In My Time (73 page)

The resistance to a surge that the president and I heard that day was in part a product of the chiefs’ mission as mandated by the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. That legislation essentially took the chiefs out of the war-fighting business and put them in charge of raising and sustaining our military forces. The chiefs don’t take our forces to war, and they aren’t in the chain of command. They nurture, prepare, train, and equip the force, but then it gets turned over to a combatant commander to fight and win wars. So, when you go into the Tank and talk to the chiefs, they have responsibilities that go beyond what’s happening on the ground in Baghdad. They are also focused on supporting and sustaining our overall military readiness. Surging forces in Iraq could make that more difficult.

Of course, if the president gives a mission to the chiefs, they will salute smartly and get it done. But they have an obligation to point out consequences, and the president needs to hear the arguments so that he understands the trade-offs.

The most articulate spokesman of the chiefs’ viewpoint that day in the Tank was General Pete Schoomaker. A graduate of the University of Wyoming, where he played football and joined ROTC, Pete was involved in Desert One, the failed attempt in 1980 to rescue American hostages in Iran. He then became part of the original special operations teams that were formed in response to that failure. I’d had a hand in recruiting him from retirement to become army chief of staff, and he had done a terrific job.

By the end of 2006, Schoomaker’s concern was that we were putting
huge stress on the force. On a daily basis he was dealing with long deployments, multiple deployments, and what that meant for soldiers and their families. He was facing recruiting and retention challenges, as well as a host of other problems that resulted from our ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, in these conflicts we’d deployed individual reservists and National Guard members to fill in where needed in Afghanistan and Iraq. This meant that when it was time to deploy these reserve and Guard units as a whole, key members had already been deployed and weren’t available. We no longer had the kind of reserve and Guard units we had anticipated having.

The pace of operations also took a toll on equipment. Humvees, for example, were normally driven about eight thousand miles a year in peacetime exercises. Some of them were now being driven forty thousand miles a year. Add to that the fact that the Humvee was never intended to be an armored vehicle. It was designed as a soft-sided, all-purpose vehicle for the military, but because of the IED threat in Iraq, we put special armor on many of them to protect the troops. A Humvee without armor weighs about 6,500 pounds, and that’s the amount of weight its transmission and suspension systems were designed for. When we up-armored them, as we had to do, we added another three to four thousand pounds. The wear and tear was significant, and that meant significant additional cost to repair and replace equipment.

When the chiefs argued that now was not the time to surge forces, I think that part of their objective was to get the notion across to the president that if he was going to order a surge in troops, he was going to have to make a significantly larger investment in our military. It was a point well taken, and in his next budget, the president included funding to increase the size of both the army and the Marine Corps.

One argument the chiefs made that didn’t go far was the notion that we ought not commit more forces to Iraq because we needed to maintain a reserve force to deploy in the event of an unforeseen contingency somewhere else in the world. The president wasn’t persuaded. He told them his priority was to win the war we were fighting, not hold back out of concern for some potential future war.

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THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD, Jack Keane brought important perspective to the matter of what our forces could bear and how far we could push the chiefs. He knew that they would be legitimately concerned about the stress on the force, but he also pointed out that in an all-out global War on Terror, you do what you have to do to win. If you’ve got to go to fifteen-month deployments or eighteen-month deployments or stop-loss orders for the entire force or doubling the size of the force, whatever you’ve got to do you do because the one thing you can’t afford is defeat. With thirty-seven years of service in the army and his experience as vice chief of staff, he was for me personally a real anchor and a source of wisdom. His advice carried a good deal of weight. His view that it was absolutely possible to do what needed to be done without breaking the force went a long way toward giving me and other policymakers a sense that a surge was doable.

THE PRESIDENT WANTED THE new secretary of defense, Bob Gates, to have a chance to visit Iraq and meet with Generals Casey and Abizaid before any public announcement of a new war strategy. After Gates returned from Iraq, the National Security Council gathered at the president’s ranch in Crawford on December 28, 2006. Bob explained that General Casey had agreed to a surge, but that he wanted no more than two brigades, with additional brigades in the pipeline for deployment if needed. This looked like the kind of compromise solution we had been trying to avoid, and the president decided against it.

By this time, he had also decided on new military leadership in Iraq. He was going to make General Casey army chief of staff and nominate General David Petraeus to replace him. I thought Petraeus was a superb choice, tough, bright, and competent. Jack Keane, who didn’t offer praise lightly, was one of his biggest fans. The two had been close since 1991, when they had been watching a training exercise at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and a high-velocity round had accidentally struck Petraeus in the chest. Keane stayed by him, helicoptering with Petraeus to the Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville, where a cardiothoracic
surgeon named Bill Frist—who would later become Senate majority leader—operated on him for nearly six hours.

Petraeus made it clear that he needed five brigades. So did the general whom the president was nominating to be second in command in Iraq, Ray Odierno, a brilliant, no-nonsense army three-star who would implement the new strategy. Petraeus and Odierno would be joined in Iraq by an extremely talented new ambassador, Ryan Crocker.

On January 10, 2007, the president announced in a speech to the nation that he was committing twenty thousand additional troops—five brigades—to Iraq, and most of them would go to Baghdad. He was also increasing American forces in Anbar, the home base of al Qaeda in Iraq, by four thousand. The brigades would deploy over time so that it would be summer before we reached full strength.

