WaPo: Bush Listens Closely To His Man in Iraq
For months, a debate raged at the top levels of the Bush administration over how quickly to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. But the discussion shut down soon after President Bush flew to Camp Arifjan, a dusty Army base near the Iraqi border in Kuwait, in January for a face-to-face meeting with the man whose counsel on the war he values most: Gen. David H. Petraeus
During an 80-minute session, the president questioned his top commander in Iraq on whether further troop reductions, beyond those planned through July, would compromise security gains. According to officials familiar with the exchange, Petraeus said he wanted to wait until the summer to evaluate conditions -- and Bush made it clear he would support him and take any political heat."My attitude is, if he didn't want to continue the drawdown, that's fine with me," Bush said before television cameras later, with Petraeus standing by his side. "I said to the general: 'If you want to slow her down, fine; it's up to you.' "
... Administration officials say it is natural that Bush would give extra weight to the views of his commander on the ground, especially one whose congressional testimony in September helped deflect efforts to force a withdrawal. Current and former officials also said Petraeus has gained Bush's trust largely because he is delivering results in Iraq, after the president lost confidence in the strategy pursued in 2006 by then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then a top commander in Iraq; and Gen. John P. Abizaid, then chief of Centcom.
The president felt frustrated that he could not "get out of either Abizaid or Casey any coherent description of how we were going to defeat the enemy" as sectarian violence spiraled in Baghdad, one former official said. That led Bush to overrule his military advisers last year, order a "surge" of 30,000 additional U.S. forces to Iraq, and search for a new field commander who would be more in line with his views on how best to wage the war.
I just got through watching the second half of Frontline's 4 1/2 hour special on the Iraq War, and if you haven't watched it yet, you absolutely must. Over the past 5 years I've read countless news stories and books and watched more than a dozen different documentaries, but nothing has put the entire thing into perspective the way this series has. For the first time, I feel like I understand how everything in this horrible war fits together.
The last two paragraphs in this story, for example, make much more sense now that I've watched the show. In the year prior to Rumsfeld's firing, there was a deep division within Bush's cabinet, one that so far as we can tell Bush was entirely uninterested in refereeing. On one side were Rumsfeld and Casey, two men who were surprised by the chaos that had engulfed Iraq following the invasion and who were working, however haphazardly, to find a way to bring US troops home. It was under their direction that we retreated behind the walls of our large, fortified bases in 2006, promising that we would stand down our forces and leave Iraq when the newly trained Iraqi police force and army stood up. But every time we began even the most minimal drawdowns, AQI or some other terrorist group would undertake a series of spectacular attacks, freezing us in place without any idea how to move down the road towards our goal.
That was why in 2006 Casey couldn't provide Bush with a "coherent description of how we were going to defeat the enemy." As Frontline made abundantly clear, we had no plan for defeating the enemy because defeating the enemy was not our goal. Rumsfeld and his generals were intent on leaving, and their plan was to leave Iraq to the Iraqis to control. That's why, for example, for nearly a year the president repeated the mantra of "when they stand up, we'll stand down." That's why whenever asked about troop strength in Iraq, Bush would always say that he was giving the commanders on the ground whatever they had asked for. And that's why in fact his generals had not once asked for increased force levels or longer deployments; Casey and Rumsfeld wanted out, and although they had no clear idea of how to achieve that, they knew that adding boots on the ground was not going to get them to their eventual goal.
On the other side of the debate was Sec. Rice, Gen. Petraeus, and a number of other counterinsurgency specialists in the US Army and Marine Corps. For them, retreating into our bases and hoping for a way out was precisely the wrong approach. Following the success of Colonel H.R. McMaster in Tall Afar, they proposed what became known as "clear, hold, and build," a counterinsurgency strategy that pushed US forces out into the community, reestablishing order one block and one neighborhood at a time. That strategy, as we all now know, is incredibly manpower intensive. Rather than allow for a drawdown of our forces, it required an increase. And thus Rumsfeld was asked to resign, and thus The Surge was born.
On the one hand, Casey and Rumsfeld were clearly wrong. Because of some of the earlier decisions made by Rumsfeld and his team, Iraq had already spiraled out of control. Hiding in our bases and hoping that things would improve on their own was simply not going to work, particularly not when there was a group of foreign fighters (AQI) who hoped to use violence and chaos to draw us deeper into the quagmire than we already were. Because there was no Iraqi Army nor any functioning central government, the Casey and Rumsfeld strategy did little more than create an enormous security vacuum, one in which both a homegrown insurgency and foreign-led terror organizations could grow.
On the other hand, the problem with the Petraeus strategy, as I see it at least, is that thanks to many of the mistakes that were made in the first few years of the campaign, there is not a single "enemy" in Iraq that we can defeat. Counterinsurgency strategy assumes that a single enemy and a single state, but in Iraq there is neither. There are numerous enemies, and worse, few friends, and many of the people we have now aligned ourselves with are in no objective sense friends in any other way than convenience. Sadr's forces are "the enemy," and yet of all of the groups in Iraq it is they who are most clearly Iraqi nationalists. Maliki's forces, the "Iraqi Army" and police forces, by contrast, are more closely aligned with Iran than virtually any other group in Iraq, and yet it is on their side that we have decided to fight. Tactically, The Surge has been at least a partial success, but strategically we are as lost as we've ever been.
