The Gamble_ General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq Part 3

Sterling Jensen, who was working as an interpreter for MacFarland's brigade and had become deeply involved in tribal issues, recalled the Marines' being even more negative. "They'd say, you guys don't know what you're doing. You're way too arrogant. You're going to get yourselves killed." The Marines had tried several times to reach out to tribes, only to see al Qaeda a.s.sa.s.sinate sheikhs who turned. Senior Marines also thought that MacFarland was dealing with third-rate sheikhs who didn't hold real power. What MacFarland wasn't seeing was that some Marine generals had noticed that there was a quiet, almost secret war under way in Anbar between some tribes and al Qaeda. The Marines were reaching out to some of the harder hit sheikhs, offering them help.

On the upside, MacFarland's superiors were willing to give him what he needed-a Marine infantry battalion, snipers from two Navy SEAL platoons (dubbed "Task Force Bruiser"), and even four 40-foot-long armored Marine riverine boats to cut off the enemy crossing points on the Euphrates River and stealthily insert patrols. "They were fast, they were quiet, they were heavily armed, and they could carry a squad and put them ash.o.r.e," he said. "They could kind of run up on the beach, dump them off, back off, and then provide fire support."

Interestingly, among the Marines deployed to Ramadi was Cpl. Jimmy Webb, son of James Webb, the novelist (Fields of Fire) and former Navy secretary who in 2006 was running a long-shot campaign to become a U.S. senator from Virginia. While home on leave, the corporal asked his father why his opponent, Senator George Allen, made cowboy boots the symbol of his campaign "when Virginia doesn't have any cowboys." Webb was intrigued. His son also pointed out that he and his father both had worn combat boots in wartime. He gave his father his own boots, which he had worn in the streets of Ramadi. Webb would wear them throughout his campaign.

MacFarland and his staff began by thinking about the "metrics" they should use. If the goal was to protect the population, as they had seen in Tall Afar, then that is what should be tracked somehow. They also knew they would have to confront the skepticism of local leaders, who had seen Americans come and go for more than three years, making promises that often weren't met or were forgotten by successor units. MacFarland began to spread the word that the Americans weren't leaving anytime soon.

Knowing that Americans had put in office a generation of leaders, and then seemed unable to keep alive those police chiefs, mayors, and governors, MacFarland made protection of local leaders a top priority. He stationed tanks at key intersections near their houses and put drone aircraft circling over their homes to keep an eye out for attacks. He also asked sheikhs for advice on where to place new police stations and outposts, calculating that they would put them near their homes.

He named the Arabic-speaking Capt. Patriquin as his liaison to the sheikhs. Together they tried to sort out who was a real sheikh, with big wasta, wasta, or influence, and who was a lightweight. They also realized that years of fighting had created an opening: Not only had some sheikhs been killed, many others had moved to Jordan-and so a new generation of tribal leaders was emerging. "It was like going into Don Corleone's house-you can tell who has or influence, and who was a lightweight. They also realized that years of fighting had created an opening: Not only had some sheikhs been killed, many others had moved to Jordan-and so a new generation of tribal leaders was emerging. "It was like going into Don Corleone's house-you can tell who has wasta," wasta," especially by following who moderated the discussion, he observed. The first sheikh with whom he began to work closely was Abu Ali Ja.s.sim, whose tribe was based out in the desert. especially by following who moderated the discussion, he observed. The first sheikh with whom he began to work closely was Abu Ali Ja.s.sim, whose tribe was based out in the desert.

Following the example of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tall Afar, MacFarland began to establish small bases in the city. In the past, U.S. units had operated from a large FOB, or forward operating base, outside it. "They exited the FOB, drove to an objective or patrolled, were attacked, exchanged fire, and returned to base," he wrote later.

The first step under the new approach was to send Special Operations sniper teams to sneak into the building he wanted to occupy. Then he would have a "route clearance" team work its way through the roadside bombs to the building, followed immediately by a company of Army troops or Marines to occupy the building. Upon arrival they would begin building a new combat outpost. The snipers would move out to the surrounding area to disrupt counterattacks. Overnight, the outpost would appear, with living s.p.a.ces and walls and barriers to limit the damage from car bombs. They even figured out how to use a crane to immediately deposit a steel "crow's nest" on top of a building, so they could begin with a well-protected observation post without having to divert troops into filling and carrying sandbags to the roof. (Learning that filling sandbags between patrols was wearing out the troops in the outposts, MacFarland inst.i.tuted a new policy on his base. Everyone had to fill two sandbags before every meal. "No work, no food," he said. "We could generate ten thousand to twelve thousand sandbags a day on Camp Ramadi and push them out to the combat outposts.") Quick steps to establish combat readiness in the outposts were necessary because new outposts were almost always a.s.saulted within two or three days.

Four benefits, much of them unexpected, flowed from the redisposition of troops into the small new bases, which eventually would total 18. In the most successful ones, Americans and Iraqi soldiers lived and ate side by side. This meant Iraqis and Americans could learn from each other-about Iraqi culture, about weapons maintenance, about leaders.h.i.+p. Also, Iraqi soldiers living on American rations began to show more energy. "You'd be surprised at how much work you can get out of an Iraqi if he has had enough calories to eat," he said. Another immediate benefit of this redeployment, he found, was that his soldiers became less predictable. No longer could Iraqi fighters simply watch the front gates of an American base to know when a patrol was coming. "Because we now maintained a constant presence in disputed neighborhoods, the insurgents could no longer accurately trace and predict our actions."

