CHAPTER 50
“Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter.”
—Winston Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission
On December 30, 2006, fifteen days after I left the Department of Defense, the Iraqi government executed Saddam Hussein. As he approached the noose, the former strongman struggled for a moment with his guards before regaining his composure. He had kept the salt-and-pepper beard he had favored since his capture, but his hair was again jet black, as I remembered it from our meeting in 1983. The country he had ruled had once been one of the most advanced and hopeful Arab nations in the Middle East, even a potential American ally. As Saddam met the judgment of his people for crimes against humanity, I could not help but reflect on the tragic waste he had made of his country during his long years in power. After the thick rope was placed around his neck, the vanquished dictator said only a few words. The small door below his feet snapped open.
The execution was greeted by dancing in the streets and guns fired into the air in most of Iraq. Along with euphoria and celebration, there was relief. Saddam had lingered in a cell far longer than suited many Iraqis. Some feared American forces might have been keeping Saddam alive as a bargaining chip with the Sunni insurgents, or that he might even be released if major groups agreed to lay down their arms. Many had bitter memories of an earlier Bush administration that had encouraged Iraqis to rise up against the Baathist regime in 1991 but then stood by as Saddam regained his power and massacred those who rose up. Now the man who had dominated and darkened their lives for decades, whose portrait had been in schools and restaurants, on television screens and buildings, was truly, finally gone. Though not all of Iraq’s demons were exorcised, Saddam’s death offered his oppressed people a psychological release that is impossible for outsiders to fully gauge.
The U.S. military involvement in Iraq has come at a high price. Combat took the lives of thousands of American servicemen and-women and left many more wounded. The U.S. Treasury spent hundreds of billions of dollars. The prolonged war also poisoned our politics at home. Political campaigns used the war as a bludgeon against President Bush, his administration, and his party.
Since Saddam Hussein’s statue was brought down in Firdos Square in March 2003, the United States’ goals—replacing Saddam’s government with one that did not attack its neighbors, or develop WMDs, and was respectful of the country’s diverse ethnic and religious minorities—had migrated into a more ambitious effort. Bush administration officials increasingly spoke about the imperative of creating a democracy, particularly after it was discovered that Saddam Hussein didn’t have the ready stockpiles of WMD our intelligence community believed we would uncover. This shift in emphasis suggested that Iraq’s intentions and capability for building WMD had somehow not been threatening. Many Americans and others around the world accordingly came to believe that the war had been unnecessary.
The Bush administration should have pointed out that, while Saddam Hussein did not have WMD stockpiles, he did in fact maintain dual-use facilities that could produce chemical and biological weapons. Given Saddam’s record of using chemical weapons against his own people, those facilities were effectively as dangerous as stockpiles. The Duelfer Report, the product of the Iraq Survey Group that examined Saddam’s WMD programs after the war, carefully documents the scope of his ambitions. Saddam wanted to “[preserve] the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) when sanctions were lifted.”1 He remained intent on reconstituting his WMD programs and kept many of them “on the shelf,” which would allow him to begin producing biological and chemical weapons within several weeks’ time.2 Instead of pointing out these facts, the White House decided not to dispute the matter to avoid “relitigating” the past and changed the subject to democracy promotion. Some assumed that the justification for the war and the need to remove Saddam were self-evident. “[O]ne of the biggest mistakes of the Bush years,” senior Bush adviser Karl Rove later acknowledged, was not “engaging” with administration critics, which “let more of the public come to believe dangerous falsehoods about the war: that Bush lied, that Saddam Hussein never had and never wanted WMD, that we claimed Iraq had been behind 9/11.”3 The damage from this error in judgment was substantial. It allowed critics to whitewash Saddam’s record and political opponents to build a deceitful narrative about the rationale for going to war.
In the weeks leading up to Saddam’s death in December 2006, Democrats who had gained control of Congress were poised to finally succeed in their efforts to cut offwar funding, which would bring U.S. involvement in Iraq to a forced end. President Bush knew that if they prevailed, it would ensure the defeat of the U.S.-led coalition and victory for the jihadists, insurgents, and other enemies of a potentially peaceful and responsible Iraq. He believed that the outcome would be not only a military calamity, but would also force the United States to endure the humiliation of a precipitous withdrawal while plunging Iraq into a further humanitarian disaster.
