Known and Unknown (80 page)

 

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ever much of a handwringer, I don't spend a lot of time in recriminations, looking back or second-guessing decisions made in real time with imperfect information by myself or others. In my press conferences I did not always conceal my lack of regard for hindsight “wisdom.” While in office, I resisted answering the frequently asked, breezy, politically loaded questions, along the lines of “What do you regret most?” or “What do you wish you had done differently?” or “Was this or that a mistake?”

A secretary of defense has to be careful about what he says in public. His comments can affect troop morale or limit the president's options in the future. Nonetheless, officials need to periodically reexamine their own views and judgments. Human beings are fallible, and the information policy makers use to make their judgments is always incomplete, imperfect, and ever changing. The assumptions that underlie strategy can become stale or even proved wrong to begin with. It sometimes requires exquisite balancing skills to be properly skeptical and yet open to criticism in internal deliberations, while not suggesting to allies or enemies abroad that one is adrift or lacking confidence in a policy.

The senior Department advisers were accustomed to receiving skeptical “big think” snowflakes from me. I did this periodically—for the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, the global defense posture realignment, major alliance management issues, transformation, and other significant activities. When one of these internal memos urging a reassessment of our strategy in the war on terror was leaked to the press, however, it made headlines. The front page of the October 22, 2003,
USA Today
read “DEFENSE MEMO: A GRIM OUTLOOK—RUMSFELD SPELLS OUT DOUBTS ON IRAQ, TERROR. ” “Despite upbeat statements by the Bush administration, the memo to Rumsfeld's top staffreveals significant doubts about progress in the struggle against terrorists,” the paper reported, adding: “The memo, which diverges sharply from Rumsfeld's mostly positive public comments, offers one of the most candid and sobering assessments to date of how top administration officials view the 2-year-old war on terrorism.”
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Even though I had limited the addressees to Myers, Pace, Wolfowitz, and Feith, the memo had leaked when it was more broadly distributed to their staffs.

In my meetings with the combatant commanders I had solicited their thoughts on where the United States was doing well and where we needed to do better. This memo was my way of prodding top Pentagon officials to think about the war on terror comprehensively, not one slice at time. The memo centered on three key questions: First, how do we know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror? Second, is the U.S. government organized properly to prosecute the war? And third, how can the United States do better in countering the enemy ideologically—that is, not just in capturing or killing terrorists, but in preventing young people from becoming our murderous enemies in the first place?

I questioned whether the Defense Department, and the U.S. government in general, were changing fast enough to do what was necessary to win. I assessed the “mixed results” of our efforts against al-Qaida. Many terrorists remained at large. I pointed out that we had done a good job in reorienting the Defense Department to take the offensive in the war with islamist extremists, but I wondered: “Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental?” My memo continued:

This document, which became known as the “Long, Hard Slog” memo, was cast by some as a rebuke of the Bush administration's strategy. It was not a sign of doubt, much less of disapproval. Rather, it was my view of what a senior official needed to do to ensure that we were not operating on autopilot—that we did not become complacent or closed-minded.

I was concerned that if the United States focused too narrowly on military means to defeat the terrorist threat posed by al-Qaida and other Islamist extremists, we could end up doing more harm than good over the long term. Even as early as October 2003, it was clear that bullets alone would not win the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. And in the much broader war against Islamist terrorism, without a serious and sustained ideological campaign to discredit radical Islamism, our enemies were going to be able to recruit and indoctrinate far more terrorists than we could capture or kill—and they'd be able to exploit our counterterrorism measures to feed anti-American resentment.

I also worried that an exclusive concentration of resources on fighting terrorism might invite other powers—perhaps North Korea or Iran—to challenge us by means other than terrorism. Terrorists and insurgents had become a serious threat, but there was no telling what kind of conflicts we might need to deter or defend against down the road a few years or decades hence. In short, we needed to give appropriate priority to other aspects of our national security strategy as well.