Most important was the political effect of the new outposts. MacFarland laid down a rule that once one was established, they wouldn't let themselves be driven from it. "You never give it up," he said. "More than anything else, that was what persuaded the sheikhs we were there to stay." In the past, he said, American commanders had said, "Don't worry, we're leaving." He decided to say the opposite: "We're staying until we win this fight." It helped that once he had an outlying base, he would begin spending reconstruction funds in the surrounding neighborhood. All told, he estimated, he would dispense more than $2 million in 2006 and early 2007.

He sought to keep up the pressure, so that the enemy, once knocked off balance, couldn't regain the initiative. "What can I do to make life miserable for al Qaeda today?" he would ask himself. "We tried to have an operation every few days. Can I put up another combat outpost? Should I start an adult literacy cla.s.s? Can I throw in the kitchen sink?" Figuring that the local al Qaeda fighters might move to the outskirts, he set up Iraqi police stations in the rural tribal areas. Police were always recruited locally, which gave them extra incentive to stand up to the terrorists, he noted. "The IPs [Iraqi police] refused to be intimidated because they were defending their own homes," he said.

By the end of July 2006, he was beginning to sense that the new approach was working, even though it brought new risks. The commander of the Marine battalion attached to MacFarland's Army brigade told him that west Ramadi was quieting down. Top Marine commanders began to be convinced that what was happening in Ramadi was different from previous sheikh-led pushes against al Qaeda. Even so, there were days when MacFarland had his doubts, especially as the enemy launched a counteroffensive. At the end of the first week of August, he thought to himself, "My G.o.d, I've lost ten guys." Two weeks later, on August 21, Sheikh Ja.s.sim, his first ally in the tribes, was a.s.sa.s.sinated. "I couldn't have protected him if I wanted to," MacFarland said. The sheikh's killers hid his body for four days, a pointed violation of the Muslim custom of quick burial. On the same day, a new Iraqi police station, in the Jazeera neighborhood, and manned mainly by members of Sheikh Ja.s.sim's tribe, was bombed. All told, MacFarland lost two dozen vehicles-a few tanks, but mainly trucks-as he moved into the city.

But, he said, the local reaction to the August attacks indicated that al Qaeda might have overplayed its hand: They drove some fence-sitters into the American camp. One sheikh, Sittar albu-Risha, was particularly angry. "Sittar has lost enough family members that he was ready to throw away caution." This sheikh, a minor tribal leader who had a reputation for running a thriving cross-border smuggling business, called a meeting for September 9. More than 50 sheikhs and other notables showed up. They created what they proposed calling "The Awakening Council." They had a platform with 11 planks. "Ten of them I would have written for them almost exactly the same way they wrote them," MacFarland recalled. The last one was problematic, in that it implied they might have to kill the governor of al Anbar Province. He suggested they modify it.

As MacFarland parleyed with sheikhs, the energetic Capt. Patriquin worked the other people in the room. "He was very extroverted and friendly and was very popular among the tribes because he was the officer who identified little things we could do for them, like attention for a sick child." Sheikh Sittar eventually gave the captain the honorary tribal name Neshan Abu Risha, which some Iraqis say means "a warrior of the Albu Risha," the sheikh's tribe.

That day was a turning point for MacFarland-and as it would develop, for al Anbar Province and Iraq. "To me, it was the first real clear vindication of the strategy we were pursuing, that we were beginning to turn the tide." The meeting encouraged more sheikhs to come in and work with the Americans, and with them came a "s...o...b..ll effect" on recruiting of local police and other tasks, MacFarland said. "Whenever a tribe flipped and joined the Awakening, all the attacks on coalition forces in that area would stop, and all the caches of ammunition would come up out of the ground. If there was ever an attack on us, the sheikh would basically take responsibility for it and find whoever was responsible, and this happened time and again. So it was incredibly effective and they were as good as their word."

MacFarland had come to terms with the fact that some of those newly forthcoming sheikhs had partic.i.p.ated in attacks on Americans. "I'm a product of Catholic schools," he said, "and I was taught that every saint has a past and every sinner can have a future." Sittar reported that he had several thousand volunteers who didn't qualify for the police, because they were illiterate, underage, or overweight, so he was allowed to create three "emergency battalions" to employ them. MacFarland armed them with captured weapons and had his SEAL teams give them a one-week training course. The prevailing American theory for years had been that improvements in security would lead to progress in politics. This was the opposite-political change leading to improvements in security.

That decision also took the United States into the dangerous and complex new territory of supporting an armed group that was opposed to the government in Baghdad that the United States also supported. As Carter Malkasian, the counterinsurgency adviser to the Marine Corps in al Anbar, put it, "For all intents and purposes, the government was permitting Sittar and his movement to have their own militia." But, as Petraeus and Odierno would do the following year, MacFarland had decided it was time to take some risks, especially given that the alternative appeared to be failure.

The s.h.i.+te-dominated Iraqi government, in the midst of a small civil war in Baghdad between s.h.i.+tes and Sunnis, wasn't happy with what it was hearing out of Ramadi about the Americans cutting local cease-fire deals with Sunni sheikhs. Here again, MacFarland found that American experience on the ground in Iraq helped. His deputy commander, Lt. Col. James Lechner, had spent time as an adviser to the Iraqi military and "knew how to work the system to get guys paid." Among other things, MacFarland noted, "That built up my wasta wasta with the sheikhs." with the sheikhs."

