CHAPTER NINE
Al Faw Palace, Camp Victory
July 1, 2004
Okay, who’s my counterinsurgency expert?” asked General George Casey, sounding impatient. It was his first day in command and his first meeting with the staff he had inherited from General Sanchez, who had left Iraq for good that morning. A dozen Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine officers sent to Iraq from posts around the world stared at him, stumped by his question. Finally Air Force Major General Steve Sargeant spoke up. He had spent his career flying jets, an experience that was largely irrelevant to a fight against low-tech Iraqi guerrillas. “I guess that must be me, sir,” said the general, who was in charge of strategic plans at headquarters. The Air Force officer’s hesitant answer drove home to Casey how little progress the military had made during its first year in coming to grips with the kind of war it was fighting.
In the four years prior to his arrival in Iraq, Casey had held some of the most critical jobs in the U.S. military, overseeing U.S. Army forces in Kosovo in 2000 and serving on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He had managed to be well liked by Clinton administration officials and by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In many ways, Casey was the model Pentagon general: steady, apolitical, and hardworking. He didn’t make bold decisions or draw attention to himself. He was an efficient manager who knew how to make big bureaucracies run and how to anticipate problems.
He’d been only occasionally involved in the Iraq war before arriving in Baghdad. In the lead-up to the invasion, Rumsfeld’s insistence that the Iraqis would have to take charge of rebuilding their country had stifled most serious postwar reconstruction planning. From his position on the Joint Staff, Casey sensed that there was going to be a need for the U.S. military to oversee the rebuilding effort. Just three months before the invasion he assembled a small group of active and retired officers that was rushed to the Middle East to deal with electricity generation, clean water, and other expected postwar problems. The small pickup team consisted of only fifty-eight people and was better suited to a relatively peaceful mission than to the chaos in Iraq. But with Rumsfeld’s aversion to nation building, it was probably the best anyone could do.
After the 2003 invasion, Rumsfeld selected Casey to be the Army’s vice chief of staff, a job that came with a promotion to four stars. He sat through hundreds of hours of meetings focused on troop rotation schedules for Iraq, plans to start bringing soldiers home, and the hurried push to buy more armor for the thin-skinned Humvees that were being shredded by insurgents’ bombs. To Casey initially the occupation didn’t seem all that different from the 1990s peacekeeping operations. The two missions had much in common. But in the Balkans the military had pressed the Clinton administration to ensure that its aims in the war-torn country were limited. Its job was to enforce a peace agreement between warring parties. In Iraq the task was far tougher. The military was essentially being asked to rebuild a society and defeat a ruthless armed resistance.
It wasn’t until he arrived in Iraq that Casey started to understand the huge challenge he faced. Casey’s headquarters at Al Faw Palace were located on the western outskirts of Baghdad. On the morning he took command, his palace office was mostly empty except for a few pictures of his wife, sons, and grandchildren. Video screens, flags, and maps covered the walls. A chandelier dangled from the elaborately carved, pastel-colored woodwork on the ceiling.
Saddam Hussein had built the palace in 1992 as a present to himself following the 1991 Gulf War. When Baghdad fell a dozen years later, the U.S. military moved into the sprawling building and its surrounding grounds. The hulking stone structure sat in the middle of a weed-choked lake. The only approach to its heavy wooden doors was a two-lane bridge. In the first year of the war the Army had remade the complex into a version of the military bases it had left behind in the United States. To house the 50,000 soldiers who lived and worked at Victory, it bought thousands of small trailers, which the Army called “containerized housing units,” and arranged them in neat rows. Troops dined on leathery steaks and Baskin-Robbins sundaes in dining halls the size of airplane hangars, each decorated with sports memorabilia shipped from back home. They could shop in large post exchanges, stocked with luxuries such as flat-screen television sets, DVD players, and the latest video games.
Inside the palace, staff officers worked in modular cubicles in marble ballrooms and former bedroom suites. Fluorescent lights were nailed to the walls to augment the glow from crystal chandeliers. Outside the palace the smell of fuel and raw sewage hung in the air. Generators droned, tank and Humvee engines roared, and helicopters thumped. The massive base violated just about every rule of counterinsurgency strategy, which preaches the importance of small groups of soldiers living among the people and providing security. But the Army didn’t know much about counterinsurgency when it built Victory Base Complex in 2003. It built what it knew.
On his way into Iraq, Casey had been told by officers in Kuwait that if he wanted to understand the enemy he needed to seek out a colonel in the palace named Derek Harvey. Harvey was a forty-nine-year-old intelligence officer who spoke Arabic and had an advanced degree in Islamic political thought. For months he’d been interviewing prisoners, poring over interrogation transcripts, and meeting with Sunni tribal leaders. Almost no one seemed interested in his work when Sanchez was in charge, which the short-tempered Harvey considered astounding. A couple of days after Casey arrived in Baghdad, he invited Harvey to step outside on one of the balconies at his new palace headquarters. “Do you smoke?” Casey asked, holding up two cigars. Harvey nodded, and they walked out onto a stone balcony overlooking the palace’s man-made lakes.
Harvey gave his new commander a tutorial on the insurgency, interrupted only by the drone of helicopters and the lapping of greenish water against the palace walls. The insurgency was being led by former Saddam loyalists who were well organized and had access to lots of money and ammunition. Their forces were being augmented by foreign jihadists whose numbers were on the rise following the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and the failed Fallujah assault. To win, the United States had to kill former Saddamists. But it also had to co-opt more moderate Baathists and win over the Sunni tribal leaders whom Saddam had pacified with bribes.
They talked for almost three hours. Casey peppered him with questions about the Sunni-Shiite split and the relationships between the foreign fighters and the Sunni tribes. Before parting, Harvey told Casey that the war was very different from the peacekeeping missions that Casey had overseen in the 1990s. “We don’t understand the fight we’re in,” he warned his new boss.
The enormous mess he’d inherited didn’t fully hit Casey until he started to read some of the awards for valor given to soldiers and Marines who had fought in the spring battles in Sadr City, Fallujah, and Najaf. In the Pentagon he had pored over the classified accounts of the uprisings. But the dry reports didn’t capture how close some units, such as the soldiers from Chiarelli’s 1st Cav Division, had come to being overrun. Casey was a fifty-six-year-old general who had never been in combat, taking command of a foundering war effort. He knew he’d have to learn fast.
