The Fourth Star (41 page)

Senator Clinton was just as searing. “Hope is not a method,” she lectured. “I have heard over and over again that the Iraqi government must do this and the Iraq army must do that. Nobody disagrees. The brutal fact is that it is not happening.” Abizaid testily shot back: “I would also say that despair is not a method. And when I come to Washington I feel despair. When I’m in Iraq with my commanders, when I talk to our soldiers, when I talk to the Iraqi leadership, they are not despairing.”

After the hearing Abizaid was furious. Rumsfeld had always served as a lightning rod for lawmakers’ fury over the foundering war effort. Now that he was gone, their anger was raining down on senior commanders, like Abizaid and Casey. “I’ll never do that again,” Abizaid fumed to his staff as he left the Senate hearing. “I’ll never go up there again.” In late October, Abizaid had accepted President Bush’s offer to serve as the director of national intelligence, a civilian job overseeing the CIA and other intelligence agencies, but a few days prior to the Senate hearing, after talking it over with Kathy, he withdrew his name. He was exhausted after more than three years in command and reluctant to take a political job. He also decided the position wasn’t right for him. He enjoyed thinking about issues such as the societal and political forces at work in the Middle East, and he disdained the grind of running a big bureaucracy. He had shown little success at getting the other parts of the U.S. government to support the war effort in Iraq. At times, he even had a hard time getting his Army to support his vision for fighting the war. Before Rumsfeld was fired, the defense secretary had asked Abizaid to postpone his retirement from the military to the spring of 2008, and Abizaid had reluctantly agreed. Everyone around Abizaid, especially his family, could see that he was burned out. He talked regularly about his desire to retire to the Sierra Nevada, thousands of miles from the second-guessing in Washington. “I really miss spending time with your mom,” he’d say wistfully to his children.

With Rumsfeld gone, the gulf between Casey and the White House became even more apparent. Bush was planning on giving an Iraq speech before Christmas and in mid-December assembled his advisors in the wood-paneled White House Situation Room to consider options. Casey
appeared by video hookup and argued for continuing with the current strategy. By the summer of 2007, he predicted, the Iraqi security forces would be capable of operating with only limited support, allowing him to begin a long-delayed drawdown in American units.

Bush wasn’t convinced. “So, more of the same?” he asked Casey doubtfully.

It was obvious the president wanted to send additional brigades to Baghdad. Casey reiterated that he was opposed to such a move unless Sunni and Shiite leaders in Iraq showed a willingness to reconcile. “If the Iraqis can get political agreement, then, if asked, we can surge,” he offered.

But Bush had concluded that if his administration didn’t do something to arrest the decline, Congress was likely to force a withdrawal. Even staunch Republicans were losing patience with the war. “We’ve got to go after JAM before the summer,” he argued. The discussion resumed the following day, with Bush pressing the case for more troops and Casey resisting. “We’ve got sufficient forces in Iraq,” Casey emphasized at one point, noting that, for all the country’s problems, the Iraqi army was not splintering along sectarian lines.

Abizaid, who was also present, took a middle course. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re against the surge?” Bush asked him.

“No, that’s not what I’m going to tell you. I’m going to tell you the pluses and minuses of it,” he replied. The extra troops would show commitment, reduce sectarian violence, and buy Maliki and other leaders time to make necessary political compromises. On the negative side, the surge would add strain to an already stretched Army, prevent the United States from addressing the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, and constrain the president’s ability to use ground forces if there was a flare-up with Iran. Abizaid also warned that unless the State Department devoted more people and money to developing Iraq’s government and economy, the surge wouldn’t work.

Bush had already made up his mind. A temporary increase in forces might be “a bridge to a better place,” he suggested. “Perhaps,” Casey replied, giving slightly.

