CHAPTER ELEVEN

“What Would You Do, Lieutenant?”

Green Zone, Baghdad

November 2005

Just before nine in the morning a convoy of Chevy Suburbans pulled up at the Adnan Palace, an ugly pyramid-shaped building on the western edge of the Green Zone. Casey clambered out of one vehicle along with several aides and diplomats, pushed through the towering wooden doors, and headed up the marble staircase to the second floor where Bayan Jabr, the interior minister, was waiting. A small man with a closely cropped salt-and-pepper beard who had spent years in exile during Saddam Hussein’s rule, Jabr now presided over a force that included some 135,000 local police and 30,000 national police commandos. He and Casey settled into a pair of cushioned armchairs. Like other government officials, Jabr normally didn’t start working until much later in the day, but Casey had wanted to see him first thing.

“This is what we found,” Casey said, pointing at a cardboard box that his aide had brought to the meeting and placed on the low coffee table in front of them. It was the same container Karl Horst had shown Casey the day before, with the whips, shackles, and other torture devices that his men had removed from the Jadiriyah bunker. Sticking out of the top was a fearsome-looking barbed club. Jabr recoiled and then let out a resigned sigh. “Iraqis,” he muttered, as if such behavior was a national trait. Casey handed him photographs of the emaciated, broken men who had emerged from the dank prison. He wanted no misunderstanding. The secret prison was in an Interior Ministry building less than a mile from his office and guarded by men on Jabr’s payroll. The only possible conclusion, Casey said in a level but firm voice, was that Jabr himself or the people around him had known about the facility and had condoned it.

With his French-cuff shirts and passable English, Jabr was one of the smoother members of the cabinet. He knew nothing about this, he sputtered. He was far removed from such sordid matters. Many of the guards had trained under Saddam Hussein, when all prisoners were treated this way. What did Casey expect? “We will have an investigation,” he said. The meeting lasted no more than fifteen tense minutes. By the time Jabr appeared before the press later to announce the joint Iraqi-U.S. investigation of the prison, the minister had recovered his composure. Most of the prisoners had been foreign terrorists, he told disbelieving Western reporters, holding up several passports. “Nobody was beheaded or killed.” It had been worse under Saddam.

Casey found Jabr hard to believe, too. After returning to his office, he ordered a secret investigation to assess whether the minister had known about the prison. Though it was never acknowledged publicly, U.S. and British intelligence eavesdropped on the top levels of the government, intercepting their cell phones and text messages. When the secret report came back a few weeks later, there was no definitive proof linking Jabr to the torture operation. But Casey was convinced that he at least had known about it. The bunker was run, the United States believed, by a relative of Jabr’s, known as Engineer Ahmed, who was often seen around Adnan Palace. The United States wanted to use the Jadiriyah incident to force personnel changes at the Interior Ministry, starting with Jabr. When Casey and U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad presented Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari with the classified report a few weeks later, the subject only seemed to make him weary. “He just said, ‘Okay. I’ll look at this,’” Casey recalled. He and Khalilzad talked about whether they should try to force the prime minister to do something by giving him a deadline to take action or calling a press conference to further expose the abuses in the ministry. Casey decided it was the ambassador’s call. “As a military guy, I didn’t feel like I ought to dictate to the prime minister,” he explained. Eventually the subject of Jadiriyah was dropped. No one important was fired, and Jabr remained in senior government posts.

There were more episodes like this one the longer Casey remained in command, moments that raised fundamental questions about the course the United States was embarked upon in Iraq. If the Interior Ministry had been infiltrated by Shiite militias that abused Sunnis and was headed by a minister who denied the evidence, how could the United States proceed with its plans to place it in charge of security? Wasn’t that a path to failure? Casey wasn’t blind to these and other contradictions. He had been in command for nearly eighteen months, longer than any other senior American, military or civilian, and knew better than most the flaws at the core of the U.S. effort. Not that Casey doubted the course he was on. He was in many ways the prototypical officer, curious and thoughtful, open to new information and ready to adjust—but usually at the margins, enough to assure himself that whatever problems existed were being addressed, if not entirely resolved. The meetings at Adnan Palace and with the prime minister were good examples. He wasn’t going to let the incident pass, but he wasn’t going to provoke a showdown, either. It wasn’t his job. This was a sovereign country, and it was up to the ambassador to handle the prime minister and major political issues, not him. Besides, he told himself, the last round of national elections was only a few weeks away. The next government would be better.

Casey had arrived in Iraq determined to keep his goals limited, not to take on tasks beyond the military’s purview and ability. It was the same mind-set that the Army had adopted during the 1990s peacekeeping missions in an attempt to avoid another Vietnam-like quagmire, which had destroyed the force. The longer he remained in Baghdad the more he became convinced of this logic. Military power could drive down the violence and buy time to build a government. But the military couldn’t force the Iraqis to get along with each other; it couldn’t win the war. There were big downsides to expanding the military’s role. Asking the Army to do more, he believed, risked breaking the institution to which he had dedicated his life and cared for deeply.

By early 2006, however, people who mattered were beginning to doubt him and the strategy. In November, Senator John McCain went public with his criticism in a major speech at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank a few blocks from the White House. The lunchtime audience overflowed into the hallways, straining to catch every word from the former prisoner of war who would shortly announce his candidacy for the presidency. “There is an undeniable sense that things are slipping,” he said, reciting the worrisome trends in Iraq. He was careful not to blame the White House or even Rumsfeld, whom he privately considered a disaster. Instead the former Navy pilot aimed his remarks at the military men in Baghdad. U.S. commanders had been slow to adopt “a true counterinsurgency strategy” that emphasized protecting the population and holding on to areas cleared of insurgents, he said. Wrongheaded plans were afoot to reduce troop levels and hand off the mission as quickly as possible to the Iraqi army and police. “Instead of drawing down, we should be ramping up,” he declared, and instead of rotating its generals after one-year tours, the Pentagon should keep the best of them in Iraq, mentioning Petraeus, Chiarelli, and others. “We need these commanders and their hard-won experience to stay in place.” He didn’t praise or even mention Casey. That was the way a mugging was done in Washington.

Petraeus was about as far from the war as a soldier could get. When he first learned that he had been chosen to head the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, he was disappointed. He wasn’t entirely sure what his new command even did. Digging into it on the Internet, he learned that he’d have responsibility for running the Army’s nationwide network of training centers and schools. He would also oversee the drafting of Army doctrine. Gradually Petraeus’s enthusiasm built.

Every couple of days Petraeus would regale Colonel J. R. Martin, his former West Point classmate, with some new aspect of the job that had piqued his intellect. Martin had a more immediate worry: “I was concerned that he wouldn’t be able to get promoted out of it,” he recalled. Even among Petraeus’s clique of supporters, the orders sending him to the Kansas outpost were seen as a sign that the higher brass thought that the ambitious general, after almost thirty months in Iraq, needed a good rest—or that the Army needed a rest from him.

On a crisp October afternoon, Petraeus took command at Fort Leavenworth from Lieutenant General William Wallace. When Wallace had been sent to Kansas in mid-2003, it was widely seen as punishment, meted out by Rumsfeld, after the general confessed to a reporter that the United States hadn’t anticipated the waves of crazed Saddam Fedayeen guerrillas that harassed U.S. troops on their initial drive to Baghdad. “The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different from the one we war-gamed against,” he’d said. At Leavenworth, Wallace hadn’t made big changes. Petraeus wasted no time in demonstrating that he had an altogether different approach to the job. After an honor guard fired the traditional fifteen-gun salute, a sergeant handed Petraeus a gleaming brass shell casing from the barrage. “I don’t know how you got it polished up so quickly,” he said, fingering the spent cartridge, “but you clearly know how I like to operate.”

Far from the battlefields of Iraq—where the war was going from bad to much worse—the bright and ambitious general began plotting an insurgency of his own, one aimed at changing his service. Like any good guerrilla, Petraeus chose to attack a spot that was poorly defended: the Army’s counterinsurgency doctrine. By 2005 the doctrine hadn’t been revised in more than a quarter of a century; it was a dusty document that few even bothered to read.

A year earlier, Wallace, whose first assignment in the Army had been as an advisor to the South Vietnamese army, had assigned a lieutenant colonel who had never laid eyes on Iraq to rewrite the document. The overwhelmed officer labored in almost complete obscurity. In a matter of days, the new commanding general made rewriting the counterinsurgency doctrine his top priority. Doctrine provides an intellectual framework for how to fight different kinds of wars. Often it is written to reflect conventional Army wisdom. In rare instances, new doctrine has driven major changes in the Army. In the early 1980s the Army unveiled the AirLand Battle Doctrine, a recipe for defeating much larger Soviet armor formations. It called on commanders to strike ninety miles behind the front lines with helicopters and artillery, using speed, cunning, and intuition to surprise the more mechanistic Soviets. The doctrine, which drove the Army for two decades, was an explicit rejection of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s rigid, measurement-focused approach to war.

