The Fourth Star (23 page)

Two days later Bremer called Abizaid and told him the Kurds had scuttled the deal for Turkish troops. Abizaid was incredulous. “I just talked to them. Did the Kurds veto it or did you veto it?” he demanded.

“Well, it’s not a smart thing to bring in neighbors, because once you bring in one neighbor, you have to bring in the other neighbors,” Bremer replied. In his 2006 autobiography Bremer wrote that there was widespread opposition among both Kurds and the majority Shiite Muslims to Turkish peacekeepers. Abizaid’s plan, he insisted, never would have worked.

Abizaid ordered his aide to check Bremer’s daily schedule. There were no meetings with the Kurdish leaders shown. He was convinced that Bremer didn’t want the Turks or any other Muslim forces because they’d complicate the Bush administration’s plans to remake Iraq—plans he thought were unrealistic. “What it all meant to me was that they didn’t want forces that they didn’t think were controllable,” he said. “The whole idea was they wanted control. The policy makers wanted control through American forces.” In the fall, he got a memo from Rumsfeld suggesting another Muslim partner. Conditions were improving in Afghanistan, and Rumsfeld opined that the Afghan warlords might send forces to Iraq. Sending ill-disciplined Afghans, scarred by decades of civil war, to a country in the midst of its own ethno-sectarian conflict was the worst idea Abizaid could imagine. The ignorance about the region back in Washington could be astounding.

It wasn’t much better among some American officers in Iraq. Abizaid was getting mostly good news from his division commanders throughout the summer and fall of 2003. With each passing month they insisted they were getting more tips and a better handle on the enemy. “Over the last two weeks we’ve hit the weapons caches and we’ve really hit the money,” Major General Ray Odierno told him on a visit to Tikrit in late July. In September General Sanchez and his division commanders all told him they were on the verge of breaking the resistance. Abizaid had his doubts. The
de-Baathification policy was alienating tens of thousands of Sunnis. Efforts to rebuild the army and police were a mess. To prevent a future military coup, the Bush administration had capped the size of the Iraqi army at 45,000 soldiers and insisted that they be used only to defend Iraq against an invasion from outside countries such as Iran or Syria. Driving through Cairo, Abizaid pointed out the large number of Egyptian soldiers standing guard on the sooty streets. In the Arab world, big armies kept young men out of trouble and held fractious societies together. “There is no Arab army on earth that’s less than 300,000 in a country the size of Iraq,” he railed to his staff.

But he never said it that strongly to Bush or Rumsfeld. He wasn’t afraid to disagree with his civilian bosses, particularly on military matters; his first Pentagon press conference proved it. But he didn’t believe it was his job to argue with them once a decision had been made. The civilians set the policy and it was the military’s job to execute it. Every senior commander struggled with how far to go in offering advice on policy issues, but in Iraq, where bad policy decisions were driving the insurgency, finding the right balance was especially tough. Should he emphasize the positive assessments coming from his subordinate commanders? Or should he focus on the deep policy disagreements he and his commanders had with Bremer and others in the administration? Was that really his job? There were no clear answers.

After one meeting in which he gave Rumsfeld a positive assessment of the security situation in Iraq, he turned to his immediate staff and asked how they thought he had done. “I felt like I might have been overly optimistic,” he said. “Sir, you were overly optimistic. I don’t think you really believed half of what you said,” said Major General George Trautman, a Marine who was Abizaid’s deputy chief for strategy.

Throughout the latter half of 2003 Abizaid debated going to Baghdad and taking command. Sanchez, whose staff had been thrown together in May, was chronically short of people in key areas such as intelligence. He was also overwhelmed by the job. His relationship with Bremer had grown so bad that the two men barely talked.