Bush realized that a political strategy with the new Congress was now as important as a military strategy. The President was frustrated that progress was too slow, but he believed that with some additional time and patience, the situation could improve. His challenge was to convince the opposition party, led by incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, that the administration had developed a promising new approach and deserved additional time. The President undoubtedly hoped that the sweeping personnel changes underway—new commanders at CENTCOM and in Iraq and a new secretary of defense—offered a concrete demonstration to the public that the commander in chief was pursuing a different course. Accordingly, President Bush took one of the boldest political and strategic maneuvers in recent American history: the 2007 surge.
Talk of executing a surge of additional U.S. troops began in November 2006 with a White House review of Iraq strategy led by J. D. Crouch and Bill Luti, both of whom had come to the NSC from the Defense Department. At the same time, officials in the Pentagon were undertaking our own review. Assistant Defense Secretary Peter Rodman and I sought to develop a DoD position that recognized the approach we had taken over the last year was not working “well enough or fast enough.”4 Though I had largely removed myself from policy making after the announcement of my resignation, I continued to oversee this review in the hope that the administration’s new course would have the support of the country’s top military officials.
We drew up a working paper in early December summarizing the options that the Pentagon’s civilian and military leaders were considering. “[F]ailure in Iraq will place the American people in even greater danger,” my cover memo for the paper began.5 We suggested further accelerating the buildup of the Iraqi Security Forces and renewed efforts at befriending the Sunnis, now that the Awakening movement in Anbar province was blossoming.6 We also suggested new efforts to curb Iran’s hostile involvement, particularly its training of sectarian Shia militia death squads and its clandestine attacks on U.S. troops.
The Defense Department’s summary paper was developed from a memo I had written the previous month to provide Bush with some “illustrative new courses of action.” One proposed course was to “[i]ncrease Brigade Combat Teams and U.S. forces in Iraq substantially.”7Since a surge of military forces still lacked support among military leaders, that suggestion was placed in my memo “below the line”—in other words, as a less favored option.8
Generals Abizaid and Casey were still uneasy with the idea of deploying more troops without a clear and agreed military mission for them. The Joint Chiefs also had questions about surging more troops into Iraq without a parallel surge by the State Department and other civilian agencies. Army Chief of Staff Pete Schoomaker and Marine Corps Commandant Michael Hagee were concerned about the toll more combat tours would take on their ground forces. Surging more U.S. troops would mean that some units’ tours would need to be extended to fifteen months—a step that could not be taken lightly. The senior military leadership had the proper concern that military power alone could not solve Iraq’s problems. I agreed with them that any surge of U.S. forces would have to be accompanied by more effective diplomatic and economic surges from other departments and agencies, and, of critical importance, by considerably greater political progress by Iraq’s elected leaders.
The President understood his surge proposal already ran against the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment, his State Department, and congressional Democrats as well as some Republicans in Congress. Without support from senior military leaders, it would be fatally wounded before it was ever proposed.9
Gradually, opinions were changing at the Pentagon. Pace had assembled a council of colonels to conduct a military review for the Joint Chiefs. The colonels, many of whom had spent more than one deployment in Iraq, were open to the idea of sending several additional brigades if they had a clear mission. Pace and I worked to allay any concerns Casey, Abizaid, and the Joint Chiefs might have. For instance, to address the Army’s and Marine Corps’ concerns about stress on their forces from continued deployments, the President endorsed an increase in the size of both services.
The skepticism of senior military leaders, however, was mild in comparison with the opposition within the State Department. Rice argued that surging more U.S. troops would further antagonize American allies and erode domestic political support. State Department officials recommended reducing U.S. troop levels and redeploying what forces were left on the ground into large bases away from the fighting.10
On December 13, 2006, President Bush came to the Pentagon for a meeting on Iraq. Present were the incoming secretary of defense, Bob Gates, and the senior military and civilian Defense Department leadership. The President urged everyone at the table to propose anything that could “show noticeable change in the situation in Baghdad.”11
“What I want to hear from you,” Bush said firmly, “is how we’re going to win, not how we’re going to leave.”12
The President knew that if he were to avoid a congressionally mandated defeat in Iraq, he needed a political and military game changer that would give the progress underway a chance to develop fully. Though I was a latecomer in supporting the surge, by the time I left the Pentagon I felt that there were solid arguments for its two main military features: a somewhat heavier U.S. footprint and a new operational approach that centered on securing the population.
