The Fourth Star (40 page)

On October 12, seventeen Iraqi soldiers were arrested by U.S. troops in the Baghdad neighborhood of Mansour, a Sunni area that was home to Iraq’s elite under Saddam Hussein. The seventeen were from a predominantly Shiite unit based in Sadr City and were detained because they were far from their assigned sector. Under questioning, they claimed that they were on a mission ordered by the prime minister’s office. When word of the incident reached Casey, he demanded an immediate meeting with Maliki, bringing along Ambassador Khalilzad. The Americans had been hearing rumors of secret military operations by the prime minister’s office. To Casey’s surprise, Maliki admitted that he had ordered the raid, bypassing the chain of command that ran through the Ministry of Defense, where
the United States had advisors, down to individual Iraqi brigades and battalions. The chain of command existed to prevent one person from using the military for personal vendettas, as Saddam Hussein had done. Casey told Maliki that it protected him from allegations that he was using his forces to further a sectarian agenda.

Maliki, however, was unapologetic. Following the standard procedures took too long, the prime minister explained. Sometimes he got information that needed to be acted upon immediately. He was the commander in chief, and he would do whatever he needed to fight terrorism. Casey fired back that his actions had been unacceptable and asked that he stop.

“Is that a threat?” Maliki replied through a translator. (The Arabic word for “ask” has the same meaning as “order.”)

No, replied Casey, he was asking Maliki not to circumvent the established procedures. The Iraqi national security advisor, Mowaffak Baqer al-Rubaie, interceded to defuse the confrontation, and the meeting broke up a few minutes later, resolving nothing. “You shouldn’t talk to the prime minister like that,” Rubaie warned as they walked out. Afterward, Casey dashed off an e-mail to Abizaid describing the tense exchange with Maliki. “He either got the message and wouldn’t acknowledge it—or he didn’t get it. I think the former,” Casey wrote. “We need to get this stopped.”

Abizaid happened to be in Baghdad when he got Casey’s note. For much of the summer and fall, he’d been consumed by growing tensions with Iran and the Israeli war in Lebanon with Hezbollah. “My number one concern right now is a strategic or tactical miscalculation with Iran,” he’d told his staff a few weeks earlier. “We need to know what we are going to do in the first ten days of a war.” He ordered them to lay out 10,000 potential infrastructure targets in Iran just in case the United States was forced into a conflict. Abizaid also was wrestling with his own future. The president had asked him to serve as the director of national intelligence, a new post in Washington set up to prevent another 9/11 attack, and he was leaning toward doing it.

He still made regular trips to Iraq and talked almost daily with Casey by phone, but he’d largely left the handling of the war up to his friend. His public statements on Iraq reflected his belief that the overall strategy was working. “Despite the many challenges, progress does continue to be
made in Iraq,” Abizaid had testified before the Senate several weeks earlier. The e-mail from Casey, however, was worrisome. His relationship with Maliki appeared to be deteriorating. With the Iraq strategy review under way in Washington, Abizaid knew, there was an appetite for major change, and he feared that if he and Casey didn’t act, decisions might be forced on them. Abizaid met with both Casey and Chiarelli. He had a long discussion with Thurman, the Baghdad commander, who pulled out a city map and showed him how the Shiite offensive was driving Sunnis into only a few enclaves in west Baghdad.

He didn’t want to second-guess Casey, but he decided to be frank. “Sectarian violence in Baghdad could be fatal,” he warned in an e-mail to Casey on the last day of his visit. “We’ve got to reverse the obvious trends soon.” Maybe, he told Casey, their staffs could work together on coming up with new options for restoring security. Abizaid had been particularly frustrated by the Army’s inability to find capable officers to serve as army and police advisors. On one trip he’d met with an overweight, fifty-six-year-old air defense officer who was advising an infantry battalion in combat. The officer didn’t know a thing about fighting insurgents or leading an infantry battalion.

In his e-mail, Abizaid didn’t tell Casey what to do, but he did warn that “the dynamic needs to change.” It was as far as he could go without ordering Casey to try something different. As dire as Abizaid’s warning was, he closed by reassuring his friend that no one was losing faith in him. “Your personal leadership has already helped steady the ship,” he wrote. “I’m so worried about the situation that I’m going on leave next week.”

