The War Within Read online

  "occupation"óa humiliating notion in any honor-bound Arab societyómaking it clear that he considered himself the sovereign authority.

  The NSC had no apparatus to make sure things happened. Powell said the philosophy was "We're hoping things will improve. We say it'll happen. Therefore, we believe it will happen." There was no follow-through, no discipline.

  To the essential question "Who are we fighting?," Powell said that the White House and Pentagon's answer would be Zarqawi, the al Qaeda leader in Iraq. That was too limited an answer, he said, but the Pentagon did not want to consider wider possibilities.

  Powell singled out the handling of Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, who had argued for a larger force after the invasion. Rumsfeld had destroyed Shinseki's career, he said. No senior Defense official had attended Shinseki's retirement ceremony, he added with disgust. Dissent simply was not allowed at the Pentagon. Those who speak up get treated like Shinseki, he said.

  "He revealed in very great detail his frustrations with Rumsfeld," Hamilton said later. "He felt like he'd lost every argument internally within the administration."

  Speaking about the raging sectarian violence between the Shia and the Sunnis that was exploding in Iraq at the time, Powell told the group, "The American armed forces have little ability to understand what is happening and to react."

  He said he felt the military was stuck, that the Americans had lost all authority. "We are no longer the occupier," he said. "We are watching the cabinet of 30 Iraqis sitting in the Green Zone"óthe walled-off enclave in Baghdad that housed the Iraqi government and U.S. embassy. "We have little control over the events in Iraq."

  Noting that the American public no longer supported the war, Powell added, "All we can do is hope that the Iraqi government pulls it togetherÖ. We are not driving this train anymore; the Iraqis are in charge."

  How about sending more troops?

  "Colonels will always ask for more troops and resources," Powell replied. "Generals should have asked for more troops when they had the chance to," meaning before the invasion. That opportunity had vanished, in his opinion.

  The Army and Marines were now stretched to their limits with multiple deployments and were cracking under the strains of perpetual war.

  "You saw a very discouraged man when he talked to us," Hamilton said later. "And a very pessimistic man about the future. He really did not think that Iraq was salvageable at all."

  What are the consequences of failure in Iraq? Hamilton asked.

  The United States would be seen as impotent, Powell said, then quickly shifted to the present tense, as if that already were the case. "Mubarak"óthe Egyptian presidentó"is putting people in jail. Putin is making sarcastic comments."

  The Chinese are listening politely, he said, but in reality they are ignoring us.

  "Folks are tired of getting slapped around by the United States," Powell added. "They've stopped listening."

  Throughout the interview, the temperature in the conference room kept rising and falling, and staff members kept slipping out to adjust the air-conditioning. But Powell himself stayed at a steady boil.

  "All that we can do is to build up the army and the police to build a Humpty Dumpty," Powell said sarcastically. "An army isn't guys with five weeks training. An army is part and parcel of society."

  What about the intelligence on the ground in Iraq?

  "Station chiefs have been shooting up red cluster messages for years," Powell said, referring to the regular CIA reports of escalating violence and trouble. "We've got a mess here. Washington didn't want to hear it."

  Is there any reasonable chance of getting help from the international community? Hamilton asked.

  "No," Powell said sharply.

  Any chance of getting help from Iraq's neighbors?

  "No."

  Several people in the room chuckled uncomfortably and shook their heads at the near hopelessness of what Powell was describing.

  "He had a general view that the world, whole world, was down on us," Perry later recalled. "Which nobody argued with him about at the meeting."

  "I thought of it very much as a therapy session," Panetta said later, "in that he felt he could sit down with people who were brothers in armsÖpeople he related to from past experiences. And felt comfortable just kind of unloading."

  The briefing, scheduled for an hour, had stretched longer, and the study group had an afternoon of interviews still to come.

  "Well, Colin," Baker finally said, "you're going to have a great book."

  Powell left as quietly as he had come, alone. Baker turned to Panetta and said solemnly, "He's the one guy who could have perhaps prevented this from happening."

  Chapter 5

  In late spring, Bush met with his entire cabinet and made a strong pitch for everyone to participate in the war effort.

  Abizaid, Casey and Khalilzad all briefed, and the president gave an all-hands-on-deck speech. Several weeks later, at an NSC meeting on May 26, 2006, Rice, who was in charge of assembling personnel willing to go to Iraq from various departments and agencies, announced the final numbers: 48 people had signed on.

  "Ma'am, that is a paltry number," blurted Casey, who was in the meeting by secure video from Iraq. To him, it proved that the civilians weren't contributing enough to the waróthe most important undertaking of the Bush administration and a venture with so many U.S. interests at stake. He hoped the president would demand more action.

  General, Rice replied tersely, you're out of line.

  "On that happy note," the president said, "we will adjourn."

  Rumsfeld immediately dashed off a SECRET snowflake to Casey: "My apologies to you for the comments that were made in the NSC meeting this morning. It is a pattern. There is not much anyone seems to be able to do about itÖ.

  Thanks for all you're doing out there and for your patience today as well."

