president was questioning his commitment. He was, in effect, suggesting that Casey was sending soldiers to their deaths for a strategy that he didn’t think would acttually win. After the briefing, Abizaid tried to ease the tension. “George, you shouldn’t yell at the president,” he said half jokingly.

In June Casey flew back to Washington with Abizaid to secure Bush’s final approval for his new strategy. The war wasn’t going well. Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a physician who spoke so softly that he often seemed to be whispering, had been sworn in as interim prime minister. Casey had hoped that Jaafari, a Shiite, would reach out to rival sects and ethnic groups and unite the country, but so far he was disappointed. “This guy is a political wind sock,” he told Abizaid. Violence rose as Sunnis, who felt disenfranchised by the January election, turned to extremists. In May there were a record 142 car bombs. When Casey landed in Washington he was dreading his meeting with Bush. “Goddammit, I just don’t feel like I am prepared,” he groused to his senior aide.

The president put him at ease. “Thanks for pushing back at me. I appreciate that,” Bush said, referring to the tense videoconference. He approved Casey’s new strategy. Actually fielding the advisory teams at the heart of the new approach would prove tougher than Casey had anticipated, however. The Army staff in the Pentagon initially balked at finding 2,500 majors, lieutenant colonels, and senior sergeants for the teams. It didn’t sound like a lot of extra manpower. But the Pentagon generals complained
that to fill the request they would have to strip combat brigades of their leaders. Instead of assigning seasoned officers to the teams, as Abizaid and Casey wanted, the Army would instead rely heavily on inexperienced reservists.

At the White House that day, though, everyone was still hopeful. After the president had signed off on the strategy, Casey updated him on the plans for the latter half of 2005. They were still on track for a constitutional referendum in October 2005 followed by another national election in late December. “You know, Mr. President, George will be gone by then,” Rumsfeld interjected, noting that the general’s official orders were for only twelve months and expired in August.

The president thought for a minute. “Eisenhower didn’t leave the war after a year.”

“Eisenhower lived in London,” Abizaid playfully shot back from across the table.

“I shouldn’t be asking you this …,” Bush said. Rumsfeld rose to his feet, stood behind his Iraq commander, and began to chant enthusiastically, “Oh, yes, you should, Mr. President! Yes, you should!”

With Rumsfeld egging him on, Bush asked Casey to stay in Iraq through at least the end of 2005. Casey later got his official orders extending his time for six more months—the first of three such extensions. Three decades earlier Casey’s father had been only a few months away from finishing his second tour in Vietnam when he received new orders assigning him to stay in Vietnam and take command of the 1st Cavalry Division. Shortly after he was extended, he died in the helicopter crash. As Casey studied his new orders, he thought of his dad and had a fleeting feeling that he might be killed before he made it home. He didn’t mention it to anyone until he left Iraq for good.

Petraeus, meanwhile, had his own Washington problems. In early 2005 Rumsfeld had dispatched a team led by General Gary Luck, a retired former head of U.S. forces in Korea, to look into the effort to rebuild a new army and police force. They arrived in Baghdad convinced that the effort was on the verge of collapse. Petraeus did in fact need help—lots of it. His
staff was made up of inexperienced National Guardsmen and whomever he could grab from Sosh and the 101st Airborne Division. His task was massive. But he bristled at the suggestion that he needed a lifeline from Washington. Petraeus had always believed that he could make up for a lack of resources with more effort. War was about will, perseverance, force of personality, and determination. No one possessed those qualities in greater abundance; he’d proven it his entire career. It wasn’t in his nature to admit that he was failing. As Jack Galvin had observed twenty years earlier, he never admitted mistakes.

Petraeus led Luck’s team through a three-hour briefing. It rapidly turned contentious, with Luck interrupting several times to ask him what he needed to speed the development of the Iraqi forces. Soon the exasperated general was waving his wallet at Petraeus. “Dave, here, take my wallet,” he said in his southern drawl. “I am not here to criticize you. I am here to help you.”

When that failed, Luck tried a new line of questioning. How many Iraqi battalions would it take to secure Iraq without the United States? The answer, Petraeus said, depended on a host of factors—the enemy’s strength, politics, and the quality of the battalion and brigade commanders.

“Come on, Dave! What’s the requirement?” asked Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, another member of Luck’s team. Petraeus, his voice tight and angry, repeated his earlier caveats. But Odierno wasn’t going to let it go.
“What is the requirement?”
he demanded again.

After the meeting, Odierno spoke privately to Petraeus. The two generals had sped up the career ladder ahead of their peers and had both commanded divisions in northern Iraq in 2003. Petraeus’s 101st Airborne Division was everyone’s favorite success story. Odierno’s 4th Infantry Division was cited as an example of the overaggressive failed tactics in the early days of the war. The criticism actually had seemed to burnish his reputation with Rumsfeld, who favored a hard-nosed approach. “Look, you need to understand that Washington is impatient,” said Odierno, who stood six feet four inches tall and had the body of an offensive lineman. He towered over his much smaller colleague.

