The Fourth Star (34 page)

Casey needed control of all aspects of the counterinsurgency campaign, Hix and Sepp argued. There was a historical precedent for the power grab. In the latter days of the Vietnam War the United States placed the economic and political development in the country under the control of General Creighton Abrams, who took over from William Westmoreland. Some historians maintained that Abrams’s “one war” approach had produced positive results by the early 1970s. The shift had just taken place too late—after the American people and Congress had given up on the war.

In early September Hix and Sepp described their report’s findings for Casey and his senior staff. Sepp knew that Casey’s father and Creighton Abrams had been friends in Vietnam, and decided to take a chance by playing up the personal connection. “Sir, it is time to do what your father’s friend Creighton Abrams did and merge the civil and military effort in Iraq under a single director, which would be you,” he said. Casey set his hands on the conference table in front of him, tilted his head, and stared off into the distance. He didn’t say anything.

Hix warned that the U.S. military could build Army and police forces forever, but without economic and political progress they would eventually crumble. “All these Army and police forces are going to be like Wile E. Coyote going off a cliff without an economic and political foundation underneath them,” he said. Hix then turned up the pressure. He understood that governance and economics were the State Department’s turf. But if the United States lost, the blame wouldn’t fall on the secretary of state or the ambassador. It would fall on Casey. Only the Pentagon had the half-trillion-dollar-a-year budget and the manpower to deliver. “This is your war,” he told his boss.

A few days later Casey flew with his two advisors to central command headquarters in Qatar so that they could give Abizaid and his staff the same pitch. Abizaid had just come from watching a video shot by French journalists that showed insurgents setting up a roadside bomb as bystanders and police applauded. As long as U.S. troops were in Iraqi neighborhoods, the violence would continue, he believed. He listened intently to Hix.

“So you are telling me that we have a total absence of effective government at the local level in Iraq?” Abizaid asked.

“Sir, in some cases it’s worse than just an absence,” Hix replied. The Shiite-dominated government was targeting Sunnis and driving them into the insurgent ranks. Fixing the problem would require about 10,000 additional troops who would report to Casey and focus solely on economic development, infrastructure repair, and local governance. In Vietnam, a slightly smaller country, Abrams had used a force of about 7,000 soldiers and aid workers.

Casey sent the report to Rumsfeld, but he and Abizaid decided that asking for control of the economic and political aspects of the war effort wasn’t going to work. “I made the judgment that it was going to take an awful lot of energy to get it done and the likelihood of success was low,” Casey recalled. At the time the State Department was proposing building Provincial Reconstruction Teams to conduct development projects in each of the eighteen provinces. The effort consisted of only a few hundred Foreign Service officers and lacked the money to make a real difference. Still, Casey thought that the civilian-led teams were a reasonable first step. At least the State Department was trying. The answer was to make State do more, not to do everything himself.

Casey did adopt Hix’s recommendation to train incoming officers in the principles of counterinsurgency. He didn’t need to fight with Washington for permission to do it and it didn’t take very many extra troops. The one-week immersion course was a significant step forward for an Army that was receiving virtually no counterinsurgency training back in the United States. One officer cycling through an early class said that his unit’s preparation for Iraq had consisted of “kick in the door, two in the chest,” recalled Sepp. Casey’s classes preached the importance of using measured force to avoid alienating the Iraqi people and stressed the importance of
mentoring Iraqi forces. Soldiers also received some instruction in Iraqi culture. Ideally such training would have occurred back in the United States, where there was more time. But the institutional Army, strained by the heavy pace of deployments, was slow to adapt. “Because the Army won’t change itself, I am going to change it here in Iraq,” Casey had said. The first U.S. officers began passing through the school, which Casey playfully dubbed the “Hix Academy,” in November 2005.

When he left Iraq, Hix went to work in the Pentagon, where his frustration grew. In Washington, the Joint Staff, the State Department, and the Bush administration were willing to do just enough to prolong the war, he believed, but not enough to prevail. Their outlook on the war was “eerily similar to the escalatory minimalist approach” that had failed so miserably in Vietnam, Hix wrote in an e-mail to Casey in early 2006. “We need to rededicate ourselves to winning the war,” he added.

His critique was almost identical to McMaster’s in Tal Afar. Hix, however, had played a major role in helping Casey develop his strategy for Iraq, which focused on pushing Iraqis to take the lead in the fight, and he felt a measure of responsibility for its shortcomings. In retrospect he said that he was too quick to buy into a bit of decades-old wisdom from British colonel T. E. Lawrence that became a mantra for U.S. troops throughout Iraq in 2005 and 2006. “Do not try to do too much with your own hands,” Lawrence of Arabia had counseled. “Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not win it for them.” By late 2005, Lawrence’s maxim was plastered on the wall of command posts throughout Iraq as if it were a religious commandment.

But Lawrence had been fighting a completely different type of war than the Americans were. He and his tribal militias were trying to drive out the occupying Turkish army with hit-and-run attacks, not govern a country. “Lawrence was the insurgent,” Hix concluded. “His insights are useful, but we were wrong to treat them as canon law.”

Casey’s small plane touched down on the narrow landing strip outside Tal Afar, where a car was waiting to ferry him the short distance to McMaster’s
makeshift plywood headquarters. After a year in combat, McMaster’s regiment was heading home. Casey took a seat at a table piled high with muffins, coffee, and sodas while McMaster delivered what he thought was a routine briefing on his pullout plans.

