Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (39 page)

Before traveling to Iraq to continue the dialogue with Petraeus on troop drawdowns, I endured another hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee. It continued my yearlong experience on the Hill of not a single Democrat having anything positive to say about the war in Iraq, even though Levin had publicly acknowledged the success of our military operations. Now Levin echoed the Pelosi-Reid theme that the surge had failed because it had not brought reconciliation among the Iraqi factions, a view disappointingly echoed by Senator Warner, the ranking Republican on the committee.

There was more discussion of possible legislation requiring increased time at home for the troops, a back-door political strategy to cut the number of troops that had been tried by Democrats but blocked by Senate Republicans the previous fall. Senators wanted to make sure the agreements we were negotiating with the Iraqis did not commit us to their defense, and Senator Edward Kennedy pushed for any agreements to be approved by Congress. After the hearing, Speaker Pelosi exploited Mullen’s comment that the U.S. military was accepting significant risk by having so many troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying that his testimony “confirms our warning that the war in Iraq has seriously undermined our nation’s military strength and readiness” and that we needed “a new direction.” There was no mention of Afghanistan. She was shameless and relentlessly partisan on the Iraq War. In fact, it was impossible to have a sensible discussion with Democrats in Congress on anything to do with Iraq in the presence of television cameras. I had never liked testifying; I was now beginning to really hate it. Every time someone in a hearing criticized the lack of reconciliation among Iraqi factions, I wanted to suggest the committee members get a mirror and
take a long, hard look at themselves and maybe try a little reconciliation nearer to home. The posturing and partisanship were requiring me to exert more and more effort to be respectful, nonpartisan, and deliberative. January 20, 2009, seemed a long way off.

On February 11, I spent nearly two hours with Petraeus in Baghdad. I agreed that getting down to ten brigades before the end of the year was unwise militarily and also that a “pause” for “evaluation and consolidation” after the last surge brigade came out in July made sense. We agreed that the president should announce the pause in April and then, conditions permitting, resume the drawdown in the fall, giving Petraeus fourteen brigades through the end of the year. I said I would support keeping the “glide path” of withdrawals as modest as possible but that we had to keep drawing down. I told Dave I believed most Americans thought the war was a huge mistake and that a continued reduction in troops was key. I repeated my mantra about maintaining minimal public and congressional support for our long-term goals in Iraq. I thought Petraeus and I were on the same page.

On the plane ride home, I told the press aboard that I thought “the notion of a brief period of consolidation and evaluation probably does make sense.” I was thinking of about forty-five days. My comments seemed to make nearly everyone mad. The White House was thinking of the pause in terms of months rather than weeks. Hillary Clinton said she was “disheartened” by what I said and called on the president “to end the war he started.” Obama said he strongly disagreed with plans for a pause in the “long overdue removal of our combat brigades from Iraq.” The chiefs weren’t all that pleased either with my agreement to a pause.
The Washington Post
, on the other hand, editorialized that “at last, a Bush administration defense secretary listens to his commanders.” And
USA Today
observed that “the success of the surge quiets the issue of Iraq in the election.”

The day after I returned from Iraq, I passed along to the president what I thought would be Petraeus’s recommendation, one I agreed with: an announcement by the president in early April of a pause for consolidation and evaluation, and resumption of a conditions-based drawdown in the fall. The plan was to announce on September 1 that another combat brigade was coming out and then at some point between October and early December announce that another one or two would come out.

That same evening I slipped on the ice and broke my shoulder, as
I mentioned earlier. I had been scheduled for a congressional hearing the next morning, which I could not attend. I had complained so much about hearings that some colleagues jokingly said I had purposely fallen just to avoid another “close encounter” with Congress. I received a very nice note from Ted Kennedy wishing me a quick recovery because “we need you my friend.”

