CHAPTER TWELVE
Baghdad
February 8, 2007
At 7:27 a.m. Casey took his place before a wall of video screens and waited for the first briefer to start his morning update. Instead Petraeus’s image popped up on one of the screens in front of him. “General Casey, sir, Dave Petraeus here. How are you doing this morning?” he asked, his voice echoing through the room. Petraeus had just arrived in Baghdad and was scheduled to take command from Casey in two days.
“Good morning, Dave,” Casey muttered. He was running the briefing from the Green Zone and Petraeus was at Al Faw Palace a few miles away. He hadn’t expected to see his replacement turn up so soon, and his weary tone made clear that he was ready to drop the pleasantries and get on with the day’s business. Petraeus didn’t seem to get the message, and he tried to make conversation by discussing Casey’s nomination to be Army chief of staff. “Congratulations on your nomination getting through the Senate Armed Services Committee,” he continued. “Let’s hope for a similar result when the vote goes to the full Senate.” Several officers in the room blanched. The Senate had unanimously confirmed Petraeus for his new job, and his remark inadvertently seemed to imply that Casey might have a tougher time on Capitol Hill. A handful of prominent Republicans had already indicated that they were going to vote against him. Casey said nothing.
“Sir, your relief is here. You’re supposed to be smiling,” Petraeus joked, trying one last time. Casey gazed up at his replacement’s image on the screen in front of him. After an exhausting two and a half years in Iraq, he was ready to go home, but not on such a low note. “I am smiling on the inside, Dave,” he said.
His final days in Baghdad were full of small ceremonies and reminders that he was not leaving in triumph. Two weeks before, Casey had jetted back to Washington for the hearing on his nomination. In the Senate hearing room bright television lights shone in his face as he stared up at the two dozen lawmakers in front of him. He knew many in official Washington thought that he was being given the chief’s job as a consolation prize. The unspoken comparison was to General William Westmoreland, who’d presided over a losing war and returned to lead the Army. The thought burned him. Serving as Army chief shouldn’t be a reward, he bluntly told the lawmakers. It was a duty. “It’s about personal commitment to the men and women of the United States Army,” he said.
For Casey the three-hour confirmation hearing had become an endurance test; the key to surviving it was not to let the senators get to him. “That was sealed in my mind,” he recalled. The toughest moment had come early on under questioning from Senator John McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam who also came from a proud military family. McCain, who was readying his run for the presidency, had softened his criticism of Bush’s wartime command. He now placed the blame for the failure in Iraq squarely on Casey, and his disgusted tone made it clear that he considered Casey’s time in Iraq an unmitigated failure.
Sheila Casey, sitting in the front row, seethed at McCain’s rough treatment of her husband. Two years earlier he’d sought her out at a Washington party to praise her husband’s leadership. She couldn’t fathom how his opinion of her husband could have changed so radically, except that he was now running for president. Although McCain insisted that he wasn’t questioning Casey’s patriotism or honor, the senator clearly was attacking Casey’s intelligence and military judgment. The general’s sins were denial and inaction. As sectarian violence rose, Casey had continued to offer up “unrealistically rosy” assessments of the war, McCain complained. Instead of arresting the decline by pushing more troops deep into Iraq’s most violent cities, the general had stuck with his approach of building up Iraqi forces and searching for a quick exit. “We have paid a very heavy price in American blood and treasure because of what is now agreed to by literally everyone as a failed policy,” McCain lectured.
Democrat Senator Carl Levin prodded more gently, suggesting that even President Bush had conceded that Iraq was “maybe a slow failure.” Casey winced but refused to give an inch. “I actually don’t see it as a slow failure. I actually see it as slow progress,” he said softly. To Casey it seemed as if the White House and some Senate Republicans were trying to pin the failure in Iraq on him and shift the focus off the weakened president. He had been around Washington long enough to know that this was how politics worked. Still, he hated it.
In his final meeting with Maliki after returning to Iraq, Casey presented the prime minister with the 9mm pistol that he’d carried throughout his Iraq tour. Although most U.S. officials had serious doubts about Maliki, Casey still believed that he could overcome his paranoia and anti-Sunni impulses and effectively lead the country. “You are commander in chief. But soon you will have control of all of the Iraqi forces. I am giving you this as a symbol of the transfer,” he said, handing over the gun.
He spent a couple of hours with Petraeus in his palace office. A month earlier President Bush had announced that he was sending five additional brigades, or about 20,000 troops, to Iraq. Bush was gambling that the extra soldiers could drive down the sectarian killing in the capital and give Sunni and Shiite leaders in the country some breathing room to reconcile. In his confirmation hearing, Petraeus said that he intended to push his troops into Baghdad’s most violent neighborhoods, where they would live in small combat outposts and focus on protecting residents from the roving death squads and suicide car bombs. As they sat at the mahogany table, Casey urged Petraeus to be clear about the change. “Don’t pretend that you’re still trying to put the Iraqis in the lead when you’re taking over security responsibility from them,” he said. “You owe it to the troops.”
Casey disagreed with the new strategy and insisted that, despite the rising violence, the government and security forces were still improving. “You’re in a lot better shape than people back in the U.S. think you are,” he said. Petraeus listened and scribbled a few notes. He felt a twinge of sympathy mixed with disbelief. After four years of war, Casey and Petraeus shared more than they sometimes acknowledged. They had spent more time in Iraq than any other Army generals and knew better than any of their colleagues the intense pressure and loneliness of commanding. Casey had given two and a half years of his life to a strategy that was clearly failing, Petraeus thought. Now he couldn’t admit he was losing.
The change-of-command ceremony took place the following day with Abizaid, who was in his final months as the head of Central Command, in charge of the proceedings. The three generals marched into the palace’s cavernous rotunda, where a crowd of about 200 had assembled. Iraqi generals and cabinet ministers filled the first two rows of seats. American officers, a mix of field generals and cubicle dwellers, sat behind them. The official change of command took only a few seconds. A military band played the 101st Airborne Division song in honor of Petraeus. Then Abizaid passed the Multi-National Force-Iraq flag, a gold-fringed banner bearing the image of a winged Mesopotamian bull, to a sergeant major, who handed it to Casey. Casey presented the flag to Petraeus, who gripped it tightly with both hands and flashed the ceremony’s only smile.
Abizaid stepped up to the lectern and did his best to buck up Casey. “History will smile upon your accomplishments,” he intoned, his voice bouncing off the palace’s marble walls. With his arms folded across his chest and his legs crossed, Casey looked as if he were trying to roll up into a ball. His eyes flitted over the rotunda’s crystal chandelier and marble columns the width of redwoods. In all his years in the military he had never felt so alone.
After Abizaid spoke, Casey stood at the makeshift lectern in Al Faw Palace. In his remarks he didn’t let any of his anger show. Pushing his glasses up on his nose, he praised Petraeus and in a final defense of his strategy expressed optimism that soon the country would be able to “assume responsibility for its own security.” From the moment he had arrived in Iraq Casey had been determined to start bringing soldiers home. He’d constantly been casting about for the always elusive Iraq exit strategy. He wanted to win, but he also was determined to shield his Army as much as possible from the long, grinding war. “I didn’t want to bring one more American soldier into Iraq than was necessary,” he said repeatedly during his Senate hearing.
Now it was clear that Petraeus was going to take the war in a completely different direction. His remarks, which followed Casey’s, signaled more than just the changing of the guard in Iraq. They marked the end of the post-Vietnam era for the Army. Ever since the disastrous war, senior Army leaders had tried, and ultimately failed, to keep their force from becoming too deeply embroiled in messy political wars that defied standard military solutions. It was a pattern that had repeated itself in Haiti, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and then Iraq, where generals often focused more on exit strategies than on plans for victory. Petraeus wasn’t interested in the drawdown plans often advanced by Casey. Instead he wanted to push U.S. troops into cities and leave them there. Only a heavy and sustained American presence could win the war, he believed.