My October 2003 memo launched a useful recalibration of the administration's strategy in the war on terror, which resulted in a somewhat greater emphasis on the nonmilitary instruments of national power. We conducted a strategic review of the global war on terror and presented several important thoughts to President Bush, including a proposal for a new U.S. information agency and a civilian reserve corps at the State Department to provide civilian partners for our military in performing stabilization missions. The key elements of our strategic review were incorporated into formal presidential directives. They became the foundation of the 2005–2006 National Military Strategic Plan for the war on terror and helped shape the administration's 2006 National Security Strategy.
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One phrase in my October 2003 memo gained special attention: “long, hard slog.” For some it evoked the Vietnam War and images of quagmire.
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I hadn't intended the unflattering comparison, but I did feel we needed to caution ourselves and the American people that the broader war against Islamist extremists might last many years like the Cold War.

We had done much work we could be proud of. We were putting the pressure on al-Qaida and other Islamist terrorist groups around the world. While there had not been another attack on our country, we knew that our enemies were reorganizing as decentralized terrorist cells and as insurgent groups. They would take advantage of our troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, using the fighting there to train their next generation of terrorists. And they would use support from Syria and Iran to arm themselves. They would launch headline-grabbing attacks to try to convince the American public that our fight with them was futile, much as the Tet Offensive in Vietnam had. Theirs was a waiting game. They knew that they didn't have to win; they simply had to outlast us.

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n June 2004, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez ended his tour as commander of American forces in Iraq and was replaced by George Casey, a four-star Army general. Casey began his military career in the late 1960s in the ROTC at Georgetown University. Though Casey had planned to stay for only two years in the military before heading to law school, he felt compelled to stay in the Army as the war in Vietnam raged. The decision was a weighty one for him. His father, a major general, had been killed in a helicopter crash in Vietnam shortly after Casey was commissioned. Throughout his time in Iraq, Casey wore one of his dad's medals around his neck as a reminder of the sacrifice.

After Sanchez's difficult tenure, the appointment of the calm, low-key, and analytical Casey was welcomed. “Boring is good, General Casey, and I applaud you on that,” Senator Hillary Clinton told him at his confirmation hearing. “Clearly, you're a master at it. And it goes to the heart of your success.”
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I had recommended Casey to the President at Abizaid's urging. Casey and his superior at CENTCOM were close personally and saw the Iraq war in similar terms. They emphasized transferring responsibility to the Iraqi government and training and equipping Iraqi forces so that American forces could begin to leave in an orderly fashion. With the end of the CPA, we had returned to our original emphasis on more modest goals—keeping the nation reasonably secure and enabling the Iraqis to defeat the insurgency over time.

In contrast to the strained relationship that characterized the Bremer and Sanchez pairing, Casey worked well with the first U.S. ambassador to a free Iraq, John Negroponte. Measured and calm, Negroponte was a forceful advocate for the United States. His approach was vastly more collaborative with our military commanders in Iraq than Bremer's had been. Casey and Negroponte established their offices next to each other in Baghdad, as I had urged them to do before they left for Iraq. Together they created a joint campaign plan that for the first time in the conflict fully unified the military, economic, and diplomatic strands of the American effort toward common goals.

There was no shortage of work to be done in regaining the momentum toward Iraqi control that had slipped during the occupation. We had lost almost a year in training Iraq's army and police forces because of bureaucratic differences and misplaced priorities. After reorienting the emphasis toward internal security, Abizaid and I made a priority of increasing the number of Iraqi security forces. Consistent with this goal, Ambassador Negroponte shifted substantial reconstruction funds away from infrastructure projects toward the training of Iraqi army and police forces.

I also pushed for more coalition forces to be involved in Iraq to lessen the burden on our troops. We could continue to bear the brunt of the difficult work, such as clearing and holding Iraqi neighborhoods, but other countries could pick up some of the slack by providing force protection at military bases and working at logistic hubs in Kuwait. If deploying troops to Iraq was politically too sensitive, I suggested that some countries replace American troops in places like the Sinai, Kosovo, and Bosnia, so we could focus more of our resources in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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I had pushed hard for a Muslim military contingent to go to Iraq to belie the propaganda aired on Al-Jazeera that America was waging a war against Islam.
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Turkey's parliament had at one point agreed to deploy two divisions of troops. But suspicious of their neighboring countries, Iraqi leaders rejected the idea—to the detriment of Iraq's security and to U.S.-Turkey relations.

