The Fourth Star (42 page)

Democrat Senator Carl Levin prodded more gently, suggesting that even President Bush had conceded that Iraq was “maybe a slow failure.” Casey winced but refused to give an inch. “I actually don’t see it as a slow failure. I actually see it as slow progress,” he said softly. To Casey it seemed as if the White House and some Senate Republicans were trying to pin the failure in Iraq on him and shift the focus off the weakened president. He had been around Washington long enough to know that this was how politics worked. Still, he hated it.

In his final meeting with Maliki after returning to Iraq, Casey presented the prime minister with the 9mm pistol that he’d carried throughout his Iraq tour. Although most U.S. officials had serious doubts about Maliki, Casey still believed that he could overcome his paranoia and anti-Sunni impulses and effectively lead the country. “You are commander in chief. But soon you will have control of all of the Iraqi forces. I am giving you this as a symbol of the transfer,” he said, handing over the gun.

He spent a couple of hours with Petraeus in his palace office. A month earlier President Bush had announced that he was sending five additional brigades, or about 20,000 troops, to Iraq. Bush was gambling that the extra soldiers could drive down the sectarian killing in the capital and give Sunni and Shiite leaders in the country some breathing room to reconcile. In his confirmation hearing, Petraeus said that he intended to push his troops into Baghdad’s most violent neighborhoods, where they would live in small combat outposts and focus on protecting residents from the roving death squads and suicide car bombs. As they sat at the mahogany table,
Casey urged Petraeus to be clear about the change. “Don’t pretend that you’re still trying to put the Iraqis in the lead when you’re taking over security responsibility from them,” he said. “You owe it to the troops.”

Casey disagreed with the new strategy and insisted that, despite the rising violence, the government and security forces were still improving. “You’re in a lot better shape than people back in the U.S. think you are,” he said. Petraeus listened and scribbled a few notes. He felt a twinge of sympathy mixed with disbelief. After four years of war, Casey and Petraeus shared more than they sometimes acknowledged. They had spent more time in Iraq than any other Army generals and knew better than any of their colleagues the intense pressure and loneliness of commanding. Casey had given two and a half years of his life to a strategy that was clearly failing, Petraeus thought. Now he couldn’t admit he was losing.

The change-of-command ceremony took place the following day with Abizaid, who was in his final months as the head of Central Command, in charge of the proceedings. The three generals marched into the palace’s cavernous rotunda, where a crowd of about 200 had assembled. Iraqi generals and cabinet ministers filled the first two rows of seats. American officers, a mix of field generals and cubicle dwellers, sat behind them. The official change of command took only a few seconds. A military band played the 101st Airborne Division song in honor of Petraeus. Then Abizaid passed the Multi-National Force-Iraq flag, a gold-fringed banner bearing the image of a winged Mesopotamian bull, to a sergeant major, who handed it to Casey. Casey presented the flag to Petraeus, who gripped it tightly with both hands and flashed the ceremony’s only smile.

Abizaid stepped up to the lectern and did his best to buck up Casey. “History will smile upon your accomplishments,” he intoned, his voice bouncing off the palace’s marble walls. With his arms folded across his chest and his legs crossed, Casey looked as if he were trying to roll up into a ball. His eyes flitted over the rotunda’s crystal chandelier and marble columns the width of redwoods. In all his years in the military he had never felt so alone.

After Abizaid spoke, Casey stood at the makeshift lectern in Al Faw Palace. In his remarks he didn’t let any of his anger show. Pushing his glasses up on his nose, he praised Petraeus and in a final defense of his
strategy expressed optimism that soon the country would be able to “assume responsibility for its own security.” From the moment he had arrived in Iraq Casey had been determined to start bringing soldiers home. He’d constantly been casting about for the always elusive Iraq exit strategy. He wanted to win, but he also was determined to shield his Army as much as possible from the long, grinding war. “I didn’t want to bring one more American soldier into Iraq than was necessary,” he said repeatedly during his Senate hearing.

