I visited Iraq again in mid-June to discuss strategy with Petraeus, to visit the troops, and to meet with the Iraqi leaders. I again urged action on key Iraqi legislation and pushed Maliki not to allow the Council of Representatives to take a monthlong holiday. I was as blunt with him as I would ever be. During that visit, I told Petraeus that we would lose the support of moderate Republicans in September and that he needed to begin to transition “to something” in October. He outlined an operational rationale for a drawdown: the population security objectives had been met; there had been success in Anbar; Iraqis wanted a drawdown; Iraqis were assuming more responsibility for security (thirteen of eighteen provinces); and the Iraqi security force was improved. He asked me about starting the drawdown with a nonsurge brigade, and I told him that that decision was his to make.
I believe Petraeus knew what I was trying to do in terms of buying more time for the surge, and that he agreed with it, but I may have pushed a little too hard during that visit. We in the administration knew the initiative in September would need to come from Dave. For some reason, he felt compelled to tell me with half a chuckle, “You know, I could make your life miserable.” I have a pretty good poker face—all those hours testifying in front of Congress required it—so I don’t think Dave knew how taken aback I was by what I interpreted as a threat. At the same time, I understood he had been given an enormous task, the pressures on him for success were huge, and like any great general, he wanted all the troops he felt he needed for as long as he needed them. Fortunately for all of us, Dave was also politically realistic enough to know he needed to show some flexibility in the fall or potentially lose everything to an impatient Congress. But he didn’t have to like it. He had just told me as much.
At the end of June, Fallon came to my office to offer his view of what the next steps ahead should be for Iraq. As he sat at the little round table that had belonged to Jefferson Davis when he was secretary of war and went through his slides, it became clear he was in a very different place than Petraeus was, and, I thought, a very dangerous place for our strategy and success in Iraq, as well as a precarious place politically for himself. He said there had been no progress on reconciliation despite constant promises; the central government was inexperienced, corrupt, and complicit in interfering in security operations to the advantage of Shia factions; the cycle of violence continued unabated, with more than one hundred U.S. soldiers being killed every month; insurgents and terrorists were targeting U.S. political resolve; the Iraqi forces were growing slowly but faced shortcomings in training, logistics, and intelligence; and finally, the U.S. ability to respond to crises elsewhere in the world was foreclosed because our ground forces were completely committed in Iraq. Therefore, he concluded, a fundamental change in Iraq policy was necessary, and “acting now” would avoid a contentious debate in September. He called for the United States to shift its mission to training and enabling, with a gradual removal of U.S. forces from the front line. Fallon recommended reducing our brigade combat teams from twenty to fifteen by April 2008, to ten by the beginning of December 2008, and to five by the beginning of March 2009.
I knew his recommendations would never fly with the president, and I disagreed with them as well, as I told him. But I could not disagree with Fox’s assessment of the situation on the ground. And while there would be rumors about differences between Fox and Petraeus on the way forward, I give Fox a lot of credit for the fact that his proposals of June 29 never leaked. Had they, there would have been a political firestorm, both in the White House and on Capitol Hill.
The rest of the summer I was largely focused on trying to retain what congressional support we had and to keep Congress from tying our hands in Iraq. The president’s veto of the war funding bill setting a deadline for troop withdrawals did not deter the Democratic leadership in both Houses from continuing to try to legislate a change in Iraq strategy. Once again their approach was to focus on our military’s readiness and the amount of time troops spent at home. Another approach, which appealed to moderate Republicans such as Lamar Alexander, was to try to legislate the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, such as ending the combat mission and shifting to supporting, equipping, and training the Iraqis within a year. (The president saw the ISG recommendations as a strategy for withdrawing from Iraq rather than a strategy for achieving success there.)
By early July, our ability to stave off congressional action had weakened even further, with Senate Republicans such as Pete Domenici breaking with the president. The situation became so dicey that I canceled a planned trip to Central and South America in July so I could stay in Washington to meet with members of Congress and work the phones. My strongest argument, especially with the Republicans, was the need to wait at least until Petraeus and Crocker could report in September. As I had hoped early in the year, that bought us time. It was hard to argue that after all we had been through in Iraq, we couldn’t wait another six weeks to hear how the president’s new strategy was going. I also started using the line that it seemed odd to me that critics of the war who had complained so vehemently that Bush had ignored the advice of some of his generals at the outset of the war were now themselves prepared to ignore—or not even wait for—the generals’ advice on the endgame.
That summer I was also focused on orchestrating how the Department of Defense would formulate and communicate its recommendations to the president in September on the next steps in Iraq, drawdowns in particular. I felt very strongly that the president should hear face to face from all of his senior military commanders and advisers. I believed that no single general should have to bear the entire weight of such a consequential recommendation; I also did not want the president to be captive to that person’s views. I hoped that the process I designed would have the added benefit of minimizing whatever differences there were among the senior military leadership, differences I knew Congress would learn about and exploit.
In the middle of all this, typical of Washington, I had to deal on a continuing basis with personality-based journalism and rumors. For example, a reporter with a reputation for having good sources in the military wrote that the president was setting up Petraeus to be the scapegoat if the surge strategy failed. It was totally untrue and made the president furious. Then I was told that “folks in the White House” were hearing that Fallon was undercutting Petraeus and that retired Army vice chief of staff (and strong surge supporter) Jack Keane was saying Fallon was “bad-mouthing” Petraeus to the chiefs.
On August 27, Petraeus and Fallon began briefing the chiefs and me on their views of the way ahead in Iraq. This was where the rubber met the road. Petraeus said that there had been progress in security, but national reconciliation had been slower than we had hoped for, that the government was inexperienced and struggling to provide basic services, and that the regional picture was very difficult. In July, there had been a record number of security incidents—more than 1,700 per week. But civilian casualties were down 17 percent from the previous December, all deaths were down 48 percent, and all murders were down 64 percent. Attacks in Anbar had dropped from more than 1,300 in October 2006 to just over 200 in August 2007.