ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

While this book is based almost entirely on my own reporting and examination of documents, I offer my deep gratitude to those journalists who have covered the Iraq War. The knowledge and information they've provided have been an indispensable foundation for this book.

In 2007, the Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded that Iraq had become one of the most dangerous wars in American history for reporters to cover, and the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented the killings of more than 125 reporters on assignment in Iraq. We owe them a debt that will never be repaid.

I thank all the sources, named and unnamed, who have patiently sat through session after session of interviews and provided me with documents, both professional and personal. I appreciate their willingness to take the risks inherent in participating in a project like this, especially when the project concerns a controversial war in an election year. It takes guts to let an outsider in, and I hope future historians who study the Iraq War and the swirl of events surrounding it will be grateful for their contribution.

This is my thirty-sixth year and fourteenth book with Alice Mayhew, my editor at Simon & Schuster. She has thrown herself into this project with the same passion, focus, and attention to detail that she has possessed since Carl Bernstein and I first began working with her in 1972 on All the President's Men. Unwaveringly fair-minded, an endless source of energy and ideas, Alice seeks the clearest possible view of events as they occurred. She quickly realized that the soul of this book is its verbatim nature, with virtually all of it taken directly from the documents and people involved. Alice shares with me an awareness of the scale of the decision making documented in these pages, as well as a belief in the necessity of impartial reporting and ensuring that all involved receive a chance to have their say.

Carolyn K. Reidy and David Rosenthal at Simon & Schuster run the best publishing house in America. They are hands-on managers and care deeply about their business and their books. They consistently display a commitment to the First Amendment that would make Thomas Jefferson feel good about his early work. Roger Labrie is diligent and meticulous, qualities that have made him a master of thoughtful editing. A great deal of gratitude goes to Elisa Rivlin, senior vice president and general counsel; Victoria Meyer, executive vice president of publicity; Tracey Guest, director of publicity; Jackie Seow, art director and jacket designer; Irene Kheradi, executive managing editor; Michael Szczerban, assistant managing editor; Karen Thompson, associate editor; Paul Dippolito, designer; Lisa Healy, senior production editor; Nancy In-glis, director of copyediting; Lynn Anderson, proofreader; and John Wahler, associate director of production.

Brady Dennis, Evelyn Duffy and I share a deep appreciation for copy editor Fred Chase, who took six days away from his home and family in Texas to travel to Washington and work on his fifth book with me. He is a joy to have around and an integral part of this book. A consummate professional, Fred's observation, insight and sound judgment prove that the best editing is about far more than marks on a page.

Eight years ago, I wrote in Maestro, my book on Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, that The Washington Post had allowed me to wander on perhaps the longest leash in American journalism. That leash has gotten longer with time, and I am ever grateful for the Post's support. The Post continues to play a vital and irreplaceable role in Washington life and politics. Don Graham, the Post's CEO, is a man with a kind soul and a businessman's savvy. He looks out for underdogs and gives voice to the voiceless. He is a generous and compassionate boss, and there is no one else quite like him. Leonard Downie Jr., the Post's executive editor and the best newspaperman in America, is retiring after a spectacular career. The newspaper's 25 Pulitzer Prizes during his tenure are a testament to his determination and skill. The Post's publisher, Katharine Weymouth, shows all the signs of a commitment to independent, aggressive journalism shared by her uncle, Don Graham, and her grandmother, Katharine Graham.

Special thanks to Steve Luxenberg for devoting his time, focus and formidable intellect while helping to excerpt this book for the Post.

The work of a number of Post reporters who covered the war from both Iraq and Washington provided many key insights. They include but are certainly not limited to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, John Ward Anderson, Ann Scott Tyson, Karen DeYoung, Josh White, Joshua Partlow, Naseer Nouri, Thomas Ricks, Anne Hull, Amit Paley, Sudarsan Raghavan, Michael Abramowitz, Peter Baker, Ellen Knickmeyer, and Jonathan Weisman. Many of my colleagues again provided help and encouragement, both in the form of their daily coverage and through the informal sharing of advice and ideas. They include Al Kamen, Susan Glasser, David Ignatius, Dana Priest, Glenn Kessler, David Hoffman, Joby Warrick, and Rick Atkinson.

Many thanks also to Michel du Cille and Wendy Galietta at the Post for their expert assistance with the photos in this book, and to Laris Karklis for the map.

I thank Carl Bernstein, who has been a friend for 36 years. He is in touch with all that is happening in American politics and he provided many thoughts and insightful analysis on Bush and the war. He and I remain linked for life as friends and colleagues.

My eternal thanks to Ben Bradlee, who raised the bar for all of us and remains a founding father of The Washington Post.