Casey didn’t budge. “There are no short-term military fixes,” he declared in a return message a few days later. The 4th Infantry Division was scheduled to leave Baghdad in a few weeks after a one-year tour. Canceling its departure, coupled with the arrival of the replacement division with nearly 20,000 troops, would have nearly doubled the U.S. forces in the capital almost overnight. But that was “a course of action I cannot recommend,” Casey explained, “until I see greater commitment from the Iraqis to solve the sectarian situation in their capital.” There had been 350 executions in Baghdad in the last twelve weeks, primarily by Shiites, he estimated. “While we will continue to do everything we can militarily to
contain sectarian violence in Baghdad, the situation will not improve until … Iraq’s leaders take appropriate action,” Casey told Abizaid.

It was a wrenching statement for an American military commander to make. There was nothing he could do to improve the situation. The best he could promise was to try to contain the Sunni-Shiite fighting until Maliki and other leaders took steps to halt the killing, though the prospects for that looked bleak. In the same message he had noted that the prime minister was imposing even tighter restrictions on operations, which had forced several raids to be canceled.

Casey had been reading Stanley Karnow’s history of Vietnam and was struck by how senior generals there also struggled with corrupt and chaotic governments. “What do you do when the president of the country you are trying to save has views that are diametrically opposed to yours?” Casey recalled thinking as he read one passage.

Since his arrival, Casey had told himself that he was responsible for overseeing the security strategy, while the embassy was in charge of governance and reconstruction. The violence, he now believed, was being fueled by political and sectarian disputes that couldn’t be repaired with military power. He could see the strain on his troops. “I had watched the Fourth Infantry Division in Baghdad, who had lived through this transition to the sectarian fight, and it really took a toll on our guys,” he recalled. “They didn’t understand it. They’d ask themselves, ‘Why are these people killing each other? We’re here to help them. What’s going on?’ It was really draining.”

As a young lieutenant in Germany, Casey had served in units ravaged by Vietnam, and the experience had made a profound impression on him. He still believed that a decent outcome was possible in Iraq and that troops should remain in the country to keep a lid on the worst violence. But he wasn’t going to commit his troops fully to a fight that he believed only the Iraqis could settle. Casey was falling back on the Powell Doctrine, the post-Vietnam dictum enunciated by General Colin Powell, which held that American forces shouldn’t intervene in messy, political wars that don’t offer clear exit strategies or outcomes.

Over the next two months, Casey found himself increasingly out of step with his civilian bosses in Washington, a situation he had once vowed
to avoid. A few days before the November congressional elections, Bush’s national security advisor, Steve Hadley, made his first trip to Iraq. Hadley was weighing whether to send in more troops. He had also seen the intelligence suggesting that Maliki’s government was acting on sectarian impulses to punish Sunnis. He wanted to get a read on the prime minister.

Hadley and his aides, Meghan O’Sullivan and Peter Feaver, met first with Casey, who insisted that progress was being made despite the rising violence in Baghdad and growing frustration with the war at home. Maliki’s government had acted in overtly sectarian ways since taking office, but Casey wasn’t convinced that the prime minister was driving the violence. In some cases, Maliki had been given bad advice by sectarian advisors or was too inexperienced and politically weak to stop the malfeasance. Maliki was also handicapped by his deep fear of a Baathist coup. On occasion he would inform Casey that he had intelligence of secret plots to spring Saddam Hussein from prison and spirit him back to Damascus. The anti-Baathist paranoia led him to distrust Sunnis, Casey explained. But he was confident that Maliki could still unite the fractured country. His government, after all, was only six months old and his military forces were growing stronger by the day. He just needed time and support.

After having breakfast with Hadley and his team, Casey handed them off to Chiarelli, who arranged for Hadley to meet several battalion and brigade commanders at Thurman’s headquarters. He then left the room so that they could get an unfiltered view of what was happening on Baghdad’s streets. The commanders’ accounts of the Maliki government were far bleaker than Casey’s, and their pessimism stunned the civilians. One officer said that in his sector police officers had recently driven through Sunni areas of Baghdad shooting up electrical substations to cut off the power there. Another commander was livid that the Ministry of Finance had closed the only bank in one of his Sunni sectors, forcing the residents there to make a deadly trip through territory controlled by Shiite militias to collect their monthly pension payments. What was the United States doing about this? Hadley asked. Very little, the officers replied.