The new commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, had distilled the lessons of counterinsurgency warfare after a year of research at Fort Leavenworth, where he had been assigned after his second tour in Iraq. He believed it was time to emphasize protecting the population now that the Sunni tribal leaders had decided to break with al-Qaida and needed the U.S. military to shield them from the jihadists’ retribution. In 2005 and 2006, local commanders had tried some of the classic counterinsurgency techniques, such as living in small outposts and cordoning off neighborhoods with cement barriers to protect the population, but not in Baghdad, where violence was escalating. Petraeus proposed to take back the capital city from al-Qaida, radical Shia militias, and death squads by securing the local population block by block.
To ensure that these gains would last, Petraeus requested and received an additional twenty thousand troops that began deploying in January 2007. More troops, however, were not the sole reason for the success of the surge. In 2005 we had twice increased U.S. troops by twenty thousand. Yet the 2005 surges did not lead to the impressive progress that was achieved in 2007. The 2007 surge coincided with seismic shifts in the Iraqi political landscape. The Sunni Awakening, which had begun in the late summer of 2006 in Anbar province, was by then a full-fledged antiterrorist movement.
Sunni Iraqis were reclaiming their towns from al-Qaida one by one. Sunni leaders in Anbar, like Sheikh Abdul Sattar al-Rishawi, were willing to risk violent death—al-Qaida murdered Rishawi in 2007—to finally disavow the extremists that had taken sanctuary in their towns and villages. Muqtada al-Sadr declared a cease-fire against the coalition and the government, effectively ending a latent Shia rebellion. An elected government, seated in mid-2006, had finally formed, and its leaders were gaining enough confidence to take on the extremists, even within their own religious sect. Shia leaders like Nouri al-Maliki were prepared to win back Basra by defeating Iran-funded Shia militias. Perhaps most important, the surge also coincided with the time when the Iraqi security forces had finally reached a critical mass in number and capability. By December 2006, some 320,000 Iraqis had been trained, equipped, and deployed, producing the forces needed to help hold difficult neighborhoods; they joined in patrols with the surge troops, putting an Iraqi face on the new strategy.
The surge recognized these major political and military changes in the environment and adopted a new approach to take advantage of them. But ultimately, the true genius of the surge was the political effect it had in the United States, where the conflict’s true center of gravity had migrated. The surge began first and foremost with a major shift in the administration’s political strategy at home, by tempering the defeatist mood on Capitol Hill.* Petraeus’ embedding of U.S. forces with Iraqi troops in violent neighborhoods also gave Iraqis a renewed confidence that the United States stood with them. It improved intelligence collection, with more tips and cooperation coming from Iraqi citizens. As more neighborhoods became calm, citizens started moving back, reopening their businesses, and once again taking their children to neighborhood parks. The terror that had aided the insurgents’ cause began to subside.
While Petraeus brought a new operational approach to Iraq, ultimately he continued the existing strategy: building up Iraqi capabilities while containing the violent threats to the new political order so Iraqis would soon be able to take charge of their own problems. This was the same sensible and modest strategy we had set out before the war. It was the same strategy that—though altered with the establishment of a longer-term Coalition Provisional Authority—we reaffirmed in our October 2003 strategic review, when I intervened to bring an early end to the CPA. It is the strategy that President Barack Obama continued to pursue in the first years of his presidency.
As I had repeatedly argued in the Defense Department and in interagency meetings, success should not be defined as our solving all of Iraq’s problems. Our strategy was not to create (for the first time in its history) a noncorrupt, prosperous democracy, with all the protections afforded by due process. Such goals were desirable, but not within the limits of American capabilities or patience. Because Iraq would be plagued for years by some level of violence, ethnic tensions, and a poor economic infrastructure, I thought our strategy should be to try to contain those problems and build up the abilities of Iraqis to deal with them so that they could manage their own affairs and not be a security problem for the region, the United States, or our allies.