Faced with skepticism from his superiors, and from journalists who were being told by Iraqi officials in Baghdad that he was arming Iraqis to fight the Iraqi army and police, MacFarland had Patriquin create a briefing to explain what he was trying to do. Far from the usual razzle-dazzle of U.S. military PowerPoints, the briefing was written breezily, almost in the style of a children's book, with stick figures. It was t.i.tled "How to Win the War in Al Anbar, By CPT Trav."

Capt. Travis Patriquin's briefing was both perhaps the most informal one given by the U.S. military in Iraq and the most important one. "This is an American Soldier," it began. "We'll call him Joe. Joe wants to win in Al Anbar. But sometimes it seems like other people don't share that idea." This made Joe sad. Then the briefing posed the key question: "How can Joe win in Al Anbar? By fighting the insurgents?" The briefing didn't say so, but the answer the U.S. military had given for three years had been: Well, of course, yes.

A subsequent slide identified the problem with that approach: "Poor Joe can't tell the terrorist from the good Iraqis." The smiling stick figures look all the same to him. The solution, the brief said, was to talk to the sheikhs about making local militiamen members of the police force. "The Iraqi Policeman can tell the difference. And the insurgent knows that. See, that's why he's sad." This makes everyone else happy. "The sheikh brings more sheikhs, more sheikhs bring more men. Joe realizes that if he'd done this three years ago, maybe his wife would be happier."

The theory was working, but the fighting continued. On September 29, Michael Monsoor of Garden Grove, California, a twenty-five-year-old member of a Navy SEAL team, threw himself on a hand grenade while his team was being attacked, an act of valor for which he was posthumously recognized with the Medal of Honor. He already had received a Silver Star for rescuing a wounded comrade under fire four months earlier.

On November 25, about three dozen al Qaeda men with weapons drove into Sufia, home of the Albu Soda tribe, just east of Ramadi. The small tribe, which had only about thirty men of military age in that area, had rebuffed MacFarland's recruiting efforts, he said, because it wanted to be neutral. But as part of that effort, it had established checkpoints to keep out al Qaeda, which antagonized the terrorist group, because the tribe lived along the main corridor from Fallujah to Ramadi. After the gunmen opened fire, some tribal members escaped in boats across the Euphrates and ran to an Iraqi army base. Soldiers there called an Iraqi interpreter for an American officer, who called MacFarland's headquarters. Capt. Patriquin and Sterling Jensen, the interpreter, began gathering information. "We're being wiped out," the tribe's beleaguered sheikh told Jensen. "People are killing us." The sheikh's sister had been killed, and al Qaeda men were dragging the body by ropes behind a pickup truck. MacFarland postponed another operation and sent the units involved in that to the aid of the tribe, even though it had held him at arm's length. A drone reconnaissance aircraft was sent to circle over the fight. Patriquin called the sheikh of the tribe. "Hey, look," he said. "We can't tell who is who. Could you have your guys wave towels over their heads so we can identify friend from foe?" That done, Marine F-18 warplanes rolled into bomb those without towels, and then arriving U.S. Army tanks began to fire on fleeing al Qaeda automobiles.

After the fight, MacFarland went to talk to Albu Soda's bloodied, combat-shocked leaders. "They were kind of battle-fatigued, had lost a lot of family members. At the same time, it was like a switch had been flipped. Guys who had been reluctant to talk to us were saying, 'Would you please build a combat outpost near our home?' and telling us where al Qaeda was in their area." That day was the tipping point, he said. After that, he was flooded with tips and recruits. "After that tribe flipped, the kids were running around, it was like liberated France, it was like Rumsfeld imagined it would be in 2003." Also, a major insurgent route into the city had been cut.

One of MacFarland's enlisted men studied street life and concluded that people in Ramadi didn't read newspapers or even listen to the radio much, but that they did pay attention to the messages from loudspeakers on the minarets of mosques. So, beginning at one platoon-sized base, Combat Outpost Firecracker, MacFarland's soldiers put up loudspeakers to broadcast, every day but Friday, the Muslim sabbath, sports news and weather reports-and occasionally slip in information about al Qaeda attacks. "The news was pulled from places like Al Jazeera and Al Iraqia and news sources that people would know were not ours," he said. Some of it was just helpful tips: "The UN warehouse has a new s.h.i.+pment of rice." Occasionally another message would slip in: "Last night al Qaeda killed a family of five in their home."

But even as late as December 6, 2006, MacFarland would be thrown for a loss. On that day, Spec. Nicholas Gibbs, a twenty-five-year-old from Stokesdale, North Carolina, was killed by small-arms fire. "Part of me died along with him," his mother told a reporter. "I will never be the same."

The same day, Sgt. Yevgeniy Ryndych, a 1998 emigre from Ukraine to Brooklyn, was killed by a roadside bomb. His fiancee received her engagement ring in the mail from him the same day. "He was one of those people who not a lot of people liked because he sat home the whole day and read books," said his brother Ivan. "He was like a genius kid."

And Marine Cpl. Dustin Libby, from Presque Isle, Maine, was manning a machine gun on a roof in Ramadi when he was shot.

