The Gamble_ General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq Part 7

After Pelosi and Murtha left the room, Othman recalled, Maliki, his face pale, turned to Othman and said, "Now I understand what President Bush is going through."

He had first met Petraeus at the end of the invasion of Iraq in April 2003, as the general was coming out of a men's room at the Mosul airport. Othman, not seeing any insignia, a.s.sumed that the small, thin, smiling man in a plain brown T-s.h.i.+rt was like him, a civilian. Petraeus is always searching for new insights, especially from people with different perspectives. They began to talk about Iraq. Othman soon found himself a.s.signed to be Petraeus's interpreter. He also came to admire this unusual general. One day he and Petraeus were in Mosul and encountered a man and a woman carrying a baby, with a daughter walking alongside. They looked hungry. Petraeus took out $3 in cash. The woman hesitated, and Othman urged her, "Take it-for the children." A week later the woman saw Othman again and approached him to say, "We ate meat for the first time in two years."

Petraeus and Othman stayed in touch while the general was at Leavenworth developing the counterinsurgency manual. After Petraeus was picked to be the top commander in Iraq, he asked Othman to work with him again. A member of Casey's staff called Mansoor, Petraeus's executive officer, to try to block the move. "We recommend highly you don't take him," the Casey man said. Asked about this in an interview, Othman said there had been some bad blood between him and the staffer. Mansoor, knowing how close Othman was to Petraeus, politely thanked them for their interest. In 2007-8, Othman's most important task was to be Petraeus's personal liaison with the Iraqi government. "We use Sadi a great deal," Petraeus said, "to talk to the prime minister, the minister of finance, to talk to a number of different ministers with whom he has very close personal relations.h.i.+ps at this point." There was one major difference beween the two men: Petraeus was no schmoozer while Othman reveled in the endless hours of chatting with Iraqi officials. "When we talk to Sadi Othman and General Petraeus, we are talking to twins," said Rafi al-a.s.sawi, a Sunni who became a deputy prime minister in 2008. "Talking to one, the message would always get to the other."

EMMA SKY.

As close at Othman was to Petraeus, Emma Sky grew even closer to Odierno, becoming a kind of physical shadow to him. The birdlike British woman made a dramatic contrast to the hulking American general, both physically and intellectually. "People always thought we were funny, this huge man and this tiny British woman who went everywhere with him," she recalled.

It was a sign of how much Odierno had changed that he sensed he needed someone like Sky to second-guess him in Iraq. He had seen her in action in Iraq in 2003-4, when he was commanding the 4th Infantry Division, and she was advising the Americans on Kurdish issues in the north. Odierno asked her to come back to Iraq to be his political adviser, but she resisted. She had opposed the war, and she didn't have a lot of time for armies, especially the American one. "From my perspective, the military were the bad guys," she said one still, oven-hot summer evening, sitting on the balcony of a palace and gazing out over the darkness of one of Saddam's shallow artificial lakes. "I was about human security, not state security." A specialist in third world economics who speaks Arabic and Hebrew, she found the military approach jarring. "I come from a world where it is, first, do no harm. When you work in development, you are very conscious of that." By contrast, she said, "The military comes in like a great cras.h.i.+ng beast." (One well-connected U.S. Army officer said he believes that Sky works for British intelligence. Upon being asked about this, she laughed.) She surprised herself by taking the job. "Odierno, by bringing me in, has probably brought in the most opposite person he could find." She did it because she thought it was time to get the United States out of Iraq and wanted to see it happen in the least damaging way possible. "Can we exit with some dignity? Can we have relations with Iraq for a generation to come? All this is still to be decided. There is still a lot we can get from this."

Aware of the reputation Odierno carried from his time in command of the 4th Infantry Division, she agreed to join his staff on one condition, that if she ever witnessed him condoning a human rights violation, she would report him to the Hague-where the International Criminal Court prosecutes war crimes. Odierno agreed, probably a bit amused. She only learned later that the United States isn't a signatory to the statute creating the court, which it maintains doesn't have jurisdiction over U.S. soldiers or other U.S. citizens.

To her surprise, she would become one of Odierno's biggest fans. "He is the only person I would come back to Iraq for," she maintained. "I'd follow him to the end of the world. Usually when you work closely with people, you see the warts and all, and your opinion goes down. My opinion of him has gone way up."

She may have been soft on Odierno, but she retained her sharpness about the rest of the world. Asked in an interview early in 2007 about Iraqi politics, she interrupted to redefine the question. "It's not a government, it's a failing state."

