America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (74 page)

 86.
“Budget Deficit History,”
usgovinfo.about.com/od/federalbudgetprocess/a/Budget-Deficit-History.htm
, accessed April 24, 2015.

 87.
George W. Bush, “Second Inaugural Address” (January 20, 2005).

14. How This Ends

 1.
The breadth of the mission statement drafted by Casey and U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte suggests the shift away from the certainties that had informed Operation Iraqi Freedom at the outset. It read: “To help the Iraqi people build a new Iraq, at peace with its neighbors, with a constitutional, representative government that respects human rights and possesses security forces sufficient to maintain domestic order, and deny Iraq as a safe haven for terrorists.” Quoted in George W. Casey Jr.,
Strategic Reflections
(Washington, D.C., 2012), 26.

 2.
U.S. Senate, Committee on Armed Services, “Nomination of Gen George W. Casey, Jr., USA for Reappointment to the Grade of General and to be Commander, Multi-National Force, Iraq” (June 24, 2005).

 3.
Casey,
Strategic Reflections,
20.

 4.
As late as December 2004, Casey was still publically predicting mission accomplishment by December of the following year. John D. Banusiewicz, “Bombs Create Illusion of Powerful Insurgency, Commander Says,”
DoD News
(December 16, 2004).

 5.
“Iraq Insurgency in ‘Last Throes,’ Cheney Says,”
CNN.com
(June 20, 2005).

 6.
Iraqi Kurds, comprising roughly one-fifth of Iraq’s total population, were also happy. Without raising much of a fuss, they had unofficially but effectively seceded, establishing an autonomous and mostly peaceful Kurdistan in territory that was nominally northern Iraq. If the United States had invaded Iraq in order to let Iraqi Kurds go their own way, the war rated as a success.

 7.
United States Senate, Committee on Armed Services, “U.S. Military Strategy and Operations in Iraq” (June 23, 2005).

 8.
United States Senate, Committee on Armed Services, “U.S. Military Strategy and Operations in Iraq” (September 29, 2005).

 9.
United States Senate, Committee on Armed Services, “Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Global War on Terrorism” (August 3, 2006).

 10.
“Iraq Index” (December 21, 2006),
brookings.edu/fp/saban/iraq/index20061221.pdf
, accessed May 3, 2015.

 11.
In February 2005, General Casey testified that coalition forces had taken fifteen thousand insurgents out of circulation over the previous year. This was thousands more than the estimated number of insurgents said to exist at that time. Either U.S. intelligence estimates were wrong or U.S. forces were creating more “terrorists” than they were eliminating.

 12.
Robert F. Worth, “Blast at Shiite Shrine Sets off Sectarian Fury in Iraq,”
The New York Times
(February 23, 2006).

 13.
Casey,
Strategic Reflections,
93, 104.

 14.
Michael R. Gordon, “U.S. Central Command Charts Sharp Movement of the Civil Conflict in Iraq Toward Chaos,”
The New York Times
(November 1, 2006). The print edition of the news article reprinted in color a leaked PowerPoint briefing slide.

 15.
Larissa MacFarquhar, “Midge’s Mash Note,”
The New Yorker
(November 3, 2003). In 2002, Rumsfeld, then seventy years old, had landed on
People
magazine’s list of “sexiest men alive.”

 16.
Fred Kaplan,
The Insurgents
(New York, 2013), 223–43.

 17.
Casey himself was “kicked upstairs” to become army chief of staff.

 18.
U.S. troop strength during the Korean War peaked at 326,000; for Vietnam, the equivalent figure was 536,000.

 19.
In the summer of 2006, Casey requested that the 172nd Stryker Brigade be extended for four months beyond its designated redeployment date. Approving the request, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld felt obliged to visit the brigade’s home station at Fort Wainwright, Alaska, to explain his decision to affected families.

 20.
William C. Hix and Kalev Sepp, “Assessing Counterinsurgency: Iraq War, 2004–5,” unpublished paper (2015). Hix and Sepp had advised Casey on counterinsurgency matters.

 21.
Lawrence F. Kaplan, “Letting Go,”
The New Republic
(July 10, 2006).

 22.
Hix and Sepp, “Assessing Counterinsurgency.”

 23.
Stjepan G. Mestrovic,
The “Good Soldier” on Trial
(New York, 2009), 57–65.

 24.
Raffi Khatchadourian, “The Kill Company,”
The New Yorker
(July 6, 2009).

 25.
The three were Generals John Galvin, Carl Vuono, and Henry Shelton. Petraeus’s father-in-law was General William Knowlton.

 26.
Daniel Bolger,
Why We Lost
(Boston, 2015), 181.

 27.
Rick Atkinson, “A Long and Blinding Road to Battle in Iraq,”
The Washington Post
(March 7, 2004).

 28.
Michael Gordon, “101st Airborne Scores Success in Reconstruction of Northern Iraq,”
The New York Times
(September 4, 2003).