Now it was clear that Petraeus was going to take the war in a completely different direction. His remarks, which followed Casey’s, signaled more than just the changing of the guard in Iraq. They marked the end of the post-Vietnam era for the Army. Ever since the disastrous war, senior Army leaders had tried, and ultimately failed, to keep their force from becoming too deeply embroiled in messy political wars that defied standard military solutions. It was a pattern that had repeated itself in Haiti, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and then Iraq, where generals often focused more on exit strategies than on plans for victory. Petraeus wasn’t interested in the drawdown plans often advanced by Casey. Instead he wanted to push U.S. troops into cities and leave them there. Only a heavy and sustained American presence could win the war, he believed.

He spoke first to his troops. Their job was to reduce the violence and protect the people so that the government could function and the economy might return to life. “These tasks are achievable. The mission is doable,” he said, leaning forward and gripping the lectern with his left hand.

Next he spoke to the Iraqis. In his previous two tours he had sat through countless lectures from sheikhs, generals, and politicians recounting the country’s history as the birthplace of learning and the cradle of civilization. Petraeus addressed them as if he were the supreme sheikh of a proud tribe, referring to their country majestically as the “land between two rivers.” He had come back to help the
Sha’ab al-Iraqi
—the Iraqi people—build a new country and realize “the abundant blessings bestowed by the Almighty on Mesopotamia.” His last words were in Arabic.
“Baraak Allah fee a sha’ab al-Iraqi,”
Petraeus said—may God bless the Iraqi people.

A snare drum snapped out a deliberate tempo, and the three generals
marched out of the rotunda. Petraeus rushed off to meet with the staff he was inheriting from Casey and set them to work on his new strategy. Casey paused on his way out the door to shake hands, force a last smile for his staff, and pose for pictures before he boarded a cargo plane headed home. After a few minutes, he glanced up and noticed that Iraq’s defense minister, interior minister, and national security advisor had all formed a tight circle around him. The middle-aged men with graying hair and mustaches looked to Casey as if they had no idea what came next. They stared at him. Casey stared back. Eventually he draped his arms over their shoulders. “You guys are going to be fine,” he said. “You know what to do.” He was probably the only one in the palace who believed it.

While he was back in the States, Petraeus had done his best to keep up with the classified intelligence assessments produced by Casey’s command, but the reports didn’t fully capture how bad conditions had become. The night of the change-of-command ceremony he flew into the Green Zone for a welcome dinner at the U.S. ambassador’s residence. Even before the main course had been served, Defense Minister Abdul Qadir al-Obaidi and the Speaker of the parliament, Mahmoud Mashhadani, began screaming at each other. Both men were Sunnis. The volatile Mashhadani castigated Obaidi for not doing enough to help his Sunni brothers. Rising to his feet, Obaidi shouted that he was defense minister for all Iraqis, regardless of sect or ethnicity. The only thing that was stopping the two men from throwing punches was the narrow table. The U.S. ambassador calmed the two men down, but a few minutes later the screaming erupted again. A dispirited Petraeus excused himself before dessert. “I’ve got to get back to Camp Victory,” he lied. “We have another update tonight.”

A Black Hawk ferried him back to his stone villa in the shadow of Al Faw Palace. He spent most of his time there in one room, which was furnished with a bed and a desk. The bed usually lay unmade. The desk was piled with books, a computer, a secure telephone, and a picture of his son, who was in his final year at MIT and about to become an Army lieutenant. Tucked inside one of the desk’s drawers was a list of soldiers who had completed an excruciating physical fitness test that he had created in 1992.
Petraeus’s bosses had frowned on the test as an unnecessary distraction. His replacements had abandoned it, reasoning that they had better things to do than hover over troops with a stopwatch counting sit-ups, pull-ups, and dips. But Petraeus loved it. It measured the qualities that he valued in an officer: will, discipline, and perseverance. These were what he would need in Iraq.

As he settled into his cot, Petraeus’s mind was racing too quickly to sleep. He couldn’t even concentrate enough to read. The fight between the defense minister and the Speaker had thrown him. The two Sunni politicians were supposed to be political allies. They couldn’t even make it through a dinner together.