He had not planned on going to Iraq. Six months earlier, on Christmas Eve 2003, he and his thirty-one-year-old son, Ryan, had rushed out to do some last-minute Christmas shopping at the Pentagon City shopping mall, just across the river from the White House. Casey’s relentless work ethic had helped him vault ahead of other Pentagon generals. Like most Washington workaholics, he typically put off his Christmas shopping to the last possible minute. As he wandered through Ann Taylor, sorting through the racks of women’s sweaters, he spotted General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who waved him over. Myers mentioned a new idea to deal with the worsening situation in Iraq. Abizaid had cornered him on a recent trip to Iraq and suggested putting a four-star general in Baghdad to command the overall military effort. “We really need it. We just can’t be cheap here,” Abizaid insisted. The new four-star wouldn’t replace the overwhelmed Sanchez, who was a three-star. Instead he and his staff would focus on crafting a long-term counterinsurgency strategy and working with political leaders. Beneath him, Sanchez’s headquarters would handle the day-to-day military operations and troop movements.
Ryan stood just out of earshot as Casey talked to Myers, who was surrounded by the chairman’s plainclothes bodyguards. When they were finished Casey mentioned to his son that they were looking to send a new general to Iraq. “Are you interested?” Ryan asked him.
“I already have a job,” he replied wistfully. He’d just been sworn in as vice chief a few months earlier, but Ryan could tell that his father would much rather be leading troops than overseeing bureaucracies and waging budget wars. “That’s the difference between you and Wes Clark,” he said, referring to the hyperambitious former general who had been an early mentor to Casey and was now weighing a run for president. “Clark would say he wanted the job and push for it. You would just wait for someone to offer it to you.” They quickly dropped the conversation and went back to the sweater racks.
A couple of months later Casey was told to put together a short list of candidates for the Iraq job. On a warm spring evening he went over to Quarters One and handed the names to General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief. They sat on the veranda in rocking chairs, with the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial in view.
“Your name’s not on here,” Schoomaker said after a moment.
“I thought you wanted me to stay here,” Casey replied.
“This may be more important,” the chief said. “Could you do it?”
“Yeah, absolutely.”
Casey’s name went on the list. Rumsfeld initially wanted his military aide for the job. But with the Abu Ghraib scandal in all the newspapers, anyone who was that close to the defense secretary had little chance of Senate confirmation. Abizaid also had considered taking the job himself. When he learned that Casey was in the mix, he quickly latched on to him as the best choice.
Since their time together in Bosnia, Abizaid and Casey had remained close. They both commanded 15,000-soldier divisions in Germany in 2000. When Abizaid’s unit was deployed in Kosovo, Casey called him from the bleachers at Fenway Park. “Hey, John, guess what I’m doing right now?” he said, holding the phone up so Abizaid could hear the crowd noise. A few months later, when Casey’s troops were in Kosovo, Abizaid made sure to phone Casey from the stands of the brand-new ballpark in San Francisco, where he was watching his beloved Giants. In 2001 and 2003, when Abizaid twice left positions on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, Casey was selected as his replacement both times. Although Casey was a few years older than Abizaid, he looked to his friend almost as a mentor. Abizaid was smart and witty and had a reputation as a big strategic thinker. A part of Casey wanted to be seen by his Army peers in the same light.
Rumsfeld had dealt with Casey on the Joint Staff and liked him. Bush went along with the consensus, and Abizaid quickly called Casey with the good news.
When he arrived home at eight-thirty that evening, Sheila was on the third floor, unpacking boxes at their home at Fort McNair. Although he had been in the vice chief job for several months, the Caseys’ move into the stately, century-old residence that came with the job had been delayed by renovations to the house. “Honey, we need to talk,” he said, motioning her toward a chair. He hadn’t even told his wife that he was being considered for the position. Not sure how to break the news, he blurted it out: “I’m going to Iraq.” He might be leaving in only a few days. Sheila burst into tears. Why hadn’t he told her he was up for the job? she asked as they embraced. “It happened pretty quickly,” he explained.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this, George. It brings back memories of your dad,” she told him.
“I know.”
His father’s death was not something Casey talked much about, even with his wife. After the Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened on the National Mall, it had taken Casey some time before he felt ready to see it. When they found his father’s name, George had been overcome, unable to speak more than a few words until he and Sheila returned to the car. As they drove home, he told Sheila that visiting the wall had been the most emotionally wrenching moment of his life.
Several years later, when he was promoted to four-star general, Casey’s family gathered at Fort Myer, where he was living at the time, for his promotion ceremony. After the party, his brother and sisters all walked down to their father’s grave, retracing the steps they had taken on the day he was buried thirty-three years earlier. George and his mother held back. The next morning they made their own quiet pilgrimage to the grave site. They could only imagine how overjoyed the elder Casey would have been to see his son rise to four-star rank.
Now George was off to war. Sheila could have told him no and, despite how badly he wanted the job, he would have turned it down. He had walked away from Delta Force without bitterness, and he had always promised Sheila that anytime she wanted to leave the Army all she had to do was tell him and they would be out. But she didn’t. This was the life they had made for themselves, and she knew the assignment was one he had yearned for all these years. Soon they moved to the kitchen and talked for hours, not about whether he would go but about everything that needed to be done beforehand. One of the first things, she reminded him, was to telephone their two grown sons. Sheila didn’t want them hearing about it on the nightly news. And, she reminded him, he had to talk to his mom, knowing that telling her was the kind of difficult conversation her taciturn husband might avoid.
“Did you call your mom?” she asked the next day.
Yes, but there had been no answer, Casey replied, so he had left a vague message on her answering machine.
“George, you have to tell her it’s important or she’ll never call!” Sheila chided.
When his mother did finally telephone from her house in Massachusetts, it was Sheila who answered. George was out. “I might as well tell you,” she said. “George is going to Iraq.”
“Okay,” his mother replied, with no trace of emotion in her voice. She rushed down that weekend to see him off. Later Casey found out he wouldn’t be leaving until July. There was too much preparation to do, and the Senate wasn’t going to vote on his new assignment for several weeks.
Unexpected as it all was, Casey wasn’t daunted by the new assignment. He wasn’t an Arabist who had prepared his whole career for a job in the Middle East, but Abizaid was, and he would help. Casey had never been in combat, but he did have experience running big organizations and was confident that he could come up with a winning war strategy. He told himself he had more experience with the political and military problems of reconstructing war-ravaged countries than most Army officers. In Kosovo he’d even dealt with a tiny insurgent uprising in which some of the Kosovar Albanian rebels in the Presevo Valley region of the province launched a series of covert attacks on the Serbian police. He had dealt with it by sealing off the valley and negotiating with the local mullahs, who helped him secure the surrender of the head of the Albanian rebel group.
He hadn’t interviewed with either Rumsfeld or Bush before being chosen. No one asked him for his ideas about what needed to be done, and he hadn’t thought about it very much. Schoomaker had given him a book entitled Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam that had been written by a young officer from the Sosh department. It was the first book Casey had read on guerrilla war. His new assignment required Senate confirmation, but he was uncontroversial, the compromise choice everyone could support. Senator Hillary Clinton pronounced him boring. “Boring is good, General Casey, and I applaud you on that,” she told him. “Clearly, you’re a master at it. And it goes to the heart of your success.”
