The War Within (45 page)

"The embassy is unsatisfactory," Keane added. As far as he was concerned, it might as well be in Singapore or Paris, given its commitment to the war.

"You need to guard against having success in the summer and then beginning to withdraw by the end of the year,"

Keane said. "It's a recipe for disaster in '08. What's happened is, we'll just start to slip back gradually to '06 levels of violence." Everyone needed to be on the same page, he said, "CentCom, the DOD, JCS, Department of State, interagency effort, NSC."

He said Secretary Gates and others in the Pentagon weren't on the same page with Petraeus.

"What do you mean?" Cheney asked.

Look at Gates's recent comments that he wanted to pull back by the end of the year, Keane responded. Gates had said during a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that if the plan to quiet Baghdad succeeded and the Iraqis began to step up, that he hoped "to begin drawing down our troops later this year."

"That is an indication to me that he really hasn't embraced this policy," Keane said, "because from the military perspective, you've got to go into '08 to cement this thing. We're two brigades into the surge. Why would a secretary be already giving ground on something unless he doesn't necessarily agree with it?"

As far as Cheney was concerned, Keane was outstandingóan experienced soldier who maintained great Pentagon contacts, had no ax to grind, and had been a mentor to Petraeus. There was nothing esoteric about Keane. He was all meat and potatoes, blunt and to the point. His reports proved accurate, and he didn't inflate expectations or waste Cheney's time.

Later, Cheney's deputy, John Hannah, informed Keane that the vice president had passed along his report to the president.

* * *

In Iraq, Petraeus had another "big idea."

He asked his staff: Who's the enemy? They were fighting al Qaeda, insurgents and extremists, both Shia and Sunni.

But some were reconcilable, while others would have to be captured, killed or driven out. The question was how to identify them. It required the meticulous shifting of intelligence to pinpoint exactly who could be won over and who could notóthe reconcilables and the irreconcilables.

He had his analysts draw diagrams and charts. Al Qaeda was clearly irreconcilable. But what about the 1920

Revolutionary Brigades, a Sunni insurgent group named after an uprising against the British in the wake of World War I? What about the various elements of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army? Who could be broken away?

Individuals? Groups?

"This is where you have to be immersed," Petraeus told his staff. He also brought in Derek Harvey, the DIA intelligence analyst, who would report directly to him.

Chapter 33

T
hat spring, Admiral Fallon attended a White House meeting on Iran.

"I think we need to do something to get engaged with these guys," Fallon said. Iraq shared a 900-mile border with Iran, and he needed guidance and a strategy for dealing with the Iranians.

"Well," Bush said, "these are assholes."

Fallon was stunned. Declaring them "assholes" was not a strategy. Lots of words and ideas were thrown around at the meeting, especially about the Iranian leaders. They were bad, evil, out of touch with their people. But no one offered a real approach. No one wanted to touch diplomatic engagement.

I later asked the president about this, and he insisted that he had been clear about the Iran policy. "Our strategy was to try to first convince them to give up their nuclear weapons ambitions, which means verifiably suspending their enrichment program," he told me. "And if they were willing to do so, they could come to the table. We'd be there with our other partners. Secondly, is to push them back where they're trying to promote their brand of government, one with the creation of a Palestinian state, two helping the young democracy in Lebanon, and three, succeeding in Iraq. And I was pretty clear about what our strategy was all along and our objectives."

Fallon tried to work the problem with others in the White House and Pentagon. But every time he tried to raise the issue, tried to argue that they couldn't solve Iraq without involving its neighbors like Iran, the reaction was negative.

"Don't go there," he was told.

"Bullshit. We're going to go there," he told some of Hadley's and Gates's deputies. "Because I can't do my job unless we get engaged with these guys."

The same went for the Syrians. He explained that when he went to see the other leaders in the Middle East, each had a variation on the same theme: "You started this goddamn war, and you had no idea what the hell you were getting into, and look what you've done, and look at the mess we're in now, and what are you going to do about this problem?"

