The War Within (51 page)

Keane said it was not just Petraeus's immediate boss, Admiral Fallon, but also those above FallonóPace, who was not leaving until the fall, and Gatesówho weren't fully supporting Petraeus. "We should all be on the same page behind themóthe Pentagon on the same page, which it's not, and the State Department on the same page, which it's not. It shouldn't just be up to these two men"óPetraeus and Crockeró"to come in here and sort of walk the gangplank by themselves for the administration."

"We can help here," Cheney finally said. "We can help here."

The conversation had gone on for nearly an hour and a half. At one point Lynne Cheney, the vice president's wife, stuck her head in the room and quietly reminded her husband, "Remember, we're supposed to be there in 10, 15

minutes."

Though he had followed Newt Gingrich's advice to lay it on the line, Keane wondered if this time he had not gone too farólaying into the leadership of both Defense and State.

A few days later, during a secure videoconference with Baghdad, the president said he was troubled that they were not doing enough to bolster Petraeus and Crocker. Their testimony was fast approaching, and everyone in the administration, including himself, had to pitch in to make it successful.

* * *

Ed Gillespie, a former lobbyist and chairman of the Republican National Committee, took over as Bush's White House counselor and communications director when Dan Bartlett resigned earlier in the summer.

"Where's the flowchart?" Gillespie had asked Bartlett, referring to the plan he hoped the White House had for how Bush would spend his time and deliver his message.

"There isn't one," Bartlett said, laughing.

Gillespie, 46, a genial Irishman who had made millions lobbying, wanted to be more strategic. He pushed for a series of high-profile speeches in which the president would underscore the stakes in Iraq and offer support to Petraeus and Crocker.

On August 22, Bush spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in Kansas City, Missouri, drawing an unusual parallel between Vietnam and Iraq. "One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like

'boat people,' 're-education camps,' and 'killing fields.'" He said "the question now that comes before us is this: Will today's generation of Americans resist the allure of retreat?" He added, "Unlike in Vietnam, if we withdraw before the job is done, this enemy will follow us home."

Six days later, the president appeared at the American Legion's annual convention in Reno, Nevada. He said that withdrawal from Iraq would leave "a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust."

* * *

On Thursday, August 24, the U.S. intelligence community released some unclassified key judgments in its National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. The assessment found "measurable but uneven improvements" in security. Though the violence had gone down, it remained "high." On the political front, the agencies said "Iraq's sectarian groups remain unreconciled."

Not included in the public report was its assessment that Maliki had "a less than 50 percent chance of surviving" in office another six to 12 months, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official. In addition, Maliki had "some real health problems" that "indicated he was going downhill," according to that senior official.

* * *

As the summer wore on, Petraeus waited for the tide to turn. Every Saturday, the staff distributed the latest chart, graphing the rise or fall in violence. During two weeks at the end of June, the number of attacks plunged by more than 300, then went back up slightly the next week. The figures rose higher the following week, then went into a generally steady march downward throughout August. By summer's end, the high of 1,550 attacks a week had fallen to just under 800ónearly a 50 percent reduction, but still an average of five an hour.

* * *

Why had the violence dropped dramatically?

On one level, the surge was beginning to have its intended effect. Doubling the U.S. forces in and around Baghdad from 17,000 to nearly 40,000 had a clear impact, as such a dramatic influx of forces would in any city. The thousands of additional troops, coupled with Petraeus's counterinsurgency game plan, had quelled some of the sectarian and other violence that had defined the past year and a half. About 30 joint security stations had been established around Baghdad by the summer of 2007. Security along the borders with Iran and Syria had improved, and the Iraqi army was performing better.

But the full truth wasn't as simple. At least three other factors were as, or even more, important than the surge.

Beginning in about May 2006, the U.S. military and the U.S. intelligence agencies launched a series of TOP

SECRET operations that enabled them to locate, target and kill key individuals in extremist groups such as al Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias, or so-called special groups. The operations, which were either Special Access Programs (SAP) or part of Special Compartmented Information (SCI), incorporated some of the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government.

Senior military officers and officials at the White House have asked me not to publish the details or the code word names associated with these groundbreaking programs. They argue that publication of the names alone might lead to unraveling of state secrets that have been so beneficial in Iraq. Because disclosing the details of such operations could compromise their ongoing use, I have chosen not to include more here. But a number of authoritative sources say these covert activities had a far-reaching effect on the violence and were very possibly the biggest factor in reducing it. Several said that 85 to 90 percent of the successful operations and "actionable intelligence" had come from these new sources, methods and operations. Several others said that figure was exaggerated but acknowledged their significance. Once again, it was American innovation that provided an edge.

Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) responsible for hunting al Qaeda in Iraq, employed what he called "collaborative warfare," using every tool available simultaneously, from signals intercepts to human intelligence and other methods, that allowed lightning-quick and sometimes concurrent operations. Derek Harvey, the DIA intelligence expert and adviser to Petraeus, said privately that the operations were so effective that they gave him "orgasms."

When I later asked the president about this, he offered a simple answer: "JSOC is awesome."

A second important factor in the lessening of violence was the Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al Qaeda and signed up with the U.S. forces. Al Qaeda had made a strategic mistake in the province, overplaying its hand. Its members had performed forced marriages with women from local tribes, taken over hospitals, used mosques for beheading operations, mortared playgrounds and executed citizens, leaving headless bodies in the streets with signs that read, "Don't remove this body or the same thing will happen to you."

The sheer brutality eroded much of the local support.

Over many months, U.S. forces worked with tribal leaders, who had once fought Americans, to help build local security forces throughout the province.