I have been asked on occasion if I believed the war was worth the costs, particularly since WMD stockpiles were not found. It is a fair question. Any calculation of the costs and benefits of the Iraq war has to take into account what Iraq and the world might look like if Saddam and his sons were still in power. While the road not traveled always looks smoother, the cold reality of a Hussein regime in Baghdad most likely would mean a Middle East far more perilous than it is today: Iran and Iraq locked in a struggle to field nuclear weapons, which could give rise to a regional arms race among Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Syria; continued support for terrorists from an Iraqi regime enriched by rising oil prices; wars of aggression launched against neighboring countries in the Gulf; the torture and death of thousands more Iraqis suspected of opposing the regime; and a United Nations even more discredited than it is today, as its sanctions crumbled. Our failure to confront Iraq would have sent a message to other nations that neither America nor any other nation was willing to stand in the way of their support for terrorism and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
President Bush made the decision to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein knowing there would be consequences that neither he nor anyone else could foresee. We had discussed many of the potential risks, but there are no methodologies or formulas that can substitute for judgment and intuition in dealing with the challenges of statecraft. There are always factors that turn out to be important, but were unanticipated. I have no doubt that given the facts that were available to President Bush in 2003, I would have made the same decision. Further, knowing what we later learned and recognizing the costs, there is not a persuasive argument to be made that the United States would be in a stronger strategic position or that Iraq and the Middle East would be better offif Saddam were still in power. In short, ridding the region of Saddam’s brutal regime has created a more stable and secure world.
In 2010, Iraq had the twelfth fastest growing economy in the world.14 Though al-Qaida still has the ability to pull off spectacular attacks, it no longer finds sanctuary in any corner of that country. Over the coming years, with a moderate, representative government, Iraq has the potential to become a positive influence in the Middle East, a region that is sorely in need of good influences. It could become a valued long-term partner of the United States and a bulwark against Iran, a role that will prove critical if Tehran continues on its belligerent path toward a nuclear arsenal.
Any optimistic prognosis for Iraq is quite a change from how things looked in 2006. But making policy and formulating strategy are not exact sciences in which outcomes are certain and measurable. Though it makes officials in both the executive and legislative branches of government uncomfortable, strategic thinking requires acknowledgment of the inevitability of considerable uncertainty.
Postulating a world in which Saddam Hussein remained in power is of course a theoretical exercise. It involves numerous known unknowns and undoubtedly some unknown unknowns. The only known certainty is that those who made the decisions with imperfect knowledge will be judged in hindsight by those with considerably more information at their disposal and time for reflection. Indeed, my own analysis—and criticisms—in this book benefit from both.
It is of note that during Bob McNamara’s confirmation hearing to become secretary of defense in 1961, not a single U.S. senator asked him a question about Vietnam. In Dick Cheney’s confirmation hearing in 1989, not a single U.S. senator asked him about Iraq. In my confirmation hearing in 2001, not a single U.S. senator asked me about Afghanistan. Yet in each case, the questions not asked dominated our tenures. The lesson is that we should learn to expect to be surprised. The limits of intelligence—of both human intellect and the products of our government’s intelligence agencies—are a reality that should make us all humble. We need to be confident but also intellectually flexible to alter course as required. Being prepared for the unknown and agile enough to respond to the unforeseen is the essence of strategy.
Over my years in both the public and private sectors, I have come to see strategy and decision making as a four-step process that requires periodic recalibration and adjustment. At its most fundamental level, grand strategy is setting large, longer-term goals that are realistic and can be balanced with the means available to achieve them. It requires continual review of the goals in light of the means and of new circumstances as they come to light.
The first step of strategy is precisely defining one’s goals. “If you get the objectives right,” George Marshall is widely reported to have said, “a lieutenant can write the strategy.” Setting clear goals may sound obvious, but it is remarkable how rarely governments—or other organizations, for that matter—take the time and care to start a policy-making process by formulating strategic goals precisely and in writing. Failure to do so can doom an enterprise before it begins. There is a tendency to deal with challenging situations by plunging into discussions of options or courses of action. That approach takes for granted that the goals are self-evident and shared by everyone involved, and that the options to be considered are appropriate to the goals. When officials fail to define their objectives with care, it’s difficult for the entire government to make and execute decisions that advance them. Without a well-understood strategy, decisions can be random and even counterproductive. Setting priorities and defining limits can help to avoid what the military calls “mission creep”—the tendency to gradually increase a commitment without fully understanding the consequences and costs of doing so.