Petraeus wanted his counterinsurgency doctrine to have the same impact as AirLand Battle. At the time, he had a couple of big strikes against him. One was Fort Leavenworth itself. Even by Army standards, the base is in the middle of nowhere. A nineteenth-century frontier fort located on the high bluffs overlooking the Missouri River, an hour’s drive from Kansas City, it is probably best known as the site of an old limestone prison. It doesn’t get much attention from Washington except when a high-profile inmate arrives in leg irons. Leavenworth is also home to the Army’s staff college, where young, rising officers learn to do war planning. The post’s red brick houses, lecture halls, and softball fields make it feel more like a tweedy midwestern liberal arts campus than an Army base. Petraeus had spent a year there in 1982—an uneventful sojourn, except that he graduated first in his class. He hadn’t been back since.

The second major handicap Petraeus faced was that doctrine is hardly an exciting topic. He asked Conrad Crane, a classmate of his from West Point who had written extensively about counterinsurgency and taught history at the Army War College, to oversee a large team that was going to rewrite the new doctrine. Petraeus enlisted a number of high-profile Washington figures, both military and civilian. Among those included was Eliot Cohen, a Johns Hopkins professor who had been a critic of the Bush administration’s handling of the war and would go on to serve in the influential position of counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He also called on now Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, the Rhodes scholar and Sosh alum whose book on Vietnam and Malaya had made him a minor celebrity, appearing on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. In early 2006, Nagl was working in the Pentagon, where he was growing increasingly disillusioned with the war effort.

Finally Petraeus called a friend who had served in the Clinton administration, Sarah Sewall, who was running Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights. He’d met her in the early 1990s when he was doing his research project on the U.S. intervention in Haiti. The center agreed to cosponsor a Fort Leavenworth conference to provide suggestions for improving the new doctrine’s first draft. Petraeus made sure the conference received the proper attention, flying in congressional staffers, journalists, and a bevy of political scientists, human rights advocates, and military historians.

He held court before them for two days. At a dinner on the first night, he unveiled a recent article he’d written for Military Review on the fourteen most important things he’d learned from soldiering in Iraq. The observations weren’t especially novel, but the crowd of counterinsurgency experts and Washington insiders was adoring. The next day the participants set to work on revising the first draft of the doctrine. It was path-breaking.

For decades, the American way of war had been to bludgeon the enemy so thoroughly with heavy firepower that he would realize he had no chance and submit quickly. In this way, the Army hoped to avoid drawn-out conflicts like Vietnam that sapped both the military’s willingness to fight and the support of the public at home. This approach was the essence of the so-called Powell Doctrine, named after General Colin Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the 1991 Gulf War. As he first had done twenty years earlier in his dissertation, Petraeus took direct aim at Powell’s tenet that the country could simply choose not to fight in messy guerrilla wars. “Most enemies of the United States … know they cannot compete with U.S. forces” in a conventional war, the 453-page manual began. “Instead they try to exhaust U.S. national will, aiming to win by undermining and outlasting public support.”

The most radical aspect of the manual was its insistence that the primary focus in counterinsurgency wars should be on protecting the civilian population and not on killing the enemy. It made this point in a series of Zen-like warnings dubbed the “paradoxes of counterinsurgency.”

“Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is,” one of the Powell Doctrine-defying precepts maintained. And so it went, point after point: “Sometimes, doing nothing is the best reaction.” “Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot.”

Petraeus’s manual also attacked an idea that had become gospel in the Army during the 1990s peacekeeping missions—that protecting the force was of paramount importance in low-intensity wars. The manual insisted that in counterinsurgency wars soldiers had to assume greater risks in order to distinguish the enemy from the innocents, safeguard the population, and in the end achieve greater safety. “The more you protect the force, the less secure you may be,” the doctrine warned.

The new manual received lavish press coverage engineered by Petraeus, who acted as his own publicist. Most generals keep journalists at arm’s length, believing the surest way to stunt their careers is to appear to be grandstanding in the press. Petraeus was different. He courted journalists with the same intensity he brought to every task, remembering their names and returning their e-mails at all hours. Thanks to Petraeus’s finely tuned public relations sense, stories about his new doctrine and the brain trust that developed it were featured on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. The doctrine’s authors even made an appearance on Charlie Rose, and Lieutenant Colonel Nagl had a seven-minute sit-down with comedian Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. In the history of Army manuals, there had been nothing like it. In its first week, the manual was downloaded more than 1.5 million times. It was later reprinted by the University of Chicago Press as a paperback, and reviewed in the New York Times Book Review.

The manual helped the exhausted Army feel as if it had expertise in the type of warfare it was facing in Iraq, and it positioned Petraeus as the most cogent thinker about the deepest strategic and tactical questions the country was facing. Anybody could see he wanted to get back to the war. In his second-floor office at Leavenworth, he would obsessively log on to the classified computer network used by commanders in the war, tracking operations, movements of units, and casualties as they unfolded four thousand miles away.

As Petraeus plotted his return, Pete Chiarelli was already on his way back to Iraq. In December 2005, the White House had nominated him for a third star and appointed him to serve under Casey as the commander in charge of daily military operations for a force that now numbered 160,000 U.S. troops along with 23,000 more from Britain and a smattering from other countries. Chiarelli was ecstatic.

He had only been back from his first tour since March, but it had been a restless few months. After returning to Fort Hood and spending a few weeks with his family, he had headed for Washington to deliver briefings at the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill, and at some foreign policy think tanks about his year in Iraq. The road show, as he called his presentation, was a hit. What 1st Cav and USAID had accomplished in Sadr City was a blueprint, he argued, for the unconventional approach the U.S. government, both military and civilians, needed to try throughout Iraq. He talked about the April firefight in Sadr City with a passion that few other generals could duplicate. As he spoke, an aide would unveil a chart that showed attacks concentrated in areas with the worst government services. It was followed by another chart that showed violence dropping off almost entirely after the money started flowing and the jobs programs got under way.

At a time when there was little good news from Iraq, Chiarelli was one senior officer who exuded confidence. Chiarelli’s ideas also had some appeal to the Bush administration. He wasn’t insisting that the answer was more troops, a prerequisite for any general who hoped to earn Rumsfeld’s nod.

For once his timing was perfect. Major General John Batiste, who had been chosen as Casey’s deputy, suddenly retired out of frustration with Rumsfeld and the way the war was being fought. Rumsfeld needed a bright former division commander, preferably with Iraq experience, to take Batiste’s place. The assignment went to Chiarelli.

The nationwide elections that month came off even better than expected. Nearly three-quarters of Iraq’s registered voters cast ballots on a day that was largely free of attacks. As expected, the clear victors were the Shiite parties, known as the United Iraqi Coalition, which won 128 seats. But Sunnis, who had largely boycotted the previous votes, turned out in much higher numbers, and the four main Sunni blocs won 59 seats in the 275-member parliament, up from 17.

Ever the optimist, Chiarelli hoped Iraq had turned a corner. The victorious parties still needed to choose a prime minister and form a government, a process that would grind on for several months. But maybe, Chiarelli told himself, the next government would be less treacherous than Jaafari’s crowd. He took over as Casey’s deputy on January 17, moving into his own lakeside villa at Camp Victory, two houses down from his boss’s quarters. Now that he had responsibility for the entire country, Chiarelli was brimming with ideas. His new civilian aide, Celeste Ward, suggested mapping out the still-to-be-named prime minister’s first 100 days in office. Maybe the new leader could visit all eighteen provinces, including Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, where voter turnout had been poor. At each stop he’d present a check for a new reconstruction project, such as a water-treatment plant or a school, as a visible sign of national reconciliation.

Once the new government was in place, Casey was eager to start reducing the size of the force to about 110,000 troops by the fall, with the first cuts coming in January. He also wanted to shrink the number of coalition bases by half, to about fifty. Fewer bases would drive home the idea that the new government was in control. Casey and Chiarelli hoped that once the new government was in place, Iraq would stabilize.

Not everyone agreed. The biggest reservations came from military intelligence officers who had been fretting over the possibility of a coming Sunni-Shiite civil war for almost a year. Colonel Marcus Kuiper, Chiarelli’s senior intelligence officer, was on his first tour of Iraq and had been in the country for only a few weeks, but he’d seen analyses from his predecessors. He sensed that the elections and wrangling over the next prime minister in parliament were likely to heighten sectarian tensions. “We’re going to have great difficulty making progress until the Shia feel secure and the Sunnis feel they can’t overthrow the government,” he told Chiarelli. The worst-case scenario was a major attack by Sunni extremists. Chiarelli listened, but Kuiper could tell his boss thought the assessment was too dire.