In Iraq Abizaid reasoned that he might be able to take some of the pressure off Sanchez, reach out to former Iraqi army officers, and press Bremer
to rethink de-Baathification and other decisions that were causing so much unrest. “I think we should just go,” he’d tell senior aide Colonel Joe Reynes. He was already spending as much as a week there every month, meeting with commanders and sheikhs. When he wasn’t in Iraq or Afghanistan he was in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, or Egypt. The meetings were always the same. He’d ask for names of Sunni sheikhs in Iraq with whom he could meet on his next trip, and the Arab leaders would pass on a list and some advice. “You have to address the honor of the tribes. Pay the families when you kill one of their men; pay the sheikhs,” the crown prince of Bahrain counseled in late October. Abizaid would make a fruitless pitch for them to send Arab peacekeeping troops. At some point they’d tell him what a huge mistake the invasion had been.

As soon as Abizaid seemed settled on moving to Iraq, he’d launch into an argument for staying. There were too many other problems in the region: the Afghan war, an increasingly aggressive Iran, and Al Qaeda’s efforts to establish a presence in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. If he were in Baghdad, he couldn’t give much attention to these problems, which he believed posed a greater long-term threat. Eventually Abizaid decided not to move his headquarters to Iraq; he would try to help Sanchez manage the war through his frequent visits.

Abizaid’s long stretches in the Middle East allowed him to see more clearly than just about any other officer the drawbacks of a long-term occupation of Iraq. He believed that as time passed, Iraqi resentment over the occupation would grow and the effectiveness of the military would be diminished. He recognized that until warring religious and ethnic groups were willing to share power, the fighting would grind on indefinitely.

In a tragic way, though, his deep knowledge of the Arabic world also constrained him. He commanded a massive military force but worried that if it tried to do too much, it would only make the situation worse. Instead of pushing for a strategy that recognized the central role that U.S. troops would have to play in stopping the violence, he often seemed to be casting about for a quick fix to Iraq’s problems.

In the fall of 2003 Petraeus secured the surrender of Sultan Hashem Ahmed, Iraq’s former defense minister and number twenty-seven on the
United States’ most-wanted list. “You have my word that you’ll be treated with the utmost dignity and respect … in my custody,” Petraeus wrote in a letter sent through tribal intermediaries to Hashem. A few weeks later Hashem returned to Mosul, had a final breakfast with his family, and turned himself in to Petraeus. The two men talked in an airplane hangar in Mosul, and Petraeus found that the former general’s assessment of some of northern Iraq’s key political figures matched his own.

Abizaid knew Hashem’s reputation well. The rotund former general had been a hero of the Iran-Iraq War. Despite his high position in Saddam’s government, he was never considered part of the dictator’s inner circle. “This guy could be what we’ve been looking for,” Abizaid suggested to Sanchez. Maybe he could serve as defense minister? Hashem had blood on his hands from his days as an Iraqi general, but so did everybody in the country, Abizaid reasoned. There was an air of desperation to the inquiry. Bremer had no interest in resurrecting former generals in any capacity; nor did the Shiites and Kurds who had been tortured by Saddam’s regime. Hashem was sent to prison and four years later sentenced to death by an Iraqi court for his role in the gassing of the Kurds.

Abizaid sat across from Petraeus in his second-floor palace office with its view of the Tigris River, a ribbon of greenish blue stretching to the horizon. He’d come to get Petraeus’s thoughts on replacing his 22,000-soldier airborne division with a much smaller force of about 8,000 troops. Abizaid and Petraeus had never had a particularly warm relationship. As they shot up through the ranks ahead of their peers, they’d always been rivals more than friends. Still, Abizaid respected the work Petraeus had done in Mosul, and told him as much. No one had done a better job winning over Sunni Arabs or working around the CPA’s disastrous decision to ban former Baathists and military officers from taking part in the government. “We are in a race to win over the Iraqi people. What have you and your element done today?” was the mantra plastered on the wall of every 101st Airborne
Division command post. Petraeus had created a sense of hope in the north that didn’t exist elsewhere.