“I’m going to have to think about that for a minute,” he replied, drawing chuckles from the half-empty hearing room. The only nervous moment came when Casey was asked how long it would be until the 140,000 American troops were home. The Army was proceeding on the assumption that it could be in Iraq another three years, until early 2007, he said in an answer that he had prepared ahead of time, but he stressed that was only an estimate, not a prediction. There was no real way of knowing how much longer the war would last. It was a safe response, and the lawmakers moved on to other topics. That evening, the Senate voted unanimously to confirm him.
His sole meeting with Rumsfeld before leaving lasted just twenty minutes. The seventy-one-year-old defense secretary greeted Casey warmly and offered him a seat at the small round table in his third-floor Pentagon office. A military aide served coffee in white and gold Pentagon china. Although President Bush was still giving triumphal speeches about bringing democracy to the Muslim world, Rumsfeld made it clear he wasn’t particularly interested in remaking Iraq. Like the senators from the confirmation hearing, he wanted Casey to figure out a way to bring American troops home soon. Take a few weeks to assess the situation before reporting back, he told Casey. But there was one parting order he did want to pass along: to resist the temptation to do too much. Military officers thought they could fix everything, Rumsfeld warned, and the more the United States tried to do for the Iraqis, the less they would do for themselves and the longer U.S. forces would be stuck there.
“I understand, Mr. Secretary,” Casey replied. He told the story of his attempt to arrange the return of Muslim refugees to the villages of Dugi Dio and Jusici while serving in Bosnia, a six-week experiment that collapsed when weapons were found in the homes of the deputy mayor. The experience had taught him that can-do Americans can’t want peace more than the people they are trying to help. Rumsfeld seemed satisfied that they understood each other. Casey thought so, too, but he didn’t want to forget their conversation. He jotted the word attitude in the green notebook he carried. It was a small reminder not to disregard what he had learned in Bosnia—not to fall into the trap of thinking he could fix everything wrong with Iraq.
He departed from Andrews Air Force Base a few days later, without talking to Bush. Casey and Sheila had gone to the White House for a private dinner with the president and Laura Bush, but that had been a social occasion, with no real discussion of Iraq. Bush had told himself he would not micromanage his generals, the way Lyndon Johnson had done. Just as some parts of the Army had vowed never to refight Vietnam, so too had the president. But Bush took his own maxim to the extreme, leaving his commanders without any real instructions except for the advice they got from Rumsfeld. While the president was insisting that the United States was in a life-or-death struggle to change the Middle East, Rumsfeld was essentially telling his top commander that he shouldn’t try too hard.
Baghdad
August 2, 2004
When Casey sat down to compose a quick e-mail to Abizaid after his first month in command, much seemed possible. “There is a strategic opportunity for success,” he wrote in early August 2004. No one had given him a mission statement, so he and John Negroponte, the new ambassador, had composed one in Casey’s Pentagon office before they left. The goal was to leave behind an “Iraq built on the principles of representative government, respectful of the rights of its citizens and the rule of law, able to maintain order at home, defend its borders, and establish peaceful relations with its neighbors.” To get there Casey and Negroponte spent their first month sketching out a campaign plan that had been decided on quickly, without exploring a lot of alternatives. Classic counterinsurgency theory held that to defeat insurgents, military forces had to win the trust and support of the people. “I came at it a little differently,” Casey recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, it’s the people, but the way we’re going to get to the people is through a legitimate Iraqi government.’” And the key to producing a legitimate government, he assumed, was the national elections scheduled for January. The voting would channel the insurgents into politics; every effort should be made to ensure they happened on time, he insisted. The assumption that fair elections would blunt the insurgency was widely held among senior U.S. officials at the time. Unfortunately, it was completely wrong.
There was a bit of the Jesuit in Casey, probably the product of his Catholic education at Boston College High School and Georgetown. He enjoyed hashing out ideas and turning them over in his mind—or, even better, puzzling out his thoughts on paper. He’d set glasses on top of his head, pull out a red pen, and revise documents word by word for hours. “I can’t help myself,” he muttered when at the end of a long day one of his subordinates suggested that a general must have better things to do than editing a PowerPoint slide.
Rumsfeld’s parting instructions had been to take a few weeks to study the situation, but after only seven days in Iraq, he was in his first video session with the defense secretary, who directed him to begin a major assessment of the effort to rebuild the Iraqi police and army. Four days later they spoke by phone, followed by another videoconference and another phone call several days after that. In all, Casey participated in twenty-three phone conversations or video meetings with Rumsfeld during his first two months, an average of one every three days. Rumsfeld was a stickler for chain of command. When Casey was scheduled to update Bush, Rumsfeld required a prebrief so that he could approve any information that went to the president. Sometimes it seemed Casey’s staff was doing little more than churning out briefing slides for Washington.
After one videoconference, Casey’s senior aide, Colonel Jim Barclay, got a call from General Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “The secretary liked the briefing,” he said, referring to Rumsfeld. “But he wants Casey to stop saying um so much when he’s talking.”
“Sir, I can’t tell him that,” Barclay protested. “But hold on. He’s right here.”
He transferred the call into Casey’s Green Zone office, and Pace told Casey himself. After hanging up, Casey and Barclay shook their heads. Like everyone else who worked with Rumsfeld, Casey received periodic one- or two-sentence notes—known as “snowflakes”—on issues that caught the defense secretary’s attention. Sometimes Rumsfeld would wonder why it seemed to take so long to plan a raid and arrest a particular insurgent target. Casey rarely worried about individual raids and was puzzled how such picayune details were bubbling up to the secretary’s level. One of the first snowflakes asked that Casey start training Iraqis to replace the relatively small number of U.S. special operations troops acting as bodyguards for senior ministers, who were prime assassination targets. The lesson was unmistakable: no part of the U.S. effort was too small to escape Rumsfeld’s green-eyeshade mentality on troops.
Beneath Casey were two deputy commanders. One was Lieutenant General Tom Metz, who oversaw daily military operations. Shortly after Casey took command, he had identified sixteen key cities that U.S. troops had to clear of insurgents prior to the January elections. Metz’s job was to direct those battles, while Casey crafted the overall strategy and made sure the newly sovereign interim government didn’t interfere. The two men had been close friends since they were twenty-two-year-old lieutenants in Germany.