On February 22, Sunni religious extremists struck the Al Askaria Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, destroying its famous golden dome. By evening Casey’s cell phone was ringing incessantly with calls from panicked Sunni officials. Do something fast, they pleaded. Sunni mosques were being burned to the ground by revenge-minded Shiites. The country was on the verge of a bloodbath. From his base in Tampa, Abizaid told his staff to shift surveillance drones and other intelligence-gathering equipment from Afghanistan to Iraq. “Give them all they need,” he ordered. “This attack could unhinge everything.” Casey and Chiarelli flooded the streets with troops, and Chiarelli caught the head of the Iraqi ground forces on his way to the airport for a trip to the United States and convinced him not to leave.

Other Iraqis weren’t as helpful. Casey and Khalilzad pleaded with Jaafari, who was fighting to keep the prime minister’s job, to issue a curfew and appeal publicly for calm. Jaafari hesitated. He saw the bombing as an act of treachery by the Sunni Baathists, and he knew that any Shiite politician calling for restraint risked appearing weak. He finally agreed to make the public statement but refused to impose a curfew for forty-eight hours.

Two days after the bombing, a worried Casey typed out a hasty e-mail to Chiarelli and his other commanders: “Troops, polit situation took a turn for the worse yesterday,” he began, warning them not to share what followed: “Situation is as volatile as I have seen it.” The curfew was in place, but Sunni sheikhs and politicians had been slow to condemn the attack and Shiite patience was “waning quickly.” Iraqis had passed along intelligence that thirty car bombs were heading to Baghdad. Casey wanted his men to look for signs that militia groups were stockpiling weapons or preparing for sectarian war. He didn’t know when the sectarian tension would subside, but he concluded, “It won’t be soon.”

After the mosque bombing, violence steadily increased. The war was changing. Shiite gunmen, many of them members of Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia, known as Jaish al-Mahdi, went block by block in mixed neighborhoods forcing Sunnis from their homes and in some cases killing those who resisted. Sunnis fought back with massive car bombs in crowded markets. Between late February and early May, 3,034 bodies were found in Baghdad. In late February Casey received an intelligence report noting that most of the bodies in Baghdad were concentrated in Sadr’s strongholds. Unless the violence could be contained, the report warned, there would be “intense sectarian strife across several provinces—likely resulting in civil war.” In the margins of the report, Casey drew a star and jotted two words to himself: “Must act.”

Sometimes he sat in his office or his quarters at night and methodically composed lists of ideas and questions to ensure he wasn’t missing something: “What’s going on?” he wrote one day after noticing that attacks by Al Qaeda were growing larger and more deadly. “Are Sunnis with military experience moving to AQ?”

“May need an offensive,” he wrote in another list. At the same time, he mulled ways of halting the fighting. “Negotiated settlement,” he jotted, wondering if there was a way to bring the warring factions into what would amount to peace talks. He wanted to change the atmosphere. Maybe, he mused, they should “level Abu Ghraib,” the Saddam-era prison that, after the 2004 prisoner abuse scandal, had become a symbol to Iraqis of the hated occupation.

Outside Samarra

February 2006

Chiarelli didn’t need a list of new ideas. Even after the Samarra mosque bombing, he was certain he knew what needed to be done. The problem was getting others in the military to embrace his ideas. A few days after the attack, he flew to the U.S. base on the outskirts of Samarra and was ushered into a dimly lit command post. He’d come to hear what the battalion responsible for the city planned to do to bring it back under control and win over the people. Even before the mosque bombing, Samarra had been a difficult place. The United States had mounted large assaults to clear the city of insurgents three times before. Each time the enemy had returned.

As he sat on a folding chair listening, Chiarelli became annoyed. The battalion had plenty of plans for killing or capturing insurgents. Troops, operating from a small patrol base in the center of the city, went out on daily patrols and raids of insurgent safe houses. They were working on finishing a ten-foot-high sand berm around the city so that they could prevent insurgents from going in and out. But he hadn’t heard any mention of plans to revive the economy, build up the local government, or bring jobs to its residents.

After listening for more than an hour, Chiarelli said he’d heard enough. “This is unacceptable. You are going to go around conducting operation after operation, but you don’t give these people some reason to hope their life is going to get better,” he said. Then Chiarelli stood up and stormed out. It wasn’t often that a three-star general dismissed a battalion’s entire plan. More confusing to the officers in the room, Chiarelli’s thoughts on what was needed in Samarra were completely at odds with what their brigade commander, Colonel Michael Steele, had told them.

Steele, a barrel-chested former offensive lineman on the University of Georgia national championship football team, was sitting just a few chairs from Chiarelli. He’d led the 1993 rescue mission in Somalia made famous in the book and film Black Hawk Down. The experience on the chaotic streets of Mogadishu had driven home to him the importance of aggressively pursuing the enemy. Before his men left Fort Campbell in Kentucky he’d gathered them in an auditorium to tell them what he expected of them. “Anytime you fight—anytime you fight—you always kill the other son of a bitch,” he said, pacing back and forth like Patton. “You are the hunter, the predator—you are looking for the prey.” He had undisguised contempt for anyone, including Chiarelli, who suggested that the Army should be trying to create jobs or convince insurgents to lay down their weapons. “This is real, and the guy who is going to win is the guy who gets violent the fastest,” he told his troops, some of whom began using “kill boards” to track how many Iraqis they had shot during the deployment.

Steele repeated none of this as Chiarelli was sitting across from him that day in Samarra. He was, after all, only a colonel, and Chiarelli was a three-star general. A few weeks later Chiarelli returned to Samarra for another visit, which was even more disturbing. This time his aide called Steele and told him that Chiarelli was bringing along Major General Adnan Thavit, who had led the police commandos and was a native of the city. Thavit knew all of the sheikhs in Samarra, and Chiarelli thought that he might be able to provide Steele with some insights. First Steele tried to bar the Iraqi officer from coming, arguing that he planned to discuss classified information. Chiarelli was astonished. “Thavit is on our side,” he thought. “Don’t they understand?” At Chiarelli’s insistence he grudgingly let the Iraqi into the briefing. Later Steele refused to give Thavit a seat in the convoy of Humvees that was ferrying Chiarelli’s entourage back to the helicopter pad. Major Steve Gventer, Chiarelli’s aide, pointed out that the sixty-four-year-old Thavit would have to walk. “I don’t fucking care,” Steele yelled. Gventer hustled away and found Chiarelli, who ordered Steele to surrender his seat.

Steele’s disdain for Iraqis, though extreme, was not atypical. Three years of occupation duty had left the Army tired and indifferent. Worried about suicide attacks and car bombs, convoys now routinely fired off warning shots at cars that strayed too close. The gulf between occupier and occupied had never been wider. Chiarelli was bothered by the incident with Steele’s brigade but kept going back to Samarra, determined to win over at least some of his subordinates.

In Baghdad, the parliament fought over who would be the next prime minister. Months passed. Violence continued to climb. The government that was supposed to unite the country was paralyzed. Chiarelli’s optimism that Iraq had turned a corner began to fade as the months without a new prime minister went on. He began looking for ways to show average Iraqis that life would improve. In April, Chiarelli’s helicopter lifted off in an eddy of hot wind and turned west. Leaving the sprawl of Baghdad, it soon was speeding low over palm groves and green wheat fields, part of the country’s farm belt, which is startlingly lush to anyone who thinks of Iraq as purely a desert country. The pungent smell of manure wafted up from the ground. Over the whap-whap-whap of the rotors, Chiarelli told the Iraqi general flying with him that he was arranging for aerial pesticide spraying of the date palm groves below. Saddam Hussein’s government had done the job every year, but the groves had gone unsprayed since the American military had arrived, and the once-lucrative crop was a mess. A smaller harvest meant fewer jobs for Sunnis in western Anbar Province, fueling the insurgency in what had become one of the most violent and chaotic spots on the earth. “We’re going to do it!” Chiarelli said of the spraying. “I’m following it every day.” He planned to give credit for the idea to the still-to-be-decided prime minister in the hope that it would further bolster his support in the Sunni heartland. The general nodded but said nothing, seemingly puzzled by the American general’s interest in dates.

Chiarelli landed at al Asad Air Base, a vast American installation in the middle of the desert. There, they were met by Colonel W. Blake Crowe, the regimental commander in far western Anbar Province. With his high and tight haircut and buff biceps, Crowe was the picture of a squared-away Marine. The Marines were under Chiarelli’s command, and Crowe, the son of a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was keen to make a good impression. But he was also a Marine, and they tended to look upon the Army as a plodding outfit without the Corps’s warrior ethos.

Ushering Chiarelli into the regimental command post in a crumbling one-story masonry building, Crowe and a half dozen of his officers launched into a detailed briefing about enemy activity in the area and the difficulty of performing the kinds of civic tasks that Chiarelli wanted. Only a few days earlier, Crowe said, a suicide car bombing just outside their front gate had killed two policemen. The only workers willing to help clear a large ammunition dump, among other Chiarelli-type projects, had to come all the way from Baghdad. But the hiring of these outside workers had angered the local sheikhs, causing still more problems and attacks. Crowe’s implication was clear: the tactics preferred by Chiarelli might work in Baghdad, but in violence-ridden Anbar the Marines would have to handle things their own way, and that meant, first and foremost, killing insurgents. He didn’t have enough troops to cover the vast territory he was responsible for and carry out the kinds of assistance projects Chiarelli wanted.