"We are the ones who saved our country," Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha, whose slain younger brother first allied himself with U.S. forces and who now serves as president of the Iraqi Awakening Council, told me. "We were able to fight al Qaeda."

The U.S. military also began setting up groups of thousands of what Petraeus called "Concerned Local Citizens"

(later known as "Sons of Iraq"), essentially armed neighborhood watch groups that would patrol their communities and provide intelligence to U.S. and Iraqi forces.

A third significant break came on August 29, when Moqtada al-Sadr ordered his powerful Mahdi Army to suspend operations, including attacks against U.S. troops. Petraeus and others knew it was not an act of charity. The order followed a gunfight between the Mahdi Army and Iraqi forces in the holy city of Karbala, during which more than 50

Shia pilgrims gathering for an annual festival had been killed and another 275 wounded. Sadr's order that his army stand down for six months marked an unexpected stroke of good luck, another in a series for the Americans.

* * *

During this period some United States intelligence agencies had extensive coverage on Prime Minister Maliki, his staff and others within the Iraqi government. Some officials knowledgeable about the intelligence gathering believe it provided a transparent view into the prime minister's actions.

"We know everything he says," one source said.

A second source said that Maliki and his people suspected, perhaps even knew, about this surveillance and that they were careful about their conversations and also took other countermeasures. In some specific cases, this source said, human sources had given senior U.S. officials a heads-up on positions, plans, maneuvers and secret actions of the prime minister, members of his staff and others in the Iraqi government.

Of the Maliki surveillance, the source said, "You never have absolute transparencyÖyou never get inside someone's headÖ. When he's talking, you can never suspect he's not playing you. We had a lotóa lotóof insights, but to say absolute, no. I could never tell you I thought I had absolute insight into what anybody was doing over there."

A third source said the surveillance on Maliki was more than routine.

A fourth source recognized the sensitivity of the issue and then asked, "Would it be better if we didn't?"

Gathering intelligence on known or suspected enemies made perfect sense. But spying on friends and allies, particularly a young democracy the United States had vowed to help, while not unprecedented, raised all kinds of questions. The intelligence agencies love to deliver the inside goods. But several senior officials asked: What was there to gain? And was it worth the risk? It was not clear that it was that useful to President Bush. Just as General Petraeus has said it is not possible for the United States to kill its way to victory in Iraq, it probably was not possible to spy its way to political stabilityóthe ultimate goal.

Chapter 38

O
n August 29, 2007, Petraeus's aide and former Australian Army officer David Kilcullen, a well-known counterinsurgency expert, wrote in an online posting, "We have spent the last four years carefully building up and supporting an Iraqi political system based on non-tribal institutions." He noted that the Coalition Provisional Authority, under L. Paul Bremer, had sidelined the tribes in 2003 in order to focus on building a "modern"

democratic state in Iraq.

But, he wrote, "We are now seeing the most significant political and security progress in years, via a structure outside the one we have been working so hard to create. Does that invalidate the last four years' efforts? Probably not, as long as we recognize that the vision of a Jeffersonian, 'modern' (in the Western industrial sense) democracy in Iraq, based around entirely secular non-tribal institutions, was always somewhat unrealistic. In the Iraqi polity, tribes'

rights may end up playing a similar role to states' rights in some other democracies.

"To be perfectly honest," Kilcullen continued, "the pattern we are seeing runs somewhat counter to what we expected in the 'surge.'ÖThe original concept was that we (the coalition and the Iraqi government) would create security, which would in turn create space for a 'grand bargain' at the national level. Instead, we are seeing the exact opposite: a series of local political deals has displaced extremists, resulting in a major improvement in security at the local level, and the national government is jumping on board with the program. Instead of coalition-led top-down reconciliation, this is Iraqi-led, bottom-up, based on civil society rather than national politics. And oddly enough, it seems to be working so far."

In the end, Kilcullen said, no matter what the United States had imagined or hoped for with the surge, it had to accept the solutions that Iraqis themselves had chosen. "Our job," he wrote, "is to support where needed, ensure proper political safeguards and human rights standards are in place, but ultimately to realize that this will play out in ways that may be good or bad, but are fundamentally unpredictable."

* * *

Fallon wanted to replace Petraeus as the Iraq commander that fall. Petraeus was under too much pressure. It was his third Iraq tour. He had spent nearly four of the past five years in Iraq, and was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, stressed out and not getting enough sleep.

Fallon recalled the pictures of World War II Navy men who lined the walls of his former Pacific Command in Hawaii. Admiral Marc Mitscher was only 59 years old when he returned to the United States after the war. He looked 90 and died seven months later.

Admiral John S. McCain, the Arizona senator's grandfather, was so worn down by the stress of the war in the Pacific that he weighed barely 100 pounds when it ended. He attended the September 2, 1945, Japanese surrender ceremony and died of a heart attack in California four days later.

The toll of the Iraq War was incredible. It was grinding on Petraeus.

Fallon later insisted that he recommended to Gates that he replace Petraeus. Gates told associates that nothing of the kind ever happened.

* * *

On Monday morning, September 10, a full-page ad in
The New York Times
greeted Petraeus hours before he was to testify before Congress. The ad had been placed by MoveOn.org, a liberal advocacy group and political action committee.

"GENERAL PETRAEUS OR GENERAL BETRAY US?" it read in big, bold letters under his picture. "General Petraeus is a military man constantly at war with the facts."

Petraeus found such a personal attack jolting, a sign of how raw and impassioned the widespread aversion to the war had become.

When he checked his e-mails that morning, Petraeus discovered that a woman in his hometown of Cornwall-on- Hudson, New York, had sent him a copy of the Rudyard Kipling poem "If." He read:
If you can keep your head when all about you