No work of this size and scope can be pieced together in a vacuum. I acknowledge the many books and newspaper and magazine articles that added background or detail to my own work. I have drawn on the excellent reporting and analysis of dozens of news organizations, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and the Associated Press. The following books were useful points of reference: The Iraq Study Group Report by James Baker III, Lee Hamilton, et al.; In the Company of Soldiers by Rick Atkinson; The U.S.

Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual; Fiasco by Thomas Ricks; Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush by Robert Draper; Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President by Stephen F. Hayes; Condoleezza Rice: An American Life by Elisabeth Bumiller; and From the Shadows by Robert Gates. I also found the Web site of the Institute for the Study of War (www.understandingwar.org) and the Small Wars Journal weblog (www.smallwarsjournal.com) helpful throughout.

Robert B. Barnett, my agent, attorney and friend, is an institution in Washington. His reach and wisdom know no parallel. Because he represents prominent politicians on both sides of the aisle, including Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, he was not consulted on the contents of this book and did not see it until it was printed. Thanks also to Brendan Sullivan, a rock of the legal profession, for providing important advice.

Brady, Evelyn and I are deeply grateful for the presence of Rosa Criollo and Jackie Crowe in our lives. They provide guidance, coherence and sustenance in a thousand different ways.

My elder daughter, Tali, spent two weeks reading the manuscript and providing many important insights. She is a brilliant young woman. Her edits and suggestions once again revealed a dedication to making the complexities of national security discussed in this book accessible to as many readers as possible. My younger daughter, Diana, completed a great fifth-grade year and provided endless hours of joy.

My wife, Elsa Walsh, has been unbelievably tolerant of the hours involved in putting together a book like this. She is a calming anchor in my life, an answerer of questions, a settler of debates, and the epitome of a partner in love, life and work.

Finally, as my assistants and I researched and wrote this book in the third-floor offices of my home in Washington, our thoughts have returned often to the many thousands of fellow citizens who volunteer to serve. We have each formed a lasting connection to these men and women. Their example is humbling, and we stand in awe of them and their families.

In November 2006, my colleague and friend Rick Atkinson took me to Arlington National Cemetery. We visited Section 60, where the war dead from Iraq and Afghanistan are buried. In what Atkinson has called "the saddest acre in America," new rows of graves were being added one after another. That day, we met Teresa Arciola, whose 20-year-old son, Michael, had been killed in Iraq. She had brought his favorite childhood book, Corduroy, and was reading it aloud at his grave side. Her request to me was the same simple appeal she had made to everyone she told about her son: "RememberÖrespectÖhonor."

PHOTOGRAPHY CREDIT

J. Scott Applewhite (Associated Press): 4

Erik de Castro (Associated Press): 23

Michel du Cille (The Washington Post): 24

Dennis Cook (Associated Press): 22, 32

Linda Davidson (The Washington Post): 18

Charles Dharapak (Associated Press): 1

Larry Downing (Reuters): 3

Ron Edmonds (Associated Press): 10

Gerald Herbert (Associated Press): 9

Nikki Kahn (The Washington Post): 14, 27

Courtesy of Senator Carl Levin: 26

Melina Mara (The Washington Post): 25

Gerald Martineau (The Washington Post): 5

Hadi Mizban (Associated Press): 30

Pablo Martinez Monsivais (Associated Press): 13, 21

Bill O'Leary (The Washington Post): 16

Robert A. Reeder (The Washington Post): 15, 17

Paul J. Richards (Getty): 2

Ali Abu Shish (Reuters): 29

Mike Theiler (Reuters): 31

Evan Vucci (Associated Press): 12

Susan Walsh (Associated Press): 20

Jim Young (Reuters): 11, 19

Ronen Zilberman (Associated Press): 28

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Woodward is an associate editor at The Washington Post, where he has worked for 37 years. He has shared in two Pulitzer Prizes, first for the Post's coverage of the Watergate scandal, and later for coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He has authored or coauthored eleven #1 national nonfiction bestsellers, including three on the current administrationó Bush at War (2002), Plan of Attack (2004) and State of Denial (2006). He has two daughters, Tali and Diana, and lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, writer Elsa Walsh.

Photographic Insert

"If I feel it, he feels it. If he feels it, I feel it," National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley said of his relationship with President George W. Bush. The president gave Hadley responsibility for the 2006 Iraq strategy review. "Let's just cut to the chase here," Bush said. "Hadley drove a lot of this."

"We have to win," Bush told General George Casey on June 13, 2006, in Baghdad. "I'm with you," Casey replied. "I understand that. But to win, we have to draw down." Despite his public show of support, Bush was losing confidence in the drawdown strategy. And Casey had come to believe the president did not understand the war.