Chiarelli heard Crowe out. “If you’re saying you’ve got to get an area secure before you do any reconstruction, you’ll never get any reconstruction done,” he said. Crowe, realizing that his presentation had gotten him nowhere (except perhaps in trouble with a general), said he was trying his best. He described how his Marines had recently tracked a suspected insurgent leader to an isolated house. A year ago, he said, they probably would have called in an air strike to kill him. Mindful of Chiarelli’s directives on limiting destruction, they raided the house and captured the man alive. “You probably got more intelligence and avoided killing civilians,” said Chiarelli, beaming. “That’s what I’m trying to make everyone understand.” The Marine evidently was off the hook.

On May 20, the new government finally formed with an obscure Shiite politician named Nouri al-Maliki as the prime minister. It was hardly the moment of reconciliation and unity that Casey and Chiarelli had hoped it would be. A few minutes into the proceedings, the main Sunni coalition stormed out. Its members were angry that the government was being formed without a decision on who would run the Interior and Defense ministries, the only two ministries left unfilled. “I call for a withdrawal!” Abdul Nasir al-Janabi, a conservative Sunni Muslim, had bellowed on his way out the door. As the national anthem, “My Homeland,” played over and over, Ambassador Khalilzad worked furiously to persuade Janabi and his fellow Sunnis to return. Casey watched apprehensively from the sidelines dressed in his formal Army greens. It was the first time he’d worn the uniform in Iraq, and it reflected his fervent hope that the seating of the new government, which included more Sunnis than the previous administration, was going to be a major turning point in the war. “I wanted to show that this was a new setup, a new order for Iraq,” he recalled.

Casey met with Maliki almost daily for the first few weeks. His assessment was mixed. The new prime minister seemed sharper than Jaafari, but he had two big handicaps. “One, he absolutely believes the Baathists are coming back to power. He’s scared to death of them,” Casey recalled telling Bush and Rumsfeld. His other weakness was that he came from the secretive Dawa Party and was surrounded by stridently anti-Sunni advisors.

Casey hoped for teams of advisors from the State Department and other agencies to help the new Maliki government, the third since Casey took over in 2004. That spring, Bush had assembled his cabinet and ordered them to find people willing to go to Iraq. Secretary of State Rice was put in charge of making sure they delivered. Six days after the Maliki government formed, Rice announced that she’d found forty-eight people who were willing to help.

“Excuse me, ma’am. Did you say forty-eight?” asked Casey, who was participating in the White House meeting by video from Al Faw Palace.

“Yes,” she said.

“That’s a paltry number,” he replied curtly.

Rice told him that he was out of line. But Casey wasn’t going to apologize. Colonel Hix, who had done a major strategy assessment for Casey months earlier, had estimated that it would take as many as 10,000 people to mount a reconstruction effort similar in scope to the one in Vietnam. Casey never expected 10,000 advisors. But he certainly had hoped for more than four dozen. The military could build up police and army units. But it desperately needed assistance developing the other parts of the government. He felt let down. Casey couldn’t help wondering whether his strategy depended too much on people who couldn’t deliver.

After the meeting Rumsfeld shot him a message thanking him for his patience with Rice. The defense secretary had been one of his staunchest supporters since he arrived, and Casey appreciated his strong vote of confidence. But he often felt that the defense secretary didn’t understand the war, or at the very least was losing patience. A few days earlier Rumsfeld had asked for a study that explained why so many soldiers were still being killed and wounded. Casey worked on the briefing with a few close aides, ordering them not to tell his field generals why he needed the casualty data. “For me to go down to my division commanders and ask, ‘Are you doing everything you can so your guys don’t get killed?’ It’s insulting,” he recalled.

The results were predictable. Most of the soldiers and Marines were dying on patrols. Rumsfeld’s request, though, sent a clear message: he wanted Casey to cut the fatality rate, and he didn’t want American soldiers intervening in the worsening sectarian fighting.

In mid-June Casey returned to Washington to update Bush and Rumsfeld on his plans for the rest of the year. By the fall, he said, he was on track to reduce the U.S. force to about 110,000 soldiers from the 134,000 then in the country. Before he made any further cuts he wanted to clear it with Maliki, but he thought it was doable. Despite the mosque bombing and the growing sectarian violence, Casey still believed that the new government could unite the country.

In Baghdad Chiarelli was slowly coming to the opposite conclusion. In the few weeks since Maliki’s government had taken office the sectarian violence had grown far worse. Major General J. D. Thurman came to Chiarelli in late June with a chart of the capital covered with red dots showing all the bodies found the previous day. Thurman was in charge of U.S. troops in Baghdad and reported directly to Chiarelli, who oversaw daily military operations throughout the entire country. Thurman’s chart was a cause for serious alarm. There were more than a hundred dots, most concentrated in west Baghdad’s mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods, where Shiite death squads and rogue police units were pushing out the Sunnis.

“We’ve got to get in to see Maliki and explain what’s going on in the city,” Chiarelli said. As a start, he hoped to lock down Sadr City, which had become a staging ground for the death squads.

A few hours later he and a senior British general from Casey’s staff laid the chart in front of the stoic prime minister. “This is not all the bodies. These are just the bodies we’re finding,” Chiarelli said. The Iraqi army and police had probably picked up dozens more. Most of the victims had been bound and blindfolded before they were shot in the head, he explained.

Maliki studied it intently for several minutes but didn’t seem overly alarmed. “It was much worse under Saddam,” he told the stunned generals, referring to the intimidation and murder inflicted against his people—the Shiites—by the old regime. When it came to Sadr City, he would not budge: any operations in the Shiite slum had to be cleared through his office.

Chiarelli’s doubts about Maliki grew more acute over the course of the summer. It was late one night when one of his staff officers stopped Chiarelli in the hallways at Al Faw Palace. There was highly classified information that he needed to share as soon as possible. “It’s bad,” the officer advised. The next day, Chiarelli sat in a windowless secure room on the palace’s second floor reading transcripts of translated conversations involving Maliki. (The United States has never publicly acknowledged listening in on the conversations of senior officials.) There were late-night telephone calls from the prime minster to one of his aides, a woman named Bassima al-Jaidri, who had served as a civilian in Saddam’s military. As they conversed, she urged Maliki to remove certain Sunni commanders in the army and replace them with Shiite officers. It was clear that Maliki was under tremendous pressure from Shiite political parties to fashion the army into a sectarian force. Chiarelli got updates every day on highly classified intelligence, but rarely was the information so revealing. When Casey read the transcripts the following day in his office, he, too, looked astounded.

It was standard practice for Casey or his staff to update the prime minister before a sensitive military operation. A few weeks later another classified intelligence report showed the cell phone and text messaging traffic from Maliki’s office after he and his aides received briefings about a pending raid. Minutes after the update, people in Maliki’s office were making calls to pass on key details—the intended target, where the U.S. forces were headed, which bridges and roads would be blocked. It wasn’t clear who was responsible for the leaks or exactly whom they were telling, but it certainly looked as if they were tipping off potential targets. The report stung Chiarelli. He’d made it a personal policy to treat Iraqis as full partners, and here was strong proof that his assumptions about them were flawed.

The leaks from Maliki’s office weren’t entirely surprising. He was new and inexperienced. He had been a virtual unknown, at least to U.S. officials, when he was finally chosen after a five-month impasse. As a compromise candidate from the tiny Dawa Party, Maliki’s greatest challenge in his first months in office was to hold together his shaky Shiite coalition, which included supporters in parliament who were opposed to cooperating with the Americans. In the best possible light, tipping off fellow Shiites about raids was a way for Maliki to build credibility with a powerful constituency that he needed to survive Iraq’s unforgiving politics. And official American policy—reiterated by every senior official from Bush down—was to help Maliki succeed. But Casey and Chiarelli needed to do something. They couldn’t confront Maliki directly without risking a major rupture with their new partner, but they couldn’t let the leaks continue, either. In the future they decided to delay briefing him and his aides until minutes before a sensitive operation was planned to begin.

Al Faw Palace

July 2006

Casey had been back from leave only a few hours when Chiarelli cornered him after the regular morning update. “This is the last chance to extend the Strykers, and I think we need to do it,” he said. He was referring to the 172nd Stryker Brigade, named for its armored vehicles, which could survive a rocket-propelled grenade blast but were still nimble enough to negotiate most of Baghdad’s streets. The brigade’s soldiers and equipment were packing up to go home after a year. Chiarelli and Casey had talked about halting the unit’s departure when Casey was in the United States. He had been reluctant to agree. Adding more forces might lead to a temporary reduction in violence, but more troops couldn’t fix the underlying political disputes fueling the war, Casey believed. Now that they were face-to-face, he could see the fear in Chiarelli’s eyes. Baghdad was falling apart.