Some critics contended we were using Iraqis interchangeably with our own forces, as if we thought a recently trained Iraqi soldier was as capable as a U.S. Marine or Army soldier.
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That was not so; we never envisioned the Iraqi security forces becoming the equivalent of the U.S. military. I did think we could aim for a competent, capable Iraqi force that, over time, could earn the respect and support of the Iraqi people. I believed that training and equipping Iraqis to secure their own country was the best strategy to achieve a government reasonably capable of dealing with the challenges it faced.
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Unlike most twentieth-century counterinsurgencies, such as that waged by the French in Algeria, the goal of the United States wasn't an Iraq that was disarmed and unable to resist occupation. To the contrary, we wanted an Iraq that we could leave behind fully independent and capable of defending itself with a well-trained and well-armed police force and army. We had a major interest in ensuring the Iraqis were successful. But ultimately we knew that we couldn't succeed for them. If more Iraqis didn't stop insurgents from taking refuge in their neighborhoods, building car bombs in their garages, and destroying power lines and reconstruction projects, and start providing more intelligence tips to Iraqi security forces, then the Iraqi people were doomed to live in a destroyed, violence-engulfed country.
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After some difficult months under a two-star general whose efforts resulted in only modest progress, we needed a three-star general who could aggressively accelerate the development of local forces. To reorient the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and make their training and equipping a top priority, I settled on an Army general who had excelled as a division commander during the major combat operations stage.

David Petraeus began his career at West Point, where he would later return as a professor armed with a Princeton Ph.D. He was by many accounts ambitious and driven. His experience with low-intensity conflict and peacekeeping in Haiti and Bosnia had served him well during his first tour in Iraq, where he commanded the 101st Airborne Division. He demonstrated inventiveness in Mosul through engagement with the population and a willingness to improvise.
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He held local elections for a town council and undertook reconstruction projects at his division's level, even as he had to cope with some CPA officials who were cool to initiatives coming from outside the Green Zone.

I'd had limited exposure to Petraeus at the time, so before settling on him I asked other senior officers for their assessments. The consensus was that he was cerebral, and savvy with the press. His personal public relations abilities were so good that the views of some of his colleagues were mixed. But despite some reservations by senior uniformed officials, I decided Petraeus would be a good fit for a mission in need of strong leadership.
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In June 2004, Petraeus deployed on his second tour to Iraq and took charge of training and equipping the Iraqi security forces, with a mandate to make sure they could assume more responsibility fighting the insurgency.
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Generals Abizaid and Casey and I agreed that putting Iraqis forward to take the fight to the enemy and assume leadership of their country was our best weapon against the insurgency and the surest way to avoid more U.S. casualties that would eventually sap the political will for America's effort in Iraq. We hoped that as Iraqis gained control of their destiny, the terrorists and regime remnants would no longer be seen as standing in opposition to Americans or coalition occupiers. Instead, the insurgents would be seen for what they were—opponents of the legitimate, elected Iraqi government.

 

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hen asked by reporters about the first signs of a sustained and organized resistance in April 2004 following the flare-up in Fallujah, I said, “Thugs and assassins and former Saddam henchmen will not be allowed to carve out portions of that city and to oppose peace and freedom. The dead enders, threatened by Iraq's progress to self-government, may believe they can drive the coalition out through terror and intimidation, and foment civil war among Sunnis and Shias, or block the path to Iraqi self-rule, but they're badly mistaken.”
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Some in the media mistook my use of the phrase “dead enders” to mean I was suggesting that victory was imminent, that the enemy would soon be defeated.
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In fact, my meaning was exactly the opposite—namely that our forces were locked in a bloody struggle with an enemy that would fight to the bitter end, to their deaths. Rather than dismissing the insurgents, I was saying that because they would fight to the end, our work against them would be difficult.
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In its early months the insurgency was dominated by former Baathist regime holdouts. Later, evidence was discovered that suggested that Saddam had planned to mount an insurgency if his conventional forces were unable to turn back a U.S.-led invasion. Saddam's intelligence service disseminated messages to its members to organize a resistance by forming cells and training terrorists in the event of the regime's collapse.
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General Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, one of Saddam's close associates and later a leader of the insurgency, led a secret program to launch a guerrilla war under the Unified Mujahedeen Command.
¹³
Baathists, whose ideology is secular, nevertheless tapped into the potent force of jihadism, attracting devout fanatics to their cause.

