The War Within (15 page)

* * *

Bush later confirmed to me that O'Sullivan's reports contradicted a lot of what he was hearing from Rumsfeld, Casey and Khalilzad.

"The whole time I'm asking the question, 'Are people able to live peaceful lives?'" the president recalled. O'Sullivan was saying no, and he agreed. "The answer's also no from the number of deaths I'm seeing and the number of, you know, the famous attacks chart." Also, the reports of 50 bodies a day showing up bound, with bullets in the back of the head.

"It's a sign that the strategy's not working," Bush said. "It becomes apparent when you're picking up reports saying,

'Twenty-five people murdered here. Thirty people's throats slit here. Fifty-five here. Ethnic cleansing. Refugees.

Neighborhoods that were once mixed are now pure.' I mean, it was beginning to accelerate."

He added, "The fundamental question at this point in time, during this period of time, one would ask, 'Why do you think it's possible to design a strategy that will work in the face of what you're seeing every day?'" The answer, he said, was "People want to live in peace."

I noted that a desire to live in peace does not itself provide the means to achieve peace.

"Correct," he said, then added that the U.S. military could win battles. "Remember, every time we show up, we whip these people." The question, he said, was whether the Iraqi government could provide security, help people find work, and improve the availability of basic services.

"So you're pretty hot during this period?" I asked him.

"You mean, meaning angry?" the president said. "No, no, no."

"No, not angry, no," I said.

"Well, that's what hot means."

"Well, wait a minute," I said. "We've got increasing violence, we've got somebody like Meghan [O'Sullivan] and some of the intel peopleÖ"

"I'm concerned it's not working," he said. "Period."

"Right, exactly," I said. "And so your usual line is, fix it."

"Yeah, but in this case, yeah," the president said. "But this case, the fix-it was Stephen J. Hadley." Looking toward Hadley, who was sitting on a couch in the Oval Office, he asked, "Is it 'J'?"

"It is 'J,'" said Hadley. He added, as if to give the president a talking point, "But it was
your
team responding to
your
direction."

"Well," the president replied, "that's what I said."

Of course, what he had really said, what he had stressed again and again in our interviews, was that Hadley was the engine driving a lot of this.

"Sure," I said. "Other words, he's the head man in terms of implementation."

"He's the guy," the president said. "Look, here's the thing. Hadley knows me well enough that we don't need a major seminar to figure out that we got to do something different. So he starts a very thorough process and keeps me posted."

Iraq was the most important issue in Bush's presidency. He was commander in chief, and he knew the war was essentially failing. By his own account, he was thinking about it all the time. So I asked, "Did you give them a deadline at this point?"

"I don't think I did," the president said. "This is nothing that you hurry."

But how could there be no deadline, no hurry, three and a half years into a failing war?

* * *

When David Satterfield considered the credibility of the military's reports from Iraq, he thought back to early 2001, after Ariel Sharon had taken office as Israeli prime minister. Satterfield, then 46 and deputy assistant secretary of state for the Near East, had met with the new prime minister after midnight at his residence. One of the most controversial figures in Israel's history, Sharon had been a military general and later defense minister. That night, Sharon devoured a huge platter of sushi while giving a lecture, repeatedly stubbing his finger on the table for emphasis. He predicted he would remain in power for years, because while he did not have the support of the extreme right and certainly not the left, he claimed he had the all-important center.

"I will tell you something else," Sharon insisted. "I was a general. I know the generals lie. They lie to themselves and they lie to the politicians. They will never be able to lie to me."

It was a great speech, Satterfield thought, and good advice. After a year of listening to General Casey's briefings in Iraq, which presented the prospects through the most rose-colored lens, Satterfield had asked him, "George, explain to us what's happening on the ground. How are you assessing what 'clear' means? What 'secure' means? We see these color charts of this neighborhood cleared. What does it mean? How are your metrics coming out? We want to see the tracking, day by day, week by week."

Casey's response was "It's tough. We're moving. We're succeeding." Satterfield didn't think Casey or the military were lying. That was just the way they did business, clinging to their optimism and can-do spirit. But he couldn't shake the memory of Sharon's edict: The generals lie to themselves and lie to the politicians.