Casey called Rumsfeld, who signed off on the extension. Later he explained his rationale in an e-mail to the defense secretary and Abizaid. “John/Mr. Secretary … We’re in a very fluid situation here,” he wrote, describing the latest wave of kidnappings, car bombs, and murders. The seating of the Maliki government hadn’t reduced violence, as he had expected. In fact, it was getting worse. “We’re beginning to see retaliatory efforts by Shia extremists as less tit-for-tat violence and more as a semi-organized effort to expand geographic control into Sunni areas.” Then came the hard admission: “We need … to keep more coalition troops here than I originally intended to help the Iraqis through this.”

A single additional brigade wouldn’t change anything permanently. Casey wanted Rumsfeld and Abizaid to know he wasn’t losing faith in the strategy all three of them had decided upon. “I firmly believe,” he wrote, “that the longer [the Iraqis] feel they can rely on us, the longer it’s going to take them to find the political will to reconcile—which they must do for Iraq to move forward. The extra brigade will help the security situation, but it’s not likely to have a decisive effect without a commitment from the religious and political leadership of Iraq to stop the sectarian killing—something they are not ready to do.”

Casey had worked himself into a corner. After insisting since his arrival that there was no military answer to the violence in Iraq, he was now admitting that a political solution wasn’t likely anytime soon. He told himself that insurgencies typically take a decade to resolve and that the recent setbacks were just part of that long, slow process. The truth was that after two years in Iraq, he was running out of ideas.

Shortly after extending the 172nd Brigade, Rumsfeld rushed to Fort Wainwright, Alaska, to meet with the soldiers’ spouses, who were furious and felt betrayed. About 300 soldiers in the Stryker unit had already made it home to Alaska. They had to head back immediately to Iraq. Another 300 were in Kuwait. For weeks after his decision, Casey received nightly e-mails from wives chastising him for keeping their husbands in the war zone for another four months. Reading them was painful. He knew better than most generals the helpless feeling that worried families experienced as they waited for their loved one to return from a war. He’d never forgotten what it was like standing in the passenger lounge at Baltimore-Washington International Airport as his dad disappeared down the jetway, headed back to Vietnam for his third tour. If anything, senior Bush administration officials fretted that his concern over the strain on the force had made him too reluctant to ask for additional troops.

Casey was scheduled to come home in the spring of 2007 and there were already quiet discussions about who would replace him. When Chiarelli was home on leave in August, he had stopped by the Pentagon and heard the buzz that he was likely to get the top job in Iraq. Later that day, he ran into Celeste Ward, his civilian political advisor, who was also home on leave. Summoning her into a vacant office, he told her that he might be asked to replace Casey and come back for a third tour. Would she be interested in working as his political advisor?

“I don’t know,” she replied. She was two-thirds of the way through her second tour and ready to put Iraq behind her. With the way things were going in Iraq, Ward was surprised Chiarelli was even interested.

“Do you really want that job?” she asked him. “Do you want to be the person who is going to preside over the final debacle?”

“I think I can make it work,” he replied.

Chiarelli hadn’t completely lost hope that if he could just get the economy to function, provide jobs, and build a decent government, Iraqis would put their sectarian hatreds behind them. Ward wasn’t sure what to make of his optimism. In 2003 she had left her job at a foreign policy think tank when she heard the Pentagon was looking for civilians to build the new Ministry of Defense. She had been reluctant to head off to a war zone, but volunteered because she believed in the invasion and felt obligated to help. A Stanford graduate, she was smart and a little bit cynical. By 2006 she was convinced that Maliki had different goals for the country than the United States did. Increasingly it appeared to her as if the Shiite-dominated police, working with illegal militias and death squads, were determined to drive the Sunnis from Baghdad. Sunnis and Shiites weren’t fighting because they lacked jobs, clean water, and electricity. It was much more complicated.

As the violence worsened over the summer, she’d join Chiarelli on the smoking patio at Al Faw Palace and gently voice her doubts. Maybe the unconditional support of Maliki and his sectarian government was driving the Sunnis into the arms of extremist groups, including Al Qaeda, that at least promised protection from the death squads. Chiarelli listened, but she could tell that he still believed the Iraqis could overcome their hatreds. “They lived for thirty years under Saddam Hussein. They just don’t know how to run a government and administer a country,” he replied.

On a helicopter ride over Baghdad, General Abdul Qadir Mohammed Jassim, the head of the ground forces, had told Chiarelli that for most of his life he hadn’t even known whether his neighbors were Sunni or Shiite. They were all just Iraqis. Chiarelli loved the story and must have repeated it a hundred times. It proved reconciliation was possible. All they needed was a decent government to provide for them and jobs. Some days Ward thought that Chiarelli was fooling himself. Other days she had a grudging respect for his optimism.

Gradually, Chiarelli’s frustrations grew over the late summer and fall. The date palm spraying effort that he had championed hadn’t worked out the way he’d hoped. He’d tried to get the Ministry of Agriculture to back it, but they proved woefully incompetent or unwilling to expend effort helping the Sunnis. So he ordered his men to find a private contractor. The United States paid a firm based out of Dubai to spray the date palms and then gave credit to the Iraqis, claiming in public that they had organized and executed the first spraying since the beginning of the war. Everyone in Iraq knew it was a lie.

Chiarelli also was disgusted with Bayan Jabr, who had been the interior minister during the Jadiriyah debacle and had taken over the Finance Ministry under Maliki. He refused to spend money for infrastructure projects in Sunni areas. The government had pledged $50 million to help rebuild Tal Afar after Colonel McMaster’s successful tour there, but a year later had spent only about $12 million, despite Chiarelli’s protests. The city was falling back into the hands of Sunni insurgents.

Near the end of the summer, General Thurman, the commander in Baghdad, took Chiarelli on a tour of Adhamiyah, the only major Sunni enclave left on the capital’s east side. He and Thurman had grown up in the military together as armor officers. Both of their fathers had been butchers, and their wives often joked that they had married SOBs—sons of butchers. Thurman wanted his friend to see up close what was happening in the once-prosperous Sunni neighborhoods. As Chiarelli walked down Adhamiyah’s streets, piled with trash, a woman dragged him into her house to see her refrigerator, which was full of maggots. She had no clean water. The militia had blown through the neighborhood and shot up the electrical transformers. The area looked worse than any of the slums he’d seen in Sadr City during his first tour in 2004. “We wanted to get members of the government to come down and see what was going on,” Chiarelli recalled. “We couldn’t get them to leave their offices. It was so frustrating.”

When U.S. troops arrested members of the swelling Shiite militias, Maliki frequently intervened. Chiarelli happened to be at Thurman’s headquarters when a call came from Casey’s staff ordering the release of a Shiite bomb maker who had been picked up south of Baghdad. Incensed, Thurman ripped off the Velcro patch that held his two stars and started waving them in the air. “Goddammit, I am going to just quit,” he bellowed while Chiarelli stood there, sympathetic but unsure what to say. He couldn’t tell his friend that it wasn’t that bad, because he felt the same way. The thought of resigning had crossed his mind, too. From the moment you pinned on your first lieutenant bars, he thought, the Army drilled you to consider the moral dimensions of being an officer. He recalled seeing an old Army training film in ROTC class at Seattle University that showed a team of soldiers, clad in Vietnam-era uniforms, firing a mortar while under enemy attack. In a freak accident, the mortar tube malfunctions, injuring several soldiers. Soon after the explosion, one of the other mortar teams nearby refuses to fire, insisting they might get injured as well. At that point, Chiarelli remembered, the short film ended with a final question: “What would you do, Lieutenant?” Back then, the answer the Army wanted—the moral answer—was obvious: stand with your soldiers, share the risk, and keep firing.

But he faced a different dilemma in Iraq. How could he remain in his job if he wasn’t effective? Didn’t he owe it to his soldiers and his country to resign and go public with a statement explaining in terms the public could understand how and why they were failing and what they needed to do to win? His closest aides could see the frustration in Chiarelli’s face. He had gained weight and was smoking far too much.

He also felt increasingly under fire from some corners of his own military. Shortly after he arrived in Iraq a reporter for Time magazine had shown Chiarelli a disturbing video from Haditha, west of Baghdad. Twenty-four Iraqis, including some women and children, had been killed after a bomb attack on a Marine convoy. When Chiarelli learned that the Marines hadn’t investigated the incident, he ordered an inquiry, which came back later that summer. He spent the next ten days with his top staff reading every page of the foot-and-a-half-high report, which painted a disturbing picture of the Marines’ actions. The investigation concluded that senior officers in the 2nd Marine Division had been negligent in failing to investigate the killings—a conclusion that Chiarelli endorsed after plowing through the voluminous report. “We had to learn from this, and one of the things we looked very hard at was whether something was missing in the training. Could this have been handled differently?” he recalled. He was particularly disturbed that the killing of that many civilians hadn’t been considered significant enough to warrant any special attention at headquarters in Baghdad.