“Publish the orders,” Casey said suddenly as he rose to his feet. He pulled out a Bronze Star and pinned it to McMaster’s tan uniform. The surprise visit was an honor he bestowed on only a handful of his best field commanders. McMaster’s regiment had won praise for its successes. Like Petraeus, McMaster had had the good sense to make sure he had plenty of reporters around to document his troops’ triumphs.

When his soldiers had arrived four months earlier they’d found an all-out sectarian war. Gangs of Sunni religious extremists kidnapped Shiites and left their headless corpses on the city’s streets. The city’s terrified police force, made up entirely of Shiites, holed up in the ruins of a sixteenth-century Ottoman castle in the city’s center, sending out small teams to conduct reprisal attacks on mostly innocent Sunnis.

McMaster’s first priority was to stop the killing. At a time when many commanders were pulling back from cities and handing over their sectors to Iraqi forces, he established twenty-nine small outposts in an effort to separate the feuding groups. He replaced both the city’s proinsurgent Sunni mayor and its Shiite police chief with outsiders from nearby Mosul. Lastly, he closely controlled the Iraqi army and police forces in the city. With his area on the verge of civil war, McMaster believed that only an outside force could mediate between warring Sunnis and Shiites.

Casey and Abizaid had long believed that U.S. forces in Iraqi cities fueled resentment over the occupation, and emphasized that their top priority should be to build up Iraqi forces. McMaster insisted that only American troops could stop the killing. In sharply worded assessments, he catalogued the Iraqis’ flaws. Local Sunnis were terrified of the abusive Shiite police commandos sent from Baghdad. The Iraqi troops were incapable of standing up to brutal Sunni insurgents. They couldn’t feed themselves without U.S. help or repair broken equipment. When one of their soldiers was killed by insurgents, the unit wasn’t even able to ship the body home. Instead the battalion commander ordered his men to put the decomposing
corpse in a room with the air-conditioning turned on full blast. In a scene reminiscent of a Faulkner novel, the Iraqis then passed a hat hoping to collect cab fare for the 500-mile trip to the dead soldier’s family home in Basra. Eventually McMaster paid the fare.

U.S. advisors complained that McMaster didn’t give their Iraqis a chance. “The Iraqi division commander in Tal Afar was really no longer the division commander,” Colonel Doug Shipman told an Army historian. “He was now taking very direct orders from a colonel in the American Army.” In Baghdad, the U.S. one-star in charge of the advisory program told McMaster that he didn’t understand Casey’s strategy, which emphasized training Iraqis and taking a step back so that they could handle the fight. McMaster testily dismissed the criticism. “It’s unclear to me how a higher degree of passivity would advance our mission,” he said.

After Casey pinned on McMaster’s Bronze Star, the two walked down a narrow hallway and ducked into McMaster’s windowless office. Casey knew there was tension between McMaster and some of the officers above him. He told McMaster that he was an extremely talented officer who had a better sense for the war’s complexities than just about any other commander. But he needed to listen more and be willing to take no for an answer, especially when it came from his superiors. The two officers were polar opposites. McMaster, passionate and intense, was a risk taker who always craved a good argument. Casey tried to be a team player and searched for consensus.

By late 2005, McMaster’s approach of moving U.S. troops into Iraqi cities and safeguarding citizens was starting to gain notice in Washington, where it had caught the eye of Phil Zelikow, a top advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. To sell the strategy as a potential model for the rest of Iraq, Zelikow decided he needed to come up with a pithy phrase that described it. He settled on “clear, hold, and build,” a play on General Creighton Abrams’s “clear and hold” strategy in Vietnam. U.S. and Iraqi troops would clear insurgents from an area. Instead of leaving, they would stay behind, as McMaster’s troops had done, establishing small outposts to protect the people. Lastly, they would rebuild the government and infrastructure.

In late October, Secretary Rice unveiled the concept in testimony to
Congress and Rumsfeld hit the roof, insisting that the term made no sense. “It is the Iraqis’ country. They’ve got 28 million people there. They are clearing; they are holding; they are building. They’re going to be the ones doing the reconstruction in that country,” he railed to reporters.

Casey felt betrayed as well. When Rice next visited Iraq he pulled her aside. “Madam Secretary, what’s clear, hold, and build?” he asked.

“That’s your strategy, George,” she said.

“Well, if it’s my strategy, don’t you think it would have been appropriate for someone to ask me about it?” Casey replied.

Later that day, he confronted Zelikow, whom he had hosted in Iraq a few months earlier. Casey didn’t explicitly object to the “clear, hold, and build” phrase, though he agreed with Rumsfeld that the priority needed to be on building up the Iraqis to take the leading role. He was most upset that Zelikow hadn’t sought him out to discuss the idea before he and Rice took it public. “This is bullshit. It is personal. You came here and I opened the books to you. I gave you free access to everything, and you don’t have the courtesy to call me and tell me what you are doing,” he said. In fact, Rumsfeld’s insistence that the Defense Department dominate the strategy debate and his refusal to listen to outside critics had made such cooperation almost impossible.

With Iraq collapsing into civil war, President Bush cited McMaster’s approach as proof that after “much trial and error” and many bloody setbacks, the United States had finally found a winning strategy. An influential
New Yorker
article described McMaster and his troops as “rebels against an incoherent strategy.” By that point, McMaster’s regiment was home; U.S. troop levels in Tal Afar had been cut by more than half, and the security in the city was starting to deteriorate.