The other was Petraeus. Casey’s relationship with him was more complicated. The same week Casey arrived, Newsweek featured Petraeus on the cover in full battle gear underneath a headline that asked “Can This Man Save Iraq?” Only a couple of months after he had returned home from Mosul, Petraeus had been promoted and sent back to Iraq to oversee the training and equipping of the army and police. “General Petraeus … is the closest thing to an exit strategy the United States now has,” the Newsweek article enthused. Casey was annoyed, though not surprised. Rumsfeld was angry. During a stopover in Ireland shortly after the article appeared, his top aide stuffed the offending Newsweek behind other magazines in the airport gift shop so that the secretary wouldn’t see them again. Casey quickly got orders to shut down the Petraeus publicity machine. “From now on, I’m your PAO,” he told Petraeus, using the military acronym for public affairs officer.
For several months their relationship remained strained. Their leadership styles were completely different. Casey was cautious, often to the point of inaction. “Almost nothing has to be done right now,” he counseled subordinates. “When you are talking about a major policy initiative, it needs to be thoughtful and deliberate. Hasty decisions in this type of environment will generally be wrong.” In contrast, Petraeus believed that the United States had a narrow window of opportunity that was rapidly closing. It was better to take risks than do nothing.
Casey typically attended meetings with senior Iraqi officials alone or with one aide. Petraeus went everywhere with an entourage of smart young officers that included two Rhodes scholars and a Columbia University Ph.D. His energy, knowledge, and eagerness to fix Iraq shone through in just about every meeting. “Sir, if I could,” he’d often interject before launching into a discourse on the problem of the day. It was hard for the new Iraqi leaders to tell whether Casey or Petraeus was in charge.
At an early Iraqi national security council meeting, Petraeus grabbed a seat at the main table with Casey, the prime minister, the minister of defense, the interior minister, and other senior Iraqi officials. “We’re fine here at the head table,” Casey told him, directing him to a seat against the wall with the other second-tier staffers.
Despite the tension, Casey badly needed Petraeus to succeed. He wanted the troops Petraeus was cranking out to fight alongside U.S. units as they cleared insurgent strongholds prior to the elections, putting an Iraqi face on what were essentially American assaults. By January, Casey hoped, there would be enough police and army units to guard polling stations during the election and allow for cuts in U.S. forces in 2005.
In early August, Petraeus’s forces were tested for the first time since the April battles in Sadr City and Fallujah. A U.S. Marine patrol in Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad, unknowingly strayed too close to a house where Muqtada al-Sadr was hiding, provoking a lengthy firefight. After the battle, Sadr’s militia fighters quickly seized police stations and government buildings throughout the city. “I was looking for the opportunity for the new Iraqi government to have a success and demonstrate that it could function,” Casey recalled. This was it. He ordered two U.S. Army battalions and three of Petraeus’s new Iraqi battalions to help the Marines retake the city from Sadr’s forces.
The U.S. troops, backed by helicopters and fighter jets, did most of the heavy fighting in the labyrinthlike cemetery around the Imam Ali shrine. The Iraqis were asked to play a supporting role. Still Petraeus was nervous. The troops had walked patrols in Baghdad, but this was the first time that they were being pressed into battle against their Iraqi brethren. A day after they arrived, Petraeus began fielding frantic calls from the Iraqi units’ U.S. advisors, reporting that the troops were desperately short of ammunition and rifles. As night fell, he and his small command gathered up all the bullets, mortar rounds, and guns they could find in storage depots and heaved the weapons onto the back of Chinook cargo helicopters.
Seeking refuge from the U.S.-led assault, Sadr and his militia forces retreated inside the Imam Ali shrine, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam. Casey met with the new prime minister, Iyad Allawi, in a small garden outside his residence in the Green Zone. The CIA had sources inside the shrine who were updating them on Sadr’s location, and Allawi wanted the troops to attack the mosque and capture or kill Sadr.
General Metz, who had raced down to Najaf to monitor the fighting, warned that the Iraqis needed at least twenty-four hours to come up with a plan. The delay gave Sadr time to negotiate a cease-fire and escape. “It got played as a victory for Sadr much like that stuff does, but it was good,” Casey recalled. The Iraqi army forces hadn’t crumbled under fire as they had in April. He and Allawi also grew closer during the crisis. “Frankly I didn’t expect such a key success so early,” Casey wrote in a note to Abizaid after the fight. “Muqtada Sadr gave the interim government its first real test and he lost.” He was so hopeful that he suggested to Abizaid that he might be able to reduce the number of U.S. troops in early 2005, after the scheduled January 30 elections.
Not all of Casey’s subordinate commanders were as convinced that the United States was on the right track. On August 14, as the Najaf battle was drawing to a close, Casey convened a meeting with his top commanders at Al Faw Palace. Around the table were Metz, Petraeus, Chiarelli, and several other senior officers. The new U.S. ambassador John Negroponte was sitting next to Casey, his position meant to signal that the civilian and military efforts were finally united. Casey started by laying out his plan for the next six months. “We have two priority efforts—training Iraqi security forces and the elections,” he told his commanders.
Marine Lieutenant General James Conway, who was responsible for Fallujah and surrounding Anbar Province, complained that Sunni tribes in his province had been given no voice in the new government and saw it as illegitimate. Allawi’s ministers, meanwhile, ignored the area. “The silence is deafening,” he complained.
Chiarelli was upset as well. Less than two weeks earlier he’d turned out 18,000 people to work in Sadr City laying sewer pipe, wiring houses for electricity, and picking up trash. He saw the turnout as a major victory that he hoped would spur more funding for similar projects throughout Baghdad and the rest of the country. Casey and Negroponte, however, were moving in a different direction. As part of their strategy they shifted $2 billion out of the reconstruction projects that Chiarelli was championing to pay for more equipment for Iraqi army and police forces.
As he headed into the palace meeting Negroponte knew he was going to get an earful on the subject from Chiarelli. Although he’d been in Iraq only six weeks, the ambassador had already grown tired of hearing about Chiarelli’s bold plans to fix the embassy-led reconstruction effort by cutting out U.S. contractors and focusing on smaller projects and jobs for Iraqis. “I am not going to listen to Chiarelli … bitch about the State Department,” he told Casey. Negroponte didn’t have a choice, though. Chiarelli was incensed and let it show more than usual. He didn’t deny the need for more army and police forces, but he didn’t think the money to pay for them should come out of the reconstruction effort, which was already wasting too much money on big-ticket ventures that offered little immediate payoff in Baghdad’s neighborhoods. He wondered in conversations with diplomats in the Green Zone whether the United States was pursuing a “bankrupt strategy” by ignoring the crumbling infrastructure and its crippling unemployment. These were driving the insurgency, he insisted.