Bush didn’t blame Casey for the failures in Iraq. “Everything he did, I approved. I am not going to make him the fall guy for my strategy,” the
president told his staff. Casey had inherited a mess when he arrived in Iraq more than two years earlier. The resistance had been growing and there was virtually no strategy to combat it. Neither he nor his troops had had any experience or training in fighting a counterinsurgency war. Casey had made mistakes. He’d underestimated the difficulty of building competent Iraqi security forces and had too much faith that elections would curb sectarian behavior and unite the country. But he’d also received little help or guidance from the rest of the U.S. government.

In late December, Gates arrived in Baghdad on his first overseas trip since taking over as defense secretary. He had sent word ahead of time that he needed a few minutes with Casey. When they were alone, Gates got straight to the point. The Army chief of staff job would be coming open in a few months, and Casey was the leading candidate. Was he interested? Gates asked. Casey said he was. He had been thinking about leaving Iraq for a while but wasn’t sure where he would go next. The chief’s job was the highest-ranking post in the Army. It was the job his father had once seemed destined to claim.

Chiarelli’s last day in Iraq was spent waiting for a plane. His one-year tour complete, he had handed over command to Lieutenant General Ray Odierno the day before and was due to leave that afternoon with his headquarters staff for Germany, where Beth and other families were waiting for their arrival. Everything about that year had been difficult, and leaving was no exception. The C-17 that was supposed to carry them home was late. Hour after hour he and his headquarters staff sat sprawled at the Glass House, a building away from the main Baghdad airport terminal that served as a VIP lounge. Even this long into the occupation, the place was a mess, with plywood boards covering the broken glass panels, and cheap and ripped chairs the only places to sit except for the floor. Their wait was the Air Force’s revenge for all the times he’d yelled at them, Chiarelli joked with his chief of staff, Brigadier General Don Campbell. As it got late, foraging parties set off in search of food. Somebody suggested going back to Al Faw Palace for the night, but Chiarelli said no: they should sit in the terminal until the plane arrived, whenever that was.

“I just don’t have the same feeling of accomplishment as I did when I left the last time,” Chiarelli told Campbell, referring to his tour with 1st Cav. He looked tired. He had been smoking too much and sleeping only four or five hours a night. Even now that it was over, he couldn’t stop replaying all that had gone wrong. Chiarelli was still hopeful he might be returning for a third tour in only a matter of months. He was already planning what he would do differently. “Will you come back with me?” he asked Campbell.

As his departure approached, he had written a long memo about everything that had gone wrong during the preceding year. Even the title, “What Happened During My Tenure,” captured Chiarelli’s shock and disillusionment. It was nearly six pages of observations, each carefully numbered, most of them about the Iraqi government’s failings: “We had high hopes that [Maliki] would come in and energetically help to stabilize the situation… What followed, unfortunately, was stasis and then a slow but definite growth of sectarianism on the part of the government… The IPs [Iraqi police] were corrupt and often participated in sectarian violence (kidnappings, torture, executions)… The Prime Minister has called us off of operations against JAM numerous times… We also have direct evidence that people from his office were tipping off potential targets.”

Chiarelli did not spare his own government. He had been reading a book entitled
Bureaucracy Does Its Thing
, a classic study written in 1973 by Robert Komer, a former CIA official sent to Vietnam by Lyndon Johnson to lead the civilian reconstruction effort. Komer had written his penetrating indictment of the war effort upon returning to the United States, and Chiarelli found that much in the three-decade-old essay still applied to Iraq. “Robert Komer’s observations,” he wrote, “are frighteningly apt here… ‘The sheer incapacity of the regimes we backed, which largely frittered away the enormous resources we gave them, may well have been the single greatest constraint on our ability to achieve the aims we set ourselves at acceptable cost.’” He closed the memo with thoughts about how to shift course. “The good news is that we still do have tools at our disposal, and some of our tools we have failed to use to their full capacity.” Chiarelli hoped he would have another chance to command.