He also was dealing with allegations of misconduct by Colonel Steele, the 101st Airborne Division brigade commander with whom he had clashed in Samarra. A few months after Chiarelli’s visit there, soldiers from Steele’s brigade had killed four men on an island in the Tigris River. Several soldiers from the unit swore to investigators that Steele had instructed them to kill all military-age males on the island—a claim Steele denied. The investigation ultimately concluded that Steele had led his soldiers to believe that distinguishing combatants from noncombatants—a main tenet of the military’s rules of engagement—wasn’t necessary during the mission. Chiarelli gave him a written reprimand, effectively ending his chances for promotion. On the day Steele arrived at Al Faw Palace for his punishment, several of Chiarelli’s staff were so worried about what the volatile colonel might do that they insisted his aide, Major Gventer, stand outside his office with a round chambered in his sidearm. But there was no blowup. After receiving the news, Steele sat down on the palace’s marble staircase, his head in his hands.

Chiarelli was certain he had made the right call, but his insistence on a thorough investigation of the Haditha incident and on disciplining Steele, a well-known officer, had led some in the military to question if he was being too hard on troops caught in a tough, unpredictable war.

Even one of Chiarelli’s proudest achievements in 2006 had led to pointed criticism. He was convinced that the killing and wounding of Iraqis at the hundreds of checkpoints around Iraq was creating new insurgents. “If this sort of thing was happening in Texas, it wouldn’t have been too long before the population was armed and taking action,” he said. He wanted every casualty that occurred at a checkpoint to be reported to his headquarters and investigated. He ordered new equipment, including sirens, bullhorns, and green lasers, to help soldiers get drivers’ attention without firing warning shots. The number of civilians killed by U.S. convoys or at checkpoints fell to about five a month from a high of twenty-five. Chiarelli received dozens of cards and letters from the States, accusing him of being more worried about Iraqis than about his own men. A soldier griped in the Washington Times that because of Chiarelli’s meddling the “military had gone severely soft.” He hadn’t changed the rules, but as with Petraeus and his counterinsurgency doctrine, Chiarelli was challenging something more fundamental: the notion that had taken root in the 1990s that protecting soldiers’ lives was more important than safeguarding civilians on the battlefield. No one would criticize him to his face, but he confided to friends that he feared he was getting a reputation as “the general who doesn’t want to kill anybody.” It was the sort of accusation that could end a promising career.

Green Zone, Baghdad

September 3, 2006

The graying men around the conference table carried themselves with assurance and the easy affability that comes with age and accomplishment. They were the members of the Iraq Study Group, a panel of experts and former officials appointed by Congress. For most the fact-finding tour was their first trip to Iraq, and the men had shed their gray suits for khaki pants and blazers—the war zone uniform of visiting dignitaries. They were creatures of Washington, and Chiarelli recognized most of the faces. There was James Baker, the secretary of state for Bush’s father, and William Perry, who had been secretary of defense under Clinton. A few chairs away was Robert Gates, the former CIA director (who two months later would replace Rumsfeld at the Pentagon), and Ed Meese, Reagan’s attorney general. Chiarelli had briefly met Meese years earlier when he was teaching at West Point and acting with Beth as a faculty sponsor for Meese’s son, Mike, who had been a plebe in 1978 and was now a colonel in charge of the Sosh department.

In some ways, Chiarelli felt that he was back at Sosh, a young professor wondering if he belonged. “Teaching at West Point, you had days when it worked and days when it didn’t,” he recalled. “That day it worked.” He didn’t use PowerPoint charts or read from notes. He could do this one cold.

He started with a recitation of the same points he’d been making for more than two years. Killing the enemy and training the Iraqi army and police weren’t enough. To win, the U.S. government had to reorient the effort to deliver electricity, jobs, clean water, and health care. It needed to push advisory teams into the ministries to teach the Iraqis how to run a government. Chiarelli had given more than forty members of his own staff to help the ministries, but it was nowhere near enough.

Nine months earlier his critique would have focused just on his own country’s shortcomings. Now Chiarelli realized the Iraqi government bore a lot of the blame for the chaos. Maliki was a Shiite pawn. The Ministry of Health was run by Sadr’s operatives, and they were using access to health care as a weapon in the war against Sunnis, who worried they’d be killed if they went to the hospital. The United States had to use its leverage over Maliki to get him and his government to act in a less sectarian manner.

After the meeting, Perry, the former defense secretary, took Chiarelli aside and asked him if he needed more troops. “Could I use a few more brigades? Sure,” he replied. “You can send all the force you want here, but if you don’t get some sort of reconciliation started, it will still be a mess.” Perry walked out of the conference room with Gates. Neither had met Chiarelli previously and both had been deeply impressed. That guy, they agreed, might end up as chairman of the Joint Chiefs someday.

The Iraq Study Group was a sign that things were changing in Washington, often to the surprise of the generals in Baghdad. With the U.S. congressional elections a few weeks away and the war going badly, President Bush’s Republican allies were in danger of losing their slim majority in the Senate. After leaving Casey largely on his own for the previous two years, the White House had begun a far-reaching reexamination of the military strategy, an effort led by White House national security advisor Stephen Hadley. At the Pentagon, General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had assembled a group of officers, including Colonel H. R. McMaster, to study options. The retired general Jack Keane, one of Petraeus’s mentors, had teamed up with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, on a plan to flood Baghdad with troops. His work had caught the attention of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. None of the reviews had yet reached Casey or Chiarelli. They had their hands full with other matters.

On October 12, seventeen Iraqi soldiers were arrested by U.S. troops in the Baghdad neighborhood of Mansour, a Sunni area that was home to Iraq’s elite under Saddam Hussein. The seventeen were from a predominantly Shiite unit based in Sadr City and were detained because they were far from their assigned sector. Under questioning, they claimed that they were on a mission ordered by the prime minister’s office. When word of the incident reached Casey, he demanded an immediate meeting with Maliki, bringing along Ambassador Khalilzad. The Americans had been hearing rumors of secret military operations by the prime minister’s office. To Casey’s surprise, Maliki admitted that he had ordered the raid, bypassing the chain of command that ran through the Ministry of Defense, where the United States had advisors, down to individual Iraqi brigades and battalions. The chain of command existed to prevent one person from using the military for personal vendettas, as Saddam Hussein had done. Casey told Maliki that it protected him from allegations that he was using his forces to further a sectarian agenda.

Maliki, however, was unapologetic. Following the standard procedures took too long, the prime minister explained. Sometimes he got information that needed to be acted upon immediately. He was the commander in chief, and he would do whatever he needed to fight terrorism. Casey fired back that his actions had been unacceptable and asked that he stop.

“Is that a threat?” Maliki replied through a translator. (The Arabic word for “ask” has the same meaning as “order.”)

No, replied Casey, he was asking Maliki not to circumvent the established procedures. The Iraqi national security advisor, Mowaffak Baqer al-Rubaie, interceded to defuse the confrontation, and the meeting broke up a few minutes later, resolving nothing. “You shouldn’t talk to the prime minister like that,” Rubaie warned as they walked out. Afterward, Casey dashed off an e-mail to Abizaid describing the tense exchange with Maliki. “He either got the message and wouldn’t acknowledge it—or he didn’t get it. I think the former,” Casey wrote. “We need to get this stopped.”

Abizaid happened to be in Baghdad when he got Casey’s note. For much of the summer and fall, he’d been consumed by growing tensions with Iran and the Israeli war in Lebanon with Hezbollah. “My number one concern right now is a strategic or tactical miscalculation with Iran,” he’d told his staff a few weeks earlier. “We need to know what we are going to do in the first ten days of a war.” He ordered them to lay out 10,000 potential infrastructure targets in Iran just in case the United States was forced into a conflict. Abizaid also was wrestling with his own future. The president had asked him to serve as the director of national intelligence, a new post in Washington set up to prevent another 9/11 attack, and he was leaning toward doing it.

He still made regular trips to Iraq and talked almost daily with Casey by phone, but he’d largely left the handling of the war up to his friend. His public statements on Iraq reflected his belief that the overall strategy was working. “Despite the many challenges, progress does continue to be made in Iraq,” Abizaid had testified before the Senate several weeks earlier. The e-mail from Casey, however, was worrisome. His relationship with Maliki appeared to be deteriorating. With the Iraq strategy review under way in Washington, Abizaid knew, there was an appetite for major change, and he feared that if he and Casey didn’t act, decisions might be forced on them. Abizaid met with both Casey and Chiarelli. He had a long discussion with Thurman, the Baghdad commander, who pulled out a city map and showed him how the Shiite offensive was driving Sunnis into only a few enclaves in west Baghdad.

