And then all hell broke loose.
In a span of forty-five years, serving eight presidents, I can recall only three instances in which, in my opinion, a president risked reputation, public esteem, credibility, political ruin, and the judgment of history on a single decision he believed was the right thing for our country: Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon, George H. W. Bush’s assent to the 1992 budget deal, and George W. Bush’s decision to surge in Iraq. In the first two cases, I think one can credibly suggest the decisions were good for the country but cost those two presidents reelection; in the latter case, the decision averted a potentially disastrous military defeat for the United States.
In making the decision to surge, Bush listened closely to his military commander in the field, his boss at Central Command, and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, giving them ample opportunities to express their views. Then he rejected their advice. He changed his secretary of defense and the field commanders and threw all his weight behind the new team and his new strategy. Like some of his most esteemed predecessors, at least in this instance, he trusted his own judgment more than that of his most senior professional military advisers.
Bush has been criticized by some, particularly in his own party, for his delay in acting to change course in Iraq until the end of the year. My view is that, given the strong opposition of most senior military leaders and commanders and others in the government to the surge right up to his decision in December, changing strategies earlier in 2006 would have been even more difficult and given the president pause. I am in no position to judge whether not acting earlier was influenced by the forthcoming midterm elections. But I do know that once Bush made his decision, I never saw him look back or have second thoughts.
THE WASHINGTON BATTLESPACE
In beginning a partnership with Dave Petraeus that would last nearly four and a half years in two wars, I would often tell him that Iraq was his battlespace and Washington was mine. We each knew who our enemy was. My enemy was time. There was a Washington “clock” and a Baghdad “clock,” and the two moved at very different speeds. Our forces needed time to make the surge and our broader plan work, and the Iraqis needed time for political reconciliation, but much of Congress, most of the media, and a growing majority of Americans had lost patience with the war in Iraq. The weeks and months to come were dominated in Washington by opponents of the war trying to impose deadlines on the Iraqis and timelines on us for withdrawal of our troops. My role was to figure out how to buy time, how to slow down the Washington clock, and how to speed up the Baghdad clock. I would repeatedly tell Petraeus that I believed he had the right strategy and, therefore, “I’ll get you as many troops as I can for as long as I can.”
All through December, the debate over a possible surge had raged in Washington, mainly in the media, since Congress was in recess. Naturally, the opposition of the Joint Chiefs and Casey to a troop increase leaked, as did debates within the administration and, especially, within the Department of Defense. A central theme of the press coverage of my initial visit to Iraq as secretary focused on the concerns expressed to me by commanders and even junior officers about a surge—about the size of the U.S. military footprint, about reducing pressure on the Iraqis to assume responsibility for security—concerns I openly acknowledged. It became increasingly apparent that within the Bush administration, the civilians favored the surge and most of the military did not. It was now being asked whether I could somehow bridge this divide. The criticism in December was just a warm-up for what was to come.
We knew we were in a precarious position with Congress. Everything depended on the Republican minority in the Senate holding firm in using that body’s rules to prevent legislative action by a now Democratic-controlled Congress to impose deadlines and timelines that would tie the president’s hands. Republican defections could be fatal to the new strategy.
To buy time, I developed a strategy in January for dealing with Congress that, at times, caused both the White House and Dave Petraeus heartburn. It was a three-pronged approach. The first was to publicly hold out hope that if the overall strategy worked—and we would know within months—we could begin to draw down troops toward the end of 2007. This caused a number of the strongest advocates of the surge, both within and outside the administration, to question whether my heart was really in the surge or if I understood that it needed time to work. They were looking at the Iraq battlefield, not the Washington battlefield. I believed the only way to buy time for the surge, ironically, was to hold out hope of beginning to end it.
The second part of my plan was to call for a review and report in September by Petraeus on our progress in Iraq and the effect of the surge. I calculated that I could counter calls from Congress for an immediate change in course with the very reasonable and I believed proper argument that we should be allowed to get all the surge troops into Iraq and then a few weeks later address whether they were making a difference. This would buy us at least until September. If the surge wasn’t working by then, the administration would need to reassess the strategy in any case. The September report would take on a life of its own and become a real watershed. (This tactic of using high-level reviews to buy time was one I would use often as secretary.)
The third element focused on the media and on Congress itself. I would continue to treat critics of the surge and our strategy in Iraq with respect and to acknowledge many of their concerns—especially about the Iraqis—as legitimate. So when members of Congress would demand that the Iraqis do more either militarily or in terms of key legislative actions to demonstrate that reconciliation was proceeding, I would say in testimony or to the press that I agreed. After all, that is exactly what I had called for in my e-mail to Baker and Hamilton in mid-October. Further, I would legitimize their criticism by saying that their pressure was useful to us in communicating the limited patience of the American people to the Iraqi government—although I steadfastly opposed as “a bad mistake” any legislated specific deadlines. I always tried to turn down the temperature of the debate.
I divide the debate over Iraq during the last two years of the Bush administration into two phases. The first, from January 2007 until September 2007, continued to be about the war itself and, above all, the surge, and whether it made any sense. It was a bitter and nasty period. For the second phase, from September 2007 until the end of 2008, I changed my modus operandi, making the subject of the debate the pace of troop withdrawals so as to extend the surge as long as possible but also to try to defuse the Iraq debate as a major issue in the presidential election. Most of the Democratic presidential candidates at least tacitly acknowledged the need for a long-term—if dramatically reduced—U.S. presence in Iraq. My hope was that a new administration would proceed deliberately—not under pressure to take dramatic or precipitous action in terms of withdrawals—and thereby protect long-term U.S. interests both in Iraq and in the region.
The strategy largely worked, for a number of reasons, all dependent on the actions and steadfastness of others. The first was the spread of the “Awakening” movement led by Sheikh Sattar and his Sunnis in Anbar, together with the success of Petraeus and our troops in quickly beginning to change the conditions on the ground in Iraq for the better and in ways that within a few months became impossible to deny. We began to see signs that the surge was working as early as July. The second was the president’s firmness and his veto power. A third was that the Republican minority in the Senate, for the most part, stayed with us and prevented the passage of legislation mandating timelines and deadlines for withdrawal of our forces. A fourth was that in matters of national security, Congress absolutely hates to challenge the president directly in a way that would saddle them with clear and full responsibility if things went to hell. Finally, negotiations with the Iraqis during 2008 on a Strategic Framework Agreement placing an end date on our troop presence was critical in defusing the issue of withdrawal in the 2008 presidential election—and buying still more time.