A little more than a week after senators trashed the Iraqis for inaction on key legislation (the pot calling the kettle black), the Iraqi Council of Representatives passed three significant pieces of legislation: a budget, a de-Baathification/amnesty law, and a provincial powers law. After months of deadlock, a grand bargain had been reached that had something for all the major factions. This was a vital step forward for the Iraqis and for our efforts to sustain support in the United States. Also in February, Lieutenant General Lloyd Austin replaced Ray Odierno as the corps commander in Iraq. Petraeus had been the primary architect of the new strategy in Iraq, but Ray had been instrumental in making it work on the ground and deserved great credit for its success. During one week that month fewer than five hundred violent incidents took place in Iraq for the first time since January 2006. In March, the command recorded the fourth-lowest number of incidents in a week since 2004. We still had very bad days—on March 10, five soldiers were killed by a deeply buried IED and a suicide bomber killed three more—but Petraeus was convinced that the insurgents were trying to crank up the violence in anticipation of his and Ambassador Crocker’s congressional testimony in April.

As we approached the April decision point, Petraeus, the chairman, and I were talking every week, often more frequently. Dave gave us a preview of his recommendations in a videoconference on March 20. He said the postsurge mission would remain “security while transitioning.” He spoke of a forty-five-day period of consolidation and evaluation beginning in mid-July, when we were down to fifteen combat brigades; moving two more brigades out by the end of the year; and removing a third just after the Inauguration.

I told Dave I thought the withdrawal of the first additional brigade as early in the process as conditions permitted would be helpful, as would a statement that we were going back to twelve-month deployments. “Trend lines and impressions are what count,” I said. We should also make clear that “evaluation” is a continuous process; that is, we would not be withdrawing brigades if the situation in Iraq went to hell.

Just a few weeks before Petraeus’s and Crocker’s next appearance before Congress, Iraqi prime minister Maliki, frustrated and angered by Iranian-backed Shia extremist actions in Basra, ordered units of the Iraqi army into the city to reestablish control. The U.S. commanders were horrified that Maliki had taken such a risk without proper preparation. They scrambled to provide the logistics, planning, and military advice to support Maliki’s effort; without such help, he almost certainly would have failed. But he didn’t and therefore won significant recognition all across Iraq for acting like a “national” leader by suppressing his Shia brethren. The president told the chiefs, “We ought to say hurray to Maliki for going down to Basra and taking on the extremists.” He characterized it as a “milestone event.” “Maliki used to be a paralyzed neophyte—now he is taking charge.” Bush was right.

In the same meeting where Bush expressed his opinion, he had a wide-ranging dialogue with the chiefs about Afghanistan and, independently, the health of our forces. Mullen observed that success in Iraq would allow a reallocation of forces to address competing demands, above all Afghanistan. “So is Iraq causing Afghanistan to fail?” Bush asked, not expecting—and not getting—an answer. The president asked about post-traumatic stress, and General Casey talked about the efforts under way to “de-stigmatize” it “from commanders on down.” Bush ended by saying, “The worst thing for morale is if you have a president who is apologetic for the action and not confident that it was the right thing to do.”

The congressional response to testimony by Petraeus and Crocker on April 8 and 9 was vastly different in both tone and substance from the preceding September. Petraeus spoke to the fragility of the security gains in Iraq and said that after the last surge brigade returned home during the summer, he had asked for a forty-five-day evaluation period, followed by an indefinite “assessment” period before making a recommendation on further troop drawdowns. On April 10, the president spoke to a veterans group, along with the Department of Defense civilian and military leadership and others, in the cross hall (the intersection between the north foyer and the hallway connecting the East Room and the State Dining Room) at the White House. He confirmed his approval to withdraw the last of five surge brigades from Iraq by July, and his strong support of Petraeus’s request to halt further reductions until after a period of evaluation and assessment. The president said, “I’ve told him
[Petraeus] he’ll have all the time he needs.” He said the war was not “endless” and announced that all units deploying after August 1 would have twelve-month tours, not fifteen.

