The Fourth Star (38 page)

On May 20, the new government finally formed with an obscure Shiite politician named Nouri al-Maliki as the prime minister. It was hardly the
moment of reconciliation and unity that Casey and Chiarelli had hoped it would be. A few minutes into the proceedings, the main Sunni coalition stormed out. Its members were angry that the government was being formed without a decision on who would run the Interior and Defense ministries, the only two ministries left unfilled. “I call for a withdrawal!” Abdul Nasir al-Janabi, a conservative Sunni Muslim, had bellowed on his way out the door. As the national anthem, “My Homeland,” played over and over, Ambassador Khalilzad worked furiously to persuade Janabi and his fellow Sunnis to return. Casey watched apprehensively from the sidelines dressed in his formal Army greens. It was the first time he’d worn the uniform in Iraq, and it reflected his fervent hope that the seating of the new government, which included more Sunnis than the previous administration, was going to be a major turning point in the war. “I wanted to show that this was a new setup, a new order for Iraq,” he recalled.

Casey met with Maliki almost daily for the first few weeks. His assessment was mixed. The new prime minister seemed sharper than Jaafari, but he had two big handicaps. “One, he absolutely believes the Baathists are coming back to power. He’s scared to death of them,” Casey recalled telling Bush and Rumsfeld. His other weakness was that he came from the secretive Dawa Party and was surrounded by stridently anti-Sunni advisors.

Casey hoped for teams of advisors from the State Department and other agencies to help the new Maliki government, the third since Casey took over in 2004. That spring, Bush had assembled his cabinet and ordered them to find people willing to go to Iraq. Secretary of State Rice was put in charge of making sure they delivered. Six days after the Maliki government formed, Rice announced that she’d found forty-eight people who were willing to help.

“Excuse me, ma’am. Did you say forty-eight?” asked Casey, who was participating in the White House meeting by video from Al Faw Palace.

“Yes,” she said.

“That’s a paltry number,” he replied curtly.

Rice told him that he was out of line. But Casey wasn’t going to apologize. Colonel Hix, who had done a major strategy assessment for Casey months earlier, had estimated that it would take as many as 10,000 people
to mount a reconstruction effort similar in scope to the one in Vietnam. Casey never expected 10,000 advisors. But he certainly had hoped for more than four dozen. The military could build up police and army units. But it desperately needed assistance developing the other parts of the government. He felt let down. Casey couldn’t help wondering whether his strategy depended too much on people who couldn’t deliver.

After the meeting Rumsfeld shot him a message thanking him for his patience with Rice. The defense secretary had been one of his staunchest supporters since he arrived, and Casey appreciated his strong vote of confidence. But he often felt that the defense secretary didn’t understand the war, or at the very least was losing patience. A few days earlier Rumsfeld had asked for a study that explained why so many soldiers were still being killed and wounded. Casey worked on the briefing with a few close aides, ordering them not to tell his field generals why he needed the casualty data. “For me to go down to my division commanders and ask, ‘Are you doing everything you can so your guys don’t get killed?’ It’s insulting,” he recalled.

The results were predictable. Most of the soldiers and Marines were dying on patrols. Rumsfeld’s request, though, sent a clear message: he wanted Casey to cut the fatality rate, and he didn’t want American soldiers intervening in the worsening sectarian fighting.

In mid-June Casey returned to Washington to update Bush and Rumsfeld on his plans for the rest of the year. By the fall, he said, he was on track to reduce the U.S. force to about 110,000 soldiers from the 134,000 then in the country. Before he made any further cuts he wanted to clear it with Maliki, but he thought it was doable. Despite the mosque bombing and the growing sectarian violence, Casey still believed that the new government could unite the country.

In Baghdad Chiarelli was slowly coming to the opposite conclusion. In the few weeks since Maliki’s government had taken office the sectarian violence had grown far worse. Major General J. D. Thurman came to Chiarelli in late June with a chart of the capital covered with red dots showing all the bodies found the previous day. Thurman was in charge of U.S. troops in Baghdad and reported directly to Chiarelli, who oversaw daily military operations throughout the entire country. Thurman’s chart was a cause for
serious alarm. There were more than a hundred dots, most concentrated in west Baghdad’s mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods, where Shiite death squads and rogue police units were pushing out the Sunnis.

“We’ve got to get in to see Maliki and explain what’s going on in the city,” Chiarelli said. As a start, he hoped to lock down Sadr City, which had become a staging ground for the death squads.

A few hours later he and a senior British general from Casey’s staff laid the chart in front of the stoic prime minister. “This is not all the bodies. These are just the bodies we’re finding,” Chiarelli said. The Iraqi army and police had probably picked up dozens more. Most of the victims had been bound and blindfolded before they were shot in the head, he explained.

Maliki studied it intently for several minutes but didn’t seem overly alarmed. “It was much worse under Saddam,” he told the stunned generals, referring to the intimidation and murder inflicted against his people—the Shiites—by the old regime. When it came to Sadr City, he would not budge: any operations in the Shiite slum had to be cleared through his office.

Chiarelli’s doubts about Maliki grew more acute over the course of the summer. It was late one night when one of his staff officers stopped Chiarelli in the hallways at Al Faw Palace. There was highly classified information that he needed to share as soon as possible. “It’s bad,” the officer advised. The next day, Chiarelli sat in a windowless secure room on the palace’s second floor reading transcripts of translated conversations involving Maliki. (The United States has never publicly acknowledged listening in on the conversations of senior officials.) There were late-night telephone calls from the prime minster to one of his aides, a woman named Bassima al-Jaidri, who had served as a civilian in Saddam’s military. As they conversed, she urged Maliki to remove certain Sunni commanders in the army and replace them with Shiite officers. It was clear that Maliki was under tremendous pressure from Shiite political parties to fashion the army into a sectarian force. Chiarelli got updates every day on highly classified intelligence, but rarely was the information so revealing. When Casey read the transcripts the following day in his office, he, too, looked astounded.