He spoke first to his troops. Their job was to reduce the violence and protect the people so that the government could function and the economy might return to life. “These tasks are achievable. The mission is doable,” he said, leaning forward and gripping the lectern with his left hand.
Next he spoke to the Iraqis. In his previous two tours he had sat through countless lectures from sheikhs, generals, and politicians recounting the country’s history as the birthplace of learning and the cradle of civilization. Petraeus addressed them as if he were the supreme sheikh of a proud tribe, referring to their country majestically as the “land between two rivers.” He had come back to help the Sha’ab al-Iraqi—the Iraqi people—build a new country and realize “the abundant blessings bestowed by the Almighty on Mesopotamia.” His last words were in Arabic. “Baraak Allah fee a sha’ab al-Iraqi,” Petraeus said—may God bless the Iraqi people.
A snare drum snapped out a deliberate tempo, and the three generals marched out of the rotunda. Petraeus rushed off to meet with the staff he was inheriting from Casey and set them to work on his new strategy. Casey paused on his way out the door to shake hands, force a last smile for his staff, and pose for pictures before he boarded a cargo plane headed home. After a few minutes, he glanced up and noticed that Iraq’s defense minister, interior minister, and national security advisor had all formed a tight circle around him. The middle-aged men with graying hair and mustaches looked to Casey as if they had no idea what came next. They stared at him. Casey stared back. Eventually he draped his arms over their shoulders. “You guys are going to be fine,” he said. “You know what to do.” He was probably the only one in the palace who believed it.
While he was back in the States, Petraeus had done his best to keep up with the classified intelligence assessments produced by Casey’s command, but the reports didn’t fully capture how bad conditions had become. The night of the change-of-command ceremony he flew into the Green Zone for a welcome dinner at the U.S. ambassador’s residence. Even before the main course had been served, Defense Minister Abdul Qadir al-Obaidi and the Speaker of the parliament, Mahmoud Mashhadani, began screaming at each other. Both men were Sunnis. The volatile Mashhadani castigated Obaidi for not doing enough to help his Sunni brothers. Rising to his feet, Obaidi shouted that he was defense minister for all Iraqis, regardless of sect or ethnicity. The only thing that was stopping the two men from throwing punches was the narrow table. The U.S. ambassador calmed the two men down, but a few minutes later the screaming erupted again. A dispirited Petraeus excused himself before dessert. “I’ve got to get back to Camp Victory,” he lied. “We have another update tonight.”
A Black Hawk ferried him back to his stone villa in the shadow of Al Faw Palace. He spent most of his time there in one room, which was furnished with a bed and a desk. The bed usually lay unmade. The desk was piled with books, a computer, a secure telephone, and a picture of his son, who was in his final year at MIT and about to become an Army lieutenant. Tucked inside one of the desk’s drawers was a list of soldiers who had completed an excruciating physical fitness test that he had created in 1992. Petraeus’s bosses had frowned on the test as an unnecessary distraction. His replacements had abandoned it, reasoning that they had better things to do than hover over troops with a stopwatch counting sit-ups, pull-ups, and dips. But Petraeus loved it. It measured the qualities that he valued in an officer: will, discipline, and perseverance. These were what he would need in Iraq.
As he settled into his cot, Petraeus’s mind was racing too quickly to sleep. He couldn’t even concentrate enough to read. The fight between the defense minister and the Speaker had thrown him. The two Sunni politicians were supposed to be political allies. They couldn’t even make it through a dinner together.
In his first days of command, he laid out his strategy in terms that even a soldier fresh out of basic training could grasp. The main mission was to make Iraq’s neighborhoods safer. Instead of commuting to the battlefield from big bases—some of which boasted swimming pools, bus systems, and post exchanges the size of a Wal-Mart—he ordered troops to move into austere outposts scattered throughout Baghdad. There they could keep a closer eye on Iraqi army and police forces and stop the worst of the sectarian bloodletting. Prior to the country’s descent into civil war, many of Baghdad’s neighborhoods included both Shiite and Sunni families. By 2007 there were virtually no mixed enclaves left. The sectarian cleansing in the months before his arrival ironically made Petraeus’s job easier. It allowed him to concentrate his troops on the fault lines between Sunni and Shiite areas where the violence was the most unrelenting.
Petraeus’s other big push was reconciliation. Most insurgents and militia fighters weren’t religious zealots and could be convinced to lay down their weapons. “We need to get as many people into the tent as possible,” he told his generals a few days after taking command. In the final months of Casey’s tenure, Sunni tribes in Anbar Province had begun switching sides to fight alongside the United States against Al Qaeda-affiliated Sunni extremists. The tribes were angry at Al Qaeda’s arrogance, brutality, and efforts to replace tribal law with a draconian form of Islam that even prohibited smoking. The fledgling tribal alliance, known as the Anbar Awakening, was one of the few bright spots in Iraq in 2006, and Petraeus was determined to find and exploit similar fissures.
Lastly, he told his commanders and his staff that he expected them to demand the forces they needed to prevail. President Bush had promised about 21,500 additional troops, but Petraeus was convinced that he’d need as many as 8,000 on top of that. The Pentagon’s Joint Staff usually didn’t deny field commanders’ requests outright. Instead it dragged its feet. Just ten days after the change-of-command ceremony Petraeus complained to his senior staff that he was “vexed” by the slow deployment of the reinforcements. The president had promised him that he would get whatever he needed for his strategy, and he intended to keep pushing until someone ordered him to stop. “We want the Joint Staff to tell us we can’t have the troops,” he told his generals in late February. “We are going to make them tell us no.” A few days later he returned to the issue. “We aren’t going to hold back on troop requests. If they tell us no, fine. I will state the risk to the mission. But they have to tell us no. We want them to tell us no.” Petraeus had been so worried about the troop issue that he seriously considered making his acceptance of command contingent on the president naming his old friend Jack Keane, who was a backer of the new strategy, as the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Keane could fight the Pentagon wars and let Petraeus focus on the real enemy. But Petraeus discarded the idea as too presumptuous. Instead he came up with another means of holding the Pentagon’s feet to the fire. Each morning he tracked his troop requests on a PowerPoint slide. If the Pentagon was withholding so much as a two-person dog handler team, he knew it and was willing to fight for it if necessary.
As Petraeus implemented his new strategy, he relied heavily on the 1st Cavalry Division, which had recently returned to Baghdad. Chiarelli had left the unit a little over a year before, but many of the officers and senior sergeants from Chiarelli’s days in command remained. These soldiers had absorbed his ethos and his ideas; they also knew Baghdad. Shortly after Petraeus was chosen for the top command in Iraq, he sent an e-mail to Lieutenant Colonel Doug Ollivant, the 1st Cav’s lead planner. Ollivant, who also happened to be a Sosh alum, had won a counterinsurgency essay contest that Petraeus had sponsored at Fort Leavenworth. His essay argued that 800-soldier battalions had to be the nexus for all security, reconstruction, and military training efforts in counterinsurgency wars. In his e-mail, Petraeus asked Ollivant whether he thought the ideas he’d promoted in his essay could work in Baghdad. Ollivant said he wasn’t sure. In Iraq, the Maliki government was fueling the sectarian violence. U.S. commanders had to weigh their actions carefully to ensure that they weren’t building a Shiite-dominated government and police force that would crush the Sunni minority in Baghdad. Petraeus encouraged Ollivant to ignore the normal chain of command and keep feeding him ideas. “You’re a very bright guy and these are exceptional times. We’re going to get one last shot at this and we need to make it really count,” Petraeus wrote. “We’re putting it all on the line and we need to be cognizant of that. It’s not business as usual as I am sure you know.”
