The War Within (65 page)

A former CIA director and deputy national security adviser, Robert Gates had worked for five presidents.

President Bush asked him to return to public service and take Rumsfeld's place. "Life may be hard" as
defense secretary, he told Gates, "but this is a chance to make history."

Hadley had unparalleled admiration for the president and called him a visionary. "He defies the conventional
wisdom by his boldness," he said of Bush. "He has a greatness in him."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was skeptical of adding more U.S. troops in Iraq. "If we do it and it
doesn't work, it'll be the last bullet. The last card," she told the president. "If you play 30,000 American
forces, put out 30,000 American forces and things don't change, what do you do then?"

The Iraq Study Group recommended a drawdown of all U.S. combat forces by early 2008. But group member
Chuck Robb had threatened not to sign the report unless it included an option for a short-term "surge" of
American forces, the approach the president eventually adopted.

"The government is unable to govern," CIA Director Michael Hayden told the Iraq Study Group about the
political situation in Iraq. "We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government that is balanced,
and it cannot functionÖthe inability of the government to govern seems irreversible."

J. D. Crouch, Hadley's deputy, headed up the administration's formal Iraq strategy review. He believed the
president had one chance to get it right. "There will not be another bite at this apple," Crouch told the group.

Meghan O'Sullivan, the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, was among the first
administration insiders to realize in spring 2006 that the strategy wasn't working. When Bush asked her about
life in Baghdad, she said, "It's hell, Mr. President."

As counselor to Rice, Philip Zelikow wrote in 2005 that Iraq was a "failed state." He proposed a new strategy
of "stepping back," a middle course between adding forces and withdrawing.

A career foreign service officer and Rice's senior adviser on Iraq, David Satterfield thought adding more U.S.

forces would fail to quell the violence in the long run. He also worried that the president's rhetoric was too
triumphant.

"I'm willing to commit tens of thousands of additional forces," President Bush told Maliki privately in
Amman, Jordan, on November 30, 2006. "You've lost control of your capital. You're losing control of your
country."

"We don't have a plan to defeat the insurgency," retired Army General Jack Keane told the president in late
2006. A mentor to General Petraeus, Keane was a strong advocate for a troop surge. He traveled to Iraq often
and reported back to Vice President Cheney.