The number of goals has to be limited. Listing more than four or five means they are probably not at the strategic level. In early 2005, for example, I suggested to President Bush the three major goals in the struggle against Islamist terrorists: defending the homeland; disrupting terrorist networks abroad; and countering ideological support for terrorism.15 We had to make some hard choices about what to leave off that list—things that would have been desirable but that I ultimately concluded were not essential and could have become distracting, such as eradicating terrorist funding through the narcotics trade or promoting democracy. Without identifying which goals are the most important, one ends up with little more than a wish list that will not provide critical strategic direction. Strategy begins by planting a clear, recognizable flag in the distance that others can see and work toward.
The second step of strategy is identifying the major assumptions associated with the challenge at hand, always recognizing that they are based on imperfect information that can change or even turn out to have been incorrect. For an entrepreneur, a major assumption might be that a company’s newly developed product will receive patent protection from competition for a period of time. A major assumption in planning military action might be that a foreign country will cooperate by granting basing or overflight rights to an air force. These assumptions can turn out to be wrong. In war, for example, a common mistake is creating a picture of the battlefield based on a static picture of the enemy that fails to recognize that the enemy has a brain and will react and change his strategy, which in turn will require changing assumptions and plans.
The third step is evaluating the possible courses of action in light of the assumptions. At the upper levels of policy making almost all possible courses of action entail negative consequences that need to be weighed. This is particularly so when it comes to ones that must be made by a president. By the time he engages on an issue, most if not all of the good options often have been attempted by others at lower levels. In July 2001, for example, when I wrote the other members of the NSC suggesting various courses of action we should consider with respect to Iraq, none were ideal.16 Ending the UN-imposed no-fly zones could embolden Saddam. Terminating the UN sanctions could give him the space to rebuild his WMD programs. Engaging with him could legitimize and prolong his regime. Pushing for regime change could alienate some of our traditional allies.
The fourth and final stage in formulating strategy is executing the chosen course of action. And this too can change based on circumstances. For example, we had to make multiple adjustments to our assumptions about the formation, development, focus, and deployment of Iraqi security forces as the situation changed over time, but we remained consistent in our emphasis on helping them develop their own capabilities. No matter how careful the preparation, fortune plays a role in all plans and necessitates the recalibration or abandonment of key assumptions, and therefore major changes in the plan. Oversight of these constant adjustments requires careful balance to avoid the extremes of disengagement and micromanagement. Kissinger once described Anwar Sadat, one of the most impressive men I have ever met, as “free of the obsession with detail by which mediocre leaders think they are mastering events, only to be engulfed by them.”17
Strategy is not linear. It is never completed until the challenge at hand has been resolved. The means must be continually reviewed to see whether they still serve the goals, and if the goals are sensible and realistic in light of one’s means and unfolding events. There is a danger that policies and courses of action can acquire a momentum of their own. Continuing them without adjustment or reconsideration is often easier than developing new ones. Inertia can be an obstacle to formulating and maintaining sound strategy.
In wartime, strategy and statesmanship require a clear-eyed understanding of the enemy and its ideology and a clear articulation of both by the nation’s leaders. After 9/11, though, our government never came to such an understanding. With the benefit of nearly a decade of hindsight, we ought to have more precisely labeled our enemies as violent Islamists. President Bush and others were properly careful not to foster or be seen as fostering the idea that Islam—a faith observed by more than one billion people across the world—was our enemy. To succeed we would require the assistance of millions of Muslims—the only ones who could forcefully reject, marginalize, and ultimately defeat the extremist elements within their faith who are our enemies. We did not want to unintentionally antagonize the overwhelming majority who shared our views. But we were wrong not to forcefully communicate that we are fighting an extremist ideology rooted in Islam.
Islamists who preach and lay the foundations for jihadist violence pose a serious challenge to liberal democracy. Paradoxically, America’s finest traits—our respect for religion and individual liberty—make our country particularly vulnerable to an enemy whose ideology is based in religion. But reluctance to face up to Islamism, to confront it directly and work actively to counter it, has been and remains even at this writing a serious and costly hesitation in our body politic since 9/11.
