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PDF FormatThe War Within narrates the struggle within the White House over the decision to adopt “Clear, Hold, and Build” and then deploy the necessary forces to bring it about. The same general Jack Keane who had bemoaned the lack of an army counterinsurgency doctrine prior to the invasion played a critical role in this debate. By now retired from the Army, Keane, in conjunction with former West Point history professor Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, helped make the case for a new strategy in Iraq. The decisive moment came on December 11, 2006, when Keane, together with four other experts, briefed president Bush in the Oval Office. He told the president, “One of the most important things we have learned is that security is a necessary precondition for political and economic progress.” In this vein, he advocated the commitment of five additional army brigades—some 30,000 troops—in order to provide that security to the Iraqi people.
Keane was up against powerful opponents at every stage of the game: the Pentagon, the joint chiefs of staff, and General George Casey, the American commander on the ground in Iraq, who stated on October 25, 2006, that “I still very strongly believe that we need to continue to reduce our forces as the Iraqis continue to improve, because we need to get out of their way.” Casey’s words were music to the ears of then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, who was convinced that America “had to take its hand off the bicycle seat” and let the Iraqis fend for themselves. However, Rumsfeld promised the president that he would resign if the Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives or the Senate in the 2006 midterm elections. As it turned out, they would lose both, although the president had already decided before Election Day to give the Pentagon over to Robert Gates. Bush told Woodward that, “new people to implement the new strategy is an exclamation point on new strategy.” To push this thing forward in the right direction, Keane urged President Bush to select General David Petraeus to take command in Iraq and oversee the implementation of “Clear, Hold, and Build.” Recognizing that this was the last chance to get it right, Petraeus contradicted Bush’s assessment of the new strategy as a “double down.” Instead, he told the president, “This is all in.”
The man who took point on the new “all in” strategy is the subject of Linda Robinson’s Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq. Then-major general Petraeus had commanded the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, while I was watching on television from Fort Riley. The general, who had been a professor of mine at West Point some fifteen years before, was shadowed during the invasion by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Rick Atkinson. More than once, in helicopters and aboard armored vehicles, Atkinson heard Petraeus say to himself, “Tell me how this ends.” Petraeus knew that the invasion was the easy part of the operation. The hard part would come once the dog caught the truck he was chasing.
After the invasion, Petraeus was put in charge of the occupation of northern Iraq. He quickly landed himself in hot water for getting in front of American foreign policy by opening border crossings and invigorating economic development in Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city. Even worse in the eyes of the powers that were, Petraeus vocally opposed the decision to disband the Iraqi Army in May 2003. After leaving Mosul and returning to the United States in February 2004, he barely had time to catch his breath before he was sent back to Iraq that June to lead the Multi-National Security Transition Command, tasked with recreating an all but nonexistent Iraqi Army. He earned praise for his performance, including a Newsweek cover story entitled, “Can This Man Save Iraq?” with the clear implication that the answer was probably yes. Seventeen months later, Petraeus was sent to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in what was widely seen as the unofficial exile of a general who was attracting more media attention than was good for him.
But it proved difficult to keep Petraeus in the background. He used his position as commander of the Combined Arms Center to push for the changes he felt were necessary to make the army more effective at conducting counterinsurgency campaigns. His most important contribution was The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, published in 2006 and written in conjunction with the United States Marine Corps—and to which I was privileged to contribute. His influence on the doctrine was overwhelming. Conrad Crane, the editor-in-chief, sent Petraeus a chapter one Saturday night in the summer of 2006, when Iraq was on fire, only to have it returned with extensive edits the following morning. The horrific and worsening situation on the ground in Iraq demanded that kind of diligence. Ultimately, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual advocated an approach very different from the one the United States was unsuccessfully trying to implement. To Petraeus, security was the sine qua non of success in counterinsurgency, and he insisted that if Iraqi forces were unable to provide it, Americans would have to do so—at least until the locals were ready to take matters into their own hands.
This was the approach Petraeus put into practice in Iraq. The popular name for it is “the Surge,” but this is somewhat misleading; far more important than the number of additional troops deployed was the mission they were given, in accordance with the dictates of the new Field Manual: secure the population first. A step in this direction was the creation of seventy-six Joint Security Stations throughout Baghdad, manned by American troops and their Iraqi Army and Police counterparts. American casualties rose as the army cleared neighborhoods controlled by insurgents, but the locals gained a higher level of security, and economic and political progress soon followed.