 29.
A research paper prepared by three serving military officers attending the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California concluded that “insurgent organization and violence increased throughout the year” while Petraeus’s troops were occupying Mosul. Insurgent violence and influence increased even further the following year. By 2005, Mosul was “a city under siege.” Jarett D. Broemmel, Shannon E. Nielsen, and Terry L. Clark, “An Analysis of Counterinsurgency in Iraq: Mosul, Ramadi, and Samarra from 2003–2005” (unpublished M.A. thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, 2006), 27, 52, 68. The authors were majors in the U.S. Army.

 30.
Newsweek
(July 5, 2004).

 31.
Within a month of its appearance, internet users had reportedly downloaded FM 3-24 1.5 million times. The University of Chicago Press quickly published a paperback version of the text, to which Petraeus himself appended an endorsement, in effect blurbing his own book: “Surely a manual that’s on the bedside table of the president, vice president, secretary of defense, 21 of 25 members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and many others deserves a place at your bedside too.”

 32.
Daniel J. Boorstin,
The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream
(New York, 1962).

 33.
David Howell Petraeus, “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam” (unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1987), 13.

 34.
United States Senate, Committee on Armed Services, “Nomination of LTG David H. Petraeus, USA, to be General and Commander, Multinational Forces, Iraq” (January 23, 2007).

 35.
United States Senate, Committee on Armed Services, “The Situation in Iraq and Progress Made by the Government of Iraq in Meeting Benchmarks” (September 11, 2007).

 36.
Petraeus himself understood this. “The Washington clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock,” he remarked to an interviewer in April 2007. “So we’re obviously trying to speed up the Baghdad clock a bit and to produce some progress on the ground that can, perhaps…put a little more time on the Washington clock.” Thomas E. Ricks, “Politics Collide with Iraq Realities,”
The Washington Post
(April 8, 2007). In his memoir, Robert Gates, who had succeeded Rumsfeld as defense secretary, used an identical comparison to describe the surge. “My role was to figure out how to buy time,” he wrote, to figure out “how to slow down the Washington clock, and how to speed up the Baghdad clock.” Robert M. Gates,
Duty
(New York, 2014), 49.

 37.
Victor Davis Hanson, “Iraq, Round Three,”
Policy Review
(November/December 2008).

 38.
Max Boot, “We Are Winning, We Haven’t Won,”
The Weekly Standard
(February 4, 2008).

 39.
Jason Campbell, Michael O’Hanlon, and Amy Unikewicz, “The State of Iraq: An Update,”
The New York Times
(December 22, 2007).

 40.
Frederick W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan, “The Patton of Counterinsurgency,”
The Weekly Standard
(March 10, 2008).

 41.
Jeffrey Bell, “The Petraeus Promotion,”
The Weekly Standard
(May 5, 2008).

 42.
For a sympathetic journalist’s account, see George Packer, “The Lesson of Tal Afar,”
The New Yorker
(April 10, 2006).

 43.
Jim Michaels, “An Army Colonel’s Gamble Pays Off in Iraq,”
USA Today
(May 1, 2007).

 44.
For MacFarland’s own account, see Niel Smith and Sean MacFarland, “Anbar Awakens: The Tipping Point,”
Military Review
(March–April 2008). But see also Gian Gentile,
Wrong Turn
(New York, 2013), 87–88, 96–98; and, Douglas Porch,
Counterinsurgency
(Cambridge, 2013), 309.

 45.
Gentile,
Wrong Turn,
89.

 46.
Gentile,
Wrong Turn,
101. For a commander’s perspective on that campaign, see Stanley McChrystal,
My Share of the Task
(New York, 2013), chs. 7–15.

 47.
Daniel P. Bolger, “The Truth About the Wars,”
The New York Times
(November 10, 2014).

 48.
John McCain and Joe Lieberman, “The Surge Worked,”
The Wall Street Journal
(January 10, 2008).

 49.
“A pursuit is an offensive operation against a retreating enemy force. It follows a successful attack or exploitation and is ordered when the enemy cannot conduct an organized defense and attempts to disengage. The object of the pursuit is destruction of the opposing force.” U.S. Army, FM 100-5
Operations
(Washington, D.C., 1993), 7–9.

 50.
The sobriquet awarded to Petraeus was either admiring or sardonic depending on the point of view of the speaker. Mark Bowden, “The Professor of War,”
Vanity Fair
(May 2010).

 51.
COIN enthusiasts were soon promoting visions of what they unhesitatingly called “global counterinsurgency.” The proper application of COIN principles, wrote Colonel James Johnson, would enable the United States to create “an environment of political, ideological and economic freedom across the globe.” “A Global Counter-Insurgency Plan for the War on Terror,”
CTC Sentinel
(June 15, 2008). See also Colonel Daniel S. Roper, “Global Counterinsurgency: Strategic Clarity for the Long War,”
Parameters
(Autumn 2008).

 52.
“Obama’s Speech on Iraq” (March 18, 2008),
cfr.org/elections/obamas-speech-iraq-march-2008/p15761
, accessed May 11, 2015.

 53.
“Obama’s Speech Against the Iraq War” (October 2, 2002); “Remarks in Washington, D.C.: ‘The War We Need to Win’ ” (August 1, 2007).