Three other soldiers died that day when their Humvee was. .h.i.t by a bomb. The first, Spec. Vincent Pomante, was from Westerville, Ohio. The second, Marine Maj. Megan McClung, became the highest-ranking female to die in combat in Iraq. A triathelete, McClung had organized a marathon for troops in Iraq. A journalist in North Carolina remembered that when a police officer pulled over McClung, she proved she was sober by doing a backflip on the side of the road. A graduate of the Naval Academy, McClung had left the Marine Corps but went back on active duty in order to serve in Iraq. Her name would become the first woman's to be added to the marble tablet at the academy that memorializes graduates killed in action. "Please don't portray this as a tragedy," her mother requested of a reporter. "It is for us, but Megan died doing what she believed in."

The sixth loss that day perhaps. .h.i.t MacFarland hardest: Capt. Patriquin, the soldier who had reached out to the tribes, had been sitting next to McClung.

The next morning MacFarland found his staff and commanders downcast. "Everybody was kind of looking at their feet." He told them about how Gen. Ulysses S. Grant handled that first terrible day at s.h.i.+loh in April 1862. The Confederates had pushed the Union troops back to the Tennessee River, where thousands huddled terrified below the bank. Thousands more lay dead and wounded on the battlefield above them. That night Grant met with his commanders next to a log house being used as a hospital, reviewing the day's losses as men under the surgeon's knife screamed and died nearby-probably not the best place to locate a command post. At midnight, Grant went out to smoke a cigar, taking refuge from the driving rain under a tree. There, MacFarland told his soldiers, Gen. William T. Sherman found him. "Well, Grant, we've had the devil's own day, haven't we?" Sherman said to his dripping friend.

MacFarland reminded them of Grant's laconic response: "Yes. Lick 'em tomorrow, though."

The stoic, taciturn Grant was an inspiration to MacFarland throughout the year. "I felt I was fighting my way through the Wilderness Campaign," he said, referring to Grant's running battle through rough ground in northern Virginia against Robert E. Lee in May 1864. "I was taking a lot of casualties." MacFarland was hardly alone. In recent years, as the Army has come to grips with Iraq, Grant seems to be enjoying a resurgence in popularity with today's officers, probably because he is its patron saint of the long, hard slog.

By the onset of winter it was becoming clear that something fundamental had changed in Ramadi. "In the latter half of December, it was like the fever broke," MacFarland said. "Up until then, when we threw a punch, they threw a punch." The death rate for U.S. forces began to decline after that incident. By the end of that month, 12 of the tribes in the area were deemed cooperative, and 6 neutral, leaving just 3 cla.s.sified as "uncooperative." By mid-2007 it wasn't uncommon for a month to go by with no U.S. losses. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, was reeling. As David Kilcullen, Petraeus's counterinsurgency adviser, later put it, "In Anbar, we've got the tribal vengeance structure working in our favor." That is, where Armericans once had been the target of Iraqis seeking revenge, now they were helping direct that impulse against al Qaeda and its allies in the insurgency.

Not only were the roadside bombs less numerous, they were becoming less sophisticated. "They went away from the remote-controlled IEDs to subsurface command wires to just hastily throwing out IEDs with pressure plates because that was all they could do," MacFarland said. "Because we were keeping such pressure on them, they just weren't able to get the big IEDs and get them all set up. So, we knew we had them on the run when we started to see those kinds of things evolve and their attacks became smaller and smaller and less and less effective."

The attacks would continue, though. All told, MacFarland lost 83 soldiers in Iraq-but he had something to show for it. In February 2007, Gen. Petraeus, newly arrived in Iraq, would come to see him and ask some questions about his methods and metrics. "Sean had obviously done something extraordinarily important," Petraeus said later. "What you had there was the first really significant example of the concept of reconcilables and irreconcilables." Petraeus already knew that he wanted his troops to go out and protect the population. In Ramadi, he learned that "a key way of implementing that is not just living with them, it is also . . . literally separating them, protecting the population from the irreconcilables. That means you have to know who the reconcilables are and who the bad guys are, and then of course try to achieve some separation and protect the one from the other."

Chiarelli, the number two U.S. commander in Iraq in 2006, said that MacFarland's operation marked the first time in the Iraq war that a counterinsurgency campaign had been conducted and then had been sustained by the succeeding unit. "Sean was the first guy who did it and it stuck for the guy who followed," he said.

Upon arriving in Iraq, Odierno would seek to build on what MacFarland had started. "He's the guy who put this together"-that is, how to operate differently and more effectively in Iraq, Odierno said later. "Once they cleared Ramadi, and they stayed in Ramadi with a significant amount of force, that was the tipping point. The whole province seemed to turn over."

But Baghdad would be more complicated. Not only was it at least 10 times larger, it also had both the s.h.i.+te militias that weren't active in Ramadi, which was h.o.m.ogeneously Sunni. Tribes were less significant in the cities and among s.h.i.+tes. Securing Baghdad in 2007 would make MacFarland's experience in Ramadi in 2006 look relatively simple.

A RUN IN OCTOBER.

In October 2006, Petraeus was in Was.h.i.+ngton, partly to lay the groundwork for rolling out his counterinsurgency manual a few months later, but also because Gen. Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had sent word that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld wanted to see him.

Petraeus didn't know what the meeting would be about. But he could see his time at Leavenworth coming to an end, and he was eager to get back into the fight in Iraq. Every indication was that a radical change in the handling of the war there was urgently required. He felt ready to lead that charge.