There was lots of private hand-wringing about Fallon. Even Gates got involved.

"If they want to spend all their time worrying about me," Fallon told Gates, "and what I'm saying and what I'm doing, as opposed to trying to figure out where this country [the United States] ought to be, then I guess I'm the wrong guy for this job. Somebody probably made a big error when they decided to sign me up."

* * *

Petraeus traveled to every region of Iraq. He sought input from generals and privates. He walked the streets. He toured the neighborhoods where residents had been forced out and took stock of how much had changed for the worse. E-mail by e-mail, phone call by phone call, he also assembled his own team to come to Iraq and study the situation in depth.

He tapped Colonel H. R. McMaster, the bulldog architect of the Tall Afar campaign, to lead the effort. The assignment was to round up the sharpest military and civilian minds to appraise the current coalition strategy and determine how best to change it. It would become known as the Joint Strategic Assessment Team, or JSAT.

By early March, Petraeus and McMaster had assembled a team of nearly two dozen people, including economists, counterinsurgency experts, Iraq scholars, military officers and diplomats. Petraeus knew that many of them were critical of the effort in Iraq. That was fine by him. He could bear people saying that the emperor had no clothes, as long as they helped find a solution.

The group gathered in the North Ballroom of a former palace in the Green Zone. At the center of the ballroom, a table sagged under the weight of a stack of paper several feet tall. The documentsómostly classifiedódealt with every aspect of the war. The reading list included current campaign plans, character assessments of Iraqi politicians and statistics on violence, government services and institutional capacity. The JSAT members dove into the mountain of reading. They split into small teams. One team headed into the Kurdish territories and Ninewa province. Others headed to Kirkuk, Tikrit and Baquba and west to Anbar. A group went south to Basra and neighboring provinces.

Another toured Baghdad. Other members of the JSAT exploited their many Iraqi contacts to try to gather as much information as possible.

Back in the North Ballroom, the group members briefed one another. The Iraqi government was in worse disarray than they had expected. Levels of violence remained alarmingly high. The U.S. strategy that Casey had pursued until his last dayóto train the Iraqis and withdraw as soon as possibleóhad made the security situation more tenuous.

At present, the JSAT determined, the United States was "rushing toward failure."

After weeks of 14-to 20-hour workdays, the JSAT concluded that the conflict boiled down to a struggle for power and survival. The question was one that Hadley had asked months earlier: Is seeking reconciliation a fool's errand?

The JSAT recommended that coalition officials demand transparency from the Iraqi ministries and insist that they spend their budgets, something they hadn't done in 2006. It also recommended what some called the "lamppost strategy." Basically, that meant the Americans should take corrupt and incompetent Iraqi officials and publicly rebuke them, making it clear they were being removed from office because of their sectarian tendencies and setting an example that such behavior wouldn't be tolerated.

Militarily, the main thrust was to deliver population security on a local level by expanding "joint security stations,"

fortified outposts manned by Iraqi army, police and U.S. forces. "There's no commuting to the fight," Petraeus and officers under him were fond of saying.

There also was a focus on setting the proper conditions for economic reconstruction and revitalization, drawing Moqtada al-Sadr into substantive negotiations, identifying and eliminating irreconcilable enemies, and working toward accommodation both locally and nationally. The paper ran more than 100 pages. It would become Petraeus's new campaign plan and the best hope for salvaging some measure of success in Iraq.

* * *

Admiral Fallon took over from Abizaid at Central Command on March 16. "We're going to start immediately,"

Fallon said to his staff that afternoon. One of his first questions was: What's our mission? He read the mission statement and nearly gagged. It was too tactical. He said Central Command was supposed to be a strategic command thinking big thoughts, engaging the world from the Middle East to the Horn of Africa. "We need to rewrite the mission statement. You can't have a dozen priorities," he said. "That tells me that we're doing everything and nothing."