Abizaid’s worry was whether it could last. He doubted that any American could ever really penetrate the tribal, sectarian, and ethnic politics. He was right about Iraq’s overwhelming complexity. Even Petraeus didn’t fully grasp the political undercurrents that the insurgency would exploit to undo his achievements and gain a foothold in northern Iraq after the 101st departed. But Abizaid underestimated the role that aggressive commanders such as Petraeus were playing in stabilizing the fractious country, at least temporarily. Without Saddam and his henchmen around anymore, only the U.S. military had the capacity to fill the vacuum.

The news of the planned cuts didn’t come as a surprise to Petraeus. Cutting so dramatically was high-risk, he warned Abizaid. But he said he thought it could work. His division had already trained 20,000 Iraqi police and military troops, who had held their own so far. As long as his successor had enough money to keep his massive reconstruction program going, Mosul could get by with fewer Americans, he said.

Shortly after their meeting, attacks spiked throughout Petraeus’s sector. The 101st suffered more deaths in November and December than any other division in Iraq. Petraeus thought he knew what was causing the unrest. Part of the problem was that his reconstruction money was running out. He’d spent $34 million in both captured enemy money and whatever funds he could harass out of Baghdad. Now the cash was gone and new funds from Washington were slow in coming. At his morning battle update briefings in the marble-floored palace auditorium, he tracked the division’s spending obsessively, reviewing upward of seventy slides each day. They all sent the same message: the manic pace of the division’s first months in Mosul was ebbing.

“Why aren’t we digging more wells?” Petraeus asked.

“Because we’re out of money,” his briefer replied.

“Dig,” Petraeus said. He’d take a risk and bet the money would eventually come.

The other big stumbling block was the CPA’s de-Baathification policy, which was finally catching up with him. Earlier in the summer Bremer had permitted him to fire and then temporarily rehire teachers through final
exams. After the exams Petraeus assembled a team of Iraqis to evaluate the former Baathists for permanent positions and was delighted when it gave 66 percent of them a reprieve. He sent their voluminous findings to Baghdad on two cargo helicopters, but the CPA reconciliation committee, run by Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi, never gave permission to rehire them. In late November Chalabi visited Petraeus at his stone palace in Mosul, and Petraeus pleaded with him for relief: “I am not saying that all these people should be kept, but if you are going to tell people that they’re never going to work again, you might as well throw them in jail.”

“At least they can eat there,” a less-than-sympathetic Chalabi replied.

A few weeks later, a colleague who worked for Pentagon deputy Paul Wolfowitz visited Petraeus in Mosul and warned him to watch his back on the de-Baathification issue. “The policy Nazis in the defense secretary’s office are keeping their eye on you,” he said.

By boosting the number of raids and capturing several insurgent leaders, the 101st was able to drive the attack rates back down. Petraeus also worked hard to give former military officers and Baathists who had been blackballed by Baghdad a sense that they were going to have a future in the new Iraq. One way he did it was by staging periodic Baath Party renunciation ceremonies. On a drizzly winter day in December a line of about 2,200 former military officers snaked down a hill in front of the Mosul Police Academy. When he first saw the huge turnout from his helicopter, Petraeus was stunned and delighted. At best, he had expected a crowd of a couple of hundred.

Most in the crowd had fought in Iraq’s bloody war with Iran during the 1980s. They felt as though they had served their country bravely. Now they were standing in the rain begging forgiveness for sins they didn’t believe they had committed. “I am here for my kids and nothing else,” one of the officers angrily told an American reporter. Petraeus couldn’t give the men their old jobs back. All he could offer was a piece of cake, a soda, and a little bit of hope for the future. He pressed his soldiers to treat the Iraqis with dignity, and warned them not to run out of renunciation certificates. Petraeus wasn’t naive; he knew the ceremony wasn’t going to win anybody over. Years later he’d refer to the event as a “wild scheme.” But maybe it could buy him some time with the fence-sitters before they slipped over to
the side of the resistance. The penitents were searched for weapons and brought into the police academy building in groups of 100. Petraeus addressed them from a plywood riser.