As he prepared, he contacted Lt. Col. Charlie Miller, whom he had known since he himself was a lieutenant colonel and Miller was a green officer in his battalion in the 101st Airborne, to ask him to go for a morning run. In 2006 Miller was a strategic planner on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and like many of his peers, was anxious about the state of the war. The next day the two met at Petraeus's hotel. It quickly became clear that Petraeus wanted to talk about Iraq. "He was very spun up on the war, knew what was happening," Miller recalled.

As they ran along the sandy paths of Was.h.i.+ngton's mall toward the Capitol, Petraeus posed a series of questions. "The nation has to decide what it is going to do-is it going to do what it takes, or is it going to get out?" he began.

After the run, Petraeus said to Miller, "What are we trying to accomplish there? And what resources do we need to do it?"

This was magic to Miller, a native of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley who was trained in strategic thinking and who had believed for years that more troops needed to be sent to Iraq. "This had been a major frustration for me," he said.

"We have undertaken a major national project and put it on the backs of a small group of volunteers."

These also were the basic questions any strategist would ask about a war-especially if he suspected he might about to be put in charge of that war.

When Petraeus went to see Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, he thought that perhaps he would be offered command in Iraq. But as he was walking up the Pentagon stairs with Pace to Rumsfeld's office, the Joint Chiefs chairman turned to him and said, "Don't be surprised if this is about the Afghanistan job." That was not a bad command, but it was still a relative backwater compared to Iraq. As it happened, Rumsfeld, who could be extremely noncommittal, didn't offer Petraeus anything.

KEANE TAKES COMMAND.

(Fall 2006)

The turning point in the war was the American midterm elections of November 2006, which transferred control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats. Without that "thumping," as President Bush termed it, the administration might never have contemplated the major revisions in strategy and leaders.h.i.+p that it would make in the following two months. Until the election, Bush seemed satisfied with blather. After it, he began to speak about the war seriously. The sweeping changes that followed ultimately would reverse the steady downward course of the war-and perversely for Democrats, thus likely extend the conflict for many more years. "I think that without the '06 elections, there might not have been a change" in U.S. strategy, said Tom Donnelly, one of the original Iraq hawks who in the wake of the November elections would help plan the escalation that would become known as "the surge."

The precise moment of the s.h.i.+ft in both congressional majorities came two days after the election, when Senator George Allen of Virginia conceded to James Webb, a pugnacious Marine veteran and former Republican who had trailed him by a wide margin during most of the race. Webb's win tipped the Senate into Democratic hands, giving the party control of the entire new Congress. Webb, celebrating his extraordinarily narrow victory, stood outside the Arlington County Courthouse, just outside Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., and held in the air the Marine combat boots that his son had first worn in Iraq and that the senator then had worn while campaigning.

Webb said in an interview that he displayed the boots at the rally not as a reference to the war, but as a symbol that the campaign was over. Yet those boots that had trod the b.l.o.o.d.y streets of Ramadi gave Webb's opinions on the war an added gravitas: Not only had he served in Vietnam, his son was in the fight now. He knew what it was like to stand in combat boots. After he waved those boots, he delivered a speech unusual for any politician, but especially for a Democrat. He began not by thanking the people of Virginia or his family or his campaign staff, but instead by saluting the Marines. "The first thing I'd like to say is tomorrow is the most special day for the United States Marine Corps-they celebrate their birthday. You almost have to be a Marine to understand that, but I want to say 'Happy Birthday' to all our Marines. There are a lot of them in harm's way today. We are going to remember them tomorrow." Next he cited those who had served in the military in earlier days. "The day after that is Veterans Day, and we remember all of those who have served our country and who are serving it, wherever they are, we all have them in our hearts and prayers." Then he turned to the politics of the situation and, among things, predicted that the s.h.i.+ft in congressional power meant that there would "result soon . . . a diplomatic solution in Iraq."

His main emotion at the time, he said later, was one of relief. Webb had proven an energetic but awkward candidate, at first walking down the center of the street in parades, rather than shaking the hands of spectators. He seemed most at ease among the coal miners of southwest Virginia, home of his Scots-Irish ancestors. The Virginia Senate campaign had been contentious but not exceptionally so. Yet Webb emerged from it furious, later declaring it "one of the nastiest campaigns in American history." He said that at the time of his victory speech, "I literally felt like I was stepping out of a sewer."

Webb had been molded by his experience as a young Marine officer in the Vietnam War. Back then, his Appalachian tenacity and populist distrust of centralized power made him a fierce critic of anti-war activists. He ended Fields of Fire Fields of Fire with a scene in which a Vietnam vet challenges a crowd of Harvard protestors: "How many of you are going to get hurt in Vietnam? I didn't see any of you in Vietnam." Yet those same deep-running character traits had made Webb an opponent of the Iraq war, where he thinks elites once again are recklessly sending someone else's children to die while their own stay home and tend their careers. with a scene in which a Vietnam vet challenges a crowd of Harvard protestors: "How many of you are going to get hurt in Vietnam? I didn't see any of you in Vietnam." Yet those same deep-running character traits had made Webb an opponent of the Iraq war, where he thinks elites once again are recklessly sending someone else's children to die while their own stay home and tend their careers.

For decades Webb had nursed a cold contempt for such people who took from their country more than they gave.

One of those who had evaded service in Vietnam was George W. Bush. In mid-November, Webb went to a postelection function at the White House for newly elected members of Congress. He avoided the reception line, but Bush sought him out. "How's your boy?" the president asked.