  Casey didn't feel at all patient. Neither Rice nor Hadley had come up with a national strategy for the Iraq War or found a way to make sure it was properly resourced. David Satterfield, the deputy chief of mission in the embassy, had told Rice on a visit to Iraq once, "Here's the most important mission for the country, and they have three linguists that can speak Arabic at the highest level from the State Department."

  * * *

  "I just took a look at the attached page 49 from the quarterly report to Congress," wrote Rumsfeld, focused on details as ever, in a May 30 snowflake to Casey about troop levels. "I noticed the gray area is coalition, and we are increasing the number of combat operations every month. I would have thought that the ISF [Iraqi security forces] would increase, the combined would increase, but the coalition would go down. It seems the opposite is happening.

  Let's talk about it and figure out why."

  Now in the fourth year of the war, the defense secretary was still asking about the elusive numbers of exactly how many Iraqi soldiers were trained and ready for duty. And he was still pushing for a U.S. military less involved in Iraq, not more.

  * * *

  Jim Jeffrey, Rice's coordinator for Iraq policy, was a 6-foot-3 Bostonian and a career diplomat who had served as U.S. ambassador to Albania and later as deputy chief of mission in the U.S. embassy in Baghdad in 2004ñ05. He believed the United States could not abandon Iraq, as it had Vietnam in 1975. And like Zelikow, Jeffrey believed it was possible to devise a successful counterinsurgency strategy along the lines of what Colonel H. R. McMaster had done in Tall Afar.

  On June 5, Zelikow and Jeffrey presented Rice with a SECRET 11-page memo titled "Possible political-military strategy for summer 2006." It reflected the sum of their frustrations.

  They noted that Maliki and his new government continue "to roll out ill-prepared, ad hoc initiatives like last week's declaration of an emergency in Basra or this week's plan to announce a large-scale release of detainees" held by the U.S.

  In bold letters, they wrote: "Likelihood of success for the proposed strategy is low."

  This w
as still an American effort, and U.S. control was essential. "The argument that the U.S. should not strongly assert its preferences to the Iraqi government is wrong," they wrote, and saying "let-them-do-it-themselves" would be a cop-out.

  "Maliki has never run a large organization," they noted. He had never even run a small one. A 56-year-old Shia, Maliki had been in exile for 23 years, apparently bouncing between Iran and Syria. His chief credential was that he had been a spokesman for the political party al Dawa (The Call), a relatively minor Shia party. The Iraqi parliament had selected him as the first permanent prime minister. He was a precarious compromise between the two real Shia forces in Iraq. The first was Moqtada al-Sadr, the young militant cleric and leader in Sadr City, the northeastern quadrant of Baghdad with more than 2 million people. The other was the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI, one of Iraq's most powerful political parties and the largest party in the Iraqi Council of Representatives, headed by Iraqi theologian and politician Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

  The SECRET memo offered three options: A) strong, B) medium and C) weak. Not surprisingly, Zelikow and Jeffrey encouraged the middle road.

  Option A, which they rejected, was called "Full Counterinsurgency."

  "This would apply a Tall Afarñlike approach to all the major trouble spots, starting with Baghdad. It is very soldier-intensiveÖ. It might require a significant additional infusion of American combat poweróperhaps several additional brigadesóto make it work."

  The option was not presented as a surefire winning strategy, designed or guaranteed to achieve victory or to address the more important threshold question of whether victory was attainable. And it failed, like many other proposals, to address the problem of who would hold an area, assimilate the population, restore order, and demonstrate the benefits of signing up with the new Iraqi government and joining in the democratic process.

  Option B was "Selective Counterinsurgency." It would include fighting in "a few selected areas" and "also could require some infusion of additional American forces in the short term, with the gamble that this strategy could produce a much better climate for withdrawal of American forces later this year or next." Calling an option they intended to recommend a "gamble" was highly unusual for the authors of an option paper.

  Option C was described as a "keep-the-lid-on," "reactive" approach that would result in "increased chance of continued decay and security conditions." With little irony, they noted in recommending Option B that "our current policies seem most consistent with Option C."

  They also said that Option B could result in a "significant drawdown of American forces, perhaps to below 100,000"

  within six months. In their analysis, "the latest Baghdad Security Plan does not appear sufficient to clear and hold the city, or even the most insecure neighborhoods in it."

  Rice sent a copy of the memo to Hadley at the White House.

  Given the obvious gravity of the situation, the remedies were modest, and the boundaries of Zelikow and Jeffrey's proposals were limited by what their superiors allowed on the table.

  The CIA kept warning that sectarian violence was growing and that the new government did not haveóand was not developingóroots. But the inner circle of the administration seemed to have shielded itself from bold new ideas, and those on the outside weren't breaking through.

  * * *

  Casey had the Special Operations units working day and night trying to locate Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. In early June, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, the Joint Special Operations commander, called on a secure line and said he thought they had pinpointed Zarqawi in a small house that likely contained women and children. "How sure are you that he's there?"

  "I'm sure," McChrystal said, his voice cracking.