Al Faw Palace
February 19, 2007
The daily briefing began when Petraeus strode into the palace’s first-floor amphitheater. Several dozen officers, sitting behind long tables and slender microphones, sprang to their feet.
“Good morning,” Petraeus mumbled as he took his seat before the wall of screens displaying PowerPoint slides and images of colleagues connected via secure video from other spots around Baghdad. He uncoiled his microphone, and his aide rushed over with hot coffee in a black 101st Airborne Division travel mug.
“Okay, let’s go, please,” he said, and the briefing began.
Most generals used their morning briefing to stay abreast of the previous day’s attacks, raids, arrests, and reconstruction projects. Petraeus explained that his morning update was going to be different. Part of what made commanding in Iraq so hard was that the disputes driving the killing varied from city to city and even neighborhood to neighborhood. He knew he couldn’t dictate solutions to his battalion and company commanders. But he also couldn’t just allow everyone to stumble across their own answers. The morning briefing, he said, was going to be his mechanism for imposing his vision on a force of 170,000 troops sprawled across more than 120 combat outposts.
The way Petraeus operated was nothing like the conventional portrait of a wartime general. It wasn’t Patton, riding crop clutched tightly in his left hand, exhorting his soldiers from the top of a tank. Rather, it was the slight and scholarly Petraeus swirling his emerald-green laser pointer over pie charts and columns full of data. “I am going to manage you by slides,” he told his troops.
Orchestrating the briefing was an art, Petraeus believed, one he had perfected over years of command. When he was running it, his voice deepened and his back, normally pitched slightly forward, straightened a bit. On a typical day Petraeus covered forty-five to sixty slides, each of which would first be briefed to him by a colonel or a major. Intelligence, enemy attacks, Iraq’s sclerotic electricity output, and press coverage merited daily attention. Other areas of interest to Petraeus, including bridge and road reconstruction, chlorine supplies at water-treatment plants, oil exports, Iraqi politics, and even chicken embryo imports, were covered weekly. Most subjects that Petraeus added after he took over from Casey weren’t military problems. They were generally considered State Department or civilian problems that senior military officers, with the exception of generals such as Chiarelli, had explicitly avoided during the first four years of the war. Petraeus was now making them military problems.
In his baritone, Petraeus regularly asked incredibly detailed questions. A report about a bank branch that Finance Minister Bayan Jabr had shuttered in a Sunni neighborhood in west Baghdad prompted queries that lasted for weeks. The closing of the bank was a small piece of a broader effort by the Shiite-dominated government to starve Sunni neighborhoods of essential services. Petraeus wanted to know: Why had the Shiite finance minister closed the bank? How quickly could the local manager reopen it? How many guards did the bank need and what was the plan to train them?
Every morning Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Miller, a longtime Petraeus acolyte and Sosh refugee, would capture the queries and send them out to various combat units around the country. For all of his power, Petraeus was rarely in a position to dictate solutions. But by asking questions he could nudge his troops to search for answers.
The broken-down electricity grid got the same treatment as the Baghdad bank. In four years the United States had pumped more than $4 billion into the electrical system, yet somehow daily output had fallen. Many Iraqis were livid. Petraeus didn’t know a lot of Arabic, but the words maku karaba, “no electricity,” were burned into his brain. In early March Petraeus latched onto a single electrical transmission tower southwest of Baghdad that was known as Tower 57. Insurgents had toppled it with a bomb more than a year earlier. Morning after morning for months Petraeus leaned into his microphone and, with all of Al Faw Palace and much of the Green Zone listening, he badgered Major General David Fastabend, the senior operations officer on his staff, about fixing Tower 57. Fastabend knew what Petraeus was doing. “It wasn’t just the tower to him,” Fastabend recalled. “The tower became a symbol of things that were broken in Iraq and never got fixed.” It was an emblem of the Army’s exhaustion and frustration.
The daily grilling about Tower 57 was humiliating for Fastabend. At times he doubted that Petraeus understood the magnitude of the electricity problem, which included a corrupt, incompetent ministry, surging demand, and regular insurgent attacks. “This is the most intractable damn thing in the world,” Fastabend groused. Petraeus didn’t seem to care. With Petraeus breathing down his neck, Fastabend hatched myriad schemes to fix the tower. Contractors were hired, paid, and then fired for refusing to finish the work in what was still insurgent-controlled territory. About thirty Iraqi soldiers then escorted government repairmen to the site, but the workers were spooked by snipers and fled. Finally the fed-up electricity minister refused to send another repair team until the United States guaranteed the area was secure. Petraeus sent a letter to Prime Minister Maliki complaining about the electricity minister’s foot-dragging. He also harangued the U.S. Army unit responsible for the insurgent-controlled area around the tower, known as the Triangle of Death. “You need to figure out what it is going to take to get the tower fixed,” Petraeus said. He didn’t care if the division moved its entire headquarters to the site of the toppled tower.
The operation to fix the tower was a massive military assault. More than 400 Iraqi soldiers, four Apache helicopters, and a U.S. team equipped with special vehicles to clear roadside bombs were mustered to protect a ten-man repair crew for a week. The Iraqis took eleven casualties.
Fixing Tower 57, which was just one small piece of a dilapidated 400-kilowatt line, hardly fixed the electricity problems. In fact, engineers had already figured out a way to make do without the tower, routing power into Baghdad via another line. Nor would fixing it stop insurgents from toppling another tower elsewhere. The big steel pillars were easy pickings. Still, Petraeus believed that fixing the tower sent a message to the enemy about U.S. resolve. It also sent a message to his men. “If the commander day after day is asking about Tower 57, then you probably take a look in your own area of responsibility and ask, ‘Are there other Tower 57s in our area? What are we doing about them?’” Petraeus recalled.
Petraeus’s first few months were brutal. As U.S. troops pushed into neighborhoods they hadn’t previously occupied, Sunni and Shiite extremists counterattacked, blowing up bridges, destroying mosques, and leveling markets. The U.S. death toll was especially heavy. More soldiers and Marines died during the spring of 2007 than during any previous period of the war. Insurgent bombs were growing larger and more lethal—big enough to flip a thirty-five-ton Bradley fighting vehicle and kill the six soldiers and the interpreter inside. Attacks, such as the May kidnapping and mutilation of three U.S. soldiers just a few miles from Tower 57, had become increasingly sophisticated and grisly.
Petraeus knew that sooner or later troops would hit their limit. The fighting and casualties didn’t harden soldiers. It broke them. Eventually discipline problems and suicides, which had risen with each year of the war, would spike. Reenlistments would plummet, just as they had during the latter days of the Vietnam War. “I’ve occasionally wondered if there’s some sort of bad-news limit,” Petraeus confessed in mid-May after eleven soldiers and Marines were killed in a day. “How much tragic news can you take in one lifetime?” The Army seemed well on its way to finding out.
In May 131 soldiers were killed, the second-highest total of the war. Some Republicans were openly talking about supporting legislation to change the strategy in Iraq and start bringing soldiers home. Petraeus was running out of time. On June 3 he attended the weekly meeting that Prime Minister Maliki held with his generals and senior ministers in the presidential palace in the Green Zone. The Iraqis took their seats around a conference table. Petraeus grabbed a chair away from the fray, near a massive mural of broad-backed workers toiling in factories and on farms—a relic of Saddam’s Stalin fixation. While the Iraqis argued in Arabic, he read through a draft of his weekly letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The letters were a Sunday afternoon ritual. Without Gates’s support, Petraeus knew, he’d have little chance of sustaining his current strategy. In contrast to Rumsfeld, who’d deluged Casey with irrelevant snowflakes, Gates worked to build a consensus among moderates in Congress for a long-term commitment to Iraq. He also pushed the military to spend more money on weapons and equipment of immediate use in Iraq and Afghanistan. Petraeus’s letters shaped the secretary’s understanding of the war. He also used them to organize his own thoughts.