"I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President," Webb responded.

"That's not what I asked you," Bush persisted. "How's your boy?"

"That's between me and my boy," Webb said. It was an abrupt, ungracious response that proved to be controversial. Seven months later, in a gesture of reconciliation, Webb would bring his Marine son, wearing his dress blues, to a White House meeting and introduce him to the president.

Even as the ghosts of Vietnam flitted over Was.h.i.+ngton, there was a growing sense among defense experts that the strategic consequences of the Iraq war could be far worse than that earlier war. The United States could walk away from Vietnam, a relatively isolated country with few resources, and six years later, with the election of Ronald Reagan, declare it "morning in America." (Of course, it didn't feel like that in Cambodia, or in the reeducation camps of Vietnam where former allies of the United States were held.) It was unlikely to be morning in Iraq anytime soon. The Iraq war "makes Vietnam look like a cakewalk," said retired Air Force Gen. Charles Wald, a Vietnam veteran. The domino theory that nations across Southeast Asia would go Communist was not fulfilled, he noted, but with Iraq, he said, the "worst-case scenarios are the most likely thing to happen," such as a spreading war in the Middle East, which likely would cause a spike in oil prices that would shock the global company.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE DEMOCRATS.

The day after the election, the president announced that he was removing Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Uncharacteristically, Rumsfeld was subdued, brief, and inarticulate. His verdict on Iraq that day was that it was "a little understood, unfamiliar war, the first war of the twenty-first century-it is not well known, it was not well understood, it is complex for people to comprehend." He seemed to be saying that the American people just didn't get it and had demonstrated their lack of understanding in the previous day's vote.

There was little unhappiness in the U.S. government about his departure.

"Rumsfeld appeared to draw from the commissar school of management, leading with a pistol from the back, because he would tell folks to advance, not offering his own vision of where to go, instead waiting to watch their choices and then questioning or potentially penalizing them," said Philip Zelikow, who was then counselor at the State Department. "The style can be praised as one of delegation and prodding, but it is also designed to allow the chief to keep his own preferences obscure as long as possible."

There was abundant evidence that Rumsfeld was an inept leader. For all his willingness to chew out subordinates, he consistently seemed unable to address major problems and make adjustments in personnel, policy, or command structures. On top of that, his leaders.h.i.+p of the U.S. military establishment was eroded by the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, which became public in the spring of 2004. It was a major setback for the U.S. war effort, and indeed a strategic loss for the United States globally. But only underlings took the hit for it. "From May of 2004 onward, he was damaged goods," military commentator Francis "Bing" West later observed. "He had lost the moral authority to lead."

After his last day in office, Rumsfeld took his family to Buck's Fis.h.i.+ng & Camping, which, despite its rustic name, is an upscale Was.h.i.+ngton restaurant. Underscoring the loathing Rumsfeld had generated in many Americans, the chef-owner there, Carole Greenwood, told her coowner, James Alefantis, to kick him out. "I'm not serving a war criminal in my restaurant," she declared. Alefantis pointed out that her business was to serve people and that Rumsfeld was with his family. Greenwood eventually relented but only on the condition that someone else cook Rumsfeld's meal. To Alefantis's chagrin, he heard that Rumsfeld soon was telling people that Buck's was his favorite restaurant in the area. Greenwood likely would go ballistic if Rumsfeld returned with his buddy d.i.c.k Cheney.

IN BOTH ART and strategy, personality plays a large but murky role. The personality of Robert Gates was the strongest a.s.set he would bring to the Pentagon as Rumsfeld's successor. Where Rumsfeld was bl.u.s.tery, Gates was quiet, even stealthy. He was a career intelligence officer, spending most of his life serving his country in the federal government, an organization that people like Rumsfeld and Bush tended to denigrate. Gates did share with them a strong sense of loyalty-but in his case, to his longtime best friend, Brent Scowcroft, who had been close to the first President Bush but had become persona non grata with the second because of his public opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Gates also had been a member of the Iraq Study Group, which had introduced him to the princ.i.p.al players in policy and steeped him in the current debate.

"Bob Gates will bring a fresh perspective," President Bush said with unusual understatement. And while a few weeks earlier Bush had said that tactics might change but that the strategy would remain the same, he now p.r.o.nounced himself open to change in both. "Stay the course means let's get the job done, but it doesn't mean, you know, staying stuck on a strategy or tactics that may not be working," he said.

Despite the change at the Pentagon, everything seemed to be going the way of the anti-war Democrats. In early December, Senator Gordon Smith, a low-key Republican from Oregon, made his way to the Senate floor to break dramatically with the president on Iraq. He had been reading John Keegan's somber history of World War I, which had led him to meditate on the sins of the British generals who sent a generation head-on into the slaughter of German machine guns, despite growing evidence that their frontal approach wasn't working. It had made him think, he said, about "how we kept doing the same thing over and over again at the cost of our soldiers' lives with no improvement in the political environment in Iraq." He also had been reading books critical of the Iraq war. One Thursday in December, he awoke to news on his clock radio that another ten soldiers had been killed in Iraq. (Six of the ten were those Col. MacFarland lost in Ramadi, including Maj. McClung and Capt. Patriquin.) He decided that he had heard and seen enough. "I went from steamed to boiled," he recalled.

