Chapter 29

On December 15, Bush and Maliki talked by secure video. The president asked the prime minister to approve additional U.S. forces. "View our coalition troops as troops that can help you do the hard work until yours are ready to go," Bush said. "Use our troops to generate calm in Baghdad."

Maliki mentioned he was speaking at a national reconciliation conference the next day and he would announce his approval publicly. When the translated text of Maliki's speech arrived the next day, there was no mention of approval.

The president was furious. Intelligence reporting indicated that Maliki had lost confidence in U.S. troopsóthey had not solved the violence problem. Maliki was saying: Why would I want more of the ineffective forces that will cause me only more problems?

* * *

Rice remained deeply skeptical of a surge, but she couldn't ignore the admonition of the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gulf states. The administration could not even appear to be pulling back from Iraq. For her, that killed the carefully drafted idea of stepping back, what she called the "Zelikow option."

In a subsequent meeting of the NSC, Rice was in a challenging mood. "Mr. President," she said, "I know you're going to get tired of hearing me say this, but I don't believe that the circumstances will permit a success based either just on a continuation of the status quo or just a surge in forces. You can surge all the forces you want, but [suppose]

the Iraqis don't do what they're supposed to do?" She said Maliki's Shia government had to be willing to take on their own peopleóthe Shia militias. "How are you going to make American forces deal with sectarian violence if the Iraqis won't?"

"I want to make clear what I see as the options here," Bush said finally. "We can hold steady. None of you say it is working. We can redeploy for failure"óhe looked over at Riceó"that's your option, Condi." Or, he added, "We can surge for success."

"That's not what I'm saying," Rice replied, realizing that she had set Bush off. "But what are you going to surge them for, is what I'm saying. It is also possible to surge for failure if we don't know what the additional troops are going to do." It was one of the most direct challenges Rice had ever made to the president, and she persisted. She said the Ministry of Interior was still practically overseeing death squads and a hundred bodies a day were still showing up in Baghdad. "We have got to determine whether or not this is a case of will" or a case of "capability" on the part of the Iraqis, she said. "If it's capability, then 20,000 American soldiers will make a difference. If it's will, they won't."

Rice refused to back down from her question about what more U.S. forces would do. "Tell me how that's supposed to improve security? And if they go in and just train more Iraqis in the way we have been training them, where half of them don't show up, that's actually not going to improve security."

* * *

Casey felt strongly they could never bring the levels of sectarian violence down in Baghdadóno matter how many U.S. forces were put inóunless the Iraqis embraced political reconciliation. Otherwise, Baghdad was indeed a "troop sump."

He didn't think much of the pressure from Bush to get the Iraqis to sign off on a surge of U.S. forces. Instead, he was spending a lot of time trying to get Maliki to stop interfering with the military and start permitting operations against the Shia militias.

"We have an opportunity now to accelerate the transition of the security to the Iraqis," Casey said during his next briefing to Bush. That was what they had agreed to two weeks earlier on November 30 in Amman. There was still no question in Casey's mind that sending in more American troops would have only a temporary, local impact. He agreed that two brigades should be added because General Fil had said he needed them, but otherwise they needed to continue with the strategy they had. Of course, without political progress on reconciliation between the Shia and Sunnis, the transition to Iraqi-led security would not happen and the Iraqi security forces would likely collapse.

* * *

On December 19, his first full day in office, Gates asked Lieutenant General David Petraeus to come to Washington from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was overseeing the writing of the military's new counterinsurgency manual. Petraeus was on everyone's list to take Casey's place as Iraq commander.

Petraeus does not fill the stereotype of an Army general. Given the nickname "Peaches" as a youth because of his lack of facial hair and because people had trouble pronouncing his name, he was no roaring George Patton. But he had successfully led the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles, in the initial Iraq invasion of 2003, and posed an intellectually tantalizing question to Rick Atkinson, a Washington Post reporter, who had embedded with the division: "Tell me how this ends."

It was a question no one had come close to answering. Though the 101st had seen more than 60 of its soldiers killed, it had initially brought some semblance of order to Mosul in northern Iraq. In 2004ñ05, Petraeus had spearheaded the Multi-National Security Transition CommandóIraqóMNSTC-I, nicknamed "Minsticky"óa newly created command responsible for training, equipping and mentoring Iraq's security forces and infrastructure. Tens of thousands of new Iraqi soldiers had been trained during his tenure, though the effort had produced mixed results.

Now he sat in Gates's new office.

"I'm going to Iraq," Gates said. He was leaving later that day. "What is it I should look for?"

"Is the strategy working?" Petraeus said. "Is this approach working?" In the eight months since he had told the Iraq Study Group, which then had included Gates, that he thought the strategy was correct, Petraeus had become increasingly doubtful due to the ever-increasing levels of violence.