Chiarelli never got a chance to prove his approach could work. The flare-up in Najaf triggered a new eruption of violence in Sadr City, and his soldiers spent much of the next ten weeks fighting over the same ground they had fought for in April. In the earlier battle Sadr’s militia had fought with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Now they were using more-deadly roadside bombs. It seemed as if the cleric could turn up the violence at will. Once calm was restored, Chiarelli restarted his reconstruction program for two months before turning Baghdad over to a new division with different priorities. He returned to the United States convinced that he had been on the right track and penned a long article in Military Review, an Army journal, laying out his theories. “Will Sadr or his lieutenants attack again? Probably. But support for the attacks will not last if infrastructure improvements continue,” he wrote. His article also took a swipe at Casey and Negroponte’s strategy, which made training a higher priority than reconstruction. “If there is nothing else done other than kill bad guys and train others to kill bad guys, the only thing accomplished is moving more people from the fence to the insurgent category,” he wrote.
Chiarelli’s loss in the summer of 2004 had been Petraeus’s gain. Most of the $2 billion taken out of the reconstruction budget went directly to his new command overseeing Iraqi army and police development. He felt good, and it wasn’t just because of the money. In Najaf his Iraqi units had held together, which was an improvement over the disasters that preceded his arrival. In late September Petraeus put down his thoughts in an op-ed in the Washington Post. His article began with a series of caveats. Training and equipping a quarter million Iraqis was a “daunting task.” Insurgent violence made it even harder. “Nonetheless, there are reasons for optimism,” he wrote. “Today approximately 164,000 Iraqi police and soldiers … are performing a wide variety of security missions. Equipment is being delivered. Training is on track and increasing in capacity. Infrastructure is being repaired.”
Soon after the op-ed appeared, Petraeus’s forces suffered a series of humiliating setbacks. In early October the newly formed 7th Iraqi Battalion was rushed to Samarra, a Sunni insurgent haven north of Baghdad, on seventy-two hours’ notice to fight in an American-led operation to take control of the city. On the way there, it was hit by a car bomb that killed one Iraqi soldier and wounded seven. As the injured were being treated, the commander and several of his aides quit, triggering an exodus of hundreds of rank-and-file troops from the 800-man unit. “They just walked out the gate and didn’t come back,” said Major Robert Dixon, an American advisor attached to the unit. Other disasters followed. In late October, Petraeus flew his Black Hawk to the Kirkush Military Training Base on the Iranian border to oversee the graduation ceremony for the 17th Iraqi Battalion. A band played as the new troops in their crisp tan-and-black uniforms marched past a reviewing stand. Petraeus gave a short speech. Immediately following the parade the troops were loaded onto buses, trucks, and minivans for two weeks of vacation. Petraeus hopped on his helicopter bound for the Green Zone. The helicopter flew fast and low over the dreary parched landscape, rising and falling to avoid electrical power lines that crisscrossed the desert. Hot autumn air whipped at his face. He felt good; he had produced yet another battalion.
A few hours later, his executive officer rushed into his Green Zone office. Three of the minivans carrying forty-nine of the new recruits had been stopped at a fake checkpoint. The soldiers were ordered out of the vans, forced to lie facedown in the sand, and executed with a bullet to the back of the head. “It was just a horrible experience,” Petraeus recalled. “We felt like they were our guys. These weren’t just some Iraqis. These were our troopers. I’d seen them graduate. I’d been out there.” A few days later he got another grim report from Mosul: dozens of soldiers, also going home on leave, were found headless on the side of the road. Many of the officers on Petraeus’s staff blamed themselves for the deaths. They should have realized that troops, who were required to turn in their rifles before they went home on leave, were easy targets.
Assassinations weren’t Petraeus’s only problem. He depended on unarmed civilian contractors to ferry new AK-47s, body armor, and helmets to Iraqi bases. Soon insurgents were targeting them, too. “It was just a battle. Everything was a flat-out fight. Every single logistical convoy and delivery of equipment,” he recalled. When he commanded the 101st in Mosul, Petraeus had a massive staff made up of topflight officers. His new training command was an undermanned pickup team that had been thrown together without vital equipment such as armored Humvees or sufficient radios.
In November, as U.S. soldiers and Marines gathered on the outskirts of Fallujah, Petraeus’s units were once again thrust into the fight. In the months since the Marines’ aborted April assault, Fallujah had become a car bomb factory under the control of radical fighters. Casey was determined to seize it from the insurgents prior to the January elections and believed that Petraeus’s troops had to play a role in the attack to blunt the inevitable claim in the Middle East that U.S. troops and warplanes were destroying a Muslim city.
As the Iraqi units prepared to move to Fallujah, hundreds of terrified soldiers deserted. Major Matt Jones, who worked as an advisor, recalled that 200 soldiers in his Iraqi battalion quit before they even left their base. One of the deserters was the battalion commander. “He stole his pistol and his staff car—a Chevy Lumina—and an AK-47. We never saw him again. That wasn’t exactly a good day for morale,” Jones said.
Many of the units that made it to Fallujah were nowhere near ready to fight. General Conway, the Marine officer leading the attack, was dumbfounded when he saw the Iraqi troops, and immediately called Petraeus. “Why did you send me all these guys without any boots and kit?”
“What are you talking about?” Petraeus replied. “We issued all that stuff to them.”
“Well, you may have. But they don’t have it. What you got is a bunch of guys running around in flip-flops and running shoes.”
Petraeus raced out to Fallujah with one of his Iraqi generals to try to figure out what had happened. The Iraqi soldiers he found looked miserable, hungry, and cold. “Didn’t we issue you this stuff?” he demanded. “Where is it?” When they’d gone home on leave they gave the equipment to their younger brothers and sisters, the Iraqis explained. “Our families needed the blankets,” one of the recruits told him.
Back in Baghdad, Petraeus comforted himself by reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence’s account of the Arab revolt during World War I. Lawrence had dealt with many of the same problems—poor leadership, desertions, and shortages of equipment. He found himself drawn to one scene in which Lawrence emerges from his tent to find that his Arab allies, whom he had been fighting with for months, are gone. They’d gone to visit their families, leaving him alone in the desert. “That just resonated with me,” Petraeus recalled.
The Iraqis’ failures were frustrating to Casey, who felt that Petraeus’s briefings to Bush and Rumsfeld in the summer and early fall had overstated the progress that he was making. “Look, you have got to be very careful when you are talking to civilian leaders,” he snapped after one video teleconference with the president, who had dialed in from his Crawford, Texas, ranch. “Don’t be so optimistic.” Frustrated with the setbacks, Rumsfeld began demanding more-frequent updates. Casey and his staff, in turn, began demanding more and more data as well. Petraeus never complained, but his staff bristled at the second-guessing.
In June Abizaid had assured Petraeus that he would get whatever he needed for the new training command. Yet it had taken months to get him the U.S. staff he’d been promised. His initial staffing request sat for almost two months in Baghdad before it was forwarded to the Pentagon. It took another two months to find the soldiers to fill it. In October the Army began sending over soldiers from the 98th Division, a reserve unit based in upstate New York. Petraeus placed some of the new arrivals in his headquarters and made the others combat advisors. The critically needed advisors were supposed to toughen up the Iraqi formations.