“It’s been a difficult week to characterize,” Petraeus began in the June 3 letter, rattling off the week’s death and destruction. Three mosques had been destroyed in a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood in southwest Baghdad, sectarian murders were up over the previous week, five British contractors had been kidnapped, and two helicopters had crashed. He saved one intriguing development for the end: “For the first time we saw the Sunni population in Baghdad start to fight back against Al Qaeda in Ameriyah,” he noted. It was too early to tell if the small group of fighters in the west Baghdad neighborhood was connected to the tribal revolt against Al Qaeda-affiliated groups that was sweeping through Anbar Province. “But nonetheless it is another data point that suggests that average Iraqis don’t want what Al Qaeda is offering,” Petraeus continued. “We helped the element and we’ll see how it evolves. I suspect the Iraqi government will have significant qualms.”
Petraeus didn’t describe the fighting, which unfolded only a few miles from Al Faw Palace. Days earlier Lieutenant Colonel Dale Kuehl, the battalion commander in charge of the area, had received a call from the Firdas mosque, located in the west Baghdad neighborhood. “We are going after Al Qaeda,” Sheikh Khaled, a prominent Sunni imam, told him. “What we want you to do is stay out of the way.”
“Sheikh, I can’t do that,” Kuehl replied. He spent twenty minutes trying to convince Khaled to work with his troops to kill the Al Qaeda fighters. But Khaled wouldn’t budge. On May 30, mosque loudspeakers throughout Ameriyah broadcast a call to war. Dozens of young men armed with Kalashnikovs, pistols, and hand grenades swarmed into the streets and attacked the extremists, who launched their own brutal counterattack the next day. Khaled barricaded inside the Firdas mosque and, surrounded by dead bodies, called Kuehl again, begging for help. The forty-one-year-old commander rushed two platoons of troops in armored vehicles to drive off the enemy.
As Petraeus was writing to Gates, Kuehl was meeting for the first time with the military leader of the Ameriyah fighters, who went by the nom de guerre of Abu Abed. A short, chubby man in his late twenties with a wispy goatee, he appeared to be in charge of about a dozen men. The meeting, which took place in the battered mosque, didn’t go well. Exhausted from two days of nonstop fighting, Abu Abed insisted that his men take over security for all of Ameriyah. He was suspicious of U.S. forces and feared the Shiite-dominated army units in his neighborhood. Kuehl countered that he wanted the right to approve any moves by the fighters.
The two men eventually agreed to conduct a trial mission together on June 4. It was an alliance of desperation. The Americans were Abu Abed’s last hope. Sunni religious extremists were determined to kill him; if they didn’t succeed, Abu Abed feared, the Shiite-dominated army would arrest him for his past ties to the insurgency. Kuehl, meanwhile, was still reeling from the worst month of his tour. He had lost fourteen soldiers in the previous thirty days. He was ready to take a risk.
The fledgling alliance in Ameriyah was just the sort of opportunity that Petraeus had been hoping for. His counterinsurgency manual placed a heavy emphasis on co-opting locals. “These traditional authority figures often wield enough power to single-handedly drive an insurgency,” the manual states. Casey had made some effort to talk with insurgent leaders, but he had been limited by the Bush administration’s reluctance to negotiate with the enemy. Petraeus had a freer hand, and he used it.
Although Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl didn’t realize it, Petraeus’s command had helped spark the anti-Al Qaeda revolt in his Baghdad sector. Shortly after taking over, Petraeus had created the Force Security Engagement Cell, essentially a department of peace negotiations, to seek out reconcilable enemies. He had put a British general in charge. “The Brits are good at talking to unsavory actors,” he reasoned, citing their experience in Northern Ireland. Several weeks earlier General Graeme Lamb, the first British general to lead the reconciliation effort, had made contact with a Sunni insurgent leader named Abu Azzam who had taken part in some of the first anti-Al Qaeda tribal uprisings in western Iraq in late 2006. By early 2007 Abu Azzam wanted help driving Al Qaeda extremists from his rural village closer to Baghdad.
Lamb, in turn, had introduced Abu Azzam to Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Pinkerton, the battalion commander in charge of the area. “See what you can do with this guy,” he said. Slowly the two men formed an alliance. In early April, Pinkerton asked the Iraqi for help finding recruits for the local police force in the area around Abu Azzam’s village. “A week or so later, I drove out to a school compound and there were about eight hundred to a thousand men waiting to volunteer,” Pinkerton recalled. He snapped a picture of the teeming crowd that made its way up to Petraeus. As was often the case in Iraq, something big was happening and U.S. commanders were only catching fleeting glimpses.
When Abu Abed started building his fledgling force in Baghdad’s Ameriyah neighborhood two months later, he borrowed some fighters from Abu Azzam’s group and turned to his fellow Iraqi for advice on working with the United States. The Americans, meanwhile, were also trading information about these potential allies. Pinkerton drafted a seven-page memo outlining his alliance with Abu Azzam that was sent to commanders throughout Baghdad, including Kuehl. “If you are not a very good diplomat, start learning,” Pinkerton advised in the memo. “Reconciliation isn’t about any one party winning, but about all parties’ willingness to compromise.” He suggested a series of gestures that had helped him win Abu Azzam’s trust, such as releasing low-level prisoners, giving him responsibility for security in his village, and rewarding his tribe with small reconstruction contracts.
Although Petraeus had emphasized the importance of reconciliation, the real work didn’t happen at his level. The enemy was too fragmented. Instead, the reconciliation effort depended on midlevel commanders seizing the initiative and making peace with their former enemies. Throughout the summer, these officers brokered alliances with dozens of Sunni insurgents throughout Baghdad. They organized neighborhood watch groups that guarded checkpoints. Like Lieutenant Colonels Pinkerton and Kuehl, they revised the rules as they went, relying on their best instincts, informal advice from their fellow officers, and their knowledge of the local politics and personalities.
By late June Petraeus’s command was getting requests from his corps headquarters, which oversees daily military operations, asking for formal guidelines on the alliances. In its four years in Iraq, the United States had issued thousands of regulations governing just about every facet of a soldier’s life; the Army loved rules. Petraeus, however, resisted the urge to put anything in writing that would constrain officers’ options. He wanted them to experiment.
The Sunni reconciliation program marked a huge shift in strategy. Under Casey the focus had been on building the government and bolstering Maliki. Working with the armed Sunni groups, which were outside of the Shiite-dominated government’s control, undermined the central government’s authority. One of Petraeus’s main tasks over the summer was to convince Maliki, who saw the former insurgents as criminals, to at least tolerate the alliances.
Even before Petraeus set foot in the country for his third tour, Iraqi officials complained that he was overbearing, arrogant, and pushy. He put demands on government leaders and on rare occasions yelled at them. A regular target was Lieutenant General Ahmed Farouk, who ran Maliki’s Office of the Commander in Chief, a secretive arm of the government that was responsible for firing several Sunni army and police commanders. In one meeting, Farouk announced that the prime minister’s office was forming a special unit to inspect checkpoints in the capital. Petraeus erupted, dismissing the idea as nonsense. It was the equivalent of President Bush forming his own armed unit to scrutinize traffic cops in Washington, D.C. “We all know what the real problem is. It’s that you don’t have an NCO corps or junior officers who will enforce standards on checkpoints,” Petraeus barked. He leaned across the table and stared directly into the eyes of Maliki’s favorite general. “Everyone knows this. We’ve been talking about it for months. What are you going to do about it?” Petraeus’s red-faced rant quickly outran his interpreter, who gave up translating. Petraeus kept yelling. He wanted to stop Farouk from forming the unnecessary unit. But the outburst also had a larger purpose. He wanted to discredit Farouk, whom he saw as a malign and sectarian influence on Maliki, and run him from the weekly security meeting.
