The Fourth Star (45 page)

He had decided to write the essay after attending a Purple Heart ceremony at Fort Hood. As he watched the troops receive their awards, he grew angry at his Army’s failings in Iraq. He was ashamed that he hadn’t spoken out more forcefully about the failures he had witnessed. By the end
of the ceremony he could barely look the wounded troops in the eye. “I can’t command like this,” he recalls thinking. He insisted that there wasn’t a lot of original thought in the piece. Rather, the essay was a distillation of conversations with fellow soldiers on patrols, in mess halls, and on training exercises.

Casey picked up the essay on the recommendation of Lieutenant Colonel Grant Doty, a Sosh alum who had worked for him in Iraq as a major and was now his speechwriter. Doty thought that he might want to send Yingling a note thanking him for writing the controversial piece. It would send a strong message to young officers that the top brass was willing to listen.

Casey said he would. But try as he might, he couldn’t get through the essay. When he reached the part that accused generals of lacking “moral courage,” he stopped reading. He had made mistakes in Iraq, but so had everyone. And he resented the insinuation that he and his fellow officers had caved in to political pressure. Even the oft-repeated charge that the generals had done little during the 1990s to prepare for insurgencies such as Iraq and Afghanistan left him raw. The country’s history was full of instances in which America had entered wars unprepared and made major changes. “I tried not to be pissed off about it. I did,” he said. He never wrote the note.

Chiarelli was more sympathetic to Yingling’s argument. If he had been a lieutenant colonel, like Yingling, looking up at the generals in their palaces, he probably would have written the same sort of thing, he told himself. Chiarelli had been deeply frustrated by his last tour and disappointed that he hadn’t been chosen to command. After spending a few weeks without a job, Defense Secretary Gates asked him in early 2007 to become his senior military assistant. Gates had been impressed by Chiarelli’s passionate presentation months earlier when he had been in Baghdad as a member of the Iraq Study Group. Chiarelli jumped at the chance to work with the defense secretary. It would let him stay connected to Iraq.

Chiarelli didn’t agree with everything in Yingling’s article, but he liked his willingness to prod his superiors to take risks. What Chiarelli didn’t like was some of his fellow generals’ circle-the-wagons reaction to the
essay—in fact, it disgusted him. The harshest criticism came at Yingling’s home base at Fort Hood, the vast post in central Texas. After the essay appeared, Major General Jeff Hammond summoned all of the captains on post to hear
his
thoughts on the officer corps. About 200 officers in their twenties and thirties, most of them Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, filled the pews and lined the walls of the base chapel. “I believe in our generals. They are dedicated, selfless servants,” Hammond said. Yingling wasn’t qualified to judge the Army’s generals because he had never been one and probably never would be. “He has never worn the shoes of a general,” Hammond told the captains and majors, many of whom found Hammond unconvincing. They didn’t want to hear a defense of the generals. They wanted someone to take accountability for what had gone wrong.

The higher Chiarelli rose, the more sympathy he had for officers willing to challenge the status quo in the Army. “The most important thing right now is that we listen to these junior officers. We need to allow them to write. We need to allow them to criticize,” he’d say. His vision was an Army officer corps more like the intellectually freewheeling Sosh department at West Point.

Chiarelli found that he liked working for Gates, who was pushing the military services to scale back purchases of expensive weapons systems in favor of equipment suited to Iraq and Afghanistan. He helped the defense secretary speed up the fielding of a new armored vehicle with a V-shaped hull that could withstand blasts from roadside bombs better than the Humvee. He also was happy Gates called for a bigger budget for the State Department so that it could play a greater role in reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Chiarelli’s job as the secretary’s senior aide practically guaranteed that he would get a fourth star. What he really wanted was to be the top commander in Iraq. In the fall of 2007 Chiarelli traveled to the Army War College in Pennsylvania to address generals headed to Iraq and Afghanistan. The darkened room with its big video screens and amphitheater-style seating looked like a NASA command center. Chiarelli had planned his presentation to be provocative. He opened with a searing seven-minute video that had been filmed by a reporter in Ameriyah just eleven days before Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl and the former insurgent Abu Abed met in the
Firdas mosque. The lights dimmed and the face of an Army specialist appeared on the big screen. “It’s a joke,” the young soldier from the video said. “We will have spent fourteen months in contact. The first week we were in Baghdad we lost two guys in our battalion and it hasn’t stopped since.” The video shifted to a shot of one of Kuehl’s Bradleys that had been struck by a massive roadside bomb in Ameriyah. Soldiers watched helplessly as six of their colleagues and an interpreter burned to death inside. A few seconds later it cut to a scene of the same troops storming into the house of an elderly woman in search of the triggerman who had killed their friends. The frail woman let out a terrified, feral wail. “God help me! God help me!” she pleaded.

The woman’s screams faded and the video jumped again. Now the troops had just shot an unarmed cabdriver who had ignored their orders to stop. A few minutes later they were rushing to save an Iraqi soldier whose legs had been blown off by a roadside bomb. It ended with a close-up of another young Army specialist angry at the extension of his tour from a year to fifteen months: “We were supposed to be flying home in six days. But because we have people in Congress with the brain of a two-year-old we are stuck here. I challenge the president or whoever has us here for fifteen months to ride along with me. I’ll do another fifteen months if he comes here and rides with me every day.”

The lights came up and Chiarelli told the generals that he was the one who had pressed Gates to extend tours to fifteen months after the president committed to sending the additional 30,000 troops to Iraq. The alternative, meting out three-month extensions over the course of a year, would have been even more painful to soldiers and their families. “It was a necessary evil,” he said. Then for the next hour he talked with the generals about his successes and his admittedly larger failings during his last tour. His biggest disappointment had been his inability to get the U.S. military more involved in the effort to build the Iraqi government. “If I got involved in Iraqi governance and economics, I got my hand slapped,” he said. “It wasn’t from Casey. It was from the embassy. And it frustrated the hell out of me.”