"I have tried to be a good soldier," Smith began in his very personal statement to the Senate that evening. "I have tried to support our president." But he said he could no longer. He remembered back to 2003, when it seemed as though the fall of Baghdad had brought a swift victory. "Now all of those memories seem much like ashes to me," he said. He no longer would be able to stand with the president, he continued. "He is not guilty of perfidy, but I do believe he is guilty of believing bad intelligence and giving us the same." So, he said, the time had come to speak out. "I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day," he said. "That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore." It was a stunning statement.

It began to look like 15 or more similarly upset Republicans might during the course of 2007 go into opposition on the war-a s.h.i.+ft that promised to give the Democrats a veto-proof majority. The Democrats also knew that soon they would take over the committees where much of the substantial business of Congress is done. No longer would the panels on Appropriations, Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence be chaired by diehard supporters of the administration. Instead, starting in January 2007, skeptics of the Iraq war would be setting the agendas, directing the committee staffs, initiating investigations, and calling the hearings.

In their moment of triumph, some Democrats began to sense the dilemma that was about to ensnare them: How to bring an end to the war without being blamed for how it ended? Their evasive answer, unfortunately, would be to appear to do something without really doing anything. They liked having the Iraq conflict be "Bush's war" and most certainly didn't intend to take possession. "Like it or not, George Bush is still the commander in chief, and this is his war," Harry Reid of Nevada would say in 2007, months after becoming Senate majority leader.

This result would be a prolonging of the war, because it meant that the Democrats ultimately would shy away from any confrontation with the Bush administration-and the White House knew it. So, for example, by the end of December, Senator Joseph Biden, the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and two years later Barack Obama's running mate, would emphatically oppose an increase in troop levels. "I totally oppose the surging of additional troops into Baghdad, and I think it is contrary to the overwhelming body of informed opinion, both people inside the administration and outside the administration," he said. Neither he nor other Democrats, despite controlling both houses of Congress, would take any serious steps to block it.

BIG JACK KEANE INTERVENES.

In the fall of 2006, Jack Keane effectively became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stepping in to redirect U.S. strategy in a war, to coordinate the thinking of the White House and the Pentagon, and even to pick the commanders who would lead the change in the fight. It was an unprecedented and astonis.h.i.+ng development for a retired general to drive policy making and indeed bypa.s.s the entire chain of command in remaking war strategy. "Retired four-stars can be very influential, but this was really an order of magnitude beyond that," commented Tom Donnelly, who worked with Keane on developing the idea of "the surge." "He is almost the keystone in the whole thing. The window was almost closed. He kept it open."

Keane was given his opening by the failure of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Peter Pace, who was proving unable to deal with the Iraq war. With no official backing, and nothing but his credibility and persuasive abilities to go on, Keane helped one general in Iraq and some civilians in a think tank formulate "the surge" as a new strategy for Iraq, pitched it to the president, and then, with a green light from Bush, told top officials at the Pentagon about how to proceed. He continued to work with that general in Iraq, Raymond Odierno, behind the back of Gen. Casey, the senior commander there, who told Keane not to visit Iraq.

Maj. Gen. Michael Barbero, who at the time was the J-33, the director of current operations for the staff of the Joint Chiefs, recalled that during the fall of 2006, Keane "was the one driving the planning." Asked if Keane effectively was acting as director of the Joint Staff-that is, a crucial but low-profile slot-Barbero responded quickly that Keane was playing a far more elevated role. "No, like the chairman" of the Joint Chiefs, he said-meaning the highest military officer of the land. "He was a key player, and he was saying, 'We've got to win this thing.' "

Keane's unusual journey to the center of American military policy making commenced on August 3, 2006, a hot, sticky day typical of the Was.h.i.+ngton summer. Keane was at home in McLean, a pleasant Virginia suburb. That evening, while the temperature was still in the nineties, he went downstairs to his easy chair in his bas.e.m.e.nt den, put his feet up on the ottoman in front of his big-screen television, and keyed in C-SPAN, which was carrying a hearing on the Iraq war that been held earlier in the day by the Senate Armed Services Committee. Keane had come to believe that "it was obvious that we had serious problems, that the strategy wasn't working." He wanted to see if Rumsfeld, Pace, and Abizaid, the three witnesses at the hearing, had anything new or different to offer.

Keane had been worrying about Iraq since his first visit there, in the summer of 2003. Then the vice chief of staff of the Army, he had left the country feeling deeply concerned and a bit guilty. "When I flew out, I was really troubled," he recalled. "I knew the Army collectively was not prepared to deal with irregular warfare. I said to my guys, we simply are not prepared to do this." He began to think about how to make amends.

Of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers then on active duty, he was one of the handful with firsthand knowledge of what the Army had done wrong in Vietnam, where he had been a platoon leader and a company commander in the 101st Airborne. When he left Vietnam and got back to Fort Benning, Georgia, he began reading history to figure out what he should have been doing. "I and others came to the conclusion that we had been conducting a conventional war against an irregular enemy."

By the end of that war, he said, the Army had learned how to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign. "We'd studied the history, we'd learned the doctrine, and some of us had the experience," he remembered. After the war, the Army "purged" that knowledge, he said. But "I kept the memory, especially the idea that you must protect the population." That idea would become the core of Keane's 2006 campaign to change the American approach to the war in Iraq.