It was standard practice for Casey or his staff to update the prime minister before a sensitive military operation. A few weeks later another classified
intelligence report showed the cell phone and text messaging traffic from Maliki’s office after he and his aides received briefings about a pending raid. Minutes after the update, people in Maliki’s office were making calls to pass on key details—the intended target, where the U.S. forces were headed, which bridges and roads would be blocked. It wasn’t clear who was responsible for the leaks or exactly whom they were telling, but it certainly looked as if they were tipping off potential targets. The report stung Chiarelli. He’d made it a personal policy to treat Iraqis as full partners, and here was strong proof that his assumptions about them were flawed.

The leaks from Maliki’s office weren’t entirely surprising. He was new and inexperienced. He had been a virtual unknown, at least to U.S. officials, when he was finally chosen after a five-month impasse. As a compromise candidate from the tiny Dawa Party, Maliki’s greatest challenge in his first months in office was to hold together his shaky Shiite coalition, which included supporters in parliament who were opposed to cooperating with the Americans. In the best possible light, tipping off fellow Shiites about raids was a way for Maliki to build credibility with a powerful constituency that he needed to survive Iraq’s unforgiving politics. And official American policy—reiterated by every senior official from Bush down—was to help Maliki succeed. But Casey and Chiarelli needed to do something. They couldn’t confront Maliki directly without risking a major rupture with their new partner, but they couldn’t let the leaks continue, either. In the future they decided to delay briefing him and his aides until minutes before a sensitive operation was planned to begin.

Casey had been back from leave only a few hours when Chiarelli cornered him after the regular morning update. “This is the last chance to extend the Strykers, and I think we need to do it,” he said. He was referring to the 172nd Stryker Brigade, named for its armored vehicles, which could survive a rocket-propelled grenade blast but were still nimble enough to
negotiate most of Baghdad’s streets. The brigade’s soldiers and equipment were packing up to go home after a year. Chiarelli and Casey had talked about halting the unit’s departure when Casey was in the United States. He had been reluctant to agree. Adding more forces might lead to a temporary reduction in violence, but more troops couldn’t fix the underlying political disputes fueling the war, Casey believed. Now that they were face-to-face, he could see the fear in Chiarelli’s eyes. Baghdad was falling apart.

Casey called Rumsfeld, who signed off on the extension. Later he explained his rationale in an e-mail to the defense secretary and Abizaid. “John/Mr. Secretary … We’re in a very fluid situation here,” he wrote, describing the latest wave of kidnappings, car bombs, and murders. The seating of the Maliki government hadn’t reduced violence, as he had expected. In fact, it was getting worse. “We’re beginning to see retaliatory efforts by Shia extremists as less tit-for-tat violence and more as a semi-organized effort to expand geographic control into Sunni areas.” Then came the hard admission: “We need … to keep more coalition troops here than I originally intended to help the Iraqis through this.”

A single additional brigade wouldn’t change anything permanently. Casey wanted Rumsfeld and Abizaid to know he wasn’t losing faith in the strategy all three of them had decided upon. “I firmly believe,” he wrote, “that the longer [the Iraqis] feel they can rely on us, the longer it’s going to take them to find the political will to reconcile—which they must do for Iraq to move forward. The extra brigade will help the security situation, but it’s not likely to have a decisive effect without a commitment from the religious and political leadership of Iraq to stop the sectarian killing—something they are not ready to do.”

Casey had worked himself into a corner. After insisting since his arrival that there was no military answer to the violence in Iraq, he was now admitting that a political solution wasn’t likely anytime soon. He told himself that insurgencies typically take a decade to resolve and that the recent setbacks were just part of that long, slow process. The truth was that after two years in Iraq, he was running out of ideas.

Shortly after extending the 172nd Brigade, Rumsfeld rushed to Fort Wainwright, Alaska, to meet with the soldiers’ spouses, who were furious and felt betrayed. About 300 soldiers in the Stryker unit had already made
it home to Alaska. They had to head back immediately to Iraq. Another 300 were in Kuwait. For weeks after his decision, Casey received nightly e-mails from wives chastising him for keeping their husbands in the war zone for another four months. Reading them was painful. He knew better than most generals the helpless feeling that worried families experienced as they waited for their loved one to return from a war. He’d never forgotten what it was like standing in the passenger lounge at Baltimore-Washington International Airport as his dad disappeared down the jetway, headed back to Vietnam for his third tour. If anything, senior Bush administration officials fretted that his concern over the strain on the force had made him too reluctant to ask for additional troops.

Casey was scheduled to come home in the spring of 2007 and there were already quiet discussions about who would replace him. When Chiarelli was home on leave in August, he had stopped by the Pentagon and heard the buzz that he was likely to get the top job in Iraq. Later that day, he ran into Celeste Ward, his civilian political advisor, who was also home on leave. Summoning her into a vacant office, he told her that he might be asked to replace Casey and come back for a third tour. Would she be interested in working as his political advisor?

“I don’t know,” she replied. She was two-thirds of the way through her second tour and ready to put Iraq behind her. With the way things were going in Iraq, Ward was surprised Chiarelli was even interested.

“Do you really want that job?” she asked him. “Do you want to be the person who is going to preside over the final debacle?”

“I think I can make it work,” he replied.