He didn’t want to second-guess Casey, but he decided to be frank. “Sectarian violence in Baghdad could be fatal,” he warned in an e-mail to Casey on the last day of his visit. “We’ve got to reverse the obvious trends soon.” Maybe, he told Casey, their staffs could work together on coming up with new options for restoring security. Abizaid had been particularly frustrated by the Army’s inability to find capable officers to serve as army and police advisors. On one trip he’d met with an overweight, fifty-six-year-old air defense officer who was advising an infantry battalion in combat. The officer didn’t know a thing about fighting insurgents or leading an infantry battalion.

In his e-mail, Abizaid didn’t tell Casey what to do, but he did warn that “the dynamic needs to change.” It was as far as he could go without ordering Casey to try something different. As dire as Abizaid’s warning was, he closed by reassuring his friend that no one was losing faith in him. “Your personal leadership has already helped steady the ship,” he wrote. “I’m so worried about the situation that I’m going on leave next week.”

Casey didn’t budge. “There are no short-term military fixes,” he declared in a return message a few days later. The 4th Infantry Division was scheduled to leave Baghdad in a few weeks after a one-year tour. Canceling its departure, coupled with the arrival of the replacement division with nearly 20,000 troops, would have nearly doubled the U.S. forces in the capital almost overnight. But that was “a course of action I cannot recommend,” Casey explained, “until I see greater commitment from the Iraqis to solve the sectarian situation in their capital.” There had been 350 executions in Baghdad in the last twelve weeks, primarily by Shiites, he estimated. “While we will continue to do everything we can militarily to contain sectarian violence in Baghdad, the situation will not improve until … Iraq’s leaders take appropriate action,” Casey told Abizaid.

It was a wrenching statement for an American military commander to make. There was nothing he could do to improve the situation. The best he could promise was to try to contain the Sunni-Shiite fighting until Maliki and other leaders took steps to halt the killing, though the prospects for that looked bleak. In the same message he had noted that the prime minister was imposing even tighter restrictions on operations, which had forced several raids to be canceled.

Casey had been reading Stanley Karnow’s history of Vietnam and was struck by how senior generals there also struggled with corrupt and chaotic governments. “What do you do when the president of the country you are trying to save has views that are diametrically opposed to yours?” Casey recalled thinking as he read one passage.

Since his arrival, Casey had told himself that he was responsible for overseeing the security strategy, while the embassy was in charge of governance and reconstruction. The violence, he now believed, was being fueled by political and sectarian disputes that couldn’t be repaired with military power. He could see the strain on his troops. “I had watched the Fourth Infantry Division in Baghdad, who had lived through this transition to the sectarian fight, and it really took a toll on our guys,” he recalled. “They didn’t understand it. They’d ask themselves, ‘Why are these people killing each other? We’re here to help them. What’s going on?’ It was really draining.”

As a young lieutenant in Germany, Casey had served in units ravaged by Vietnam, and the experience had made a profound impression on him. He still believed that a decent outcome was possible in Iraq and that troops should remain in the country to keep a lid on the worst violence. But he wasn’t going to commit his troops fully to a fight that he believed only the Iraqis could settle. Casey was falling back on the Powell Doctrine, the post-Vietnam dictum enunciated by General Colin Powell, which held that American forces shouldn’t intervene in messy, political wars that don’t offer clear exit strategies or outcomes.

Over the next two months, Casey found himself increasingly out of step with his civilian bosses in Washington, a situation he had once vowed to avoid. A few days before the November congressional elections, Bush’s national security advisor, Steve Hadley, made his first trip to Iraq. Hadley was weighing whether to send in more troops. He had also seen the intelligence suggesting that Maliki’s government was acting on sectarian impulses to punish Sunnis. He wanted to get a read on the prime minister.

Hadley and his aides, Meghan O’Sullivan and Peter Feaver, met first with Casey, who insisted that progress was being made despite the rising violence in Baghdad and growing frustration with the war at home. Maliki’s government had acted in overtly sectarian ways since taking office, but Casey wasn’t convinced that the prime minister was driving the violence. In some cases, Maliki had been given bad advice by sectarian advisors or was too inexperienced and politically weak to stop the malfeasance. Maliki was also handicapped by his deep fear of a Baathist coup. On occasion he would inform Casey that he had intelligence of secret plots to spring Saddam Hussein from prison and spirit him back to Damascus. The anti-Baathist paranoia led him to distrust Sunnis, Casey explained. But he was confident that Maliki could still unite the fractured country. His government, after all, was only six months old and his military forces were growing stronger by the day. He just needed time and support.

After having breakfast with Hadley and his team, Casey handed them off to Chiarelli, who arranged for Hadley to meet several battalion and brigade commanders at Thurman’s headquarters. He then left the room so that they could get an unfiltered view of what was happening on Baghdad’s streets. The commanders’ accounts of the Maliki government were far bleaker than Casey’s, and their pessimism stunned the civilians. One officer said that in his sector police officers had recently driven through Sunni areas of Baghdad shooting up electrical substations to cut off the power there. Another commander was livid that the Ministry of Finance had closed the only bank in one of his Sunni sectors, forcing the residents there to make a deadly trip through territory controlled by Shiite militias to collect their monthly pension payments. What was the United States doing about this? Hadley asked. Very little, the officers replied.

As Hadley’s team prepared to leave for the airport, Chiarelli got an unexpected phone call from Casey telling him that Maliki wanted the United States to remove a series of checkpoints that had been placed around Sadr City following the kidnapping of an American soldier near there. In the week that the barriers had been in place, sectarian killings had fallen in Baghdad, Chiarelli recalled. Shiite death squads were having a much harder time leaving Sadr City to conduct killing sprees in Sunni neighborhoods. Casey could have refused the demand by Maliki, who was under intense political pressure from his constituents to take down the checkpoints. But Casey believed that if Maliki was going to have a chance of succeeding, he couldn’t undercut him publicly.

Chiarelli felt otherwise. The order was like “a kick in the teeth,” he recalled. He explained what had happened to Hadley, who was still absorbing what he’d heard from the brigade and battalion commanders. For most of the ride to the airport, no one spoke. Finally the taciturn Hadley broke the silence. “I wish I had come here more often,” he said.

A few days later Hadley drafted a classified memo for Bush and his top advisors that gave the White House a picture of the depressing situation. “We returned from Iraq convinced we need to determine if Prime Minister Maliki is both willing and able to rise above the sectarian agendas being promoted by others,” Hadley wrote. “Reports of nondelivery of services to Sunni areas, intervention by the prime minister’s office to stop military action against Shia targets and to encourage them against Sunni ones, removal of Iraq’s most effective commanders on a sectarian basis and efforts to ensure Shia majorities in all ministries—when combined with the escalation of Jaish al-Mahdi’s (JAM) killings—all suggest a campaign to consolidate Shia power in Baghdad … [T]he reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.”

Hadley’s impressions did not differ greatly from Casey’s or Chiarelli’s. Where they did disagree was in what to do. Casey favored strengthening Maliki and his security forces. Hadley suggested a long list of possible steps, including more troops, which Casey opposed and which Chiarelli doubted would do much good.

In early November, after the Democrats took control of the Senate in the midterm elections, Bush fired Rumsfeld. A few hours after he learned of the dismissal, Casey wrote Rumsfeld a quick note: “Thank you for your courage and support throughout this long and difficult mission. I really appreciate your leadership and I’ll continue to say so publicly.” Rumsfeld had not been an easy boss, but Casey had felt since their brief meeting before he took command that they saw the task in Iraq in roughly similar terms. And Rumsfeld had always stood up for him in Washington.

A few days after the midterm elections, Abizaid was summoned to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Abizaid had always been able to charm lawmakers. He was eloquent, witty, and, at times, disarmingly honest with them; he had a way of always coming off as the smartest, most levelheaded guy in the room. This time, though, the lawmakers weren’t interested in hearing what Abizaid had to say. They had brought the general to Washington so that they could vent their frustration. Abizaid had hoped to mollify the angry senators with a new military strategy. He’d been pressing Casey to bolster the U.S. advisory teams that were embedded in Iraqi army and police units. Abizaid believed the teams were the key to victory, and he had been frustrated that senior Army officers in the Pentagon had staffed them for years with mostly inexperienced troops. Abizaid asked Casey to triple the size of the ten- to fifteen-man teams. Instead of relying on the Pentagon to assign personnel the advisory units, he wanted to use officers who were already serving in Iraq to man them. “I believe in my heart of hearts that the Iraqis must win this battle with our help,” Abizaid told the senators. Only the Iraqis could end the country’s civil war, he insisted.