She still could blow the whistle on the U.S. military, but now she did so from inside the tent. In the spring of 2007, she was in a "battle update a.s.sessment" as an officer showed gun camera footage of an attack helicopter surprising insurgents emplacing a bomb and blowing them to bits. This was red meat for officers who had spent years being attacked by anonymous roadside bombers. "They all loved it," she recalled, so much so that the officers at the briefing began talking about taking the decla.s.sification steps necessary to release the imagery to the media. "We should get this out, get it on TV," they commented.

Sky was shocked. "These are American versions of jihadi videos," she interrupted angrily, knowing they would be taken aback by the comparison to decapitation photographs and videos posted on the Internet. "Is this the image you want to present to the world? This is America killing people. Yes, it has to happen. But let's not glorify it." Furious, she stood up and strode out of the conference room.

After she left, Odierno discussed her comments with his corps sergeant major, the highest-ranking enlisted man for tens of thousands of troops. Half an hour later, the sergeant major walked into her office. "Ma'am, you're right," he said, and then hugged her.

Yet the two still had their differences. At one point in 2007, Odierno called Sky into his office and told her she was being overly pessimistic. "I need you on this!" he said, half arguing and half imploring.

"I never liked the idea of this war anyway," Sky muttered.

At another point, she recalled, she was so tense and frustrated by one issue-she said she couldn't remember what it was-that she decided to quit. Like Odierno, but unlike Petraeus, she tended to show emotion and then get over it. She stayed.

Once, when Petraeus pointed out in a meeting to Odierno that Sky, Odierno's political adviser, made a certain argument, Odierno responded, "She's not my adviser, she's my insurgent."

To her astonishment, in the course of 2007 she would also become an admirer of the U.S. military. "I love them," she said. She added provocatively that she thinks the military is better than the country it protects. "That's the way I feel about it-America doesn't deserve its military."

The willingness of American commanders to ask for her advice consistently surprised her. "The Brits came in with more experience in this sort of operation, but over the years I think the American Army has learned a lot more. I mean, there's no way the British army would ask someone like me to come along." She also came to appreciate the meritocracy of American culture: "What I found with the Americans is they always gave me a place at the table. Once there, it was up to me to prove myself. With the British military, it's always a fight to get a seat at the table-I'm female, I'm not military, I'm a tree-hugger."

TIME WAITS FOR NO ONE.

Looming over this new American team and its revamped approach was the nagging question: Was it simply too late? "The one resource that Petraeus needs, and lacks, is time," Col. Holshek, the civil affairs veteran of Iraq, said as the surge began in the spring of 2007.

Fastabend agreed. "The first thing you need," he told Petraeus, "is more time on the clock." And he would get that, Fastabend continued, only if when he went before Congress later that year he was able to show clearly understandable successes, like sharply lower violence in some parts of the country. "It can't be a 1.5 percent improvement in ministerial capacity and blah blah blah." In another Army connection, Fastabend years earlier had served as Jack Keane's executive officer.

There were many expert observers who thought the U.S. effort already was out of time. After all, this argument went, the American people had voted against the war in November 2006, and the task now was to wind it up. "It's too late to make a difference in Iraq," said Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University expert on terrorism who had advised the U.S. government on the war effort.

Petraeus recognized the pressing need for more time. "The Was.h.i.+ngton clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock," he said. "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 Was.h.i.+ngton clock." But many of Petraeus's critics didn't seem to recognize what he needed that time for: not to bring the war to a close, which everyone involved thought would take years, but simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it. That would be the real war goal for 2007.

GAMBLING ON A "s.h.i.+TTY HAND"

(Spring and Summer 2007)

We were dealt a really s.h.i.+tty hand, but we've played it to the best of our ability," Col. Peter Mansoor said as he looked back to the troubled beginning of 2007.

They had deplaned into a small civil war, and the streets of Baghdad seemed to grow bloodier by the day. On January 16, two bombs were detonated during the after-school rush at a Baghdad university, killing at least 60 people. Six days later, two more bombs devastated a street bazaar, killing at least 79 more. On January 30, 60 s.h.i.+tes were killed in multiple attacks across central Iraq. "We had U.S. Air Force F-16s engaging the enemy on Haifa Street, twelve hundred meters from the emba.s.sy," recalled Kilcullen.

It is easy to forget now, after it has become conventional wisdom that the surge worked, at least tactically, how audacious a venture it was. Almost all military experts agreed with the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the U.S. troop presence was an irritant, so more troops likely would only worsen the situation. The liberal position was to withdraw as soon as possible. Hawkish centrists advocated getting smaller and staying longer. Escalation of the sort that was chosen was a radical position advocated by a small minority. At best, it was unclear what a relatively small number of additional troops might do. At worst, many thought, it simply was reinforcing failure-a cardinal sin in military operations. The consensus seemed to be that at best it probably was just delaying a horrific civil war that unfortunately seemed inevitable.