  Not long afterward, McChrystal called to report that the planes had hit the target and that the body had been brought to his headquarters.

  "We're going to wait on the fingerprints, but this is the guy," the Special Operations commander said. "All my guys who've been working this for two years are convinced this is the guy."

  "Mr. Secretary, listen," Casey said in a secure call to Rumsfeld, "I want to tell you something that I'm not 100

  percent sure of, but I'm sure enough that you need to know this is happening."

  Rumsfeld held his breath, expecting the worst.

  "I think we got Zarqawi tonight."

  "Oh, Jesus Christ!" Rumsfeld bellowed, unused to good news. "All I could say to myself was 'What the hell else could have gone wrong there?'"

  Later, Rumsfeld dictated a personal snowflake to Casey: "Congratulations on finding, fixing and finishing Zarqawi.

  What a superb job you have done in Iraqóyou make us all proud."

  * * *

  "I don't think you'll find that there is a lot of disagreement about the strategy," Rice said during a meeting on June 7, 2006. This was to be her public positionóoptimistic and unyielding. "I think you'll find that most people think we're on the only reasonable course." She and her staff were to keep up the appearance that widespread agreement existed on the current strategy. But it was untrue. Most everyone inside and outside the administration was realizing that the current course seemed less and less reasonable. Rice had key staff members such as Zelikow examining the Iraq strategy and writing classified memos about their findings, and she knew only too well that the war effort was in serious trouble.

  "It was pretty clear what we were doing wasn't working," she would say two years later, looking back on that time.

  "We were not going to succeed. We might not even be able to fight to a standstill if we just stayed on the course we were on."

  * * *

  "I've just returned from Baghdad," Bush said at a morning news conference in the Rose Garden on June 14, the day after his surprise visit to Maliki in Iraq, "and I was inspired." He expressed no reservations about the strategy and gave no hint of the trouble they were in. Nor did he express doubt about Casey.

  "I've got people who say, 'You need to increase the number of forcesónow,'" Bush said. "I've gotten people that said,

  'Well, the role of the United States ought to be more indirect than it has been,' in other words, in a supporting role.

  To those folks, I say, 'Look, I'm going to rely on General Casey.'"

  He added, "I know there is a lot of discussion about troop levels. Those troop levels will be decided upon by General Casey. He will make the recommendations, in consultation with an Iraqi government. But whatever decision General Casey makes, the message is going to be, 'We'll stand with you.'"

  * * *

  That same afternoon, the president met privately with the 10 members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. "It's going to work," he said, brimming with confidence. He said he never paid attention to public opinion polls and instead listened to General Casey.

  He also seemed impressed with Maliki. "We know the problems," the president said. "He's going to solve them."

  Bob Gates pressed. "We're putting a lot of chips on Maliki. Are we sure he's the right guy?"

  Bush indicated that he had no doubts.

  Alan Simpson insisted that the president find some way to talk with the governments of Iran and Syria. Not talking doesn't work, he said. Doesn't work in marriages, doesn't work between governments.

  Throughout the meeting, the president offered little more than a reprise of his public statements.

  Was this "the real deal"? Baker asked. Was the president serious about listening to the Iraq Study Group's recommendations, whatever they might be?

  Bush insisted that he was and that he would order his administration to cooperate fully.

  * * *

  In Baghdad, Casey appreciated the president's repeated public votes of confidence. But he kept asking himself: What do civilian leaders bring to such a war? After all, neither the full capacity of the U.S. government nor the American people were ever mobilized. No one ever articulated a grand strategy about what the heck the United States
was doing. Nearly everything fell to the military. Casey was scheduled to return to Washington later in the month to see the president, Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs.

  So he sat down at breakfast with his senior commanders in Iraq. "Okay," he said, "does everybody have the troops they need?"

  They all said yes.

  On June 21, Casey was back in the United States, meeting with the Joint Chiefs in their secure conference room inside the Pentagon, known as the tank.

  "Iraq Update and Way Ahead," read his SECRET briefing. Casey told them that all of Iraq would be ready for transition to Iraqi control within 18 months, with the exception of Anbar province. A colored map showed only Anbar as red, meaning not ready for transition. Everything else was green. Casey envisioned reducing the U.S. force from the current 15 combat brigades to as few as 10 within six months. Then, six months after that, it would be down to seven or eight brigades, and by December 2007 only five to six combat brigades would remain.

  Currently, he said there were 69 U.S. bases in Iraq, but in a year and a half he intended to cut to 11 basesóan 84

  percent reduction.

  After the killing of Zarqawi, Casey felt optimistic. The war on the ground was nothing like Vietnam. They were not fighting organized units at all. As he put it, "Even the militias are just a bunch of ragbags in pickup trucks."

  On Friday, June 23, Casey was at the White House residence, briefing the president.

  "I think we can off-ramp a couple more brigades," he told the commander in chief, meaning about 5,000 troops would leave in September and not be replaced. He summarized his plan of continuing to draw down brigades for the next 18 months, leaving the United States with only five to six brigades by the end of 2007.