Abizaid tried to tout his new approach as a major change. But to the lawmakers the new plan sounded a lot like Casey’s current approach. The strongest attacks came from the committee’s two presidential hopefuls, John McCain and Hillary Clinton. For the first time in Abizaid’s golden career, powerful people were questioning his credibility and competence in public. McCain summarily dismissed Abizaid’s new plan as the “status quo.” The senator’s voice dripped with sarcasm and anger as he recounted for Abizaid the details of a mass kidnapping in Baghdad the day before. “Was it encouraging when in broad daylight yesterday people dressed in police uniforms were able to come in and kidnap 150 people and leave with them through Iraqi checkpoints?” McCain asked. “General, it’s not encouraging to us. It’s not encouraging to those of us who have heard time after time that we’re making progress, because we’re hearing from other sources that it’s not the case.”

Senator Clinton was just as searing. “Hope is not a method,” she lectured. “I have heard over and over again that the Iraqi government must do this and the Iraq army must do that. Nobody disagrees. The brutal fact is that it is not happening.” Abizaid testily shot back: “I would also say that despair is not a method. And when I come to Washington I feel despair. When I’m in Iraq with my commanders, when I talk to our soldiers, when I talk to the Iraqi leadership, they are not despairing.”

After the hearing Abizaid was furious. Rumsfeld had always served as a lightning rod for lawmakers’ fury over the foundering war effort. Now that he was gone, their anger was raining down on senior commanders, like Abizaid and Casey. “I’ll never do that again,” Abizaid fumed to his staff as he left the Senate hearing. “I’ll never go up there again.” In late October, Abizaid had accepted President Bush’s offer to serve as the director of national intelligence, a civilian job overseeing the CIA and other intelligence agencies, but a few days prior to the Senate hearing, after talking it over with Kathy, he withdrew his name. He was exhausted after more than three years in command and reluctant to take a political job. He also decided the position wasn’t right for him. He enjoyed thinking about issues such as the societal and political forces at work in the Middle East, and he disdained the grind of running a big bureaucracy. He had shown little success at getting the other parts of the U.S. government to support the war effort in Iraq. At times, he even had a hard time getting his Army to support his vision for fighting the war. Before Rumsfeld was fired, the defense secretary had asked Abizaid to postpone his retirement from the military to the spring of 2008, and Abizaid had reluctantly agreed. Everyone around Abizaid, especially his family, could see that he was burned out. He talked regularly about his desire to retire to the Sierra Nevada, thousands of miles from the second-guessing in Washington. “I really miss spending time with your mom,” he’d say wistfully to his children.

With Rumsfeld gone, the gulf between Casey and the White House became even more apparent. Bush was planning on giving an Iraq speech before Christmas and in mid-December assembled his advisors in the wood-paneled White House Situation Room to consider options. Casey appeared by video hookup and argued for continuing with the current strategy. By the summer of 2007, he predicted, the Iraqi security forces would be capable of operating with only limited support, allowing him to begin a long-delayed drawdown in American units.

Bush wasn’t convinced. “So, more of the same?” he asked Casey doubtfully.

It was obvious the president wanted to send additional brigades to Baghdad. Casey reiterated that he was opposed to such a move unless Sunni and Shiite leaders in Iraq showed a willingness to reconcile. “If the Iraqis can get political agreement, then, if asked, we can surge,” he offered.

But Bush had concluded that if his administration didn’t do something to arrest the decline, Congress was likely to force a withdrawal. Even staunch Republicans were losing patience with the war. “We’ve got to go after JAM before the summer,” he argued. The discussion resumed the following day, with Bush pressing the case for more troops and Casey resisting. “We’ve got sufficient forces in Iraq,” Casey emphasized at one point, noting that, for all the country’s problems, the Iraqi army was not splintering along sectarian lines.

Abizaid, who was also present, took a middle course. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re against the surge?” Bush asked him.

“No, that’s not what I’m going to tell you. I’m going to tell you the pluses and minuses of it,” he replied. The extra troops would show commitment, reduce sectarian violence, and buy Maliki and other leaders time to make necessary political compromises. On the negative side, the surge would add strain to an already stretched Army, prevent the United States from addressing the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, and constrain the president’s ability to use ground forces if there was a flare-up with Iran. Abizaid also warned that unless the State Department devoted more people and money to developing Iraq’s government and economy, the surge wouldn’t work.

Bush had already made up his mind. A temporary increase in forces might be “a bridge to a better place,” he suggested. “Perhaps,” Casey replied, giving slightly.

Bush didn’t blame Casey for the failures in Iraq. “Everything he did, I approved. I am not going to make him the fall guy for my strategy,” the president told his staff. Casey had inherited a mess when he arrived in Iraq more than two years earlier. The resistance had been growing and there was virtually no strategy to combat it. Neither he nor his troops had had any experience or training in fighting a counterinsurgency war. Casey had made mistakes. He’d underestimated the difficulty of building competent Iraqi security forces and had too much faith that elections would curb sectarian behavior and unite the country. But he’d also received little help or guidance from the rest of the U.S. government.

In late December, Gates arrived in Baghdad on his first overseas trip since taking over as defense secretary. He had sent word ahead of time that he needed a few minutes with Casey. When they were alone, Gates got straight to the point. The Army chief of staff job would be coming open in a few months, and Casey was the leading candidate. Was he interested? Gates asked. Casey said he was. He had been thinking about leaving Iraq for a while but wasn’t sure where he would go next. The chief’s job was the highest-ranking post in the Army. It was the job his father had once seemed destined to claim.

Chiarelli’s last day in Iraq was spent waiting for a plane. His one-year tour complete, he had handed over command to Lieutenant General Ray Odierno the day before and was due to leave that afternoon with his headquarters staff for Germany, where Beth and other families were waiting for their arrival. Everything about that year had been difficult, and leaving was no exception. The C-17 that was supposed to carry them home was late. Hour after hour he and his headquarters staff sat sprawled at the Glass House, a building away from the main Baghdad airport terminal that served as a VIP lounge. Even this long into the occupation, the place was a mess, with plywood boards covering the broken glass panels, and cheap and ripped chairs the only places to sit except for the floor. Their wait was the Air Force’s revenge for all the times he’d yelled at them, Chiarelli joked with his chief of staff, Brigadier General Don Campbell. As it got late, foraging parties set off in search of food. Somebody suggested going back to Al Faw Palace for the night, but Chiarelli said no: they should sit in the terminal until the plane arrived, whenever that was.

“I just don’t have the same feeling of accomplishment as I did when I left the last time,” Chiarelli told Campbell, referring to his tour with 1st Cav. He looked tired. He had been smoking too much and sleeping only four or five hours a night. Even now that it was over, he couldn’t stop replaying all that had gone wrong. Chiarelli was still hopeful he might be returning for a third tour in only a matter of months. He was already planning what he would do differently. “Will you come back with me?” he asked Campbell.

As his departure approached, he had written a long memo about everything that had gone wrong during the preceding year. Even the title, “What Happened During My Tenure,” captured Chiarelli’s shock and disillusionment. It was nearly six pages of observations, each carefully numbered, most of them about the Iraqi government’s failings: “We had high hopes that [Maliki] would come in and energetically help to stabilize the situation… What followed, unfortunately, was stasis and then a slow but definite growth of sectarianism on the part of the government… The IPs [Iraqi police] were corrupt and often participated in sectarian violence (kidnappings, torture, executions)… The Prime Minister has called us off of operations against JAM numerous times… We also have direct evidence that people from his office were tipping off potential targets.”

Chiarelli did not spare his own government. He had been reading a book entitled Bureaucracy Does Its Thing, a classic study written in 1973 by Robert Komer, a former CIA official sent to Vietnam by Lyndon Johnson to lead the civilian reconstruction effort. Komer had written his penetrating indictment of the war effort upon returning to the United States, and Chiarelli found that much in the three-decade-old essay still applied to Iraq. “Robert Komer’s observations,” he wrote, “are frighteningly apt here… ‘The sheer incapacity of the regimes we backed, which largely frittered away the enormous resources we gave them, may well have been the single greatest constraint on our ability to achieve the aims we set ourselves at acceptable cost.’” He closed the memo with thoughts about how to shift course. “The good news is that we still do have tools at our disposal, and some of our tools we have failed to use to their full capacity.” Chiarelli hoped he would have another chance to command.

Their plane finally arrived the next morning, and he and his staff loaded their gear into the belly of the cargo jet and flew home to Germany. They arrived a few hours later to a heroes’ welcome in Heidelberg, held in the post gymnasium. Beth, his daughter, Erin, and his son, Peter, greeted him. Soon after his arrival they left on a skiing vacation in the Austrian Alps with Don Campbell and his family. Chiarelli was a nervous wreck, religiously checking his e-mail, hoping he would get a message about his next assignment. He heard nothing. At the end of their weeklong vacation, as the Chiarellis and Campbells were driving back to Heidelberg, they stopped along the highway for a snack and saw a German newspaper with a picture of Dave Petraeus on the front page. Chiarelli translated the story with his rusty German. Petraeus, it seemed to be saying, was the leading candidate to replace Casey. A few days later came the official announcement: Bush had chosen Petraeus as the next top commander in Iraq.