But all that pessimism had one positive side effect, because it created the conditions for strategic surprise-which as Clausewitz, the great Prussian philosopher of war, observes, is the most important and effective kind of surprise. After four years in Iraq, no one seemed to expect the Americans to develop a way to operate differently and more effectively.

The s.h.i.+ft was all the more unexpected because it came as President Bush was politically cornered. Usually, "sustained strategic boldness . . . requires a solid foundation of popular support," Oxford historian Piers Mackesy observed in The War for America, The War for America, his cla.s.sic study of how the British managed to lose the American Revolutionary War in 1781 after appearing to have won it just a year earlier. But in agreeing to a troop escalation, Bush was operating from a position of extraordinary political weakness. Not only was he deeply unpopular, he had reversed course at a time when it seemed that stubborn persistence was his sole virtue as a leader: After years of saying he would heed the advice of his military, Bush had split with the overwhelming view of his top military leaders, from the Pentagon to Central Command to the top general in Iraq. his cla.s.sic study of how the British managed to lose the American Revolutionary War in 1781 after appearing to have won it just a year earlier. But in agreeing to a troop escalation, Bush was operating from a position of extraordinary political weakness. Not only was he deeply unpopular, he had reversed course at a time when it seemed that stubborn persistence was his sole virtue as a leader: After years of saying he would heed the advice of his military, Bush had split with the overwhelming view of his top military leaders, from the Pentagon to Central Command to the top general in Iraq.

What probably saved Bush was his political opposition-a splintered and confused Democratic Party. The Democrats were close to paralyzed by the Iraq war, wanting to gratify their supporters by questioning it but not wanting to be responsible for the outcome. The major weapon available to them was to cut off funding for the war-but to do that would make them appear antimilitary, which would carry a political price they were not willing to pay. Put bluntly, they wanted to appear to be doing something about it without really doing anything. So, while the House of Representatives voted 246 to 182 in February 2007 to oppose the surge, it wasn't prepared to follow up that nonbinding resolution with action. This empty-handed approach would prove to be a huge political advantage to Bush, enabling him to launch and continue the counteroffensive.

PETRAEUS AMID THE PESSIMISTS.

In news photographs, they are the people on the side, escorting a top official or leaning in to interpret during the photo shoot. In one such image that ran on the front page of the New York Times, New York Times, two Petraeus aides, Col. Mike Bell and Sadi Othman, flank the Iraqi prime minister and the American secretary of state. These were the people who studied operations, wrote critiques, and drafted papers, the plumbers and mechanics of policy. As 2007 began, few of them believed the surge would succeed. "When I first got here in January," said Emma Sky, her "sense was, the war was lost, how do we get out?" Nor, with her pacificistic tendencies, was she attracted to the new American strategy. "At the beginning of the surge, I felt violence begets violence. I felt sick. I felt horrible." two Petraeus aides, Col. Mike Bell and Sadi Othman, flank the Iraqi prime minister and the American secretary of state. These were the people who studied operations, wrote critiques, and drafted papers, the plumbers and mechanics of policy. As 2007 began, few of them believed the surge would succeed. "When I first got here in January," said Emma Sky, her "sense was, the war was lost, how do we get out?" Nor, with her pacificistic tendencies, was she attracted to the new American strategy. "At the beginning of the surge, I felt violence begets violence. I felt sick. I felt horrible."

Kilcullen calculated that Petraeus would achieve his goals on security but not on politics. He went on to bet that he could summarize the situation in just ten words and did: "My bottom line: good team, right strategy, possibly too late." He even had drawn up a paper to give to Petraeus if the situation fell apart. First, he advised, you will need to recognize that you have reached a decision point. Second, act on that recognition in a timely fas.h.i.+on. Third, "credibly communicate" your a.s.sessment to the president and other Was.h.i.+ngton decision makers.

Nor did Capt. Liz McNally, the eager young Rhodes Scholar who was drafting Petraeus's speeches, think they were on the path to success in Iraq: "Even given the perfect amount of resources, I don't know if what we're trying to do is possible," she confessed one day in the spring.

Hearing that Petraeus might be given command in Iraq, Sadi Othman prayed that he wouldn't take it, "because the situation was very bad, and because I care about my friend Dave Petraeus." The stakes were huge, Othman believed, and the odds against success nearly overwhelming. "Let me put it this way, it is very hard to be very optimistic," he said one day in May 2007, as the casualties continued to rise. "Having said that, I strangely believe it is doable. If, G.o.d forbid, Iraq falls apart, I think it will impact the entire region in an unbelievable way. If the problems aren't solved, I believe the consequence is the whole region up in flames." It was a chilling thought. He folded his hands in his lap.

