The Longest War (51 page)

But to those who were most closely following the Iraq War—such as the “surgios” at the NSC, commanders like Odierno and Petraeus with extensive experience on the ground in Iraq, and those outside the government, like General Keane and AEI’s Fred Kagan—the fact that Iraq needed both more American boots on the ground and a better strategy to stanch the civil war there was quite obvious. It was so obvious to them that they all arrived at quite similar conclusions at more or less the same time during the fall of 2006, sometimes working independently of each other and at other times feeding off each other.

Petraeus, for instance, had a
back channel
to O’Sullivan, to whom he could not have been more clear about his need for a significantly larger force just before he was about to assume command in Iraq. Petraeus remembers saying to O’Sullivan, “
Give me everything
—find everything you can and get it all.” Similarly, Odierno had a back channel to both Keane and Petraeus, and Keane had a back channel to Vice President Cheney. And coordinating all this was Stephen Hadley, an unassuming, thoughtful workaholic, who deftly managed the policy-making process around the surge so that the senior Pentagon and State Department officials who had once opposed it eventually and, in some cases, begrudgingly, endorsed the surge.

Emma Sky
is a lively British graduate of Oxford who studied Arabic there and then went on to work in Palestine doing development work. With that background it was hardly predictable that she would end up working as a key aide to the top U.S. military commanders in Iraq. After the American and British invasion of Iraq in 2003, Sky became the Coalition Provisional Authority representative in the key northern city of Kirkuk, and as a result met regularly with both Petraeus and Odierno.

As the surge started four years later, Odierno, now the number-two commander in Iraq, asked Sky to work as his political adviser. Contemporary coverage of the surge tended to fixate on the numbers of new troops going to Iraq, which would eventually amount to an additional thirty thousand soldiers. Sky suggests that the most important, and often undervalued aspect, of the surge was “
the huge psychological
impact it had on us—and on Iraqis. We proved to ourselves—and to our critics—that we were not defeated.”

Sky became part of a small team of a half dozen or so known as the
Initiatives Group
advising Odierno, which included Derek Harvey, an Arabic-speaking intelligence officer who had first laid out for President Bush at the White House the real scale and nature of the Sunni insurgency in the
winter of 2004
, and Colonel Mike Meese, an instructor at West Point’s Social Sciences Department. (Former and present faculty at West Point provided a good deal of the intellectual firepower that reshaped the American strategy in Iraq, including Meese, John Nagl, H. R. McMaster, Fred Kagan, and Petraeus himself.)

During January 2007, the Initiatives Group worked through the strategy that the surge of new troops would help implement. Sky recalls that the National Security Council “gave permission for there to be a surge: great. They gave no details about what that meant.” The Initiatives Group started to sort out the key question of who the reconcilables and irreconcilables were, a pragmatic approach to success that recognized that the United States had to make deals with even those insurgent groups that had American blood on their hands. Sky recalls that an important first symbolic step was to stop labeling all the insurgents with the Orwellian and obscuring name of “Anti-Iraqi Forces,” as the U.S. military was then calling them. Sky explains, “
The biggest mind-set change
was for us to look at Iraqis as not the enemy, but to look at the Iraqis as people who needed protecting.”

Just as the surge began in February 2007,
General Petraeus arrived
as the new U.S. commander in Iraq. He had not been back in Iraq for sixteen months. Shortly after his arrival he took a tour of Baghdad neighborhoods he knew from his past deployments. “
I just couldn’t believe it
… here’s literally tumbleweed rolling down the street of what I remembered as a very prosperous, upper-middle-class, former military officers’ neighborhood in northwest Baghdad. It was just … Wow!” There were now
well over two hundred car bombings
and suicide attacks every month in Iraq. Six months earlier there were around a quarter of that number. “Security incidents” that
ran the gamut from attacks on Iraqi government forces to rocket attacks were averaging
more than 1,600 every week
, up from 600 or so a year earlier. Iraq was simultaneously exploding and imploding.