The Baathist-jihadist axis, at least in its early phases, was less of an insurgency—an armed political movement that arose organically from the general population—and more a counterrevolution. It consisted mainly of Baathists seeking a return of their dictatorial power. When CENTCOM produced a list of the thirty-nine top leaders in the insurgency in the fall of 2004, almost all were connected to the old regime of Saddam. Indeed, early on one prominent insurgent group called itself “the Party of the Return.”
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The insurgency began primarily as an effort to reclaim Sunni supremacy over Iraq's Kurds and Shia. But by 2004 it had grown, bolstered by the support of a larger, more diverse group, not just of committed Baathists but of a number of non-Baathist Iraqi nationalists as well. Former Baathists exploited Islamist ideology to expand the conflict and attract recruits from all across the Muslim world. To anyone outside this privileged circle of Saddam regime loyalists, creating a new Islamic caliphate in Baghdad was far more appealing than reinstating Saddam and his ilk to power. The insurgency soon became dominated by foreign fighters and terrorists; predominant among them was a group calling itself al-Qaida in Iraq.

Al-Qaida's followers infiltrated Iraq and took advantage of the Sunnis' sense of disenfranchisement and alienation. Though only comprising approximately 20 percent of the population, Sunni Arabs had been the ruling class in Iraq since the British Mandate of Mesopotamia after World War I. But nearly overnight following Saddam's fall, the Sunnis had become a mere minority in a country with a new Shia-led government. Neighboring Sunni governments in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria were unhappy and worried about the new order in Iraq. Iraqi Sunnis feared they might become targets of reprisals for past grievances, and al-Qaida capitalized on this insecurity. While our intelligence community's prewar view was that secular Baathists and al-Qaida's religious extremists would not cooperate, it had become obvious by 2004 that al-Qaida in Iraq had formed bases in Sunni populations throughout much of the country, using a combination of security promises, persistent recruitment efforts, and brutal intimidation.

At first this may have seemed an attractive alliance to the Sunnis, but al-Qaida was not interested in helping the Baathists return to power. Al-Qaida forces seized control of neighborhoods and villages. They labeled as traitors those Iraqis who cooperated with the Iraqi government or with the Americans. We received reports of terrorists who murdered children or booby-trapped dead bodies so that families would be killed when they tried to retrieve their loved ones. In Fallujah, those who refused to collaborate with the terrorists who controlled the city were beheaded and tossed into the Euphrates River.
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In November 2004, we recognized that our troops had to return to Fallujah. It was a sanctuary for al-Qaida in Iraq and much of the insurgency. Fifteen thousand U.S. Marines and soldiers along with two thousand Iraqi troops encircled the city. In the early morning hours of November 8, they swept northward through the city, block by block, engaging in the toughest urban fighting of the Iraq war. It also proved to be the bloodiest, with ninety-five American troops killed in combat. Though hard won, it was a key victory over the insurgents.
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Fallujah was cleared of the terrorists who had taken refuge there, and the city has never reverted to the enemy.

 

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e had a priceless advantage in an ideological struggle against the enemy. We could offer the Iraqis a future the majority of Iraqis wanted—a future of self-government and national pride. We could also finally disprove the notion that the Americans were occupiers there to steal their oil. Elections would be a critical step toward that goal.

Holding an election during such a fragile period in a war-torn country carried significant risks. There was the obvious danger that terrorists could launch devastating attacks on Iraqi citizens on election day, setting back any political progress. We also had to keep in mind that if we rushed to national elections, we could end up with an antidemocratic result. Groups that were already well organized would have a major advantage if elections were held too soon. Those groups tended to be bankrolled by the Iranian regime and were deeply sectarian. If they emerged the ultimate winners, the long-term survival prospects of a free society in Iraq capable of resisting foreign influences would be slim. In the worst-case scenario, we could end up with leaders in power who rivaled Saddam in their lust for violence and support for terrorism.