In 2006 and 2007 U.S. officers talked about the Iraqis as if they were an inviolable force of nature: “We can’t want it more than the Iraqis,” generals would grouse. Petraeus believed he could make the Iraqis want what was best for them, though it would take time.
Petraeus never raised his voice with Maliki, but their relationship grew testy the longer it continued. He and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, a fluent Arabic-speaker, met with the prime minister on Thursdays in his office. Crocker took the chair closest to Maliki. Petraeus sat on the ambassador’s right. “Where are the M-16 rifles you promised us?” Maliki would rail one day. A few days later he’d accuse Petraeus of withholding ammunition from his troops.
“With respect, Mr. Prime Minister, I am prepared to give you my side of the story if you are willing to listen,” Petraeus would interrupt. To Maliki it looked as if the United States was more interested in organizing insurgents into militias than in building legitimate security forces. The prime minister’s aides began complaining that the United States didn’t even know how many Sunnis were participating in the neighborhood watch units.
In truth, it was hard for the Americans to keep count. The program was growing too quickly. By early fall Kuehl had 231 citizens on the U.S. payroll in Ameriyah, but there were at least 600 men in Abu Abed’s neighborhood force. Every month Kuehl gave the Iraqi about $160,000, most of which Abu Abed used to pay his men and buy local support. He sat behind a desk wearing a black cavalry hat, a gift from his American benefactors, and doled out money and favors to supplicants who lined up each afternoon outside his door. “I know Abu Abed was cutting deals in Ameriyah that we never saw and didn’t understand,” Kuehl said. Abu Abed also undoubtedly kept some of the money for himself.
The U.S. military, with Petraeus’s encouragement, had helped the anti-Al Qaeda uprising in Ameriyah take root and spread to other areas of Baghdad, causing violence levels to drop throughout the capital. In the summer of 2007 the military didn’t control these fledgling uprisings. No one did.
Arlington, Virgina
May 2007
As chief of staff, George Casey lived in Quarters One, a Victorian brick mansion at Fort Myer that he’d known since childhood; as a young boy he’d once set off the outdoor sprinkler system there, disrupting a garden party that he was attending with his parents. The house sat atop a hill overlooking Washington’s marble monuments and Arlington National Cemetery, where his father had been buried just weeks after he’d been commissioned as a second lieutenant.
One of George Casey’s first acts after taking office was to invite the retired general Edward “Shy” Meyer for lunch. Meyer, a longtime family friend, had been a protégé of Casey’s father. On the morning the elder Casey was killed, Meyer had tried to talk him out of flying his helicopter in bad weather. Nine years later, with the Army at its nadir, Meyer was named Army chief, the position Casey now held. He had been renowned for his bluntness in the job. In 1980 he had famously told Congress that the Army, still recovering from its defeat in Vietnam, was a “hollow force” that lacked the equipment and the motivated and educated soldiers it needed to prevail against the Soviets. His warning helped spur the Reagan defense buildup.
Casey and Meyer ate at a small table in his Pentagon office. Casey’s main job as chief was ensuring that the Army was holding up under the strain of two wars and was ready for any future conflicts. Some senior officers were concerned that the service, consumed with occupation duty and counterinsurgency, was losing its ability to fight a conventional war. Artillery units in Iraq and Afghanistan were being used as military police. Armor officers walked foot patrols, and when they were back in the United States, they spent most of their time recovering or preparing to return to the wars. They didn’t have time to practice battalion- or brigade-sized assaults in their tanks. There were troubling indicators with regard to personnel issues. Suicides were rising. The Army was having a hard time retaining enough officers to fill jobs.
Casey invited Meyer to the Pentagon because he wanted some advice. “What were the early warning signs after Vietnam that the Army was in trouble?” he asked. Had anyone seen it coming? How quickly had the force collapsed?
It had been almost impossible to pin down the breaking point, Meyer replied. For years the force was strained by Vietnam but still holding together. Then all of a sudden it just fell apart. Experienced captains and sergeants started streaming out of the service, and no matter what the brass tried it was impossible to stanch the bleeding. It took ten years to pull the Army out of the spiral—and shifting to an all-volunteer force at the same time didn’t help. “There’s an invisible red line out there. You won’t know it until you cross it,” Meyer said. “Once you cross it, it’s too late.”
One key to keeping the Army away from the red line was convincing battle-hardened captains to stay in the military, Casey believed. But, worn down by repeated deployments, they were leaving at a growing rate. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been during Vietnam, but the Army had missed its goal for keeping captains two years in a row. Casey settled on the idea of a $20,000 retention bonus aimed at these officers in the Army. The Pentagon had long used cash bonuses to entice enlisted soldiers to stay in the service, but this was going to be the first time it had ever tried such a program out on officers.
Before he signed off on the bonuses, Casey asked division and brigade commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan to survey their captains and see if the cash payments would make a difference. The answer was mixed. Perhaps the most eloquent response came from Colonel J. B. Burton, who in the summer of 2007 was in charge of U.S. troops in west Baghdad and Ameriyah. “This is a very tough crowd of warriors,” Burton wrote. “They have spent the past four years in a continuous cycle of fighting, training, deploying, and fighting and seen no end in sight. They have seen their closest friends killed and maimed leaving young spouses and children as widows and single parent kids… It’s not about the money, at least not $20,000. What these warriors really want is for their Army to invest in them personally by giving them time back to invest in themselves and their families.”
The long deployments weren’t the only gripe. Young officers also were frustrated that their Army hadn’t changed its training, equipment, and strategy quickly enough. At lower levels, captains and majors insisted that they had had to adapt to survive on Baghdad’s violent streets, but their generals were a step behind. The growing anger was captured most clearly in an essay written by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, a rising officer who was just about to take command of a 540-soldier battalion. Yingling published his critique, which was entitled “A Failure in Generalship,” in the June 2007 edition of Armed Forces Journal, a privately owned military publication. The essay was a passionate, angry, and in part naive cry for accountability and change at the top ranks. “America’s generals have been checked by a form of war that they did not prepare for and do not understand,” Yingling wrote. The essay’s most oft-repeated line came at the end: “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”
Yingling would admit that some senior officers had pushed for change. Both Petraeus and Chiarelli, for example, had written extensively about their experiences and the need to incorporate the lessons that young officers were learning in Iraq. To Yingling, though, the Army brass’s problems extended far beyond the efforts of a few reformers. The shortcomings in the general officer corps, he maintained, grew out of a personnel system that encouraged conformity and discouraged risk takers.
Within hours of its publication, the essay was rocketing around the Army by e-mail. Yingling had credibility because he had volunteered for two tours in Iraq, the second one working for Colonel McMaster in Tal Afar. He had a sterling pedigree that included three years teaching in the Sosh department at West Point and a recent selection to command a battalion. In short, he had a lot to lose.
He had decided to write the essay after attending a Purple Heart ceremony at Fort Hood. As he watched the troops receive their awards, he grew angry at his Army’s failings in Iraq. He was ashamed that he hadn’t spoken out more forcefully about the failures he had witnessed. By the end of the ceremony he could barely look the wounded troops in the eye. “I can’t command like this,” he recalls thinking. He insisted that there wasn’t a lot of original thought in the piece. Rather, the essay was a distillation of conversations with fellow soldiers on patrols, in mess halls, and on training exercises.
Casey picked up the essay on the recommendation of Lieutenant Colonel Grant Doty, a Sosh alum who had worked for him in Iraq as a major and was now his speechwriter. Doty thought that he might want to send Yingling a note thanking him for writing the controversial piece. It would send a strong message to young officers that the top brass was willing to listen.