One day early in 2007, Col. Bill Rapp, Petraeus's closest adviser, was in his office watching CNN's Michael Ware, a reporter he respected, discuss the state of the war. The correspondent gloomily said to his colleague Anderson Cooper that "it just doesn't seem that there's any road forward that does not involve the spilling of so much innocent blood or the abandonment of so many of the principles that we of the West hold dear."

Col. Rapp, who was already worried, "trying to figure if we needed to get out of Dodge," was so struck by the comment that he wrote it down. Then he picked up a marker and copied it onto the big erasable white board he used with his subordinates to brainstorm. "I wrote it down as a challenge to myself and the CIG [commander's initiatives group] to help the CG [commanding general] find an alternative. Those days were fairly bleak."

Their job as the brains behind Petraeus, he instructed them, was "to prove Mick Ware wrong." Rapp's deputy, Charlie Miller, arriving in Iraq in February 2007, estimated the chances of success at 10 to 15 percent. By May he considered himself a relative optimist and raised his guess to 35 to 40 percent. It was better but still far from a safe bet.

Soon after he arrived in Iraq, Lt. Col. James Crider, commander of a cavalry squadron deploying in Baghdad, was pleasantly surprised to run into Col. Mansoor, whom he had known and admired for years.

"Hey, sir, I'm pretty optimistic, I think it's gonna work," Crider said.

"I'm not," Mansoor replied, gray-haired and expressionless behind his gla.s.ses. "I'm not sure it's gonna work. In fact, the odds are against it."

It was a sobering, even frightening exchange for Crider, who had orders to take his unit into one of Baghdad's toughest neighborhoods. He thought to himself, "This is a guy I know, and he's General Petraeus's executive officer, and he's not sure it's gonna work?"

One of the few relative optimists around Petraeus was a senior intelligence official who would be interviewed only on the condition that he not be identified by name. "I thought we had a real chance of making it work," he remembered. At the American military headquarters in Iraq, he said, "A lot of people were thinking ten percent, fifteen percent." He was at 40 percent, he said.

Despite the odds, they were going to try, especially because they didn't see a lot of good alternatives. Just because the odds were bad didn't mean there was a better choice available. There was in this period a sense of being dutiful: They had to cast a cold eye on the blunders of their predecessors while trying to be positive about their own chances. They had to risk their lives and see comrades bleed and die, all the while believing it was likely their efforts would fall short. Mixed with that ambivalence was a determination to at least try, to give it one more shot and at least salvage as much as possible.

Even the princ.i.p.als harbored profound doubts. "I didn't know," said Amba.s.sador Crocker. "I thought it could work. If I had thought it absolutely would not I would be insane to come out here . . . I will not be one of those who said I saw this all along. I thought probably it was a long shot, given the levels of violence that had prevailed and the damage they had done to the political and social fabric."

Odierno also harbored doubts but was at the optimistic end of the scale. "I thought about seventy-thirty, it would work," he said, looking back. He didn't think five brigades were enough, but figured that by adding in a Marine battalion, an aviation unit, and various Special Operations units, he could get close to what he needed.

Petraeus, the apotheosis of "can-do"-ism, may have been alone in holding that the new mission was entirely plausible. "I didn't consider it a Hail Mary pa.s.s," he insisted one day that spring. He saw a series of tasks that needed to be performed, and thought they could be done with some additional troops, some reasonable improvement in the quality of Iraqi forces, and some application of the theory of counterinsurgency. At the ceremony at which he took command, he gave a short talk in which he a.s.sured his audience, "this mission is doable." But a year later he would concede that part of the role of a commander is to stay publicly optimistic.

"THE MESOPOTAMIAN STAMPEDE"

Petraeus's chosen image of his task was a Frederic Remington oil painting called The Stampede, The Stampede, a 1908 work that depicts a nineteenth-century cowboy riding for his life as a herd of cattle panics under a breaking thunderstorm. The cowboy's own pony is wild-eyed with fear, all four hooves clawing in the air. Next to the cowboy, cattle with their heads and horns down are driving as hard as they can away from the storm, which already is beginning to douse them with sheets of rain. The sky behind the cowboy and the herd is blackening. One long white streak of lightning is striking near another cowboy and cows in the misty distance, which is murky, a green and black haze of rain and storm. Everything about the painting conveys the threat of chaotic danger. If the cowboy's pony trips, or throws him to the stony ground, the unfortunate man will be ripped by the horns of the charging cows or pulped by their heavy hooves. a 1908 work that depicts a nineteenth-century cowboy riding for his life as a herd of cattle panics under a breaking thunderstorm. The cowboy's own pony is wild-eyed with fear, all four hooves clawing in the air. Next to the cowboy, cattle with their heads and horns down are driving as hard as they can away from the storm, which already is beginning to douse them with sheets of rain. The sky behind the cowboy and the herd is blackening. One long white streak of lightning is striking near another cowboy and cows in the misty distance, which is murky, a green and black haze of rain and storm. Everything about the painting conveys the threat of chaotic danger. If the cowboy's pony trips, or throws him to the stony ground, the unfortunate man will be ripped by the horns of the charging cows or pulped by their heavy hooves.