But the Petraeus' strategy is nevertheless appealing because it creates the illusion of policy coherence. We now have goals, and they are goals that sound good. We will work proactively with the Iraqis to decrease violence, and then use the improved security situation as a catalyst for political reconciliation. Given that most average Iraqis want nothing more than to live their lives in peace, the first part is at least to some extent possible, and more importantly it is something that our Army and Marines know how to do. Rather than reacting to events, this strategy is proactive, and if there's one thing Americans like, its action. So it sounds good, yes, but....
The sad thing is that if this approach had been taken 3 or 4 years ago, there's a chance it might have worked. No guarantees, of course, but it might have been possible. Before the second battle for Fallujah, before the bombing of the Samarra mosque, and before the execution of Saddam Hussein, it might have been possibly to get things under control in a way that allowed for some small moves towards political reconciliation. It would have always been a long shot, but the odds would have been far better then than they are now.
Now, I fear, it is simply too late. Chaos and violence serve the needs of far too many different groups, and until they change their minds there is not much for us to do beyond referee the conflict. And although I understand why some think this is a role we now must play, I do not see how doing this, with all of the various costs it will entail, is in either our short or long-term interest as a nation. We have unleashed hell on Iraq, and no matter how badly we might wish to make up for this, we must accept the painful truth that we cannot.
One last point and then I will let this go for now. Whenever I write on this subject, one of the most frequent criticisms I hear is that I am ignoring the moral implication of the decision to withdraw. In its most basic form, the argument is something along the lines of Gen. Powell's Pottery Barn dictum: we broke it, so now we own it. If we leave, violence, terror, and possibly genocide will sweep across Iraq. We have, these people argue, a moral obligation to prevent that.
In the past, I have responded by arguing that this is why this war should never have been fought in the first place, and although I still believe that to be true, it does nothing to move the debate forward. So instead, let me focus on the future. There, my response is two-fold:
First, violence, terror, and genocide have already swept across Iraq, and our presence there did very little to stop it. The wave of sectarian violence that swept across Iraq in 2007, for example, wasn't random or haphazard. It was a campaign of violence designed to create ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods, and by in large it succeeded. With several hundred thousand more soldiers, perhaps we could have stopped this, but we did not. Those worst case scenarios have already played out, and they did so despite the presence of US forces. Will a second wave of terror and violence sweep across Iraq should we carefully withdraw? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. We simply do not and cannot know. We do not know what will happen if we stay, nor do we know what will happen if we go. What we do know, however, is that in the past our presence did not prevent, and often caused, immense suffering for average Iraqis. In weighing the moral costs of withdrawal, it seems as if that fact is almost universally ignored.
Second, given that our presence in Iraq has not stopped these awful things from happening, I see little reason to be certain that things will get much worse should we announce our plans to withdraw. Things might get worse, yes, but it is also possible that things will get better. Perhaps without US troops there serving simultaneously as both a target and a conflict referee, perhaps the Iraqis will finally be forced to reach some basic form of reconciliation and political agreement. With us in Iraq, a low level campaign of violence against your enemies - see, for example, these past few weeks in Basra - makes sense because should things get out of control, under the moral imperative version of our continued presence the US military inevitably be forced to intervene. Knowing that the US would step up to his defense if necessary, for example, al Maliki was likely far more willing to take risks in Basra than he would have otherwise been. Thus, I think it is entirely possible that our presence makes violence and terror more likely, not less. And if that is true, then the moral argument is at best impossible to settle, and at worst (for those arguing that it means we must stay) is flipped on its head.
Ultimately, I think it comes down to this: Either the Iraqis want peace and reconciliation, and are willing to do the hard work necessary to achieve it, or they do. If they do, then it is highly likely that a carefully planned and executed withdrawal will act as a motivating force for such efforts, a new reality that forces them to make the hard compromises and decisions necessary to make some version of their country or countries work. But if they do not, or if there is a sufficiently large minority hell bent on ensuring that such efforts fail, then there is nothing we can do, no matter how long we stay, to hold Iraq together. Add to that the fact that we know large majorities of Iraqis in poll after poll say that they want us to leave, and I do not see it makes any sense - strategic, tactical, moral, or otherwise - for us to stay.
Iraq does not belong to us. It cannot, should not, and will not. Not now, and not ever. On balance, staying there does not make us safer, and it is likely to make our security situation far worse. End this thing. Do it as carefully as we were careless getting in, but end it. Not next year. Not tomorrow. Today.
