The War Within (14 page)

Bush had always maintained that he had to let the generals run the war. The problem during the Vietnam War, he told me in 2002, was that "the government micromanaged the war"óboth the White House and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. During Vietnam, Bush had been a Texas Air National Guard F-102 pilot, though he had never served in combat. "I remember my pilot friends," he said, "telling me that over Thud Ridge"óthe path American jets took to Hanoió"they could only fly a certain time, and the enemy knew when they were coming."

Micromanaging the war from the White House had been a red line for Bush. The generals' words almost always were unchallenged gospel. He did not want to second-guess them. He would regularly ask if they had everything they needed.

All that was about to change.

"We must succeed," Bush said. "We will commit the resources to succeed. If they"óthe Iraqisó"can't do it, we will."

In a direct challenge to Rumsfeld, the president used the bicycle seat analogy. "If the bicycle teeters," he declared,

"we're going to put the hand back on. We have to make damn sure we cannot fail. If they stumble, we have to have enough manpower to cope with that."

"I've got it," said Casey. "I understand your intent." What he didn't quite understand was just how much his world was about to change.

The president was not done. Did Casey need the permission of Prime Minister Maliki to deal with the Shia militiaóespecially those led by Moqtada al-Sadr?

Yes, Casey said, he did indeed need Maliki's approval to go after targets in the Sadr City enclave. "Maliki claims that he's working with [Moqtada al-]Sadr, that he may have a deal there." Maliki had refused to okay five missions against Shia death squad members in Sadr City and nearby areas, Casey said. "'If you're not going to let us go after them,' I tell Maliki, 'then ask Sadr to give these people to us.'" So, Casey said, "Maliki is exercising his sovereignty."

The United States and the coalition had technically ended the occupation three years earlier, formally declaring that Iraq was a sovereign nation. As the president knew, Maliki didn't see the death squads as a threat. He himself had no political base and believed he needed the Shia extremists who supported him to one extent or another.

"If the Shia believe that we're hitting the Sunni extremists, that we're hitting al Qaeda, then won't that reassure them?" Bush asked.

"Well," Casey said, "70 percent of our effortótargetingóis against al Qaeda and the Baathists, 30 percent against the death squads." So he had a credible case to make to Maliki.

"How's Maliki doing?" Bush asked.

"He's a dramatic improvement over his predecessor," Khalilzad said, referring to the former interim prime minister Ibrahim al-Jafari, who was too close to the Iranians and Moqtada and was known as the "fog machine" because he talked endlessly and in circles. "He's decisive. He works at a faster pace, relatively speaking." But he was constrained by the bigger forces of Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the largest Shia political party in Iraq.

Casey agreed with that assessment. "Maliki's a little more like Allawi"óAyad Allawi, the CIA-supported Shiite who was the first prime minister in 2004. "He's still getting his legs as prime minister." Though Maliki viewed the Baathists as the universal enemy, he had included some Sunnis in the government.

Bush reminded them that he had thought the Camp David conclave two months earlier would produce benchmarks for Iraqi political progress.

Khalilzad said he was trying to put something together, especially on fuel subsidies and a law on investments. But on political issues, the ambassador said, it was just very hard. The implication was that it was not doable.

"Every quarter," Pace said, "governments report to their populations on how they're doing. Maybe the Iraqi government ought to make a report to the Iraqi people quarterly on how it's doing."

That's a new idea, Khalilzad said charitably.

"You may need to consider it," the president said. But he wanted to go to larger issues. "Is there a normal life at all for the people of Iraq?" he asked. Since the invasion, he had asserted that the Iraqis, as all people did, craved freedom. Now his question was more basic. "Is there some matrix you can use to describe what life is like for the people in Iraq?"

"You can see at night, when you fly over, lights are on," Rumsfeld said. "Currency is relatively stable. Schools are open."

"More children in school," Bush said, "universities are full. More electricity. So life is relatively normal?" He paused. "We can make that case?"