Petraeus included a copy of the Remington painting in a briefing on "The Mesopotamian Stampede" he would give to members of Congress and other visiting Americans. It is "a metaphor really of the need to be comfortable with slightly chaotic circ.u.mstances," Petraeus explained, seeming a bit uneasy, perhaps because of the role the image a.s.signs Iraqis. "A stampede is not always orderly. In that particular painting the ground is rugged, the wind is howling, it's raining cats and dogs, there's lightning-and you can use the lightning as a metaphor, it could be an IED, it could be a tasker from higher headquarters, it could be some sort of political challenge in Iraq, who knows what it might be. And the concept of outriders and trail bosses-again the concept of the challenges on the trail, the idea that some issue, some cattle, some tasks, will actually get out ahead of us. They will move on their own and that's fine. We will catch up with them. But some will also fall behind and we will have to go back and round those up. That some cattle are killed along the way. There's bad guys out there, rustlers who are trying to kill us and to kill those in the cattle drive. And you can use the cattle to represent any number of different items, from the ISF-the herd is growing, they are getting stronger. There are Iraqi trail bosses out there with us, and we are gradually handing off more of the responsibility for the cattle drive to them."

He also used the painting to convey to his subordinates his notion of command. "I don't need to be hierarchical," he explained. "I want to flatten organizations. I'm comfortable with a slightly chaotic environment. I know that it's okay if some of you get out ahead of us. Some of the cattle will get out ahead and we will catch up with them. And some will fall behind and we will circle back and we won't leave them behind." He didn't show the image to Iraqis, he said. It was more useful with Americans. "We're just trying to get the cattle to Cheyenne."

Lt. Col. Nielsen, one of his aides, added that, in her view, the image is also about the limitations of high command. "A lot of it is about intent, about setting parameters, and an incredible decentralization," she said. The message, she said, is, "I can't tell you exactly what to do," because Iraq simply was too chaotic.

Petraeus adopted a posture of much lowered expectations, and as was his wont, set the tone for his entire command. One of his most striking characteristics is his ability to discern and evaluate the reality of events. That isn't as easy as it sounds, and it is especially difficult to pick out reality through the fog of war. The first and foremost task of a commander is to understand, with a steady head, the nature of the conflict in which he is engaged. In order to achieve that understanding a commander can be neither overly optimistic nor pessimistic, and especially, not subject to McClellanesque mood swings, seeing every minor victory as a triumph and every partial setback as disaster.

Even more important, Petraeus injected a new spirit into senior commanders. At his first meeting with his division and brigade commanders and senior staff members, in February, he sought to convince them they could succeed. "I was amazed with what Petraeus did," recalled Keane, who attended the meeting. "He took over a command with a sense of futility and hopelessness about it and almost overnight he changed the att.i.tude and he brought them hope and a sense that we can do this, we can succeed at this."

Crocker brought a far different self-image to his partners.h.i.+p with Petraeus. In keeping with the morose outlook that led President Bush to dub him "Mr. Suns.h.i.+ne," he joked once that he saw the general and himself as resembling the lead characters in a movie about two convicts on the run from a chain gang, "shackled" together and so forced to cooperate. He seemed to be referring to The Defiant Ones, The Defiant Ones, a 1958 film starring Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier. a 1958 film starring Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier.

Both Crocker and Petraeus had served in Iraq before but didn't know each other until early 2007, when both arrived for their current tours. Crocker's thought after their initial meeting then was, "I had just gotten very very lucky, given his ability, his drive, his experience, and his intellect."

At the emba.s.sy, Crocker began to oversee and revive a staff that Keane found lethargic. "The whole att.i.tude of the place changed" after Crocker arrived, Keane said. "They had pa.s.sion. They were taking personal risks. They were connecting with Iraqi officials."

SMALLER GOALS . . .

One of Emma Sky's fears in returning to Iraq was that she would be subjected to endless rounds of happy talk at top American headquarters, as she had on her previous tour in Iraq, when she worked in the northeast. "They say 'Camp Victory' without any sense of irony," she noted archly.