“I got it,” Petraeus replied. “But there is hardly a Ministry of Defense
here. There is hardly a Ministry of the Interior. There is no training and doctrine command.” His biggest problem was finding Iraqi commanders who wouldn’t abandon their troops in the middle of a firefight. He needed time.

“The best leaders we have found so far are from a jail alumni association,” Petraeus told Odierno. He was referring to an unplanned unit that the interim interior minister had created and named the Special Police Commandos. “This is the force that will save Iraq,” the minister had boasted to him in the fall of 2004. At first Petraeus had been skeptical; the Iraqis regularly made grand promises that never panned out. When he finally went to see them he’d been impressed. Several hundred commandos, clad in mismatched uniforms and led by tough sergeants, were training at a bombed-out base just beyond the western gate to the Green Zone. Iraqi units typically did a horrible job maintaining their equipment, but the commandos’ weapons, scrounged from Saddam-era stockpiles, were clean and well oiled. Petraeus had been knocking his head against a wall for months trying to build a unit like the commandos, with little success. Out of nowhere a seemingly outstanding unit had appeared only a few hundred yards from his headquarters. It was almost too good to be true—a desert mirage.

“How did you pick these guys?” Petraeus asked the commander of the unit, Major General Andan Thavit, who also happened to be the interim interior minister’s uncle.

“I knew them all in jail. Every one of us was arrested by Saddam,” Thavit replied. He had been a two-star general in Saddam’s intelligence service until an unsuccessful 1995 coup attempt landed him on death row. Before his nephew summoned him to Baghdad, the jowly sixty-three-year-old general had been sitting at home. Now he ruled his men with a mixture of fear and charisma. Thavit wore black leather jackets regardless of the weather and chain-smoked. When commandos entered his sparse office, they stamped their right boot, flashed an exaggerated salute, and stood rigidly at attention. He frequently threatened to cut off the testicles of any of his soldiers caught stealing. No one was entirely sure if he was kidding.

Petraeus supplied them with uniforms, ammunition, and a fleet of camouflage-painted Dodge Ram pickups with machine guns bolted to the
back. The commandos raced off to fight insurgents. In Mosul, occupying police stations that had been overrun in the November 2004 fighting, they withstood a four-hour barrage that killed twelve commandos but didn’t break the unit. Without them, Mosul never would have been able to participate in the January elections, Petraeus said.

The commandos were not perfect soldiers, by any means. They looted constantly. “Every time they’d move from one place to another they’d take a lot of stuff with them. It was just very unprofessional conduct,” Petraeus recalled. In early 2005 there were persistent but unproven rumors that they were abusing prisoners. In the spring Petraeus obtained pictures of detainees who had been beaten in the commandos’ custody. He was furious. “I know you guys think you know [how to handle Iraqis] better than we do and that a little abuse is accepted,” he told Thavit angrily. “It is not acceptable.” Thavit promised to stop immediately.

At the time Petraeus had other problems. His command was now responsible for training and equipping more than 100 battalions, the growing commando force, and more than 130,000 regular police. To meet the growing demand he figured he needed to add about 150 U.S. troops to his 550-soldier training outfit. The request, however, languished at Casey’s level for months. Finally Petraeus demanded a meeting with Casey’s chief of staff, Marine Corps Major General Tim Donovan, who had to sign off on the request before it could be sent to the Pentagon. For the next five hours he and his staff went through all 150 positions in the manning document with Donovan, justifying the need for each one. They jokingly dubbed the marathon session “Operation Breaking of the Will.” A few days later, Donovan ran into Petraeus at Al Faw Palace and told him that he was going to have to trim the request a bit more. “Goddammit, chief, you are screwing us,” Petraeus yelled, slamming his fist into the wall.

Abizaid had promised Petraeus whatever he needed, but he wasn’t getting it. Petraeus didn’t directly blame Casey for the struggles he was having finding troops for his staff. After a rocky start, the relationship between the two generals had warmed. Instead he guessed that both Casey and Abizaid were under pressure from Rumsfeld to bring down troop numbers. Even a request for a measly 150 soldiers was going to set off alarms in the Pentagon.

Casey
was
under pressure from Rumsfeld to cut forces, but some of the pressure was also self-generated. He firmly believed that the longer the United States stayed in Iraq, the longer radical groups such as Al Qaeda would pick away at its forces. Sooner or later the attacks would exhaust the patience of the American people. The only way to win was to pare back troop levels and make the Iraqis do more. Casey knew that his subordinate commanders, including Petraeus, weren’t going to volunteer to get by with fewer soldiers. Iraq was a “troop sump,” he said, meaning there was an almost endless supply of tasks to be done in the country. If he didn’t set tight limits, he believed, the force would grow forever.