UPDATE: Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin has some related thoughts that are worth appending here:
The reality is that war is a negative sum game. Invariably, both sides lose relative to an immediate agreement on the final peace terms. In the vast majority of cases, both sides are worse off than if the war had never been fought. With nearly equal certainty, anyone who passes up an opportunity for an early ceasefire will regret it in the end.
The negative sum nature of war is most obvious when, as predictably happened in Basra, the stage of bloody stalemate is reached. At this point, both sides typically want to come out of the fight with some gains to show for the exercise. Fighting on, they sometimes achieve this and sometimes do not. But the losses incurred in the process ensure that both sides are worse than they would have been with an immediate ceasefire.In this respect, Basra is a microcosm of the whole Iraq war. Six years after the push for war began just about everyone is far worse off than if they had agreed to peace on the most humiliating terms imaginable. Saddam Hussein and most of the Baathist apparatus are mostly dead or one the run, and many of the survivors are glad to take a pittance from the US occupiers. The Shi'ites, despite gaining political power, have suffered more in the years of conflict (with the Americans, the Sunni and among themselves) than they ever did under Saddam. The Americans and British have poured endless blood and treasure into Iraq to no avail and both Bush and Blair are utterly discredited. Even the Kurds have overreached themselves and brought the Turkish army into their territory. The only winners have been the Iranians, as interested bystanders, and merchants of death like Halliburton and Blackwater, and even these may yet end up worse off.
Coming back to McCain's historical claim, it's easy to point to cases, like the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971 where the winning side declared a unilateral ceasefire. More pertinently, perhaps, governments fighting insurgent movements have frequently followed up successful military campaigns with unilateral ceasefires and amnesty campaigns, aimed at reintegrating the rebels into civil society. If the government forces had achieved their main goals in Basra within the three-day period initially suggested, it would have made good sense for Maliki to follow this example.
Even more relevant to the argument presented here are the many cases when initial success in war could have been followed by a ceasefire and a peace deal on favorable terms, but was not, with disaster as the common aftermath. Two examples:
At the end of 1792, the French revolutionary armies were everywhere victorious against the invaders of the First Coalition. Against the arguments of Robespierre and others, the government pressed on, converting a defensive war into one of unlimited expansion. When the fighting ended more than 20 years later, with the restored Bourbons replacing the Bonaparte dictatorship, the millions of dead included nearly all of those who had made the decision to go to war.
After four months of fighting in Korea, the US/UN forces threw back the North Korean invaders. A peace at least as favorable as the status quo ante could easily have been imposed unilaterally at this point. Instead MacArthur invaded the North and brought the Chinese into the war, resulting in one of the worst defeats ever suffered by US forces (until the greater disaster of Vietnam). Three years and countless deaths later, the prewar boundary was restored.
Finally reaching a conclusion, the central error in pro-war thinking is the belief that every war has a winner. On the contrary, in war there are far more losers than winners, and in most cases there are no real winners apart from the merchants of death mentioned above. Even those who seem to win have usually sowed the seeds of future disaster. The only sane response to war is to end it as soon as possible.[1]
fn1. Obviously, WWII will be raised as an exception. If a powerful state is controlled by a madman bent on war, there is nothing that can be done to avoid it. But I'm more and more convinced that arguments for war, or about the conduct of war, that rely solely on WWII should come under the same embargo as other arguments that invoke Hitler and Nazism.
UPDATE II: And this from Joe Klein:
I can't emphasize this enough: the most important question now is whether we take the fateful step of injecting ourselves into the intra-Shi'ite fight. If we oppose Sadr, we are siding against arguably the most popular leader in Iraq--who is no friend of ours, to be sure, but also more independent of Iran than ISCI is. The bloodshed inherent in such a decision would be dreadful.
I suspect that there's plenty bloodshed to come between the Sadr and Hakim factions, and between the Sunnis and Shi'ites...and perhaps between the Kurds and the Arabs (not to mentionthe Turks). The true nature of the actual government of Iraq--as opposed to the Maliki farce--will emerge from the result of those contests. If we and the Iraqis are lucky, the result will be decided in the local elections next October and the national elections of 2009. We also shouldn't kid ourselves: there won't be a reliable Iraqi Army until there's an reliable Iraqi government that commands the respect and affiliation of all sides.That is something the Iraqis must, by definition, accomplish without us. The only way out of Iraq is to make it clear to all sides that we're not going to "babysit a civil war" as Hillary Clinton says. This--not timetables or metrics for the training of Iraqi forces--is what we need to hear about from Petraeus and Crocker. They have been the most accomplished general and ambassador that we have sent into this mess. They are to be congratulated for the transformation of al-Anbar province into a peaceful place, the largely successful campaign against Al Qaeda in Iraq and the success in the suppression of violence in many Baghdad neighborhoods, through the use of Counterinsurgency tactics.
But now the Congress has to suss out whether Petraeus and Crocker are going to start getting us out of Iraq--or drag us deeper into the mess by taking sides in the Shi'ite civil war.
Congress doesn't have to "suss" this out. Congress needs to stop following and start leading. Leave the "sussing" to someone else, OK?
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