Instead she was surprised to walk into a marathon conversation among top commanders and advisers about how to lower the goals of the mission. In the course of several weeks early in 2007, she said, "We redefined success in a much more modest way as 'sustainable stability."' This was key: The grandiose goals of the past three years, of turning Iraq into a beacon of democracy that would transform the Middle East, or even of turning Iraq into a dependable ally of the United States, were quietly put on hold. Bush administration rhetoric didn't always reflect this s.h.i.+ft. But on the ground in Iraq, the new goal was simply getting to a more or less peaceful Iraq that didn't explode into a regional war or implode into a civil war.

As Odierno, Sky, and others talked into the night, hours at a time, three or four nights a week, they focused on the way that parts of the Baghdad government exercised power to further sectarian agendas, undermining the legitimacy of the entire enterprise. "It is a failed state with ungoverned s.p.a.ces in which the government is part of the problem," Sky summarized as their conclusion. In particular, they would target s.h.i.+te militiamen employed by the Ministry of Health, who among other things were killing Sunnis who sought medical care.

They also decided that they needed to reposition the U.S. government. In February, Odierno would tell his subordinate commanders to conduct "balanced operations targeting groups on both sides of the sectarian divide." That is, rather than act as an ally of one side, the s.h.i.+tes, they would recast the American role in Iraq as an arbiter between groups.

As part of that move, Odierno ordered the abandonment of the term "AIF," for "anti-Iraqi forces," an Orwellian designation that U.S. officials had given to insurgent groups, as if Americans could decide who was a real Iraqi. They also would carefully release certain leaders of insurgent groups to see if they might begin to cooperate. The message to them would be that the U.S. government recognizes their concerns, which are legitimate, and will work with you, as long as you don't use violence against us. Finally, they decided that the key indicator of progress in security was Iraqi civilian casualties, not those inflicted on the American and Iraqi militaries.

Odierno also discussed with Keane what do to about Sadr City, the Bronx-sized slum in eastern Baghdad dominated by Moqtada al-Sadr. Keane and he concluded that "we should avoid Sadr City," and try to deal with it later politically, instead of engaging in another round of block-to-block fighting in a huge neighborhood of hostile Iraqis.

They also decided that there was a hole or a gap in the middle of Iraqi society. The people had needs, especially for security, but the Iraqi government couldn't provide it, so that opening was being filled by militias. "We need to step into that gap," Odierno ordered. The way to do that, he said to his advisers, was "to get back out into Baghdad-I want to get my people out there." In effect, they had reversed the American policy of the previous three years.

In April 2007, Maj. Gen. Fastabend, Petraeus's strategic adviser, composed a twenty-page essay, "How All This Ends"-that is, the answer to the question Petraeus had posed four years earlier-that captured the revamped approach: The United States, he wrote, needed "to settle for far less than the vision that drove it to Baghdad."

... AND BIGGER RISKS.

The other shoe, Fastabend continued, was to take far bigger risks. He subt.i.tled his essay "It's Fourth and Long, Go Deep." In the essay, which isn't cla.s.sified but has been held so closely that its existence hasn't previously been disclosed, he employed the literary device of having Petraeus look back from the future-2009-to recount how he had turned around the situation in Iraq. Never one to waste a moment of his time, Petraeus kept a copy of Fastabend's essay next to the toilet in his private bathroom, taking it out occasionally to refresh his thinking.

It can end well, Fastabend explained, if the U.S. government would take more risks. But to take risks, we have to think seriously, he continued. Few anti-war critics were as scathing of the conduct of the Iraq war as are members of Petraeus's staff, such as Fastabend, his chief of strategy. "As a sole superpower, we thought we didn't have to make hard choices. We thought we could just come here, without thinking about the opportunity costs. When you just write conditions, and never have to say who does what by when-then you don't make choices and decisions. All you get is conditions: Close the border, end corruption, change the culture."

It was time, he told Petraeus, "to take some risk-not the ones you're comfortable with, but gut-wrenching, hold-your-b.a.l.l.s risks."

He recommended six major departures: Get rid of extremists by working with them. We had been fighting them for four years, he said, "whacking and stacking them"-but with little to show for all that blood, sweat, and tears. Maybe, he suggested, it was time to replicate the example of Ramadi and cut some deals with tribal leaders and other insurgent organizations. Tell them they aren't militias, they are neighborhood watches. Parole insurgents to them. "Commanders will object-'catch and release.' There will be letters from mothers and fathers-'They killed Americans.' You'll have to take some heat. Make a choice!" Fastabend even called for large-scale detainee releases, which would be considered but eventually was shelved. "Petraeus was comfortable with it, but division commanders weren't," Col. Rapp explained. Petraeus agreed to drop the idea because of their concern that it would damage troop morale. But he would go on to implement the idea of local cease-fires with former insurgents. Another major risk Fastabend recommended taking was alienating our own allies, the s.h.i.+te-dominated central government. Push Maliki hard. And don't let him shut down the deals with former insurgents. Like Odierno, Petraeus was ready to go further there. In the following months, American commanders would sign up tens of thousands of former insurgents to become local militias, first called Concerned Local Citizens and then later, Sons of Iraq. Third was reaching out to Moqtada al-Sadr. Part of these negotiations were even about whether to talk to each other. "They said, we want a date for your exit," recalled Kilcullen, who was briefed on the initial exchange with Sadr's representative.