He broke the senior staff into small groups to think and debate for an hour. When he called them back, he said, "Now let's see if we can articulate what it is everybody said." It was pretty obvious. "Two houses are burning. And they're burning very brightly." Iraq and Afghanistan would be the priorities.

"How many people are down here?" Fallon asked, inquiring about the size of the CentCom staff.

One of his deputies reported that it was precisely 3,415.

"You've got to be shitting me," Fallon replied. "Give me a breakdown of where they are. How many people are on my personal security detachment?"

Several answers came back: 53, 49, 60-some.

"Okay, let's take the lesser number," he said. "Forty-nine people are on my personal security detachment. For what?"

That's how it's been, he was told.

"Show me the breakdown of these people," Fallon ordered. "What they're doing, where they came from."

Several dozen were reservists mobilized to protect the commander.

"We have a war going on in two places," Fallon said, "and you've got three dozen guys mobilized for how many years now to guard me? This is bullshit. I had one guy in the Pacific. Get rid of them. Now."

You will be going to war zones, staff members told him. You'll need protection.

"If I go to Iraq, Petraeus better be protecting me," he said. In Afghanistan, his commanders would do the same. Let's trim it to 12, he said.

But the security detail had to cover his deputy, his wife and his house, staff members replied.

His quarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa sat on a small compound with a fence surrounding it and a manned guard shack behind itóinside an already heavily guarded base at the tip of a peninsula.

"He goes now," Fallon said of the guard. "Get him out of here. Gone."

He saw that two big black SUVs were parked at his headquarters, blocking the front walk. "What the hell are these?"

he asked. That was part of his security. He would be driven a half mile from his office to his quarters. "They go too, right now. Get rid of them. Get me a goddamn sedan I can actually sit down in."

Did he want an armored sedan?

"No."

Fallon believed he was witnessing the legacy of the draft that had been in effect when he entered the service in 1967.

To the Army, labor was free. People were available on demand, and the military had not changed its ways of using forces carelessly and ineffectively, as though there were an unlimited supply.

* * *

Speaker Nancy Pelosi felt confident that the Democrats, with their new majorities in both the House and the Senate, would be able to force a drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq. She saw the surge as the president's attempt to disrupt the antiwar movement and the efforts of the Democrats. Pelosi knew that since 2004, Bush had ordered at least four troop increases, each of 20,000 or more, mostly for additional security during Iraqi elections. One such increase had stretched from May to October 2006, when the violence had escalated nearly out of control. So why was this surge different? She took the question directly to the president in the early days of her speakership.

"Mr. President," she said. "We've had surges." She briefly cited the others. "What makes you think this one is going to work?"

"Because I told them it had to," Bush answered.

"Well, Mr. President," she said, "why didn't you tell them before?"

Pelosi later told her closest staff members, "I'm very, very worried about the state of mind of a person who has decided to stay in a war without the public support." In early 2007, polls showed that two thirds of Americans didn't think the war was going well, while only 30 percent thought it was.

On Thursday, March 29, 2007, Bush and Pelosi were to speak at a ceremony under the U.S. Capitol Rotunda to honor the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II. Before the event, the president and the House speaker had a private moment in Pelosi's office.

"Mr. President," she said, "we owe it to the public to try to reach some consensus." She was convinced that the public wanted Congress and the president to come together on a solution, and she was willing to support legislation that would not require a troop drawdown, merely set it as a goal.

"My views are well known," Bush replied. "I've made myself clear."

"My views are well known too," Pelosi said. "But that's not the point. The point is we owe it to the public to try to find some common ground."

Bush wasn't interested.

The president later told me in an interview that he did not remember Pelosi's suggestion that they find common ground after his surge decision. "It created a lot of turmoil in the Congress," he said. "A lot of people on both sides of the aisle were hoping that I would pull troops out rather than put more troops in. And once you commit to more troops in, then the common ground, as far as I was concerned, would be to fund the troops going in and make sure they had what it meant to succeed."