* * *

"Senator, are we winning in Iraq?" NBC's David Gregory asked Arizona's John McCain on the Sunday, August 20, 2006, episode of
Meet the Press.

"I don't think so," McCain replied, "but I'm not sure that it's turned into a civil warÖ. But it's a very difficult situation. We've got to win, we doóstill do not have enough of the kind of troops we need over there, and it's going to be a very difficult process."

"The president has said repeatedly that he has a strategy to win," Gregory said, "that if his commanders want more forces, they will get them. Should more troops be sent?"

"Well, I think it's been well documented now that we didn't have enough there from the beginning, that we allowed the looting, that we did not have control," McCain replied. "We make mistakes in every war, and serious mistakes were made here. The question is, are we going to be able to bring the situation under control now? I still believe we can."

"Do you think military commanders on the ground are asking for more troops?" Gregory asked.

"I know that military commanders on the ground need more troops," McCain replied.

* * *

The next day, August 21, despite the criticisms that were now building from allies and opponents alike, with some like McCain calling for more troops and others demanding a timeline for withdrawal, the president passionately defended his Iraq policy in a news conference. He acknowledged that the increasing sectarian violence and growing U.S. casualties were "straining the psyche of our country," but he argued that withdrawing from Iraq too quickly would carry grave consequences.

"Leaving before the job was done would send a signal to our troops that the sacrifices they made were not worth it.

Leaving before the job is done would be a disaster," Bush said.

"You know, it's an interesting debate we're having in America about how we ought to handle Iraq," he said, not mentioning the behind-the-scenes debate that was now under way within his own administration. "There's a lot of peopleógood, decent peopleósaying, 'Withdraw now.' They're absolutely wrong. It would be a huge mistake for this country."

He insisted that the war in Iraq was vital to the larger struggle against global terrorism. "If you think it's bad now, imagine what Iraq would look like if the United States leaves before this government can defend itself and sustain itself."

The president's once ambitious goals for Iraq seemed to have evaporated. No longer able to argue that the U.S.

presence was making the situation in Iraq better, he was left to argue only that leaving would make it worse.

* * *

On Thursday, August 24, General Abizaid toured two of Baghdad's violent neighborhoods, accompanied by
Washington Post
columnist David Ignatius and a CBS reporter. For several months, Casey had thrown thousands of additional U.S. troops into the capital to restore security under Together Forward, meaning that U.S. and Iraqi forces would team up to regain control of the capital. As they tramped around in the 115-degree summer heat, Abizaid asked an Iraqi dressed in a white knitted prayer cap and robe if security had improved. "Thank God, yes!" he replied.

Though somewhat skeptical, Ignatius reported that the murder rate in Baghdad had dropped 41 percent that month, and his column in the
Post
the next day was headlined, "Returning Some Order to Iraq's Mean Streets."

The next day, Casey issued a SECRET commander's assessment. "Baghdad security improving but still long way to go," he said, adding optimistically, "On track to make noticeable impact by Ramadan"óthe next month.

The SECRET report contained statistics from Operation Together Forward, phase two, and said preciselyóthe military was always preciseóthat as of August 25, "buildings cleared: 33,009. Mosques cleared: 25. Detainees: 70."

That was an astounding amount of dangerous work for the troops, often going into buildings virtually blind, never sure whether the place was rigged with explosives or full of armed fighters. During this period, the report said, the military had taken only 70 detainees. That meant that nearly 500 buildings had to be cleared to apprehend each suspected insurgent, al Qaeda terrorist or sectarian extremist.

I asked President Bush about this August 25 report and told him I was astonished when I saw that they had cleared so many buildings and captured only 70 detainees. It meant that the enemy was moving out ahead of U.S. troops, waiting for them to leave before they returned.

"Oh, I can't remember my reaction to that meeting," the president said, before offering advice about how to write this book. "Look, use all this to paint the general environment of, it isn't working, Bush starts the processó"

But I wanted to know what he had said to his commanders. "Did you say to General Caseyó"

"I can't remember."