"He's never been the head of a country before. He's going to have to learn," Bush said of new Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in 2006. "And I'm going to have to engage with him personally to help him learn."

"I've decided to replace Rumsfeld," President Bush told Vice President Dick Cheney in early November 2006.

"Well, Mr. President," said Cheney, "I disagree, but obviously it's your call."

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group, headed by Republican James A. Baker III and Democrat Lee Hamilton, interviewed every key policy maker on Iraq, including the president, and traveled to Baghdad to meet with U.S. military commanders and Iraqi leaders. The first line of the group's report, released in December 2006, stated, "The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating."

In the fall of 2006, General Peter Pace convened a secret internal review with some of the rising stars from every branch of the military. Nicknamed the Council of Colonels, they reported regularly to the Joint Chiefs.

But their findings never were presented to the secretary of defense or President Bush.

Colonel Tom Greenwood worked on Bush's National Security Council staff during 2003ñ04. As part of the Council of Colonels, he was chosen to deliver the group's bleak conclusion to the Joint Chiefs: "We are not

winning, so we are losing."

Colonel H. R. McMaster, the author of Dereliction of Duty, which exposed the weaknesses of the Joint Chiefs during the Vietnam War, found success as a ground commander in Iraq. His counterinsurgency tactics in Tall Afar became a model for protecting the population. A member of the Council of Colonels, he later became an adviser to General David Petraeus.

Donald H. Rumsfeld, who had served as Bush's defense secretary from the beginning, wanted to hasten the handoff of responsibility to the Iraqis. "We have to take our hand off the bicycle seat," he said time and again.

He vowed to resign if the Republicans lost either the House or the Senate in the 2006 election. The day after the election, Bush announced Rumsfeld's resignation and named Robert Gates as his replacement.

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.

Bush and Cheney met with the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon on December 13, 2006. The chiefs made clear that they opposed a troop surge. It could break the military. The president had all but made up his mind, yet he decided to hear them out. "They may have thought I was leaning, and I probably was," he said later. "But the door wasn't shut."

General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, worried that the Army was being stretched too thin and told the president that a surge of five brigades would not work without extending Army tours. "These kids just see deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan for the indefinite future," he told Bush. "I don't think you have time to surge."

On February 10, 2007, General David Petraeus relieved Casey as the top U.S. commander in Baghdad. Casey still wanted to turn responsibility over to the Iraqis as soon as possible. "It is going against everything that we've been working on for the last two and a half years," he said of the new strategy.

On March 29, 2007, President Bush met privately with Nancy Pelosi, the new Democratic speaker of the House. "Mr. President," she said, "we owe it to the public to try to reach some consensus." Bush replied, "My views are well known. I've made myself clear."

On April 19, 2007, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the Iraq War "is lost." Bush later said of the comment, "I'm not shocked by anything in Washington anymore. This war has created a lot of really harsh emotion, out of which comes a lot of harsh rhetoric. One of my failures has been to change the tone in Washington."

Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, acted as a sounding board for Defense Secretary Gates, who wanted to know how reappointment of General Pace as JCS chairman would be received in the Senate. "It's going to be a battle royal," Levin said. Gates soon told Pace he would have to retire.

General David Petraeus, the Iraq commander, agreed to give Congress regular updates on the war. His first, on September 10, 2007, was in the words of one commentator, "the most important testimony of any general in 40 years." Sitting at attention for hours was so painful, Petraeus gobbled Motrin tablets during breaks. He reported progress but tried to avoid overstatement.

As the new Central Commander, Admiral William J. Fallon questioned Petraeus's constant requests for more manpower in Iraq. "This is nuts," he told Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace. "Nobody's doing strategic thinkingÖ. Now I understand why we are where we are. We ought to be shot for this."

Radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army were a powerful force in Iraq. When he ordered the group to suspend attacks in 2007, it helped reduce the violence. In 2008, he announced the creation of a new paramilitary unit to attack U.S. forces, but some officials thought his influence was declining as the Iraqi government became more assertive.

Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser to Prime Minister Maliki, frequently met with administration officials in Washington. On May 9, 2007, as violence kept rising in Iraq, Stephen Hadley told Rubaie, "We have to dramatize progress. We need a dramatic event."

In the spring of 2008, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that General Raymond Odierno would succeed Petraeus as the U.S. commander in Iraq, while Petraeus would take over as Central Commander.

Retired General Jack Keane said the appointments would lock in the current strategy. "Let's assume we have a Democratic administration and they want to pull this thing out quickly, and now they have to deal with General Petraeus and General Odierno," he told Gates. "There will be a price to be paid to override them."

Republican presidential nominee John McCain and Democratic nominee Barack Obama greet each other on Capitol Hill in 2007. One of them will inherit the presidency and the Iraq War on January 20, 2009.