In his first days of command, he laid out his strategy in terms that even a soldier fresh out of basic training could grasp. The main mission was to make Iraq’s neighborhoods safer. Instead of commuting to the battlefield from big bases—some of which boasted swimming pools, bus systems, and post exchanges the size of a Wal-Mart—he ordered troops to move into austere outposts scattered throughout Baghdad. There they could keep a closer eye on Iraqi army and police forces and stop the worst of the sectarian bloodletting. Prior to the country’s descent into civil war, many of Baghdad’s neighborhoods included both Shiite and Sunni families. By 2007 there were virtually no mixed enclaves left. The sectarian cleansing in the months before his arrival ironically made Petraeus’s job easier. It allowed him to concentrate his troops on the fault lines between Sunni and Shiite areas where the violence was the most unrelenting.

Petraeus’s other big push was reconciliation. Most insurgents and militia fighters weren’t religious zealots and could be convinced to lay down their weapons. “We need to get as many people into the tent as possible,” he told his generals a few days after taking command. In the final months of Casey’s tenure, Sunni tribes in Anbar Province had begun switching sides to fight alongside the United States against Al Qaeda-affiliated Sunni extremists. The tribes were angry at Al Qaeda’s arrogance, brutality, and efforts to replace tribal law with a draconian form of Islam that even prohibited smoking. The fledgling tribal alliance, known as the Anbar Awakening, was one of the few bright spots in Iraq in 2006, and Petraeus was determined to find and exploit similar fissures.

Lastly, he told his commanders and his staff that he expected them to demand the forces they needed to prevail. President Bush had promised about 21,500 additional troops, but Petraeus was convinced that he’d need as many as 8,000 on top of that. The Pentagon’s Joint Staff usually didn’t deny field commanders’ requests outright. Instead it dragged its feet. Just ten days after the change-of-command ceremony Petraeus complained to his senior staff that he was “vexed” by the slow deployment of the reinforcements. The president had promised him that he would get whatever he needed for his strategy, and he intended to keep pushing until someone ordered him to stop. “We want the Joint Staff to tell us we can’t have the troops,” he told his generals in late February. “We are going to make them tell us no.” A few days later he returned to the issue. “We aren’t going to hold back on troop requests. If they tell us no, fine. I will state the risk to the mission. But they have to tell us no. We want them to tell us no.” Petraeus had been so worried about the troop issue that he seriously considered making his acceptance of command contingent on the president naming his old friend Jack Keane, who was a backer of the new strategy, as the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Keane could fight the Pentagon wars and let Petraeus focus on the real enemy. But Petraeus discarded the idea as too presumptuous. Instead he came up with another means of holding the Pentagon’s feet to the fire. Each morning he tracked his troop requests on a PowerPoint slide. If the Pentagon was withholding so much as a two-person dog handler team, he knew it and was willing to fight for it if necessary.

As Petraeus implemented his new strategy, he relied heavily on the 1st Cavalry Division, which had recently returned to Baghdad. Chiarelli had left the unit a little over a year before, but many of the officers and senior sergeants from Chiarelli’s days in command remained. These soldiers had absorbed his ethos and his ideas; they also knew Baghdad. Shortly after Petraeus was chosen for the top command in Iraq, he sent an e-mail to Lieutenant Colonel Doug Ollivant, the 1st Cav’s lead planner. Ollivant, who also happened to be a Sosh alum, had won a counterinsurgency essay contest that Petraeus had sponsored at Fort Leavenworth. His essay argued that 800-soldier battalions had to be the nexus for all security, reconstruction, and military training efforts in counterinsurgency wars. In his
e-mail, Petraeus asked Ollivant whether he thought the ideas he’d promoted in his essay could work in Baghdad. Ollivant said he wasn’t sure. In Iraq, the Maliki government was fueling the sectarian violence. U.S. commanders had to weigh their actions carefully to ensure that they weren’t building a Shiite-dominated government and police force that would crush the Sunni minority in Baghdad. Petraeus encouraged Ollivant to ignore the normal chain of command and keep feeding him ideas. “You’re a very bright guy and these are exceptional times. We’re going to get one last shot at this and we need to make it really count,” Petraeus wrote. “We’re putting it all on the line and we need to be cognizant of that. It’s not business as usual as I am sure you know.”