According to their own utterances, writings, and propaganda, Islamists seek to reestablish the caliphate, an empire that stretched from Spain to India in the tenth century, and expand it around the globe. The network of our terrorist enemies comprises a diverse group of people, but what links them are totalitarian, expansionist, and revolutionary distortions of Islam. Some Islamist ideals are represented by Shia ayatollahs in Iran; others by bin Laden and Sunni al-Qaida terrorists in Pakistan. All Islamists, however, promote replacement of the world’s international system of nation-states with a single theocratic empire that imposes and enforces sharia (Muslim holy law). Islamist ideology rejects democracy, civil liberties, and laws made by men. Those of us who embrace such practices are despised and detested as an insult to Allah. Though his statement was mocked and ridiculed by some, President Bush was correct—profoundly so—when he said that the terrorists who struck on 9/11 “hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”18
Still, we never successfully translated that basic vision into a message that explained to Americans and the world who we were fighting and why they had attacked us. In fact, we often seemed to do the opposite, out of fear of being labeled anti-Muslim—a pattern that the Obama administration has taken to a dangerous extreme in initially denying the ideological links among the terrorist plots in Times Square, Fort Hood, and Detroit.
While those of us in the Bush administration did not engage in the debate needed to identify the enemy’s ideology, we did at least recognize that the challenge we faced was fundamentally ideological. “The important point is that what we face is an ideologically-based challenge,” I wrote in 2004, when we were engaged in both Iraq and Afghanistan. “Radical Islamists may be centered in the Middle East, but their reach is worldwide and their goals are global.” My memo continued:
If it is an ideological challenge, our task is not simply to defend, but to preempt, to go on the offensive, and to keep the radicals offbalance. We learned this lesson in the Soviet Union cold war case. For one thing, we will need to show the moderates in the religion that they have support. . . . [T]hey must take up the battle and defend their religion against those who would hijack it. . . . [I]deologies can be defeated. The Soviet collapse teaches us this. If Islamism’s goal is the fantasy of a new “Caliphate,” we can deflate it by, over time, demonstrating its certain futility. Simply by not giving in to terrorist blackmail—by not being riven out of the Middle East—we will demonstrate over time that the extremists’ ideology cannot deliver.19
One of the three components of the strategy we developed in the months after 9/11 addressed how to counter the enemy’s ideology. We knew that wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would not end Islamist terrorism and, in fact, in the short term could give the enemy opportunities to attract more recruits and cite the inevitable casualties as proof that the United States was warring against Islam. As long as madrassas and mosques from Jakarta to Hamburg preached Islamism and justified terrorism in its service, military action could make only limited headway. After circulating our 2005 national defense strategy, the State Department objected to the inclusion of “countering ideological support” as a goal.20 While some in the administration recognized the problem, there was never any resolution and as a result we are not able to fashion and execute a plan to confront it effectively.
I favored a major effort to win over those Muslims who were sitting on the fence—those not supporting al-Qaida but who were not actively opposing the extremists either. Our extremist enemies did not terrorize only Westerners, but their fellow Muslims. I thought we needed a campaign to win over friends and allies in the Muslim world and “mobilize moderate Muslims,” as I argued in July 2005.21 We needed to tell the truth about the Islamist extremists—about their brutality, injustice, and totalitarian political ambitions. The best way to communicate that message was not for American political leaders to do it, but to find ways to get more Muslims around the world publicly speaking out against them. But the United States and other Western countries have been notably unsuccessful in encouraging Muslim political, religious, and educational leaders to take a stand against Islamism and the preaching of violence and terror.
This failure has been a serious deficiency in the West’s struggle against the extremists. Our inability to compete in the battle of ideas and to counter our enemies’ ideology has invited them to focus on communicating through the media, where they have enjoyed consistent and sustained success. This is the essence of asymmetric warfare. Instead of engaging our military forces, they engage us where we and all democracies are most vulnerable: our public will and staying power. They seek to demoralize free people and cause their nations to withdraw from the world into isolationism.
Our enemies know that a single attack cannot break our will. They also know that a single attack, skillfully handled, with accompanying grisly pictures and video, can affect public opinion dramatically and quickly. In Iraq and Afghanistan our enemies’ goal was to sour U.S. public opinion on the wars and cause members of Congress to do what the enemy fighters could not do: force the U.S. military to stop fighting. They worked to inflict at least a few casualties on us every day, providing more negative images and headlines for the next news cycle. They hope to achieve what they have sought since they successfully defeated the Soviet empire in Afghanistan: the humiliation of another superpower. They almost achieved exactly that in 2007, when Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid pushed to cut funding for the Iraq war. Their efforts, if successful, would have led to precisely the kind of rout the enemy hoped for—the kind I remembered all too well from the difficult days in the spring of 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War.