"There is an enormous conceptual issue here," he said. "Is the priority security of the people," which he had emphasized in his new counterinsurgency manual, "or is it transition to Iraqi security forces?"

"Are there enough troops?" Gates asked.

"I just can't conceive that there are," Petraeus answered. "But I'm not on the ground. I haven't done the troop-to-task analysis." He would have to systematically study the mission and carefully ascertain the number of troops required to complete it.

He knew the level of violence in Iraq had become overwhelming to the U.S. military. How could anyone expect the Iraqi military to do better?

* * *

Early Wednesday, December 20, Colonel Tom Greenwood, serving his last few days on the Council of Colonels, walked to the end of his driveway and picked up The Washington Post.

"U.S. Not Winning War in Iraq, Bush Says for 1st Time," read the front-page headline. Well, thought Greenwood, maybe the colonels' message was making some headway with the chiefs: "WE ARE NOT WINNING, SO WE ARE

LOSING." He read on. Bush was quoted as saying, "I think an interesting construct that General Pace uses is, 'We're not winning, we're not losing.'"

It was enough to make Greenwood's head hurt. Pace or Bushóor perhaps bothóhad turned the colonels' line on its head. "Losing" had somehow become "not losing." What the hell did Bush's remark mean? It was Orwellian.

In notes written later, Greenwood said, "We never met with the SecDef. We never met with the president. And I never got the feeling from General Pace that much of what we generated ever saw the light of day in his world. Just who was Meghan O'Sullivan????" After returning to his assignment as director of the Marine Corps Command and Staff College in Quantico, Virginia, Greenwood put together a PowerPoint briefing on the colonels' work. On the slide labeled "What Did I Learn?," he wrote:

"WARÖIT SHOULD STILL BE THE LAST RESORT!!!"

* * *

"Take care of George," the president had said to his new secretary of defense, adding, "I don't want Casey dumped on."

After Gates's first day as secretary, he and General Pace flew to Iraq. One day after lunch, Gates asked to see Abizaid and Casey privately.

He told them that he and the president were considering Casey for promotion to become Army chief of staff, the nominal head of the Army and a member of the Joint Chiefs. It was the initial promotion given General William Westmoreland when he left Vietnam in 1968óa kind of soft landing.

"I'd be honored to do that," Casey told Gates, "and if I did it, if you ask me to do it, I'd like 60 days between this job to kind of recharge my batteries." He had already held the command in Iraq for almost 30 months.

Who should replace you? Gates asked.

Dave Petraeus, Casey said. Petraeus's two tours in Iraq and his time as head of the Combined Arms Center, rewriting the military's counterinsurgency manual, had given him plenty of time to ponder what the hell they were doing in Iraq. If anyone would be able to look at this a little differently, Casey said, it would be Petraeus.

* * *

At Gates's first press conference outdoors in Iraq, a firefight erupted in the background. "Holy shit," the new secretary said sarcastically to his aides, "This is a lot of fun."

He knew that the United States was in serious trouble in Iraq. He had concluded that it was important America not fail because the regional consequences would be too severe. But he could see that stability was going to take longer than Congress or the American people anticipated. Gates made it his personal goal to get Iraq in a better place so that it would not become the overriding issue in the 2008 presidential campaign. He didn't want the next president to be forced into making commitments during the campaign that would lead to failure.

* * *

Jack Keane forwarded a copy of the American Enterprise Institute plan to Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, another longtime Army friend, who was Casey's new deputy in Iraq and the corps commander in charge of tactical ground operations.

"We don't need as many forces in Anbar," Odierno said in a call to Keane, "because Anbar's starting to turn around."

But the proposal for five more brigades for Baghdad was in the right direction. His boss, Casey, had approved a plan for only two brigades for Baghdad, but there had been discussion of having three more in line waiting to be called if needed. One could be added each month.

"God, Ray," Keane said, "that's a broken strategy. Every time we need more forces, we're going to make another announcement of a brigade moving into Iraq?" Dribbling the decision out that way would be political suicide, he said. The president had to make a one time announcement of all five brigades.

"My problem's Casey," Odierno said. "I can't get this through him, and he's still here. I can't get any more out of this guy."

"Let me see if I can work it on my end," Keane said.

On December 22, Keane went to see Hadley at the White House.

"We may not need all these brigades," Hadley said. "There's a lot of pressure on us about this."

"Steve," Keane said, "you can't shop this around like it's an amendment to a health care bill or something. You've got a military requirement. We've defined the requirement. The ground tactical commander in there, Ray Odierno, agrees with that requirement." The problem was Casey. "There's some constipation in this process with Casey, I'll admit to that," Keane said. "But you can't trade these things off for political expediency, because this is a military problem here. And our problem here for the last three years is, we've never had enough forces. Now we're trying to get enough forces and do it right."