The reservists, however, were ill prepared to lead foreign forces in combat. Most were drill sergeants who spent two weeks each summer on active duty, putting American teenagers through basic training. Many of these part-time soldiers had joined the 98th because they thought the unit would never deploy overseas. Now they were being asked to fight alongside inexperienced Iraqi units and live on Spartan bases—a mission typically handled by elite Special Forces teams.
Petraeus’s staff knew they had a problem when the soldiers started unpacking shipping crates filled with their broad-brimmed drill sergeant hats, easel boards, flip charts, and urinal disinfectant cakes. They had assumed they were going to run basic training, teaching Iraqis how to shoot, march, and care for their equipment—not be pressed into battle with them. In late 2004, Brigadier General James Schwitters, Petraeus’s deputy in charge of the Iraqi army training effort, told Petraeus that only about a third of them were effective in their jobs. Most of the advisors didn’t even know how to operate an AK-47, the rifle of choice for the Iraqi military. Schwitters was one of the Army’s most experienced, unflappable professionals. He had commanded Delta Force, where his troops gave him the radio call sign “Flatliner,” a reference to a dead person’s electrocardiogram reading. Nothing seemed to unhinge him. His assessment of the American soldiers advising the Iraqi army battalions was blunt but accurate.
Outwardly and with Casey, Petraeus adopted a can-do attitude. He was going to figure out how to make it work with the soldiers that he had been given. He and Schwitters created a training academy north of Baghdad to teach the advisors the basics of fighting with foreign troops. Both men knew, though, that the solution was far from ideal, and not the proper way to conduct a mission that Bush and Rumsfeld were saying was the most important in Iraq. In truth, the Pentagon and Casey had no idea how difficult it was to rebuild a military in a country that was being torn apart by an insurgency. In the Balkans, where there was no fighting, the United States had handed the mission of training army and police forces off to private contractors, its NATO allies, or the relatively small Special Forces. The most relevant lessons when it came to rebuilding a foreign military were from Vietnam, but that war had been long forgotten.
Petraeus’s other big worry was Mosul. He had poured his heart into stabilizing the city, and still referred to himself as a Moslawi, or citizen of Mosul. “I go back and it’s like the return of the prodigal son,” he told a Newsweek reporter in June 2004. “There’s even a street in Mosul named for the 101st Airborne, and you know it’s authentic because there are two misspellings in [the street sign].” In the fall of 2004 his project was coming apart. Petraeus had turned over the city in early 2004 to Brigadier General Carter Ham, who led a force about one-third the size of the 101st. Ham also received far less reconstruction money than Petraeus. “I wasn’t as aggressive as I needed to be in asking for money,” Ham would say years later. His other handicap was that he wasn’t Petraeus. “Petraeus has this big room-filling personality,” he recalled. “That just isn’t me.” After Petraeus had departed, the political deals that he had brokered began to unravel. He had urged Ham to make sure that the provincial governor, Ghanim al-Basso, a Sunni Arab, stayed in his job. “From day one the message from the council was that Governor Basso had to go,” Ham recalled. Basso was fired a few days after Petraeus left. The next governor, who was appointed by the council, was assassinated in June 2004 after only a few months in office.
In late August 2004 Petraeus visited northern Iraq, ostensibly to inspect a new regional police training center. His real goal was to check on Mosul, and he arranged to spend two days there, visiting Ham and his former Iraqi cohorts. A few weeks earlier, a female law professor whom Petraeus helped place on the Mosul city council had been found tortured and killed in her home. Attacks were on the rise, and the police chief and new provincial governor were feuding. Petraeus visited a police station in downtown Mosul and gave a pep talk. Afterward, Mohammad Barhawi, the Mosul police chief, warned him that foreign jihadists were infiltrating the city and that he was having trouble with the governor, who was trying to drive him from his job.
Before he left, Petraeus stopped by the governor’s office. “I lost fifty-three soldiers in Mosul and it pains me enormously to see you two bickering,” he told him. “This is a time when all Moslawis have to pull together.” As night fell he headed to his helicopter, which was waiting for him with its rotors spinning. Petraeus turned to his assistant, Sadi Othman, a skillful translator who had stayed with Petraeus for years. “You can’t go home again,” he said ruefully.
Three months later, insurgents attacked Mosul’s police stations. Petraeus was in his Baghdad office when Barhawi called in the midst of the battle, begging for help. The Iraqi’s voice, normally strong and deep, trembled with fear. There was little Petraeus could do but try to stiffen Barhawi to fight back. “You’ve got to hang in there,” he told him. “This is your opportunity to show what you’re made of.” Petraeus had equipped Mosul’s SWAT team with new vehicles, body armor, and heavy machine guns. It had far more firepower than the insurgents could ever muster. “Just get out there with your machine guns and your SWAT team and you can fight these guys off,” he said, trying to sound as calm as possible.
Ham suspected that Barhawi had been cooperating with the insurgency for months and might have been involved in the assassination of the Mosul governor. Petraeus was more sympathetic; he believed that Barhawi, a former general in Saddam’s elite Republican Guard, was a good man who was under intense pressure from the enemy to surrender or switch sides. “We knew he was a former special operations guy and all this stuff, but in the early days when Mosul had nothing he stood up and was ready to lead,” he recalled. Since Barhawi had become chief, insurgents had kidnapped his sister, blown up his house, and shot him in the calf. Even after he had been wounded in the fall of 2003, he continued to run the Mosul police force from his hospital bed. But as Petraeus hung up the phone, he could tell that his friend had nothing left. Barhawi fled to Kurdistan with a sack full of cash. The police, whom Petraeus had touted as a model, collapsed as insurgents took over nearly all of the city’s two dozen stations.
In the weeks after the Mosul uprising Petraeus looked tired and dispirited. He was working sixteen to eighteen hours a day and guzzling coffee to stay awake. He believed that a commander should never express doubt in front of his troops. “You might put your head down privately somewhere, but then when the door opens you’ve got to show determination and total commitment. You’ve got to be unyielding,” Petraeus often said. But his slumped shoulders and bloodshot eyes betrayed him. For the first time in his accomplished career he was failing.
Baghdad
November 14, 2004
Abizaid knew things weren’t going well and that relations between Casey and Petraeus had been strained. He wanted to try to fix things and thought he could, if the three of them could talk it out. They were three of the most experienced generals in the Army, solid professionals and dedicated soldiers. He knew the Middle East and what it took to bring stability to its fractured societies. Petraeus had probably thought and studied more about counterinsurgency than anyone. Casey knew the Army and its capabilities like few other officers. If the three of them could think through the problems, they might be able to devise a new way forward. They met around the mahogany conference table in Casey’s Al Faw Palace office. “Between the three of us we need to figure this out in a nonaccusatory manner,” Abizaid said. “We are missing something philosophically. This is the only war we have got. We have to win it.”