"We can't do that," the Americans replied.

"Well, forget it then," a Sadrist politician replied.

But the Americans were curious. "What date did you have in mind?"

"Well, December 2012," the Sadrist said. That brought private grins to the Americans-promising to stay in Iraq until then was a position that would have drawn protests from many in the U.S. Congress.

Fourth was beginning to emphasize reconciliation at the local level, among Sunis and s.h.i.+tes in towns and provinces, rather than a deal among national leaders, which had hit a dead end. Petraeus and Crocker would go along with this. Also, he argued, put the brakes on the transition to Iraq control, stopping the cycle of rus.h.i.+ng to failure. "Casey was all about transition," said Fastabend. "Petraeus has slowed it down." One risk that surprised Fastabend was how dangerous it was to deal with the Iraqi government. While scheduling appointments, Americans had to worry about whether the government official who was being met would tip off the insurgents to set up an ambush.

Fastabend was even more bothered by how the government had reacted a few weeks earlier to the suicide bombing of the Iraqi parliament, an incident that killed eight in the worst breach of security the Green Zone had ever suffered. One Iraqi official told him, "We'll show them, we'll meet tomorrow."

"Well, I was just over there, and it needs to be cleaned up," Fastabend responded.

"Oh yeah, it will be," anotehr Iraqi promised.

He went back the Council of Representatives building the next morning just to check. It was still a b.l.o.o.d.y mess. "The motherf.u.c.ker's legs were still on the floor, and parts of him were all over the walls," he recalled. He called one of the Iraqis: "You think you're going to walk the press through here in twenty minutes?"

Finally, Fastabend was mulling something that was politically explosive back home. "I think you announce a withdrawal schedule." Moqtada al-Sadr couldn't live with a big U.S. force in Iraq, which he deemed an occupation. But maybe, Fastabend calculated, he'd want a small presence, of 5 brigades, or perhaps 35,000 troops, just to keep him safe from the Sunnis. "Some people say he wouldn't accept it. I say, 'Take a risk."' He explained: "So we say to him, we'll give you a timetable. Maybe come down to twelve [brigade combat teams] by the end of 2008, and five by a year later."

His bottom line: "If this is the decisive struggle of our time-be decisive." Fastabend didn't think he was asking too much. "Considering that the alternative is getting chased out of here, it doesn't seem that audacious to me." Fastabend didn't think he was asking too much. "Considering that the alternative is getting chased out of here, it doesn't seem that audacious to me."

There are two kinds of plans, he explained-those that fail and those that just might work. "If we fail, we are getting ready for a pretty major civil war, leading to a regional war. If things work, we are in an accommodation phase" that might lead to a preserved Iraq. So, he said, play according to the stakes.

Fastabend was correctly pointing to a major flaw in the American approach in the war from 2003 to 2006. For years, U.S. commanders had tended to seek strategic gains-that is, winning the war-without taking tactical risks. They ventured little and so gained less. By making the protection of their own troops a top priority, and by having them live mainly on big bases and only patrol neighborhoods once or twice a day or night, they had wasted precious time and ceded vital terrain to the enemy. Also, their priorities undercut any thought of making the protection of Iraqi civilians their mission. That was literally seen as someone else's job-Iraq soldiers and police.

Capt. McNally, who studied the Fastabend's essay, concluded that its core message was "It's put up or shut up time." The way forward it recommended, she explained, was, "Take risks. Otherwise, we just keep going along, and we lose six soldiers once a week when the Strykers [wheeled armored personnel carriers] get blown up."

One risk Fastabend didn't mention in his essay was the internal one Petraeus was taking on as he clashed with his immediate superior, Adm. William Fallon, who had succeeded Abizaid as chief of the Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. Petraeus was determined to speak his mind, leading to what would amount to a running feud with Fallon, his ostensible boss.

A FOUNDATION FOR STRATEGY.

It is axiomatic that good tactics can't fix a bad strategy, but that a good strategy tends to fix bad tactics, because the inappropriateness of those individual actions becomes self-evident when seen against the larger scheme. For example, in a mission where the top priority explicitly is protecting the people, there would be no excuse for an incident like Haditha.