"We'll just sequence them in there based on need," Hadley said.

"Militarily, it makes no sense," Keane said. "They have to come in one at a time anyway because of when they are ready. Think about what it means politically to you. We've got two brigades on the ground fighting, and the commander says we need more troops. We move another brigade to Kuwait and on into the theater"óinto Iraq.

"You're going to do this three times, with The Washington Post sitting right on the fence line watching everything that you do, listening to everything?" Each time the request went out for another brigade, there would have to be an explanation, Keane said. The explanation would inevitably be: Well, we don't have enough troops. And the questions would be predictable: So you underestimated and lowballed again? Things aren't going right? "They're going to pounce on you. You want three more bites of this political problem of escalating forces? Why would you do that?

Militarily, it doesn't make any sense. But certainly, politically it doesn't either."

Hadley said he saw the argument but added, "We can probably get this done in about six months, so some time around the summer, we can make an announcement that we're going to start to pull back."

"Steve, listen to me," Keane said, alarmed. "We'll just be getting there by the summer. It'll take all the way through the rest of '07 and well into '08 to have the kind of cause and effect of what we're doing. Protecting the people, which means changing attitudes, changing behavior, forcing the Sunnis to see they can't win and seeking reconciliation, convincing the Shia that they don't have to fight the Sunnis anymoreóthis'll take time. We won't really have an answer until '08. That's the reality of it."

Hadley wasn't sure. "We have to depend on what comes out of the Pentagon," he said.

"Like you've been dependent on it for the last three-plus years, that's what you're saying?"

They agreed to stay in touch.

* * *

Several days later, a two-star general who worked in the operations directorate ( J-3) of the Joint Staff called Keane.

"We've got Casey's plan in here," the general said. "It's two and two."

"What do you mean?" Keane asked. "Two brigades of Army and two battalions of Marines?" That would amount to about 7,000 Army soldiers and 4,000 Marines.

"Yes," the J-3 general said.

"What's your view of that?"

"Our collective view on the staff here is that this is failing. It'll be just Together Forward III." That was about as damning a comparison as could be made because the first two Together Forward operations had failed completely and Casey's command had publicly acknowledged the failure.

"God, that is just awful!" Keane said.

"We're taking it to Pace," the general said.

"You've got to tell Pace it just can't succeed, just like you told me," Keane said. This was the moment to step up and speak truth to poweróa very difficult task considering the head of the J-3, Lieutenant General Doug Lute, opposed the surge.

The two-star general called Keane back to report. "We took it to Pace. We said, 'It's two and two. This plan won't work.'"

So what did Pace say? Keane asked.

The general reported Pace's words as follows: "I don't want to know that. I don't want to hear it won't work. I want you to tell me how to sell this at Crawford." The president was meeting with the NSC at his ranch on December 28.

"Holy shit," Keane said. He had always considered Pace a sycophant, but this, in his opinion, was letting down the people wearing the uniform and fighting in combat. He concluded that it would be futile to call Pace, who clearly did not want to contradict Abizaid and Casey, even though they were going to be replaced. Such a challenge to the ground commanders would be inside the danger zone for a chairman. The senior military leader, the chairman was only an adviser and not technically in the chain of command. Keane figured that Pace was making the safe move, in effect hiding behind Abizaid and Casey's recommendation. "He takes refuge among them," Keane said, "and uses them as protection for himself."

Keane made another call, this one to John Hannah, Cheney's national security adviser. Hannah and the vice president were headed to the Crawford meeting.

"It's two and two," Keane told Hannah. "It's wholly inadequate. It cannot be executed militarily. If that's the case, we should not do it because we're raising the risk of more violence." It was another Together Forward, an operation destined to fail. "It would put more troops at risk without the capacity to bring down the level of violence."

Keane spoke with Hadley again and told him the president or the vice president should ask a single question of Pace: Is this a decisive force? "Now, the answer to that is a resounding no, and he will know it's a resounding no. He'll probably tell you, he'll stammer over it and say, 'General Abizaid and General Caseyóthis is their recommendation.'"

If you press him, Keane said, he'll say something like "Well, I have not asked that question of them. I'm assuming they think it is, or they wouldn't have given us the recommendation." Keane said that the president had to demand an answer about whether the recommendation was a "decisive force." If the answer was no, he said, the president would have to overrule his military advisers.