The president’s decision was particularly courageous against the drumbeat of criticism we were facing from outside the administration. On December 17, 2006, former secretary of state Colin Powell had said that America was “losing in Iraq” and a “surge cannot be sustained.” Days after the president’s speech, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel declared the surge “a waste of our troops and a waste of our treasure,” and Senator Barack Obama predicted that rather than solving sectarian violence, the surge would increase it.

Shortly after the additional troops began arriving in Iraq, critics declared that the surge had failed. Perhaps most memorably, in April 2007 Senator Harry Reid said, “This war is lost, and the surge is not accomplishing anything.” While even members of his own party thought Reid had gone too far in declaring America’s defeat, there was certainly hand-wringing on both sides of the aisle, especially among members worried about reelection and concerned that we weren’t seeing results quickly enough.

Inside the White House and the Pentagon, senior officials began to look for ways to placate the Congress and a hostile media. Although the president had just signed up for the surge, some of his advisors were already talking about bringing at least one brigade home by the end of the year. This was a political recommendation, totally divorced from
the situation on the ground, which according to Generals Petraeus and Odierno would require the surged brigades well into 2008.

On Tuesday morning, May 22, a David Ignatius column appeared in the
Washington Post
titled “After the Surge: The Administration Floats Ideas for a New Approach in Iraq.” It quoted administration officials on the need to revamp policy in order to attract bipartisan support and to take into account the fact that the surge might not have the stabilizing effect we had hoped. I was very concerned when I read the piece, and I raised it with the president in the Oval Office. “Whoever is leaking information like this to the press is doing a real disservice, Mr. President,” I said, “both to you and to our forces on the ground in Baghdad.” We shouldn’t be suggesting that our war policy was being tailored for political purposes, pieced together to include elements simply because they would attract Democratic support, I said. And we shouldn’t be cutting our commanders off at the knees, suggesting that their strategy would fail before the forces were even in place. “We have to correct this,” I said, “particularly with our generals in the field. They have to know they have the full backing of the president and his top officials and that we will not start pulling troops out before the mission is complete.”

A short time later Steve Hadley came into my office and closed the door. He told me that he was the source for Ignatius and that he’d talked to him at the instruction of the president. That gave me a moment’s pause, but then I thought it was just as well I hadn’t known. I might have been less forceful about making a case that deserved to be made forcefully. This wasn’t a time for mixed messages.

A little before 7:00 a.m. on Saturday, May 26, 2007, I boarded Air Force Two for the short flight to New York, where I was scheduled to deliver remarks at the U.S. Military Academy’s commencement ceremonies. The day’s papers were laid out on the table in my cabin, and as I scanned the front-page headlines, a story by David Sanger in the
New York Times
caught my attention. “White House Is Said to Debate ’08 Cut in Iraq Combat Forces by 50%,” it read. In language making clear that key people inside the administration were sources for the article, the story laid out an administration plan to begin withdrawing well before commanders on the ground thought was wise and to “greatly
scale back the mission that President Bush set for the American military when he ordered it in January to win back control of Baghdad and Anbar Province.” It was another major story suggesting that the surge in forces—which was still not complete—would not succeed. The story also indicated that the administration was trimming back because of “growing political pressure.”

A few hours later under a hazy blue sky I helped present diplomas to the impressive young cadets of the West Point Class of 2007. Their class motto was “Always Remember. Never Surrender.” I found myself wishing that we in Washington could speak so clearly.

On May 30, toward the end of our weekly secure videoconference with our team in Iraq, the president asked our new ambassador Ryan Crocker and General Petraeus whether they had anything they wanted to add before signing off. General Petraeus, to his great credit, raised the issue of the press reports suggesting that the administration thought the surge might fail and was looking for ways to bring troops home early. He said that he and General Odierno had been sitting out there in Baghdad reading these reports, looking at each other across the table, and wondering what was going on back in Washington.

In Baghdad with three of the generals who led us to victory in Iraq, Commander of U.S. forces, General David Petraeus, his deputy and successor, General Ray Odierno, and General Stan McChrystal, who commanded our special operations forces. (Official White Hosue Photo/David Bohrer)

Bringing up the news stories was a gutsy thing to do, and he did it in a way that was direct but totally nonconfrontational. Exactly right.

The president was getting some bad advice from those on the staff urging a political compromise for our Iraq strategy. I thought it would be helpful if he spent some time with Jack Keane. On Thursday, May 31, when I’d been scheduled to have my regular weekly lunch with the president, I suggested bringing Jack along, and I asked Steve Hadley to join us as well.

Jack traveled to Iraq frequently, and he and I had an informal arrangement that he’d stop by my office after he got back from a trip. I wanted to be sure he had the opportunity to pass along information he thought the president should have. Because of ongoing resistance inside the Pentagon and at Central Command to the surge strategy, I also wanted to ensure that General Petraeus’s thoughts and concerns made it all the way up the chain of command.

Jack was just back from his second trip to Iraq since General Petraeus
took over, and as we sat around the table in the president’s private dining room, Jack began by talking about how proud he was of the caliber of our forces. They were the most competent and capable military force in history, he said, and they believed deeply in what they were doing. And even though the president’s decision to surge forces meant longer deployments, more time away from home and families, and higher casualty rates initially, the sense of duty and commitment and pure competence among our forces in the field were just superb.