Mullen and I testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee a few hours after the president’s statement. Petraeus naturally had wanted to err on the side of caution in terms of further drawdowns and the president wanted to support him. I described the halt in troop withdrawals as a “brief pause.” “I do not anticipate this period of review to be an extended one, and I would emphasize that the hope, depending on conditions on the ground, is to reduce our presence further this fall.” I said Petraeus would provide recommendations in that regard in September. The senators jumped on the difference between Petraeus’s more open-ended period of evaluation and assessment and my characterization, and I responded, “One of the benefits of being the secretary of defense, I suppose, is that I’m allowed more to hope than the field commander is.” My comments were portrayed as being at odds with—or contradictory to—both the president’s and Petraeus’s statements, and the truth is, they were, at least in tone. I was convinced we needed to keep the drawdown carrot dangling to lower the political temperature.

But my motives in staking out a more forward-leaning position were broader than that. As I’ve said, I was convinced a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq was in our national interest. I believed that continued drawdowns in 2008 were critical to make that outcome politically possible after our elections. That meant keeping pressure on the president and Petraeus to continue the drawdowns while simultaneously resisting Democratic efforts to change the strategy even as I pressed them to support a long-term approach. I knew I was walking a political tightrope.

I ended my prepared statement at the hearing with a very personal one:

I have eight months remaining in this position. We continue to find ourselves divided over the path forward in Iraq.… It was my hope sixteen months ago that I could help find a bipartisan path forward in our Iraq policy that would sustain a gradually much lower—but still adequate and necessary—level of commitment beyond this administration in Iraq [and] that would ensure [Iraq] is an ally against extremists and [able to] govern and defend itself. Now I fear that understandable frustration over slow progress and dismay over sacrifices already made
may result in decisions that are gratifying in the short term but very costly to us in the long term. We were attacked at home in 2001 from Afghanistan and are at war in Afghanistan today in no small measure because of mistakes we made—mistakes I, among others, made—in the endgame of the anti-Soviet war there. If we get the endgame wrong in Iraq, I predict the consequences will be far worse.

My comments notwithstanding, keeping the temperature down did not mean Iraq had disappeared as a campaign issue. After the president had spoken and Petraeus, Crocker, Mullen, and I had testified, Obama said, “There is no end in sight under the Bush policy. It is time to bring this war in Iraq to a close.” And Hillary Clinton asserted, “It’s time for the president to answer the question being asked of him: In the wake of the failed surge, what is the endgame in Iraq?”

A critical element of the “endgame” was the negotiation of a Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA) and Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the Iraqi government. A successful SOFA—the legal basis for a continuing U.S. troop presence—negotiation was required during 2008 because at the end of the year the UN Security Council resolution authorizing our military presence in Iraq would expire. The Iraqis weren’t interested in extending, or “rolling over,” the resolution. Our negotiating team was led by Rice, Crocker, Brett McGurk of the NSC staff, and David Satterfield from State. Defense was represented on the team, and there was close coordination with both the department and Petraeus and his staff, but the military was more than happy to let State and the civilians do the heavy lifting in the negotiations. And it was heavy lifting. The obstacles to success were daunting, in substantial part because of the Iraqi political environment and strong opposition to any continuing U.S. presence in several quarters—above all, from the Iranian-supported Shia. Everyone soon realized the plan to sign the agreements on July 31 was completely unrealistic.

The forces agreement was clearly the more problematic, and I suggested that the more it looked like similar SOFA agreements we had with other countries, the more acceptable it would be to the Iraqis. I proposed we tell the Iraqis to talk to the South Koreans and Japanese about their experience with the SOFAs we had with them. That was a monumentally bad idea. Representatives of those countries shared with the Iraqis their frustrations about U.S. troops breaking local laws. Immunities for
contractors would be difficult given the Iraqis’ very unhappy experience with them. In a videoconference on February 5 with Mullen, Petraeus, Fallon, Edelman, and others, I set out the Defense Department priorities for the negotiations. Most important would be operational freedom of action (including legal protection for our troops) and keeping detainees (violent extremists we believed the Iraqis might release). “We could compromise on” contractors. The next day Edelman quoted Crocker as saying, with respect to protections for contractors, “This is radioactive and will blow up the SOFA.”