Petraeus, an intensely competitive officer with a Ph.D. from Princeton, assembled a brilliant staff to reassess and redirect the war.
Laughing, he recalls
, “I didn’t get all these superstars in Iraq because people wanted to send me their best people. I got them because I said I’ve just been picked for mission impossible; the president supports it; and, with respect I’d like to get H. R. McMaster over here and I’m going to take this guy and I want that guy.”

Petraeus brought with him to Iraq a sense that there was a
plan
. And he also had the full support of Bush, with whom he held a weekly private videoconference, which was unprecedented since the president was circumventing several levels in the chain of command to speak to his field commander. Watching Petraeus’s BUA, or
Battlefield Update Assessment
, held every morning at “Camp Victory” in Baghdad, was to see a master at work, cajoling and cheerleading his commanders across the country via video link as they reported on every variable of the Iraqi body politic from the grandest of political issues to the minutest of water projects.

The new team and new approach got American soldiers out of their bases and into the neighborhoods and was amplified by the arrival of what would eventually become the thirty thousand soldiers of the surge. Petraeus outlined that “population-centric” strategy in a
three-page letter
he distributed to all of the soldiers under his command. “You can’t commute to this fight.… Living among the people is essential to securing them and defeating the insurgents … patrol on foot and engage the population. Situational awareness can only be guaranteed by interacting with people face-to-face, not separated by ballistic glass.”

Sky says that Petraeus played
another key role
, which was buying time in Washington for the new strategy to work. “In showing that there was somebody in charge, somebody credible, that there was a policy. He owned the policy and he owned the implementation. Now without his strategic communications, without people’s belief in Petraeus we would never have got the time.”

O’Sullivan says the concern at the White House during the summer of 2007 was that the political will to do what was necessary to roll back the violence in Iraq was beginning to evaporate: “
Where everyone
was very worried was with Congress. I think we were very nervous that we would lose
the opportunity to fully execute.” A telling defection in Congress was that of Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the foreign policy eminence grise of the Republican Party. On June 25 Lugar took to the Senate floor to withdraw his support from the surge, saying, “
Persisting indefinitely
with the surge strategy will delay policy adjustments that have a better chance of protecting our vital interests over the long term.”

The greatest test of whether the political will existed to continue with the ramped-up Iraq effort was the congressional hearings held on the sixth anniversary of 9/11. On September 11, 2007, Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the veteran diplomat who was U.S. ambassador to Iraq, were grilled by both the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, on which happened to sit five senators all seriously vying for the presidency—Joe Biden, Christopher Dodd, Barack Obama, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton—one of whom would become president of the United States in just over a year. Petraeus recalls that the hearing “was just
charged beyond belief
. I mean, you could just feel the spotlight of the world on you. It was carried live in Baghdad.”

Petraeus and Crocker gamely tried to present a picture of progress in Iraq but the Democrats were having none of it. Clinton interjected at one point: “You have been made the de facto spokesmen for what many of us believe to be a failed policy. Despite what I view as your rather extraordinary efforts in your testimony … I think that the reports that you provide to us really require the willing
suspension of disbelief
.” This is Washington-speak for “you are either wrong or lying.”

The day before, the duo had also testified before a joint hearing of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees. Petraeus knew it was going to be a rough day when he received a heads-up that the
New York Times
was running a full-page ad about him, paid for by the left-wing advocacy group MoveOn.org. Under a
banner headline
general petraeus or general betray us? the general was accused of “Cooking the Books for the White House.” The ad copy went on to assert, “Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed.… Most importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war.” Around six o’clock on the morning of his testimony, Petraeus, an avid runner, went for a lonely run as a new day dawned gray in Washington, D.C. “Talk about feeling like an ‘Army of One.’ … Man, I’ve just been called a traitor, in a newspaper I used to read every morning,” recalls Petraeus, a native of New York state.

The two days of contentious congressional hearings each lasted a grueling eight or nine hours. Petraeus remembers sitting outside the PBS studio in northern Virginia where he and Ryan Crocker were scheduled to give interviews following one of the hearings, saying to his colleague, “‘You know, Ryan, I am never going to do this again.’ And he said, ‘Neither am I.’ It’s a little bit like the sentiment after you run a particularly grueling marathon, not just any marathon, but one in which you sort of ran into the wall at the nineteenth-mile mark, instead of the
twenty-three-or twenty-five-mile
mark.”