As Hadley’s team prepared to leave for the airport, Chiarelli got an unexpected phone call from Casey telling him that Maliki wanted the United States to remove a series of checkpoints that had been placed around Sadr
City following the kidnapping of an American soldier near there. In the week that the barriers had been in place, sectarian killings had fallen in Baghdad, Chiarelli recalled. Shiite death squads were having a much harder time leaving Sadr City to conduct killing sprees in Sunni neighborhoods. Casey could have refused the demand by Maliki, who was under intense political pressure from his constituents to take down the checkpoints. But Casey believed that if Maliki was going to have a chance of succeeding, he couldn’t undercut him publicly.

Chiarelli felt otherwise. The order was like “a kick in the teeth,” he recalled. He explained what had happened to Hadley, who was still absorbing what he’d heard from the brigade and battalion commanders. For most of the ride to the airport, no one spoke. Finally the taciturn Hadley broke the silence. “I wish I had come here more often,” he said.

A few days later Hadley drafted a classified memo for Bush and his top advisors that gave the White House a picture of the depressing situation. “We returned from Iraq convinced we need to determine if Prime Minister Maliki is both willing and able to rise above the sectarian agendas being promoted by others,” Hadley wrote. “Reports of nondelivery of services to Sunni areas, intervention by the prime minister’s office to stop military action against Shia targets and to encourage them against Sunni ones, removal of Iraq’s most effective commanders on a sectarian basis and efforts to ensure Shia majorities in all ministries—when combined with the escalation of Jaish al-Mahdi’s (JAM) killings—all suggest a campaign to consolidate Shia power in Baghdad … [T]he reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.”

Hadley’s impressions did not differ greatly from Casey’s or Chiarelli’s. Where they did disagree was in what to do. Casey favored strengthening Maliki and his security forces. Hadley suggested a long list of possible steps, including more troops, which Casey opposed and which Chiarelli doubted would do much good.

In early November, after the Democrats took control of the Senate in the midterm elections, Bush fired Rumsfeld. A few hours after he learned of the dismissal, Casey wrote Rumsfeld a quick note: “Thank you for your
courage and support throughout this long and difficult mission. I really appreciate your leadership and I’ll continue to say so publicly.” Rumsfeld had not been an easy boss, but Casey had felt since their brief meeting before he took command that they saw the task in Iraq in roughly similar terms. And Rumsfeld had always stood up for him in Washington.

A few days after the midterm elections, Abizaid was summoned to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Abizaid had always been able to charm lawmakers. He was eloquent, witty, and, at times, disarmingly honest with them; he had a way of always coming off as the smartest, most levelheaded guy in the room. This time, though, the lawmakers weren’t interested in hearing what Abizaid had to say. They had brought the general to Washington so that they could vent their frustration. Abizaid had hoped to mollify the angry senators with a new military strategy. He’d been pressing Casey to bolster the U.S. advisory teams that were embedded in Iraqi army and police units. Abizaid believed the teams were the key to victory, and he had been frustrated that senior Army officers in the Pentagon had staffed them for years with mostly inexperienced troops. Abizaid asked Casey to triple the size of the ten- to fifteen-man teams. Instead of relying on the Pentagon to assign personnel the advisory units, he wanted to use officers who were already serving in Iraq to man them. “I believe in my heart of hearts that the Iraqis must win this battle with our help,” Abizaid told the senators. Only the Iraqis could end the country’s civil war, he insisted.

Abizaid tried to tout his new approach as a major change. But to the lawmakers the new plan sounded a lot like Casey’s current approach. The strongest attacks came from the committee’s two presidential hopefuls, John McCain and Hillary Clinton. For the first time in Abizaid’s golden career, powerful people were questioning his credibility and competence in public. McCain summarily dismissed Abizaid’s new plan as the “status quo.” The senator’s voice dripped with sarcasm and anger as he recounted for Abizaid the details of a mass kidnapping in Baghdad the day before. “Was it encouraging when in broad daylight yesterday people dressed in police uniforms were able to come in and kidnap 150 people and leave with them through Iraqi checkpoints?” McCain asked. “General, it’s not encouraging to us. It’s not encouraging to those of us who have heard time
after time that we’re making progress, because we’re hearing from other sources that it’s not the case.”