* * *

Meanwhile, Hadley had another backchannel contact. His Iraq deputy, O'Sullivan, kept in regular contact with General Petraeus. The two had first met in Iraq more than three years earlier, in 2003, when she was working for Jerry Bremer and he was the commander of the 101st Airborne Division. They had stayed in touch, frequently e-mailing and phoning each other, sharing an occasional meal.

During one lunch, Petraeus had persuaded O'Sullivan to speak at a counterinsurgency conference with lots of "big wheels" in attendance. "Meghan, there's nobody from the White House at this conference," he told her. "This is huge." O'Sullivan went to the conference with Petraeus and gave an impromptu set of remarks.

Another time, Petraeus contacted O'Sullivan and invited her to the first Iraqi Ranger School graduation at Fort Benning, Georgia. "I want you to come down and see this," he said. They flew down together, and Petraeus delivered a speech to the graduates.

Petraeus thought the world of O'Sullivan and had great respect for her academic thinking and her abilities as a manager. They shared a common problem: trying to find a successful counterinsurgency plan.

Petraeus told O'Sullivan he believed counterinsurgency tactics could be applied effectively in Iraq. Typically, 20

counterinsurgents per 1,000 residentsóor about 2 percent of the populationóis considered the minimum required for effective counterinsurgency, he had written in the Army's updated Counterinsurgency Field Manual. "However, as with any fixed ratio, such calculations remain very dependent upon the situation." U.S. forces alone could not match such a ratio in Iraqóthat would mean a minimum of about 120,000 security forces just to control the 6 million residents of Baghdadóbut he did believe the mission could be accomplished with additional help from Iraqi security forces and private contractors.

O'Sullivan ran Casey's proposal of two extra brigades by Petraeus. "Can you change your strategy with one or two brigades?" she asked.

"No," he said.

"How many troops, how many brigades, do you need to do this?" she asked.

"I want all the force you can give me," he said.

O'Sullivan passed the word to Hadley and Crouch that she had talked to Petraeus. "It's my understanding that we can't change the strategy with only one or two brigades," she said. "We're going to make the same mistake. Now we're going to get the mission right, but we're not going to resource it appropriately. And it's going to fail."

Bush confirmed to me that he'd been told of Petraeus's conclusions. And he obviously already had Petraeus in mind as his new Iraq commander. "If you're thinking about changing the strategy to 'clear, hold and build' and you've recognized that there's not enough to hold," the president recalled, "and if you're the new commander coming in, it makes eminent sense to say, 'Give me all you've got.'"

* * *

The president later told me, "The military, I can remember well, said, 'Okay, fine. More troops. Two brigades.' And I turned to Steve and said, 'Steve, from your analysis, what do you think?' He, being the cautious and thorough man he is, went back, checked, came back to me and said, 'Mr. President, I would recommend that you consider five. Not two.' And I said, 'Why?' He said, 'Because it is the considered judgment of people who I trust and you trust, that we need five in order to be able to clear, hold and build.'"

Those trusted people, of course, came largely through back channels: Ray Odierno telling Petraeus he needed five brigades, Petraeus telling Meghan O'Sullivan he wanted all the force he could get, and Jack Keane telling Hadley and Cheney that a minimum of five brigades were necessary.

Hadley maintained that the number "comes out of my discussions with Pete Pace."

"Okay, I don't know this," Bush said, interrupting. "I'm not in these meetings, you'll be happy to hear, because I got other things to do."

Despite Hadley's characterization, Pace had told the Joint Chiefs weeks earlier that it was actually the White House that had come asking what could be done with five extra brigades.

* * *

After Gates returned from Iraq, he spoke with Petraeus again about the level of forces that might be required. How would the general go about figuring that out?

Once the mission was established, Petraeus said, a commander would have to establish what specific tasks had to be accomplished and determine how many troops would be needed. If those resources weren't available, the commander had an obligation to say, "This is the risk that is incurred by not having that level of resources." And at a certain point, the risk might be so great that the commander would say, "The mission cannot be accomplished." Then you would have to change either the tasks or the mission.

Petraeus said it was important to have an open conversation about military requirements, to welcome transparency.

"We have committed the nation," he said. "And if the nation is not going to provide the commander on the ground with what he asks for, then everyone needs to know." The requests, of course, had to be reasonable. "I can't ask for something that doesn't exist. Look, I can take no for an answer. But then, other people have to know that the answer has been no."

"You need to tell me what you need and not worry about the politics here in Washington," Gates said. "Let me handle that. I'll work that part of the problem. And this building [the Pentagon], as part of the problem. You focus on what you need to do in Iraq, and I'll take care of the rest."

Aware of the Rumsfeld legacy of discouraging dissent, Gates added, "I expect your candor. I expect you to tell me exactly what you think, and in very plain terms. I want to hear what you have to say."