Casey said he would. But try as he might, he couldn’t get through the essay. When he reached the part that accused generals of lacking “moral courage,” he stopped reading. He had made mistakes in Iraq, but so had everyone. And he resented the insinuation that he and his fellow officers had caved in to political pressure. Even the oft-repeated charge that the generals had done little during the 1990s to prepare for insurgencies such as Iraq and Afghanistan left him raw. The country’s history was full of instances in which America had entered wars unprepared and made major changes. “I tried not to be pissed off about it. I did,” he said. He never wrote the note.
Chiarelli was more sympathetic to Yingling’s argument. If he had been a lieutenant colonel, like Yingling, looking up at the generals in their palaces, he probably would have written the same sort of thing, he told himself. Chiarelli had been deeply frustrated by his last tour and disappointed that he hadn’t been chosen to command. After spending a few weeks without a job, Defense Secretary Gates asked him in early 2007 to become his senior military assistant. Gates had been impressed by Chiarelli’s passionate presentation months earlier when he had been in Baghdad as a member of the Iraq Study Group. Chiarelli jumped at the chance to work with the defense secretary. It would let him stay connected to Iraq.
Chiarelli didn’t agree with everything in Yingling’s article, but he liked his willingness to prod his superiors to take risks. What Chiarelli didn’t like was some of his fellow generals’ circle-the-wagons reaction to the essay—in fact, it disgusted him. The harshest criticism came at Yingling’s home base at Fort Hood, the vast post in central Texas. After the essay appeared, Major General Jeff Hammond summoned all of the captains on post to hear his thoughts on the officer corps. About 200 officers in their twenties and thirties, most of them Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, filled the pews and lined the walls of the base chapel. “I believe in our generals. They are dedicated, selfless servants,” Hammond said. Yingling wasn’t qualified to judge the Army’s generals because he had never been one and probably never would be. “He has never worn the shoes of a general,” Hammond told the captains and majors, many of whom found Hammond unconvincing. They didn’t want to hear a defense of the generals. They wanted someone to take accountability for what had gone wrong.
The higher Chiarelli rose, the more sympathy he had for officers willing to challenge the status quo in the Army. “The most important thing right now is that we listen to these junior officers. We need to allow them to write. We need to allow them to criticize,” he’d say. His vision was an Army officer corps more like the intellectually freewheeling Sosh department at West Point.
Chiarelli found that he liked working for Gates, who was pushing the military services to scale back purchases of expensive weapons systems in favor of equipment suited to Iraq and Afghanistan. He helped the defense secretary speed up the fielding of a new armored vehicle with a V-shaped hull that could withstand blasts from roadside bombs better than the Humvee. He also was happy Gates called for a bigger budget for the State Department so that it could play a greater role in reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Chiarelli’s job as the secretary’s senior aide practically guaranteed that he would get a fourth star. What he really wanted was to be the top commander in Iraq. In the fall of 2007 Chiarelli traveled to the Army War College in Pennsylvania to address generals headed to Iraq and Afghanistan. The darkened room with its big video screens and amphitheater-style seating looked like a NASA command center. Chiarelli had planned his presentation to be provocative. He opened with a searing seven-minute video that had been filmed by a reporter in Ameriyah just eleven days before Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl and the former insurgent Abu Abed met in the Firdas mosque. The lights dimmed and the face of an Army specialist appeared on the big screen. “It’s a joke,” the young soldier from the video said. “We will have spent fourteen months in contact. The first week we were in Baghdad we lost two guys in our battalion and it hasn’t stopped since.” The video shifted to a shot of one of Kuehl’s Bradleys that had been struck by a massive roadside bomb in Ameriyah. Soldiers watched helplessly as six of their colleagues and an interpreter burned to death inside. A few seconds later it cut to a scene of the same troops storming into the house of an elderly woman in search of the triggerman who had killed their friends. The frail woman let out a terrified, feral wail. “God help me! God help me!” she pleaded.
The woman’s screams faded and the video jumped again. Now the troops had just shot an unarmed cabdriver who had ignored their orders to stop. A few minutes later they were rushing to save an Iraqi soldier whose legs had been blown off by a roadside bomb. It ended with a close-up of another young Army specialist angry at the extension of his tour from a year to fifteen months: “We were supposed to be flying home in six days. But because we have people in Congress with the brain of a two-year-old we are stuck here. I challenge the president or whoever has us here for fifteen months to ride along with me. I’ll do another fifteen months if he comes here and rides with me every day.”
The lights came up and Chiarelli told the generals that he was the one who had pressed Gates to extend tours to fifteen months after the president committed to sending the additional 30,000 troops to Iraq. The alternative, meting out three-month extensions over the course of a year, would have been even more painful to soldiers and their families. “It was a necessary evil,” he said. Then for the next hour he talked with the generals about his successes and his admittedly larger failings during his last tour. His biggest disappointment had been his inability to get the U.S. military more involved in the effort to build the Iraqi government. “If I got involved in Iraqi governance and economics, I got my hand slapped,” he said. “It wasn’t from Casey. It was from the embassy. And it frustrated the hell out of me.”
He was packing up when Casey walked into the room for his presentation to the same generals. He was the senior officer in the Army and moved around with an entourage of colonels who reflected his status. “Pete, what are you doing here? I thought you were a horse holder,” Casey said, using the Army slang for an aide whose main job is to shadow his more important boss, in this case Gates. Casey was only needling him, but Chiarelli looked crushed. His shoulders slumped and the blood drained from his face. It felt like a jab, reminding him that he was still the junior three-star general and not a real commander. Chiarelli had always seen himself as a bit of an outsider within the clubby general officer corps. He regularly boasted that in his entire Army career he’d never been tapped for an early or “below-the-zone” promotion, like most golden boys. He was one of those rare Army leaders who had plodded up the chain of command, proving wrong all those who had thought he wasn’t quite good enough.
The rumor was that Petraeus was going to leave command at the end of the year, and Chiarelli had already started thinking about what he would do if he was picked for the top job. He’d push harder to reform the corrupt ministries and use the high-profile command to rally the military and the rest of the U.S. government to jump-start the economy. The job was just beyond his grasp. Chiarelli shoved his speech notes into his briefcase and quickly hustled out of the room.
Green Zone, Baghdad
July 2007
Petraeus and Admiral William “Fox” Fallon boarded a Black Hawk helicopter for an aerial tour of Baghdad. Fallon had replaced Abizaid, who retired as the top commander in the Middle East a few months earlier.
Abizaid had left the Iraq war strategy largely to Petraeus during his final weeks in command. He’d signed off on all Petraeus’s requests for additional troops with no argument. Fallon, by contrast, had decided to focus his attention on what he saw as the shortcomings of Petraeus’s strategy, which he thought was failing. He’d crafted his own plan calling for swift cuts to U.S. troop levels and a renewed focus on shifting the fight to the Iraqis. Petraeus had invited him on the helicopter tour as a last-ditch effort to convince Fallon to ease off. The temperature had soared past 115 degrees and the hot air pouring through the helicopter’s open windows felt like a hair dryer on maximum power. Soon every uniform was drenched in sweat. Petraeus’s enthusiasm bordered on desperation. After a few minutes, the two officers were hovering over downtown Baghdad; Petraeus was pointing out a soccer field. “They have real games there. The teams wear uniforms. You wouldn’t believe it,” he said. The helicopter banked over an empty public swimming pool. “They are fixing that pool, by the way,” he told Fallon. “You see that amusement park? It’s empty now, but on Thursday and Friday nights it is full of people.”