Big Jack Keane talks like the native New Yorker he is, with a working-cla.s.s tone that he brought with him from the Lower East Side and Was.h.i.+ngton Heights, the two neighborhoods where he was raised. "I think New York is such a magical city because it is a place where, truly, immigrants get started, and then immigrants come and go, and different cultures are there, so it all transitions," he said in an interview. With his accent, big hands, square face, and hair combed straight back, Keane could easily be mistaken for an old-style member of the New York City Police Department. Indeed, he bears a pa.s.sing resemblance to the corrupt police captain shot by Michael Corleone in an Italian restaurant in The G.o.dfather. The G.o.dfather. Underneath that old-school appearance, Keane is crackerjack smart, and extremely articulate, often in a concise, blunt way. Most importantly, and unusually, he is an independent and clear thinker. Underneath that old-school appearance, Keane is crackerjack smart, and extremely articulate, often in a concise, blunt way. Most importantly, and unusually, he is an independent and clear thinker.

He didn't go public with his concerns in 2003, but after he retired he began to share them privately with others. He had gotten to know Henry Kissinger, an adopted son of Was.h.i.+ngton Heights, when both served on the Defense Policy Board, and in 2005, he began a series of conversations with the former secretary of state. One day that year, Kissinger, preparing to visit President Bush, asked Keane, "What is the military strategy to defeat the insurgency?"

Keane paused, then said, "We don't have a military strategy to defeat the insurgency."

"Jack, we will lose," Kissinger replied. As Keane remembered it, Kissinger meant that there would have to be a political solution, but it would come about only if enabled by an effective military strategy. So, Keane said, "if we don't have a military strategy to defeat them-and by defeat we meant change the behavior and att.i.tude of the insurgent-then we would lose."

As Iraq grew bloodier, Keane watched and worried more. "I knew that the violence was worse in '04 than it was in '03, worse in '05 than it was in '04. And now the wheels were coming off and it was going off the charts." Yet American strategy, inexplicably, wasn't changing-"I also knew at the time that we are still on a mission to transition to the Iraqis despite this." His worry was that the American strategy didn't protect the people and instead remained focused on transitioning to Iraqi forces, who could not protect the population either, so staying the course really meant riding a losing strategy into defeat.

Other insiders were also becoming persuaded that the course in Iraq was a loser. In May 2006, after five months of wrangling, a new Iraqi government was finally a.s.sembled, to be led by a compromise candidate, Maliki, to the relief of American officials in Baghdad and Was.h.i.+ngton. But in the following weeks, it became clear that this political movement wasn't leading to a lessening of violence-which was the keystone of the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq-but rather increasing it. "At this point, the strategy couldn't explain what was happening," said Fred Kagan, the American Enterprise Inst.i.tute a.n.a.lyst who was a member of the group that met with the president at Camp David in June. "I think it [the strategy] became visibly bankrupt" at that point.

One day in the summer, Keane got a phone call from Adm. William "Fox" Fallon, the U.S. commander for the Pacific. As Keane remembers it, Fallon began by saying, "Jack, I just came out of Iraq. Could you help me to understand what the f.u.c.k is going on? . . . Casey is up to his ears in quicksand and he doesn't even know it. This thing is going down around him."

For Keane, the final straw came on that August night as he settled before the television and watched that tape of Rumsfeld, Pace, and Abizaid appearing before the Senate Armed Services panel earlier that day.

"Despite the many challenges, progress does continue to be made in Iraq," Abizaid had rea.s.sured the senators. That could be understood as code for: Get off my back, we are going to stay on the same path of pa.s.sing the mission of providing security to Iraqi forces. Indeed, he said he could "imagine" additional U.S. troop reductions later in the year.

Abizaid, a bright, witty officer who spoke Arabic, had been the great hope of the Army when he replaced Tommy R. Franks as chief of Central Command in 2003. Not only did he understand the region, he also had shown a willingness to stand up to Rumsfeld. But by 2006 he appeared burned out, as did many who worked closely with the defense secretary. In 2003-4, Abizaid had left in place as his top general in Iraq Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, seen by many inside the Army, especially those in Iraq, as an overwhelmed and perhaps incompetent general. Abizaid had failed to get the Army to send out enough specialists to staff Sanchez's headquarters. He had stood by as persistent differences poisoned the relations.h.i.+p between the U.S. military and U.S. civilian officials in Iraq, with Sanchez and L. Paul Bremer III, the civilian occupation chief, barely civil to each other by the end of their 12 months together. He had not been able to get other parts of the federal government to engage enthusiastically in Iraq. Most of all, he had failed to stand up to the Bush administration's blandishments of "steady progress" in Iraq, and instead, over time, seemed to join in them.

Rumsfeld said at the hearing that ending the sectarian violence was a job for Iraqis, not American troops. As Keane watched, he knew that wasn't happening, and he worried that such false hopes would lead to defeat. "I liked these guys," he said. "What was bothering me most, it seemed blatantly obvious that our strategy had failed. It had blown up in our face. We were on the precipice of the new Iraqi government fracturing. That's where we're heading, a humiliating defeat for the United States, and all the security problems that would ensue from that."

The hearing climaxed with Senator Hillary Clinton's rebuke of the defense secretary. "We hear a lot of happy talk and rosy scenarios, but because of the administration's strategic blunders and, frankly, the record of incompetence in executing, you are presiding over a failed policy," the New York Democrat a.s.serted. "Given your track record, Secretary Rumsfeld, why should we believe your a.s.surances now?"