"Vast areas are doing well," Khalilzad said. "Seven million people have cell phones. The whole of the north is stabilizing. There is a building boom there. And part of the south is also doing all right."

Zelikow, who had made a dozen trips to Iraq, could not contain himself. "Mr. President," he said, "Baghdad is in terrible shape, and that's one quarter of the population of the country. There's violence all over the place." There were more than 150 violent attacks a day in the countryóIEDs, car bombs, suiciders wearing vests of explosives, small-arms fire, ambushes, mortar, artillery, as well as some surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles. Zelikow named major cities and provinces outside Baghdad that were experiencing substantial violenceóin the north, Mosul, Kirkuk, Diyala; Basra in the south; and Anbar in the west. "The conditions there are not normal," he said. "For millions of Iraqis, they're in daily struggles to survive that we can only barely understand."

As a professor of history, Zelikow had written about presidential decision making and the dynamics of a national security team under stress in his book
The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So perhaps it was the pained look on Bush's face or the discomfort in his body language. Perhaps Zelikow didn't want to be entirely out of step with the optimism or didn't want to be seen as a naysayer. Perhaps he simply could not overcome the old clichÈ that advisers fold in front of the president. Whatever the reason, Zelikow quickly shifted ground. "But one of the inspiring things about the reason why we're there," he said, "and why we need to help these people, is the heroism of ordinary Iraqisóthousands of people we never ever hear of who are putting their lives on the line to try to make things work in a desperately difficult situation."

Casey said that extremism in its many forms was itself a major problem that transcended the sectarian divide between Sunni and Shia. The death squads on both sides were pushing people into one camp or another. It was a struggle for power among the Iraqis. "We have to deal with that," Casey said.

Are al Qaeda fighters still streaming in? Bush asked.

"They are trying," Casey said. Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the current al Qaeda leader in Iraq, was "trying to pull in foreign talent."

"Don't understate the sectarian problem," Abizaid said. "There is a sectarian line that divides the whole Arab world.

It runs right through Iraq. Religion is a way of life, and so a sectarian divide is profound. And this struggle in Iraq could be one that is defining for the whole region." He spoke with an air of historical understanding: History itself might be against the kind of new order that Bush envisioned.

Do you think Iraqi nationalism trumps religious convictions? Bush asked him. The U.S. approach was based on the presence of Iraqi nationalism, or at least reconciliation between the Shia and Sunnis.

"The center may not hold," Abizaid replied. "It's tottering. The battle for moderation is hugely important."

Was coexistence possible? Bush asked. "Because if not, a fix would be impossible."

The question hung in the room.

The United States could help shape it, Abizaid said. "We must shape it in Iraq."

Josh Bolten, 51, who had been chief of staff for 16 months, had been quiet. His predecessor, Andrew Card, had told him that his job would be "Iraq, Iraq, Iraq," so Bolten had immersed himself in the policy debate. He was the former editor of the
Stanford Law Review
and a Goldman Sachs investment banker. "It's most important for the Iraqi government to reach accommodation on how to divide power and resources. If it gets worse," Bolten asked, "what radical measures can the team recommend?"

A long silence followed. "Radical" was a word rarely used in the Bush White House, where core principles and courses of action seemingly had long ago been settled: Taxes must be reduced. Presidential power must be increased.

The Iraq War must be waged and won.

Rumsfeld finally attempted an answer. "That's the back side of my earlier point. What do we do? There are things we can preview now and say, 'Here's what we may do. We could close bases, bordersÖ'" He even proposed fashioning some external event, but he was vague about it and it was not clear what he meant. It seemed he did not catch the weight and drift of Bolten's suggestion of something "radical."

For the third time, the president returned to Baghdad. Could it be calmed down?

"Yes," Casey said. Operation Together Forward was under way, with thousands more U.S. troops brought into Baghdad from other parts of Iraq.

Hadley also had been silent for most of the time. The 2006 congressional elections were only 10 weeks off, and the possibility of losing Republican control of both the House and Senate seemed likely. The last years of the Bush administration were going to be rough no matter what, but he knew that if the Congress were lost, an unbelievably difficult road lay ahead.