Fallon kept asking about the Sunni areas of the city, where trash filled the streets and stores were shuttered. Petraeus tried to direct his attention to more positive areas. After forty-five minutes in the area the two men went their separate ways. The sales pitch backfired. “He’s not seeing the whole city,” Fallon groused. He worried that Petraeus’s preternatural enthusiasm and ego wouldn’t allow him to admit that the war might not be winnable. Rumors of Fallon’s contentious visit spread through the palace. In the morning update, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, who had replaced Chiarelli as the number two commander in Iraq overseeing daily military operations, did his best to reinforce confidence in the strategy. He had played a key role in pushing for the extra surge forces and deciding where to place them. “My sense is that we are in the pursuit mode in many areas throughout Iraq,” he said. “The extremists are running in Baghdad. They are running in Anbar and in Mosul. The Iraqis are starting to see the results of our offensives.” Publicly Petraeus and Odierno weren’t going to show a hint of doubt.
When the two generals were paired up, some in the Army buzzed with concern about how they would get along. In 2003 they both commanded divisions in northern Iraq. Petraeus easily charmed the media and visiting congressmen, his division quickly becoming everyone’s favorite success story. Odierno’s 4th Infantry Division was often cited as an example of overaggressiveness in its single-minded pursuit of FREs—former regime elements. The generals clashed a year later when Odierno visited Baghdad as part of a Pentagon team looking for ways to accelerate Petraeus’s training of Iraqis.
In 2007, the pressure cooker of Iraq drew the two men closer. On particularly hard days Petraeus and Odierno, recalling a Civil War moment that Petraeus had read about, would quote Ulysses S. Grant’s exchange with William Tecumseh Sherman after the bloody first day at the Battle of Shiloh. Unable to sleep, Grant was standing beneath a tree as rain fell on him. Sherman appeared out of the darkness. “Well, Grant,” Sherman said, “we have had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?”
“Yup,” Grant replied. “Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”
The really difficult days dwindled over the summer as commanders organized former Sunni insurgents into armed neighborhood watch groups, known as the Sons of Iraq. By the fall the United States had almost 70,000 sons of Iraq on the payroll. To control Iraqi neighborhoods, U.S. commanders blocked off neighborhoods with concrete barriers that made it harder for Sunni extremist groups and Shiite death squads to come and go. In some cases the Americans used the barriers to keep Shiite-dominated national police and army forces out of Sunni areas. The idea for the walls had come from the field, not headquarters. David Kilcullen, an Australian specialist on guerrilla war whom Petraeus had recruited as his counterinsurgency advisor, referred to the walls as “urban tourniquets,” a temporary measure designed to stop the bleeding so that the patient doesn’t die.
In September Petraeus returned to Washington to give his first assessment to Congress on whether his strategy was producing lasting results. He and his staff went through twenty-seven different drafts of his opening statement. The final version ran a stunning forty-five minutes. The Iraq debate had become too superheated for logic. So he decided that he was going to bludgeon skeptical lawmakers with data. His testimony was going to be a war of attrition.
A few days before the hearing, the Bush administration arranged for several officials well acquainted with congressional hearings and Iraq to come to Petraeus’s house at Fort Myer to fire questions at him in a mock hearing. In Washington, it was known as a “murder board.” The civilians who had been sent to help him prepare told him to start slashing his statement. Petraeus began stripping out paragraphs with his executive officer, Colonel Pete Mansoor, and Captain Liz McNally, a Rhodes scholar who acted as his speechwriter.
The final presentation, which Petraeus delivered in a flat monotone, still ran a lengthy eighteen minutes. Violence levels were down in eight of the previous twelve weeks, he told the lawmakers. Civilian deaths had fallen by 45 percent. The number of weapons caches discovered was higher, suicide attacks were down, and Iraqi defense spending was increasing. “The military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met,” he concluded. To hold on to the fragile gains, he recommended sustaining the increased troop levels and the fifteen-month tours through the summer of 2008.
A few days after he had returned to Baghdad he met with Prime Minister Maliki, who was ecstatic. “We all thank God for your successful hearings,” he said. “I can now see the beginning of a victory in Iraq.” Petraeus tried to tamp down his confidence. “Obviously we are going to need to see continued security improvements, but we are also going to have to show progress in other areas,” he said. In particular, Petraeus was eager to see the Iraqis hold provincial elections that would allow Sunni tribal leaders who had boycotted earlier balloting to amass some political power. The Iraqis also had to settle on a formula for distributing oil revenues and develop a plan to find permanent jobs for the more than 100,000 Sunnis participating in the Sons of Iraq neighborhood watch program.
Like Casey and Chiarelli in 2006, Petraeus found it almost impossible to pin down Maliki’s real intentions toward Sunnis. A few weeks after his fall testimony he and Ryan Crocker met with the president via a video teleconference link from Baghdad. Maliki had been feuding with his Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, and Bush asked whether the prime minister disliked all Sunnis or just Hashimi. “Maliki is not viscerally anti-Sunni, but he thinks that Hashimi is out to get him and he might be right,” replied Crocker, who had been working closely with the country’s political leaders for almost a year. “This is not a government of national unity,” the ambassador continued. “The only time the Iraqi leaders behave that way is when you hold their head under water for a while and then let them back up.”
The Sunni tribal leaders’ fledgling alliance with the United States, the increase in American troops, and Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy continued to drive down violence. The United States also caught a break when radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who was losing control of his militia, called for a six-month cease-fire. The sectarian and ethnic tensions that had sparked the civil war in 2006 were still strong but increasingly were being pushed below the surface.
In September 2008 the last of the U.S. reinforcements started heading home. Petraeus was just a couple of weeks away from leaving as well. He’d been chosen to lead U.S. Central Command, replacing Abizaid’s successor, Admiral Fallon, who resigned after a short, rocky tenure. In the United States Petraeus was being hailed as the most influential military officer of his generation. The problem, as he reminded his staff, was that the war wasn’t over. Daily attacks had plummeted to levels not seen since early 2004, when the insurgency was in its infancy. But the relative quiet was still dependent on the presence of U.S. forces and the relationships that they had forged with former Sunni insurgent groups. How dependent? No one actually knew.
In an area south of Baghdad known as the Triangle of Death, the Rakkasans battalion that Petraeus had commanded in the early 1990s was going to find out. Petraeus had visited the battalion more than any other in Iraq, doling out advice on counterinsurgency and just about everything else, including what dance steps to use when the unit went home and partied. “If you want to throw a good welcome-home ball for your troops, you need to learn how to do the electric slide,” Petraeus counseled the battalion commander. “Then you need to get out and do it. Everyone else will follow.” It was pretty good advice if you were commanding the battalion in 1992, joked Lieutenant Colonel Andy Rohling, the current commander.
By 2008, the Rakkasans epitomized Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy. They had been so successful that they were averaging less than one attack a day and were on the verge of turning over their sector, which only a year earlier had been one of the most violent in Iraq, to a company about one-third the battalion’s size. Colonel Rohling called his company commanders together a few weeks before the handover to lay out the plan.
The battalion headquarters was in a half-finished power plant that a Russian construction company had abandoned on the eve of the 2003 invasion. Al Qaeda-affiliated fighters had occupied it for much of 2005 and 2006. American troops had seized the compound in a bloody nighttime raid the following year and had held it ever since. The partially completed steel-and-cement skeleton stood ten stories. Graffiti on its support beams praised Saddam Hussein and listed the names and dates of “martyrs” and their suicide missions. Surrounding it were green pastures, reed-choked irrigation ditches, and dirt-poor farmers.
Rohling and his company commanders crammed into the battalion’s main conference room, which they had fashioned out of plywood sheets on the power plant’s second floor. “This is where we’ve been and what we’re trying to avoid,” Rohling said. He flashed a slide showing Vietnamese civilians scrambling to board a helicopter perched precariously on the roof of the CIA building in Saigon. No one laughed.