It was a meeting that could easily have happened in Saigon in 1968, the last time the United States found itself in a war against a vicious insurgency with no victory in sight. A few days earlier the Marines had taken Fallujah, flattening the Sunnis’ stronghold in a block-by-block operation. The huge attack had destroyed the insurgency’s primary safe haven and knocked the enemy off balance. But Abizaid took little encouragement from the victory. A year and a half after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqis were still unwilling or unable to fight for their own country. Ninety-five U.S. troops had been killed and 560 wounded in the battle. By contrast, only eleven Iraqi soldiers died in the fighting and just forty-three were wounded, he said.
“The feeling in D.C. is, ‘What the fuck are the Iraqis doing?’” Abizaid said.
In a weird paradox, the more American troops fought to stabilize the country, the more resentment they generated among ordinary Iraqis, frustrated at the presence of U.S. troops in their neighborhoods. They had to do something to change the dynamic, Abizaid said. There was only one real course: they had to figure out a way to get Iraqi troops to take more responsibility for maintaining order. Abizaid was quick to reassure Petraeus that the Iraqis’ failures weren’t his fault. Many of the men sent to act as advisors didn’t have the experience or skills to train soldiers for combat. “Dave, I think we have missed the mark,” Abizaid conceded. “We didn’t give you the best and the brightest. We put the third team out on the field.” The key to fixing the Iraqi forces was using the best and most experienced U.S. troops as combat advisors, he argued.
As Abizaid searched for a historical parallel his mind drifted back to what he recalled from studying Vietnam. It was hardly an inspiring example, given the South Vietnamese army’s collapse in 1975, but it was the last time the Army had tried to rebuild a military on anything like the scale it was doing in Iraq. In the early 1960s the Pentagon had created a special command to select, train, and oversee U.S. officers advising South Vietnamese units. Maybe it was time to build a similar advisory command in Iraq, Abizaid said. He suggested filling the advisory jobs with lieutenant colonels from the Army War College. These were officers who had promising careers ahead of them and in most cases had already done a tour in Iraq or Afghanistan. “That could be what we want,” Casey agreed. They’d need to clear it with the Pentagon first.
Abizaid also was worried that the United States wasn’t finding tough Iraqi leaders who were willing to stand up to the insurgents. “In the Middle East there is usually one guy who holds a unit together,” he told Petraeus. He wanted to step up efforts to lure Sunnis and even some of Saddam’s former military commanders back into the army. “I don’t sense that we have a Sunni outreach program that isn’t AC-130-based,” he said, referring to the heavily armed ground attack planes that had killed hundreds of insurgents in Fallujah. Petraeus said that they were trying but were running into resistance from the predominantly Shiite interim government, which feared a Sunni coup. “They are afraid of Sunni leaders,” he said. The meeting ended with more questions than answers. Everyone was coming to the conclusion that the insurgency would continue for several more years and that the Iraqi security forces would not be able to handle the fight anytime soon. “It’s tough to make a nation of sheep move forward,” said Abizaid. “But that is our deal; that is our challenge.”
More immediate problems intervened, as they always did. Every six months Casey got an assessment of military operations in Iraq. He usually asked one of the British generals to write it, believing that a foreign officer would be more willing to give him the honest assessment he needed. The December 2004 review was brutal. There was more and more hard evidence that the strategy wasn’t working, at least not on the ambitious timetable that he had laid out in August. U.S. military operations over the previous six months had eliminated insurgent safe havens in a dozen cities. The Shiite uprising in Sadr City had finally been beaten down by Chiarelli’s men. Despite those military successes, conditions were worsening. Since October, more than 300 Iraqi government officials had been assassinated as part of a campaign aimed at hollowing out the ministries. Polling data showed that 40 percent of the Sunnis in Baghdad supported the armed opposition, more than supported the current interim government. If the Sunnis didn’t turn out to vote in January, there was very little chance that the elections would produce a representative government that could win over insurgent sympathizers, the six-month assessment warned.
It wasn’t only Casey’s staff that had doubts. The CIA station in Baghdad was issuing dire warnings that the country was too unstable for elections. Even Ambassador Negroponte wondered if it wouldn’t be prudent to postpone. “I think it may be too risky,” he suggested one evening over dinner in Casey’s residence, a small villa across the lake from Al Faw. Casey insisted that they had to go forward and asked Negroponte to sleep on it. The next morning Negroponte dropped his objections. In an effort to ease worries, Casey temporarily boosted the number of troops in the country to 150,000, the highest number since the invasion.
At 7:30 a.m. on Saturday, December 12, 2004, Casey strode into the small auditorium for his morning briefing. Behind him about thirty staffers sat in five tiers of stadium-style seating. Each morning all his major subordinate commands updated Casey on the last twenty-four hours, their presentations projected on three large flat-panel screens at the front of the room. That morning Casey received the normal update on the security situation in major cities and towns, each of which was assigned a color grade—red, orange, yellow, or green—depending on the insurgency’s strength. Casey noticed that Fallujah was rated orange, which meant that the insurgent threat there was still significant. It had been nearly a month since a Marine-led force had essentially destroyed the city in ten days of brutal house-to-house fighting. Although a few holdout insurgents still took occasional potshots, the city was essentially devoid of life, insurgent or otherwise. Casey asked his staff to reassess Fallujah to determine if it still belonged in the orange category. The next day the staff upgraded it to yellow.
Did anyone have a problem with revising the assessment? Casey asked. No one in the room protested. But Major Grant Doty, a slim, bespectacled strategist who was watching the briefing by live video from his desk elsewhere in the palace, was frustrated. “This is the most fucked-up thing in the world,” he thought. The staff had changed the color rating on Fallujah just to make Casey happy. He started typing an e-mail to the general, noting that he was “shocked and disappointed” by the change in the city’s status. “I think this is a mistake and was in response to the false perception that this is what you wanted, and they were going to give it to you,” he continued. It really didn’t matter whether Fallujah was rated yellow or orange, Doty thought. But changing it because the commander suggested doing so indicated a much larger problem. It all smacked of Vietnam, when officers inflated body counts so that headquarters could feel good about how the war was going.
Casey didn’t reply directly to the e-mail, but Doty noticed that in the weeks afterward he began getting invited to more meetings with the boss. When Casey would make day trips to units around the country, he started bringing along Doty, too. Doty wasn’t sure if his contrarian e-mail was the reason for his new access, but he thought it might be. Unlike many senior generals, Casey was open to second-guessing from his staff, even if he didn’t always act on it.