Their plane finally arrived the next morning, and he and his staff
loaded their gear into the belly of the cargo jet and flew home to Germany. They arrived a few hours later to a heroes’ welcome in Heidelberg, held in the post gymnasium. Beth, his daughter, Erin, and his son, Peter, greeted him. Soon after his arrival they left on a skiing vacation in the Austrian Alps with Don Campbell and his family. Chiarelli was a nervous wreck, religiously checking his e-mail, hoping he would get a message about his next assignment. He heard nothing. At the end of their weeklong vacation, as the Chiarellis and Campbells were driving back to Heidelberg, they stopped along the highway for a snack and saw a German newspaper with a picture of Dave Petraeus on the front page. Chiarelli translated the story with his rusty German. Petraeus, it seemed to be saying, was the leading candidate to replace Casey. A few days later came the official announcement: Bush had chosen Petraeus as the next top commander in Iraq.

A
t 7:27 a.m. Casey took his place before a wall of video screens and waited for the first briefer to start his morning update. Instead Petraeus’s image popped up on one of the screens in front of him. “General Casey, sir, Dave Petraeus here. How are you doing this morning?” he asked, his voice echoing through the room. Petraeus had just arrived in Baghdad and was scheduled to take command from Casey in two days.

“Good morning, Dave,” Casey muttered. He was running the briefing from the Green Zone and Petraeus was at Al Faw Palace a few miles away. He hadn’t expected to see his replacement turn up so soon, and his weary tone made clear that he was ready to drop the pleasantries and get on with the day’s business. Petraeus didn’t seem to get the message, and he tried to make conversation by discussing Casey’s nomination to be Army chief of staff. “Congratulations on your nomination getting through the Senate Armed Services Committee,” he continued. “Let’s hope for a similar result when the vote goes to the full Senate.” Several officers in the room
blanched. The Senate had unanimously confirmed Petraeus for his new job, and his remark inadvertently seemed to imply that Casey might have a tougher time on Capitol Hill. A handful of prominent Republicans had already indicated that they were going to vote against him. Casey said nothing.

“Sir, your relief is here. You’re supposed to be smiling,” Petraeus joked, trying one last time. Casey gazed up at his replacement’s image on the screen in front of him. After an exhausting two and a half years in Iraq, he was ready to go home, but not on such a low note. “I am smiling on the inside, Dave,” he said.

His final days in Baghdad were full of small ceremonies and reminders that he was not leaving in triumph. Two weeks before, Casey had jetted back to Washington for the hearing on his nomination. In the Senate hearing room bright television lights shone in his face as he stared up at the two dozen lawmakers in front of him. He knew many in official Washington thought that he was being given the chief’s job as a consolation prize. The unspoken comparison was to General William Westmoreland, who’d presided over a losing war and returned to lead the Army. The thought burned him. Serving as Army chief shouldn’t be a reward, he bluntly told the lawmakers. It was a duty. “It’s about personal commitment to the men and women of the United States Army,” he said.

For Casey the three-hour confirmation hearing had become an endurance test; the key to surviving it was not to let the senators get to him. “That was sealed in my mind,” he recalled. The toughest moment had come early on under questioning from Senator John McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam who also came from a proud military family. McCain, who was readying his run for the presidency, had softened his criticism of Bush’s wartime command. He now placed the blame for the failure in Iraq squarely on Casey, and his disgusted tone made it clear that he considered Casey’s time in Iraq an unmitigated failure.

Sheila Casey, sitting in the front row, seethed at McCain’s rough treatment of her husband. Two years earlier he’d sought her out at a Washington party to praise her husband’s leadership. She couldn’t fathom how his opinion of her husband could have changed so radically, except that he
was now running for president. Although McCain insisted that he wasn’t questioning Casey’s patriotism or honor, the senator clearly was attacking Casey’s intelligence and military judgment. The general’s sins were denial and inaction. As sectarian violence rose, Casey had continued to offer up “unrealistically rosy” assessments of the war, McCain complained. Instead of arresting the decline by pushing more troops deep into Iraq’s most violent cities, the general had stuck with his approach of building up Iraqi forces and searching for a quick exit. “We have paid a very heavy price in American blood and treasure because of what is now agreed to by literally everyone as a failed policy,” McCain lectured.