Napoleon famously said, “All my generals are good. Give me ones who are lucky.” Petraeus was both good enough and lucky enough to take advantage of the “Sunni Awakening,” the decision of several Sunni tribes to switch sides and fight against the Iraqi branch of al-Qaida (AQI) with the support of American forces. This development, years in the making, marked a dramatic change in American policy, which had until then stubbornly ignored tribal power structures in favor of democratic processes for which Iraq was simply not ready. Petraeus had the wisdom to recognize this opportunity, and the courage to seize it.
In one of the best chapters of Tell Me How This Ends, Robinson describes how the Awakening extended from its origins in al-Anbar—Iraq’s Wild West—to Baghdad’s Ameriyah neighborhood, itself no rose garden. My West Point classmate Lieutenant Colonel Dale Kuehl, who was commanding the First Battalion-Fifth Cavalry Regiment in the area, supported Sunni leader Abu Abid when he chose to turn against AQI in late May 2007. Adversaries became allies in a vivid illustration of the classic principle, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” A platoon leader described the overnight transformation with dramatic understatement: “It was weird,” he said. Petraeus, briefed on the plan, had two instructions: “Do not let our army stop you,” and “Do not let the Iraqi government stop you.” It’s been that kind of war.
Neither the United States Army nor the Iraqi government was able to stop what eventually became the Sons of Iraq militia, which spread like wildfire across the Sunni west and center of the country. The effective end of the Sunni insurgency and the implementation of Petraeus’s Joint Security Stations eliminated the need for the Shi’ia militias that had sprung up to defend their sect against their old enemies. In 2008, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-
Maliki deployed the Iraqi Army to clear the militias from Basra and Sadr City. By the time Petraeus left Iraq in September of that year, the net result of his strategy was a decrease in violence by some 80 percent, with the lowest American casualty rates of the war.
Maliki deployed the Iraqi Army to clear the militias from Basra and Sadr City. By the time Petraeus left Iraq in September of that year, the net result of his strategy was a decrease in violence by some 80 percent, with the lowest American casualty rates of the war.
Dexter Filkins was not in Iraq during the turnaround, but he returned there this past summer to report on developments. The situation on the ground had changed so much that he didn’t recognize the place at first. I also returned to Iraq after a long absence at about the same time, and similarly struggled to comprehend the extraordinary reversal in Iraq’s fortunes. Filkins’s New York Times article, “Back in Iraq, Shattered by the Calm,” published in September, helped me believe what I had seen with my own eyes but was simply unable to process, befuddled by the contrast between my memories of a destroyed society and the reality of one that was being reborn right in front of me.
Since then, the Iraqi government has accepted a Status of Forces Agreement that mandates the departure of all American troops from Iraqi cities by June 2009 and a full withdrawal by 2011. These deadlines are roughly the same as those proposed by Senator Barack Obama during his presidential campaign. Unfortunately, they are overly optimistic. Mosul remains a combat zone where American soldiers and Iraqi policemen engage in almost daily clashes with the remnants of al-Qaida, and there is little prospect that local security forces will be capable of handling the situation on their own within six months. The same holds true on a broader scale. The Iraqi Air Force, for instance, currently possesses no jet aircraft and will not be able to control its own airspace for the better part of a decade. But there is no doubt that the peak of American involvement in Iraq is past us, and the future of the country is far brighter than I could have imagined when I left al-Anbar in 2004, when al-Qaida controlled Fallujah, or than Dexter Filkins could have dreamed during the horrendous summer of 2006.
While these three books are all of high quality, pride of place must belong to Filkins. He provides the reader with a brilliant, vivid, and unflinchingly accurate impression of an Iraq torn asunder by ethnic hatreds and crippled by flawed American policy and strategy. Speaking as someone who lived through much of what he writes about, I think his book deserves a Pulitzer Prize. Bob Woodward’s work is less intense, but it is also important and informative. It helps explain how years of inaction and dithering in Washington allowed the situation to deteriorate so badly under the leadership of a president who “spent three years in denial and then delegated a strategy review to his national security adviser.” And by painting a compelling portrait of the man who, through intelligence and sheer determination, turned a failing war around in the nick of time, Linda Robinson helps provide some hope for the reader exhausted by the missteps and tragedies of this war. Her book makes it hard to believe that Petraeus will fail to achieve the same kind of success in Afghanistan now that he has assumed responsibility for both wars as head of Central Command. Taken together, these three books provide extraordinary insight into a war that I have known all too intimately. Understanding what has happened, and why, is a useful if incomplete palliative to my nightmares.
John Nagl is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. A retired U.S. Army officer, he fought in Iraq in 1991 and 2003-2004. Nagl is the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (University of Chicago, 2005) and co-authored The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (University of Chicago, 2008).