"Or Rumsfeld, 'Don, General, this isn't working.'"

"I can't remember what I told them."

Hadley interrupted and said that Rumsfeld and Casey were "partly telling him it's not working" because the statistics showed the problems.

Yet Casey had mentioned the 33,000 buildings as an accomplishment.

"I can't give you the interface [with] these men," Bush said, "because I can't remember it."

But at the time, David Satterfield at the State Department was appalled when he saw the report. Just more numbers, he thought. It was a smoke screen. It made no sense. CIA reports and other intelligence showed that soon after the buildings were cleared, various extremist or violent elementsóespecially the Shia militiasómoved right back in. The Iraqi forces that were supposed to join in and "hold" the neighborhoods and buildings had never arrived at full strength. And staying behind to "hold" was not part of the mission of the limited U.S. forces, despite what the clear-hold-and-build strategy said on paper.

Satterfield wished that the president, Cheney, Rice, Hadley, or Rumsfeldósomebodyóhad responded to Casey's reports along the lines of "George, this doesn't make sense to me." Instead, they had only nodded. Often, discussion at the NSC would descend into a Kabuki or formalized pantomime: Casey would give his report. The president would ask if Casey needed more forces. Casey would say he didn't, and General Pace, the JCS chairman, would remind the president that whatever was necessary could be made available.

At principals meetingsóthe NSC without the presidentóRice on several occasions blasted Casey's optimistic reports in front of Cheney, Hadley, Pace and others. Once she said, "We've had years of overconfident briefs by the military, gliding past the emergent problem. The president needs to be focused on the skeptical case, not the best case."

She maintained to her senior staff that she thought Pace, Casey and the senior military officials were "honest guys"

who just got caught up in meaningless numbers and metrics and were no longer measuring the real problem of sectarian violence.

She never brought her complaints directly to the president for two reasons. First, she was an optimist, as was the president. "Everybody has a tendency toward optimism," she said. In fact, the president almost demanded optimism.

He didn't like pessimism, hand-wringing or doubt. Second, Rice claimed that as secretary of state, she didn't feel it was appropriate to criticize Rumsfeld or Casey to the president. The military was their realm, not hers, and the president should judge their information and advice on its merits. "It's not that they're trying to pull the wool over the president's eyes," she maintained. "It's not that they're trying to deceive him."

So there never was direct conversation, and the Kabuki went on.

"Unless you are pretty blind," Rice said, it was obvious "this just isn't going in the right direction."

* * *

When Rice returned from her five-day vacation in West Virginia that August, she asked her staff for copies of all the major cables from Baghdad, including intelligence reports and estimates. She took the paperwork and some computer discs back to her apartment in the Watergate complex and spent a few days alone reevaluating the past year and the road aheadóand addressing the question: What is going on in Iraq?

She found two especially distressing issues. First, bringing the minority Sunnis into the political processóthe so-called political reconciliationówas supposed to stop the insurgency, but it hadn't. Second, the bombing of the Golden Mosque at Samarra had set off ethnic tensions and violence that had deeply infected the political process. How could reconciliation occur when government officials themselves were condoning and even inciting violence? The only slightly positive development was Anbar province, where it looked as if al Qaeda was wearing out its welcome and the population was turning against it.

* * *

On August 30, in Salt Lake City, Utah, Bush argued that leaving Iraq would be a total disaster.

"If we leave before Iraq can defend itself and govern itself and sustain itself, this will be a key defeat for the United States of America in this ideological struggle of the 21st century," he said.

"If we leave before the job is done, we'll help create a terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East that will have control of huge oil reserves. If we leave before the job is done, this country will have no credibility. People will look at our words as empty words. People will not trust the judgment and the leadership of the United States. Reformers will shrink from their deep desire to live in a free society. Moderates will wonder if their voice will ever be heard again. If we leave before the job will be done, those who sacrificed, those brave volunteers who sacrificed in our United States military will have died in vain. And as General Abizaid has said, if we leave before the job is doneóif we leave the streets of Baghdadóthe enemy will follow us to our own streets in America."