General Ray Odierno, Petraeus’s massively built deputy, known as “Big O,”
put two brigades
of the newly arrived soldiers of the surge into Baghdad’s toughest neighborhoods and three more brigades into the “belts” surrounding the capital where AQI had established bases. This operational approach emerged following the December 2006 capture by U.S. Special Forces of documents that outlined al-Qaeda’s plan to control the belts around Baghdad so as to slowly strangle the city. It was in those belts that al-Qaeda hid its car-bomb factories and rest houses for its fighters. Odierno set out to destroy those havens.

The surge of American soldiers brought a surge of American combat deaths as their deployments into neighborhood outposts exposed them to greater risk. In May 2007, 120 American soldiers died, the
deadliest month in two years
.
For those who worked
on the surge it was agonizing. “It was awful. We had a hundred a month we were losing. Everywhere we went, a little note would come to Odierno, ‘another guy dead, another guy dead,’” remembers his political adviser, Emma Sky. Odierno recalls, “The worst was May and June; the most difficult times. I was obviously concerned, but the reason I was still fairly confident it would work is because the majority of the deaths and the casualties were coming from us breaching these defensive belts that had been put in these safe havens.”

Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations, a critic of how the Iraq War was going, was recruited by Petraeus to be one of two outside civilians to sit on his Joint Strategic Assessment Team (JSAT) to help him work up the new campaign plan for the war. The JSAT, which was chaired by Colonel H. R. McMaster, who had restored order to Tal Afar two years earlier, recommended that the Anbar Awakening model be expanded to the rest of Iraq. Biddle described this approach as “
Tony Soprano does Iraq
: we had to manipulate
the incentive structures of all three of the major actors—the Kurds, the Shiites, and the Sunnis. We could not simply permanently align with any one of them. There are no good guys and bad guys; there are just ethno-sectarian groups that are at war with each other in a security dilemma. Our job is to resolve the dilemma by compelling them against their will to come to compromises.”

Odierno also enthusiastically endorsed embracing America’s former enemies. Soon after assuming his new job as deputy commander, Odierno
traveled in January 2007 to Ramadi
, the city where the Awakening movement had first started, to meet with its leader, Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha. Odierno says Abdul Sattar “was somebody who was convinced that, together with the U.S. forces, they could beat al-Qaeda. And he was all in.… There were thirteen different tribes out there, and at that time there were only eight who were working with us. There were still five more that we were trying to bring over, and he was helping us to do that.”

Odierno says that by then other Sunni tribes in other provinces were clamoring to ally with the Americans against al-Qaeda: “We started getting feedback from other Iraqis saying, ‘Why can’t we have an Awakening movement?’ … So we had a large internal discussion, how do you reach out to someone who’s been trying to kill you, and fighting against you?” Odierno issued guidance to his commanders in February and March about how to move forward to set up Awakening movements around Iraq so that the Anbar model could be extended to the rest of the country.

Odierno recalls that this was a hard sell to some of his commanders. “Initially, people were nervous about it, and rightfully so.… Once they got out there, and they started seeing the results and how willing people were to do this, they really bought into it.” The new approach precipitated literally hundreds of local cease-fires with insurgents and tribal leaders, deals that were often sweetened by substantial
cash payments
. Odierno points out that the new soldiers of the surge also helped this process: “
As we were able to
establish ourselves in areas we’d never been able to establish ourselves in, it gave them confidence to become part of the Awakening.” Odierno explains how this process worked: “We would go set up a patrol base. When we first got there nobody would talk to us, but when they saw the walls go up, and the permanent base, they’d come out of the woodwork. They’d go, ‘OK, they’re going to stay. So they will be here to help us; they’re not just going to leave and we’ll be left here and be slaughtered by al-Qaeda.’ When they
knew we were going to stay and be there for a while, they gave us help and information.”