As President Obama had decided a month after his inauguration, the U.S. combat role in Iraq ended on August 31, 2010, nearly seven and a half years after we invaded. For Americans, the war in Iraq was finally over. Since the March 20, 2003, invasion, 4,427 American troops had been killed and 34,275 injured. Of the 3,502 killed in action, 1,240 died on my watch; of the 31,894 wounded in action, 9,568 had been hurt while I was secretary. During the preceding two years, we had withdrawn nearly 100,000 troops, closed or transferred to the Iraqis hundreds of bases, and moved millions of pieces of equipment out of the country.
The president marked the end of the war, the combat mission named Operation Iraqi Freedom, with a visit to Fort Bliss, Texas, on the thirty-first and with an address to the American people from the Oval Office that evening. He lauded the troops and their sacrifice and noted that because of them “Iraq has the opportunity to embrace a new destiny, even though many challenges remain.” He spoke of the huge cost in lives and treasure America had paid to put the Iraqis’ future in their own hands, of his own opposition to the war, and of its contentiousness in the United States. He discussed Afghanistan and his strategy there and concluded with his views on the need to tackle the many challenges at home. He hit all the political bases in his remarks, and he certainly could not be accused of waving a “mission accomplished” banner marking the end of the Iraq War.
I, too, gave a speech on August 31, to the American Legion in Milwaukee. I, too, waved no banners: “This is not a time for premature victory parades or self-congratulation, even as we reflect with pride on what our troops and their Iraqi partners have accomplished. We still have a job to do and responsibilities there.” I observed that the opportunities in front of the Iraqis had been purchased “at a terrible cost” in the losses and trauma endured by the Iraqi people, “and in the blood, sweat, and tears of American men and women in uniform.” I left the hall and immediately boarded an airplane to Iraq.
I landed at the gigantic Al Asad Air Base in western Iraq, once home to 22,000 Marines. It was now a ghost town, its long runways used mainly for ferrying soldiers home. I visited U.S. troops in nearby Ramadi, the scene of some of the most vicious fighting of the war. The reporters accompanying me asked if the war had been “worth it,” and I responded—in “markedly anti-triumphal remarks,” as they would write—that while our troops had “accomplished something really quite extraordinary here, how it all weighs in the balance I think remains to be seen…. It really requires a historian’s perspective in terms of what happens here in the long run.” I added that the war would always be clouded by how it began—the incorrect premise that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and an active nuclear weapons program. In stark contrast to the cosmic questions posed by the press, the troops were mainly interested in retirement and health benefits and hardly mentioned the war.
Later the same day, September 1, Biden and I presided over the inauguration of the new U.S. training and advisory mission in Iraq, Operation New Dawn, and the change of command ceremony in which Ray Odierno handed responsibility to his successor, General Lloyd Austin. The ceremony was held in Al Faw palace, crowded with American and Iraqi commanders and as many troops as could be stuffed into the ornate hall built for Saddam. We all made speeches. Biden’s was the longest as he paid tribute to Odierno, his family, and the troops. (It was a little awkward listening to the vice president, knowing that he had vigorously opposed the military surge that had made this relatively peaceful transition possible.) My remarks focused primarily on Odierno’s accomplishments, noting that without his leadership as Multi-National Corps commander under Petraeus in 2007 and his ability to turn plans into results on the ground, “we would be facing a far grimmer situation outside these walls today, and more broadly a strategic disaster for the United States.” I recalled asking him to return to Iraq as overall commander in the fall of 2008; he subsequently kept a boot on the neck of al Qaeda in Iraq and expanded the capabilities of the Iraqi army and police, all while overseeing the drawdown, restructuring, and repositioning of U.S. forces. I also welcomed Lloyd Austin. In addition to praising the troops, both Biden and Odierno called upon the Iraqi government to end its squabbling and get on with forming a government and addressing the country’s challenges. During the speeches, I noticed that my jet-lagged senior staff sitting in the front row, to a man, had fallen sound asleep.
Fifty thousand U.S. troops would remain in Iraq, deployed in six “advise and assist” training brigades, with all American forces scheduled to depart Iraq by the end of December 2011 unless there was a new agreement of some sort with the Iraqis. During my remaining time in office, 26 more Americans would be killed in action in Iraq, and another 206 wounded in action. But the war that President Bush in November 2006 asked me to help salvage and that President Obama two years later asked me to help end was over. The future of Iraq was up to the Iraqis. I was indescribably proud of what our troops and their commanders at every level had accomplished, against all odds at home and in Iraq itself.
AFGHANISTAN
As I’ve said, the president had made a tough decision on the surge in Afghanistan in November 2009, and he had, for all practical purposes, made me, Mullen, Petraeus, and McChrystal swear a blood oath that we would support his decision. Unfortunately, Biden and his staff, the White House staff, and the NSS apparently had not taken the same oath of support. From the moment the president left West Point, they worked to show he had been wrong, that the Pentagon was not following his direction, and that the war on the ground was going from bad to worse. The president’s decision clearly had not ended the rancor and division over war strategy inside the administration, or the White House–NSS suspicion of the senior military—and me—on this issue. Indeed, the suspicion seemed to have increased.
Everything each side said and did was perceived through this distorted prism. A big issue in the fall 2009 debate had been the need to get the additional 30,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan quickly, as had been done in Iraq in 2007. The logistics challenges in Afghanistan were beyond daunting, but Mullen, Petraeus, and the military’s logistics professionals pretty much pulled it off. When the Defense Department informed the White House in January that the last few thousand troops might not arrive until early September, we were accused of having misled the president. Almost none of the critics in the White House or the NSS—whose ranks were filled primarily by former Hill staffers, academics, and political operatives—had ever managed anything, and so there was no understanding of or sympathy for the challenges involved in what we were trying to do, only an opportunity to accuse us of walking away from our commitments to the president.
Biden, Donilon, Lute, and others bridled when McChrystal referred to his strategy as “counterinsurgency,” accusing him of expanding the mission the president had given him. But words that had been so carefully parsed in the White House debate were not adequate to explain the mission to 100,000 soldiers and Marines, and the core of that mission was, in fact, counterinsurgency, albeit with fairly tight geographical and time limits. Troops risking their lives need to be told that their goal is to “defeat” those trying to kill them. But such terms were viewed in the White House as borderline insubordinate political statements by generals trying to broaden the president’s strategy. Biden publicly asserted that the drawdowns beginning in July 2011 would be “steep.” I said I thought they would, and should, be gradual. When I said in testimony on the Hill that the president always had “the freedom to adjust his decisions” with respect to the timing and pace of drawdowns, it was interpreted by administration skeptics as my saying that the drawdowns might not begin in July.