Rohling’s best counterinsurgent was Captain Michael Starz. He stood out for his passion, intelligence, and youthful bravado. Under Rohling’s plan, Starz’s ninety-man company was turning its area over to a thirty-soldier platoon. Starz, who had the look of an earnest graduate student in camouflage, had bluntly told his boss a few days earlier that he thought it was a dangerous and dumb idea. The area was too complex. The fledgling relationship he was trying to foster between the local Sunni tribes that had until recently backed the insurgency and the Iraqi army was too strained and fragile.
When Petraeus ventured out into the field—typically twice a week—he made sure that he spent at least an hour with company commanders such as Starz. He’d kick out their bosses, close the door, and ask the young officers what they thought was really happening in their sector. What had they learned? What mistakes had they made? What did they need to win? Petraeus knew that captains such as Starz had the best understanding of the politics and personalities on the ground.
Starz’s sector, which included the cities of Mohmudiyah and Yusufiyah, had been among the most violent and unforgiving in Iraq. Over the years insurgents had inflicted heavy casualties on U.S. troops in the area, and in brazen attacks twice kidnapped U.S. soldiers off checkpoints, torturing and killing them. It also was the place where four angry, drunk soldiers raped a young girl and murdered her and her family. By mid-2008, several thousand of the area’s young men had been organized into Sons of Iraq groups and were being paid $400 a month to guard street corners. “We pretty much employ all the extremists in my area,” Starz said. He said it without pride or outrage; this was how the war was being won.
A few weeks before he turned over his sector, he grabbed a briefcase packed with crisp $100 bills and paid a visit to the Owesat tribe. The first time that Starz had driven down the dirt road that leads into the tribe’s village, insurgents had seeded it with more than twenty roadside bombs, one of which killed Lieutenant Tracy Alger, a thirty-year-old officer from rural Wisconsin. “The people who killed Tracy were all from this tribe that we are going to pay,” he said. “To tell you the truth, it doesn’t bother me that we are paying them. I am very detached from it. I don’t hold any anger in my heart.” As Starz entered the village, barefoot tribal elders all rushed to greet him, and the tribe’s preeminent sheikh welcomed him with kisses on each cheek. Sheikh Musahim al-Owesat led him past a cluster of boxy one-story cement houses to the tribe’s diwan, a large room with benches and pillows lining the walls and a wheezing air conditioner connected to a clanking electric generator. Soon the men of the tribe were lining up to collect their $100 bills from one of Starz’s lieutenants.
“How old are you?” Starz asked one boy, no more than fourteen. The United States wasn’t supposed to pay anyone younger than eighteen. Before the boy could answer, the sheikh barked at him to take his money and leave. “His father was killed in the fighting and his family needs the money to survive,” Sheikh Musahim explained. Starz crossed his name off the list for the next payday but let him keep the money. “I guess he’ll be our target audience in a couple of years,” he said philosophically. Tables full of cash were replaced by a feast of eggs, watermelon, bread, yogurt, and tomatoes. It was Ramadan, when Muslims fast during the day, but few seemed reluctant to eat. Starz was fasting to see what it was like to go without food or water in 120-degree heat. Once the meal was done, Starz said goodbye to Sheikh Musahim, who lavished him with praise. “I respect you and love you as a human,” the sheikh told him.
Soon his convoy was back on the road, rumbling past new, U.S.-funded poultry farms. The area south of Baghdad had raised most of the chickens for Iraq when Saddam Hussein was in power. Now Starz’s unit was trying to relaunch the industry. His brigade commander had spent about $1 million to import 95,000 chicken embryos from the Netherlands, which were of hardier stock than the scrawny, disease-prone local chickens. Petraeus loved the project and demanded regular updates on its progress in the morning briefing.
The chicken-farming initiative might have been borrowed right from one of Petraeus’s favorite novels, The Centurions, the 1960 book that follows French paratroopers as they fight insurgencies in Vietnam and Algeria. In one of the novel’s more memorable passages a French officer in Vietnam explains to another, more conventionally minded colleague how his unit had changed its approach, abandoning firepower-intensive attacks for a strategy that focused on winning over the locals and even helping them raise pigs. “We no longer wage the same war as you, Colonel,” the officer says. “Nowadays it’s a mixture of everything, a regular witches’ brew … of politics and sentiment, the human soul, religion and the best way of cultivating rice, yes, everything, including even the breeding of black pigs. I knew an officer in Cochin-China who by breeding black pigs, completely restored a situation which all of us regarded as lost.”
The chicken farming initiative in Starz’s sector wasn’t producing the same stirring results that pig farming did in Lartéguy’s novel. It was turning out to be far cheaper to import whole frozen chickens from big industrial poultry farms in Brazil than it was to raise and slaughter fresh ones south of Baghdad.
Starz’s most prized project was to rebuild the ancient Sayeed Abdullah shrine, which honored a Shiite saint and had been leveled by Sunnis when Iraq was melting down in a civil war. He had convinced the Iraqi commander he was partnered with to use some of his reconstruction money to contract with a local Sunni tribe to rebuild it. Whatever their sect, most people in his sector were eager to make peace with the United States. They were less willing to forgive each other, and Starz saw the contract as a step toward a sturdier peace. On his way to the shrine, he stopped by the office of Captain Mohammed Amjen, the Shiite commander of the local unit. Loose hand grenades were scattered across Amjen’s desk. On the wall hung a picture of his predecessor, who had been killed four months earlier by a female suicide bomber. Amjen passed on some rumors about Al Qaeda fighters moving back into the area. A few minutes later the two officers headed out to the shrine.
There they struck up a conversation with the construction foreman, a Sunni tribesman clad in a dirty dishdasha. His face was covered by a few days’ worth of stubble. “Al Qaeda destroyed everything in this area,” the foreman said, shaking his head.
“Tell the truth,” Amjen replied, angrily waving a finger. “Your tribe was Al Qaeda. And they didn’t destroy everything. They didn’t touch the Sunni mosques. They just killed the Shiites.”
The foreman, not wanting to alienate his patron, quickly changed the subject. “Without Captain Starz and Captain Amjen none of this would have happened. You both are kind and generous. May God bless you and make you undefeated in all your battles.”
Petraeus had pushed young officers to seek out local leaders, many of whom had supported the insurgency. His “bottom-up” reconciliation strategy required meticulous intelligence work and a deep understanding of local politics. It also demanded a mind-set shift. In Petraeus’s Iraq there were very few good guys or bad guys, and certainly no “anti-Iraqi forces,” the Orwellian term that Rumsfeld had once coined to describe the enemy when he decided that insurgent was too flattering.
Back at his base in an abandoned potato plant, Starz tried to explain how his perspective had changed during his second yearlong tour. He was less idealistic and far more practical. He’d come to realize that concepts such as democracy and loyalty to country or the central government didn’t resonate. “Loyalty is constantly shifting here, and there is no moral component to it,” he said. “It’s so foreign to our way of thinking, and it’s hard to respect. But you have to remember that it is a different way of seeing the world.”
As for counterinsurgency, “it comes naturally to me,” Starz said. “I like the thinking part of it.” It was the somewhat hidebound pre-Iraq Army that he had joined out of West Point in 1999 that now seemed strange. As Starz prepared to leave, he resembled one of the French paratroopers in The Centurions, who ebulliently celebrates the changes he and his fellow officers have been able to make in battle as they cast off the rigid, bureaucratic tendencies of the French Army and adapted to the messy guerrilla war they were fighting. “I’d like two armies: one for display, with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, fanfares, distinguished and doddering generals … an Army that would be shown for a modest fee on every camp fairground,” the French officer says. “The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage who would not be put on display but from whom all sorts of tricks would be taught. That’s the Army in which I should like to fight.”
It was the Army that Petraeus had forged in Iraq.