It wasn’t the first time Doty had approached Casey with advice. A few weeks earlier he’d sent Casey an e-mail critiquing the boss’s performance during a CNN interview. Casey needed to drive home an overall theme or message in his interviews with the national media, Doty had told him. A printout of the e-mail had come back with the words “exactly on!” written in Casey’s cursive scrawl at the top.
Doty, a former instructor in West Point’s Social Sciences Department with a master’s degree from Yale University, had arrived in August and was assigned to Casey’s “initiatives group,” a small team that was supposed to come up with unconventional ideas for the commander. In twenty years in the Army, Doty had frequently felt like an outsider. He thought the war had been a mistake, but he had vowed to himself that he would do what he could to help. He resolved to make himself a bit of a pest, someone who questioned assumptions and fought bureaucratic tendencies.
Since Casey had arrived, the American officers in the palace had been telling themselves that they were figuring out how to win. They had constructed a strategy, dubbed it counterinsurgency, and thought they were on their way to victory. But Doty wasn’t convinced. The United States was in a brutal fight, unlike anything it had trained for, and yet people on the staff weren’t questioning and debating. The incident in the morning briefing with Fallujah proved it. He wanted Casey to be flexible and improvisational and to foster the same spirit in his officers. He advised Casey to go to the briefing early one day and ask people what they were reading. If it didn’t have something to do with Iraq or Arab culture, Casey should tell them to read something that did. He suggested building a library and stocking it with classic accounts of past counterinsurgency wars. He could start with David Galula’s dissection of the French army’s war in Algeria against Arab guerrillas or Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy, which chronicled the debacle in Vietnam. Casey heard him out, but Doty left unsure what would come of his efforts. Casey was hard to decipher, and Doty hadn’t said everything he really thought—that the United States was settling into a delusion that it was winning.
Casey woke on January 30, the day of the elections, a little after 3:00 A.M. He wanted to take a quick aerial tour of Baghdad and get to the Green Zone before the polls opened at 7:00 a.m. His helicopter lifted off in darkness from Al Faw Palace and made a few lazy loops over west Baghdad. It was a cold, wet morning, typical of January. He and Prime Minister Allawi had banned all vehicle traffic in Iraq’s major cities in an effort to prevent car bombs and limit the enemy’s movement. To keep the insurgents off balance, they had made the announcement one day prior to the balloting. Working furiously in the weeks before the election, U.S. special operations units also had captured some key insurgent leaders tied to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s terrorist movement. But there was no way of telling whether it would be enough.
As the sun rose over Baghdad, Casey took in the city with his aide, his executive officer, and Doty. From the air the Iraqi capital looked almost deserted—no cars, no trucks, and, unusual even for that hour, almost no people on the streets. He had spent the previous seven months preparing for this moment. Now there was nothing left for him to do. “Is anyone going to show?” he wondered.
His helicopter touched down in the Green Zone around six-thirty, and Casey moved briskly to his office and turned on the BBC’s televised coverage. Around seven Ghazi al-Yawer, Iraq’s portly president, strode into a polling place in his crisp white dishdasha and with a flourish dropped his ballot into a box. Casey waited anxiously for the next two hours. Small numbers of people were turning out to vote, and he worried the election would be the disaster that the CIA was predicting. At 10:00 a.m. his division commanders, who were scattered around the country, updated him via video teleconference. Most were reporting a light turnout. The best news came from Baghdad, where Chiarelli reported that hundreds of people were walking to polling sites from Abu Ghraib, a Sunni enclave just west of the capital. A few minutes later, Chiarelli excitedly interrupted the briefing. “It’s not hundreds of people coming in from Abu Ghraib, it’s thousands of people,” he said. A cheer of joy, mixed with relief, went up from the dozens of people in the briefing room with Casey.
The U.S. command reported a record number of attacks on the day of the elections, but the vast majority of them were minor or ineffective. U.S. forces stayed largely out of sight, leaving security duties around the polling stations in Baghdad and other big cities to Iraqi army and police units. By late afternoon cable news outlets were beaming back to the United States pictures of long lines of ecstatic Iraqis holding up their purple-stained fingers to prove that they had cast votes in the country’s first free election in more than three decades. Later that afternoon Casey took off in his helicopter for a two-hour tour of Baghdad and the neighboring cities. Throngs of people filled Baghdad’s streets. Many of them were lined up outside polling sites, playing soccer, or celebrating. Casey asked his pilots to fly out to Fallujah. There the scene was different. The streets were mostly empty. In all of Anbar Province, the heart of the Sunni insurgency, only about 2,000 people voted.
Around 6:00 p.m. Casey was preparing to meet with his staff when Rumsfeld called. “George, when the eyes of the world were on you, you stood and delivered,” the defense secretary told him. “Thank you, Mr. Secretary,” Casey replied. “I’ll pass that on to everybody.” Petraeus telephoned Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who had been one of the leading advocates for the invasion. More than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen had turned out to help guard polling places, he said. For the first time since the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi tanks were out on the capital city’s streets. Given the past month’s failures, this was great news. Wolfowitz asked Petraeus to send photos of soldiers and tanks. He wanted to show the American people that the Iraqis were finally taking responsibility for their own country.
As the day drew to a close Casey stood and addressed his staff. “What a historic day,” he said as the applause welled up from his men. He then returned to his quarters and called Sheila, who was crying tears of joy and relief for him. When he hung up, Casey and his aide, Major Tony Hale, walked out onto the patio behind his quarters at Camp Victory and smoked cigars. Hale brought out a bottle of grappa, an Italian brandy, and they toasted their success. “From then on, I thought, ‘This will work,’” Casey recalled years later.
The next morning Casey spoke with Abizaid by phone. The two friends chatted amiably while Casey’s staff listened: “Yeah, John, I know. Great outcome, great outcome,” Casey said. In the Pentagon’s daily summary of U.S. press clippings there wasn’t a single negative article, he noted. Doty, sitting on the black leather couch in Casey’s small Green Zone office, couldn’t resist puncturing the euphoria a bit. Turning to Casey, he recalled the end of the movie Patton. World War II is over. Patton, played by the actor George C. Scott, walks his dog. He is only a few months from his death. In the background, Scott’s deep, rough voice recalls that when victorious Roman generals returned from war they were honored with a parade. The conquering general would ride in a triumphal chariot. Just behind him stood a slave who would whisper in his ear, “All glory is fleeting. All glory is fleeting.”
“Maybe I should be the slave at the end of Patton whispering, ‘All glory is fleeting,’” Doty said.
Casey shot Doty an annoyed look. He knew the elections weren’t going to solve all of Iraq’s problems. Only the Shiites and Kurds had really turned out to vote. Most Sunnis, who made up the bulk of the insurgency, had boycotted the elections and would almost certainly continue to fight. But after seven exhausting, frustrating months, he needed a moment to savor his victory.