He was packing up when Casey walked into the room for his presentation to the same generals. He was the senior officer in the Army and moved
around with an entourage of colonels who reflected his status. “Pete, what are you doing here? I thought you were a horse holder,” Casey said, using the Army slang for an aide whose main job is to shadow his more important boss, in this case Gates. Casey was only needling him, but Chiarelli looked crushed. His shoulders slumped and the blood drained from his face. It felt like a jab, reminding him that he was still the junior three-star general and not a
real
commander. Chiarelli had always seen himself as a bit of an outsider within the clubby general officer corps. He regularly boasted that in his entire Army career he’d never been tapped for an early or “below-the-zone” promotion, like most golden boys. He was one of those rare Army leaders who had plodded up the chain of command, proving wrong all those who had thought he wasn’t quite good enough.

The rumor was that Petraeus was going to leave command at the end of the year, and Chiarelli had already started thinking about what he would do if he was picked for the top job. He’d push harder to reform the corrupt ministries and use the high-profile command to rally the military and the rest of the U.S. government to jump-start the economy. The job was just beyond his grasp. Chiarelli shoved his speech notes into his briefcase and quickly hustled out of the room.

Petraeus and Admiral William “Fox” Fallon boarded a Black Hawk helicopter for an aerial tour of Baghdad. Fallon had replaced Abizaid, who retired as the top commander in the Middle East a few months earlier.

Abizaid had left the Iraq war strategy largely to Petraeus during his final weeks in command. He’d signed off on all Petraeus’s requests for additional troops with no argument. Fallon, by contrast, had decided to focus his attention on what he saw as the shortcomings of Petraeus’s strategy, which he thought was failing. He’d crafted his own plan calling for swift cuts to U.S. troop levels and a renewed focus on shifting the fight to the Iraqis. Petraeus had invited him on the helicopter tour as a last-ditch effort to convince Fallon to ease off. The temperature had soared past 115 degrees
and the hot air pouring through the helicopter’s open windows felt like a hair dryer on maximum power. Soon every uniform was drenched in sweat. Petraeus’s enthusiasm bordered on desperation. After a few minutes, the two officers were hovering over downtown Baghdad; Petraeus was pointing out a soccer field. “They have real games there. The teams wear uniforms. You wouldn’t believe it,” he said. The helicopter banked over an empty public swimming pool. “They are fixing that pool, by the way,” he told Fallon. “You see that amusement park? It’s empty now, but on Thursday and Friday nights it is full of people.”

Fallon kept asking about the Sunni areas of the city, where trash filled the streets and stores were shuttered. Petraeus tried to direct his attention to more positive areas. After forty-five minutes in the area the two men went their separate ways. The sales pitch backfired. “He’s not seeing the whole city,” Fallon groused. He worried that Petraeus’s preternatural enthusiasm and ego wouldn’t allow him to admit that the war might not be winnable. Rumors of Fallon’s contentious visit spread through the palace. In the morning update, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, who had replaced Chiarelli as the number two commander in Iraq overseeing daily military operations, did his best to reinforce confidence in the strategy. He had played a key role in pushing for the extra surge forces and deciding where to place them. “My sense is that we are in the pursuit mode in many areas throughout Iraq,” he said. “The extremists are running in Baghdad. They are running in Anbar and in Mosul. The Iraqis are starting to see the results of our offensives.” Publicly Petraeus and Odierno weren’t going to show a hint of doubt.

When the two generals were paired up, some in the Army buzzed with concern about how they would get along. In 2003 they both commanded divisions in northern Iraq. Petraeus easily charmed the media and visiting congressmen, his division quickly becoming everyone’s favorite success story. Odierno’s 4th Infantry Division was often cited as an example of overaggressiveness in its single-minded pursuit of FREs—former regime elements. The generals clashed a year later when Odierno visited Baghdad as part of a Pentagon team looking for ways to accelerate Petraeus’s training of Iraqis.

In 2007, the pressure cooker of Iraq drew the two men closer. On
particularly hard days Petraeus and Odierno, recalling a Civil War moment that Petraeus had read about, would quote Ulysses S. Grant’s exchange with William Tecumseh Sherman after the bloody first day at the Battle of Shiloh. Unable to sleep, Grant was standing beneath a tree as rain fell on him. Sherman appeared out of the darkness. “Well, Grant,” Sherman said, “we have had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?”

“Yup,” Grant replied. “Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”

The really difficult days dwindled over the summer as commanders organized former Sunni insurgents into armed neighborhood watch groups, known as the Sons of Iraq. By the fall the United States had almost 70,000 sons of Iraq on the payroll. To control Iraqi neighborhoods, U.S. commanders blocked off neighborhoods with concrete barriers that made it harder for Sunni extremist groups and Shiite death squads to come and go. In some cases the Americans used the barriers to keep Shiite-dominated national police and army forces out of Sunni areas. The idea for the walls had come from the field, not headquarters. David Kilcullen, an Australian specialist on guerrilla war whom Petraeus had recruited as his counterinsurgency advisor, referred to the walls as “urban tourniquets,” a temporary measure designed to stop the bleeding so that the patient doesn’t die.

In September Petraeus returned to Washington to give his first assessment to Congress on whether his strategy was producing lasting results. He and his staff went through twenty-seven different drafts of his opening statement. The final version ran a stunning forty-five minutes. The Iraq debate had become too superheated for logic. So he decided that he was going to bludgeon skeptical lawmakers with data. His testimony was going to be a war of attrition.