The biggest single strategic change in Iraq in 2007, the one that preceded all others and enabled them, may also have been the least noticed one: a new sobriety in the mind-set of the U.S. military. It wasn't just the Bush administration that had taken years to face reality in Iraq. The military also was slow to learn. McMaster's successful campaign in Tall Afar in late 2005, for example, seemed to be largely ignored by top commanders, or dismissed as irrelevant. Despite the attention given to Tall Afar by the media, there seemed to be no concerted effort in the Army to discern if the success there might be replicated elsewhere. By the beginning of 2007, though, the U.S. military had been fighting in Iraq longer than it fought in World War II. It had been flummoxed and humbled by its struggle in the Land Between the Rivers, trying nearly everything in its toolbox of conventional methods, and not finding much that promised a successful outcome. Finally, it was ready to try something new.

It had to come a long way. In the feel-good days after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before 9/11, and even for some time after, when the U.S. military was the armed wing of "the sole superpower," Pentagon officials liked to talk about "rapid decisive operations." That was a term for, as one 2003 study done at the Army's School of Advanced Military Studies put it, the devastating c.u.mulative effect of "dominant maneuver, precision engagement and information operations." The technocentric notion behind it was that U.S. forces, taking advantage of advances in sensors, communications, computer technology, and long-range weaponry and precision logistics, all areas in which it excelled, would fight so quickly and adeptly that the enemy would never have a chance to catch up and understand what was happening. Blinded, confused, and overwhelmed, the enemy's will would break, U.S. forces would triumph, and everyone would live happily ever after. "We need rapidly deployable, fully integrated joint forces capable of reaching distant theaters quickly and working with our air and sea forces to strike adversaries swiftly, successfully, and with devastating effect," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in January 2002. Thus, he continued, we would possess "the option for one ma.s.sive counteroffensive to occupy an aggressor's capital and replace the regime."

One of the people in the audience that day was Gen. Tommy Franks, then the chief of the U.S. Central Command, and 14 months later the commander of U.S. forces invading Iraq. The "rapid decisive operations" approach culminated in Franks's plan for going into Iraq, in which he sought to subst.i.tute speed for control. "Speed kills" became his mantra, repeated endlessly to his subordinates. But as U.S. forces found after they raced from Kuwait into Baghdad, speed could temporarily subst.i.tute for ma.s.s in military operations but wasn't the same as control. Once the Americans got to the capital, they stopped moving. Lacking both ma.s.s and velocity, they soon lost control of the situation.

Col. McMaster would argue later that the very concept of rapid decisive operations had hamstrung American commanders as they entered the country, because it had "artificially divorced war from its political, human, and psychological dimensions. So, if flexibility hinges on a realistic estimate of the situation going into a complex situation, we were behind at the outset." It would only be after American commanders and strategists began paying attention to the most basic human elements-tribes, blood feuds, and fights over water, money, and women-that they would begin to understand the war they were in, which Clausewitz maintains is the first and most important task of the military leader.

"Our mindset was not to kill, it was to win," recalled Lt. John Burns, who led a scout platoon in Baghdad during the Petraeus counteroffensive. "We constantly evaluated our situation and made certain we were fighting the war we had and not necessarily the one we wanted."

But that sort of seasoned understanding would come only after four years of struggle that more often was counterproductive than not. As the war for Iraq began in earnest in the summer and fall of 2003, U.S. commanders, surprised by the intensity and duration of the resistance to their presence, emphasized capturing and killing their enemies. But every time they captured key leaders, more seemed to spring up. By 2007 the military had realized that this approach was not leading toward success. "I think if the last four years in Iraq show anything, it's that you can't get by on brute force alone, and our generals should understand that by now," Col. Mansoor, Petraeus's executive officer, said one day in Baghdad late in 2007.

Under Petraeus, many did indeed get it. "You can't kill your way out of this kind of war," said Lt. Gen. James Dubik, in a comment that many repeated that year.

In remaking itself in the 1970s and '80s as a blitzkrieg force, the Army may have repeated the mistakes of the German army of World War II, observed Andrew Krepinevich, the defense intellectual who wrote the seminal work on the Army's failure in Vietnam. "In World War II, the Germans were very good tactically, but they were terrible at the strategic level," he said. Thus the rebuilding of the Army during the 16 years from the fall of Saigon to the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War, rather than being new and innovative, may actually have signaled the end of an era. As retired Army Col. Bob Killebrew, a thoughtful strategic thinker, put it, "We may well look back on the '90s as the final spasm of blitzkrieg." That observation casts a new light on the two "thunder run" tank charges that the Army used to penetrate Baghdad during the invasion: They may have been not the harbinger of a new, more agile Army, but rather a last blaze of glory for the heavy conventional force, a miniature version of its glory days of 1944-45 in Europe and 1991 in Kuwait.