Though I disagreed with those who argued to end our efforts in Iraq abruptly, I continue to believe that military missions undertaken by the United States need to be realistic in intent and limited in scope. Strategy and statesmanship require recognizing and understanding that our nation’s capabilities are finite. Further, the American public is not tolerant of the long-term involvement of U.S. forces in combat. Wars threaten to change free societies, which is why it is difficult for democracies to wage prolonged bloody conflicts. This laudable aversion to war makes it all the more challenging when U.S. military efforts are required and must be sustained.
For a time, a popular maxim about Iraq was “If you break it, you own it.” But to be clear, the United States did not “break” Iraq. It was broken by a dictator who over twenty-five years ran his country into the ground. Nor did the United States break Afghanistan, a land that had been broken, at least by Western standards, for centuries. We can encourage, assist, and advise, but we should not take on the responsibility as the prime actor. Local Afghans and Iraqis know far better than we do how to form and at what pace to evolve their societies. Solving corruption in Afghanistan or building a secular democracy in the Middle East are not America’s problems to tackle. They are not our broken societies to fix.
The futures of Afghanistan and Iraq have yet to be decided, and circumstances could still deteriorate. Afghans, Iraqis, and their elected leaders may make wrong choices in the years ahead and lose some of the hard-won gains of the U.S. military. Nonetheless, it must be said that America has given them a chance at success. Because of American sacrifice, they have been given the opportunity to build better, more secure, more prosperous, and freer societies than they ever knew under the Taliban or Saddam Hussein. They are now challenged with the responsibilities of sustaining their free societies, just as Americans are responsible for sustaining ours.
In the late 1970s, after two decades in government and my early years in business, Joyce and I had saved enough to purchase a small place in El Prado, New Mexico, just north of Taos, then a sleepy town of a few thousand people—a haven for artists, skiers, self-described free spirits, and graying hippies. For decades it had been a crossroads of Hispanic, Indian, and Western cultures, combining the millennia-old traditions of the original inhabitants of the continent with the pioneering spirit of the settlers who first headed West.
Next to our farm is the Taos Pueblo, thought to be the oldest, continuously inhabited community in North America. The Native American tribe that founded it has made the area its home for more than a thousand years, centuries before the first Europeans set sail for the New World and well before a Declaration of Independence pitted thirteen colonies against an empire. Few other places in America serve as a more vivid reminder of how young our nation is, which for me only makes even more miraculous what has been achieved in its short existence. When I am in New Mexico and see the majestic landscape and endless blue skies, I sense what this great land of ours represents: promise, possibility, and renewal.
A few years after New Mexico became part of U.S. territory, the American Civil War began. During that conflict, deep divisions between those loyal to the North and South led to skirmishes in the area, including efforts by Confederate sympathizers to take down the American flag flying over the Taos Plaza. Eventually, a group of men, including the legendary frontiersman Kit Carson, resolved to nail the Union flag to a tall wooden pole, where it was kept under twenty-four-hour watch. Though federal regulations prevented municipalities from flying the Stars and Stripes after sundown, Congress passed a special law authorizing Taos to be the first city in the nation allowed to fly the flag day and night. And there the flag has flown ever since, through times of war, economic despair, disease, and disaster—in the cruelest of times as well as the best of times.
Our still-young country has withstood tragedies and trauma of unimagined scope. And yet it has continued to thrive, thanks to proud and resilient citizens and leaders from both political parties who have done their best to guide the nation. “If those young Americans who have the advantage of education, perspective, and self-discipline do not participate to the fullest extent of their ability,” Adlai Stevenson once said, “America will stumble, and if America stumbles the world falls.” He warned, “For the power, for good or evil, of this American political organization is virtually beyond measurement. The decisions which it makes, the uses to which it devotes its immense resources, the leadership which it provides on moral as well as material questions, all appear likely to determine the fate of the modern world.”22 Those words remain as true and profound today as when I first heard them at my senior class banquet at Princeton University in 1954.
Those who have been privileged to serve our country have been the guardians of one of the greatest achievements of mankind. Our United States of America, at once imperfect and extraordinary, has offered more opportunity and improved more lives, both at home and throughout the world, than any other nation in history. In writing this book I have looked back over a life enriched beyond measure by those opportunities. I hope readers will come away with a conviction that service to America is an obligation to be fulfilled, as well as an honor to be embraced.