"Is the effort to seek reconciliation with the Sunnis a fool's errand?" Hadley asked. It was one of the harshest, most explicit questions he had ever posed. "And is there any chance that that strategy can succeed?" The mere posing of the question by the man who was supposed to remain neutral was surprising. Could the Shia and the Sunnis work together? Was the very idea of Iraq, as one nation, even possible?

Too soon to tell, Khalilzad answered, but he added that the elements of reconciliation were not in place. "Sunnis are not yet really in the political process." After three elections in Iraq and three and a half years of war, he said, "Their issues are not being addressed yet." The rivalries remained intense. "This will take time. You can't win this by killing enough people without having reconciliation. Seventy percent of the population are against the Sunnis. But we can continue and we can try to close a deal, and then make a judgment."

The president returned to his opening question: "Can we succeed? If the answer is maybe, if there's doubt, then maybe we need another posture."

"We definitely can," Khalilzad said. "We're making progress." Paying some attention, as he put it, to Iran and Syria could help with that progress.

Casey agreed. "As I keep reminding Steve Hadley, the Iraqis know they are not going back" to the old order, he said.

The president said he was planning to give a speech that would put any new analysis, information and strategy together in the larger context, including the Palestinian and Israeli issues.

Perhaps recognizing that the meeting had been both directly and indirectly critical of Khalilzad and Casey, Cheney offered praise for the hard work that both the men were doing.

"I support you guys 100 percent," Bush chimed in, taking the cue. "But we need to ask tough questions. I hope that Ambassador Khalilzad and General Casey understand that. So that we can be confident, I have to tell you folks what's on my mind. If you can't answer the questions, that makes me nervous. These are difficult times; we need to ask some difficult questions."

Casey said he appreciated the hard questions, and the president adjourned the session.

But the sense of doom and the dark insinuation remained. The declaration that the president and vice president supported the generals "100 percent," of course, carried the not-so-subtle suggestion that the opposite was true. Some of the hard questions remained unanswered. Bush later told me that he was intentionally sending a message to Rumsfeld and Casey: "If it's not working, let's do something differentÖI presume they took it as a message."

T
hough Meghan O'Sullivan was writing the daily TOP SECRET Iraq Note for the president, Bush often peppered her with questions when he saw her during the day at briefings or meetings in the Oval Office with Cheney, Hadley, chief of staff Josh Bolten or others. Several times it was just Bush and O'Sullivan. Not only was she the deputy national security adviser for Iraq, but she also had extensive personal contacts in Iraq whom she had kept in touch with for more than three years.

In early May 2003, when she had gone to Baghdad to work first for Jay Garner and then for Jerry Bremer, her first political job was to get to know the largest Shia party, SCIRI, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was obviously going to have a major say in the new Iraq. SCIRI leaders, who had extremist and Iranian ties, were reticent to build relationships with the United States. So at 33, O'Sullivan had driven her beat-up Hyundai all over Baghdad, stopping when she saw a SCIRI party sign and asking people, "Do you know anyone from this party?

Do you know where I could find them?" She went knocking on doors like a saleswoman or a journalist. She made the rounds for almost a year and got to know the party leadersóAbdul Aziz al-Hakim and Adil Abd al-Mahdi. From the White House, she kept in touch with these Iraqis by phone and e-mail. So when Bush quizzed her, she spoke with some authority. More than a dozen times, he asked her questions such as "What are you hearing from people in Baghdad? What's it like in Baghdad? What are people's daily lives like? Can they get around? Do they live a normal life?"

His queries were growing in number and variety that summer. He was also more insistent. O'Sullivan was determined not to mislead or lie to him. So her answer was often simple: "It's hell, Mr. President."

Her reports contradicted the happy talk and positive spin from the military and the Baghdad embassy. She thought it was smart of Bush that he kept asking, and she could see his deep frustration. Her job was to get him good information, but she did not know, or would not say, howóor whetheróhe squared what she told him with the other reports.