The War Within (18 page)

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The next morning, September 12, Peter J. Schoomaker walked down the marble hallways of the Rayburn House Office Building and turned into office 2423.

Schoomaker was into his third year as Army chief of staff, a job that had taxed him emotionally and filled his days with frustration. A bear of a man, Schoomaker had served in Special Operations almost his entire career. He had been a captain in the legendary Delta Force during the ill-fated 1980 operationónamed Desert Oneóto rescue the 53

Americans held hostage in Iran. The failed raid, in which eight American servicemen died, was another blow to the U.S. military on the heels of Vietnam, and it had essentially sunk the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

In the years that followed, Schoomaker had risen through the ranks and been involved in all the Army's major operations, including the 1991 Gulf War. He had retired in 2000 as a four-star general, after commanding all Special Operations forces.

But in the spring of 2003, just months after the Iraq invasion, he was driving through Wyoming, looking to buy a ranch, when a call came from Rumsfeld's office. Spurning all active duty generals, Rumsfeld put a full-court press on Schoomaker to return as Army chief of staff. Schoomaker flew to Washington and had dinner with Rumsfeld and his wife, Joyce. He also spent the better part of an afternoon getting a pitch from Cheney, who had been Schoomaker's congressman from Wyoming for a decade.

Rumsfeld wanted a more mobile, agile and lethal Army, and he told Schoomaker he would support him in re-creating the Army in the image of the Special Forcesósmaller, self-contained units that could deploy rapidly into any situation.

Schoomaker took the job, though he didn't see any definitive winning or losing. The war simply looked like a long slog, for which Rumsfeld and the others had refused to plan. Schoomaker had spent years during the 1980s in Lebanon, where he had witnessed insane, illogical escalations of violence. He had come away believing that human beings possess a dark nature and that once emotions boil over into fighting, they are nearly impossible to quell.

Office 2423 was home to Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania. A framed picture of Marines raising the American flag at Iwo Jima hung on one wall. On another was a picture of Theodore Roosevelt. Near the entrance sat a bronze bust of George Marshall, who supervised the U.S. Army during World War II and later became President Harry Truman's secretary of state.

The surroundings served as a reminder to visitors that Murtha was a military man to the bone. He had earned a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts for his service as a Marine officer during Vietnam.

He had voted to authorize the Iraq War in 2002 but had come to regret the decision. In November 2005, much to the dismay of the White House, he had publicly called for a redeployment of troops from Iraq and had been an irritant to the administration ever since.

Murtha, 74, was the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, meaning he had a firm hand on the purse strings.

Which is precisely why Schoomaker had come to visit. Weeks earlier, he had taken the unprecedented step of refusing to submit the Army budget by the August 15 deadline. His protest followed a series of cuts in the service's funding requests by the White House and Congress. Rumsfeld wanted the Army to get by on $114 billion, $25

billion short of what Schoomaker said it needed.

For the better part of an hour, the two gray-haired warriors had a civil give-and-take. The conversation turned to the war and the future of the military. Schoomaker believed the biggest future threat was global terrorism. Murtha didn't agree. He felt China and other potentially hostile nations posed more significant threats.

Schoomaker argued that it was important to win in Iraq. Most people he had met out in the country, he said, wanted to see it through. It was important to succeed.

Murtha launched into a diatribe against the president and the Iraq War. You can be as enthusiastic about the war as you want, he said, but we simply don't have the troops to sustain it for much longer. Public opinion was strongly against the war. How could the president ignore the American people? This is a democracy, Murtha insisted, pounding the table, waving a copy of the Constitution in the air and claiming that Bush had become "a dictator."

Schoomaker suggested that if Murtha thought the president's approval rating was low, he ought to take a look at recent polls. You'll find that the military is the institution that people have the most confidence in, followed by police and firefighters, then organized religion, he said. All those were above or near 50 percent approval. The president was down in the 30s, and Congress was in the 20s or lower. "Congress is even lower than the president,"

Schoomaker said.

"This meeting's over!" Murtha shouted, red-faced and angry as hell.

Schoomaker left quietly.

* * *

Several days later, on September 15, Bush held a press conference in the Rose Garden at the White House.

The Washington Post'
s Peter Baker asked, "Mr. President, you've often used the phrase 'stand up, stand down,' to describe your policy when it comes to troop withdrawals from IraqÖ. The Pentagon now says they've trained 294,000 Iraqi troops and expect to complete their program of training 325,000 by the end of the year. But American troops aren't coming home, and there are more there now than there were previously. Is the goalpost moving, sir?"

"No, no," Bush insisted. "The enemy is changing tactics, and we're adapting. That's what's happening. I asked General Casey today, 'Have you got what you need?' He said, 'Yes, I've got what I need.'"

Bush continued, "The reason why there are not fewer troops there but are moreóyou're right, it's gone from 135,000

to about 147,000, I think, or 140,000-something troops is because George Casey felt he needed them to help the Iraqis achieve their objective. And that's the way I will continue to conduct the war. I'll listen to generals. Maybe it's not the politically expedient thing to do, is to increase troops coming into an election, but we just can'tóyou can't make decisions based upon politics about how to win a war. And the fundamental question you have to askÖCan the President trust his commanders on the ground to tell him what is necessary? That's really one of the questions."

The president seemed almost to be having a debate with himself.

"In other words," he said, "if you say, 'I'm going to rely upon their judgment,' the next question is 'How good is their judgment; or is my judgment good enough to figure out whether or not they know what they're doing?' And I'm going to tell you, I've got great confidence in General John Abizaid and General George Casey. These are extraordinary men who understand the difficulties of the task, and understand there is a delicate relationship between self-sufficiency on the Iraqis' part, and U.S. presence.

"And so to answer your question, the policy still holds. The 'stand up, stand down' still holds, and so does the policy of me listening to our commanders to give me the judgment necessary for troop levels."

Of course, both the president and his advisers knew the stand up/stand down approachóas the Iraqis took charge, the Americans would reduce their roleówasn't working. Behind closed doors, they were searching ever more urgently for a strategy that would.

* * *

By mid-September, Chuck Robb realized that the Iraq Study Group was coalescing around a recommendation for a fixed early withdrawal from Iraq. The group was scheduled to meet the week of September 18, but Robb had a family vacation that had been planned for a year. So he wrote a memo to his fellow members. "Without being overly dramatic, I believe the Battle for Baghdad is the make-or-break element of whatever impact we're going to have on IraqÖ. My sense is that we need, right away, a significant short-term surge in U.S. forces on the ground." Taking U.S. forces from elsewhere in Iraq would leave them playing "whack-a-mole," because new trouble would likely pop up in the places that they left behind. Robb added that "time is of the essence," and if Together Forward did not succeed by spring, "we lose." His memo said it was "time to let our military do what they're trained to do on offenseówithout being overly constrained by a zero casualties or collateral damage approach." The clock was running out, and the study group report needed to be "bold and consequential," he wrote, adding, "I'm very much aware of the difficulties inherent in this brief rant."

Baker and Hamilton wanted a unanimous report and a unanimous series of recommendations from the five Democrats and five Republicans. Without consensus, they knew they would have little or no impact, rendering their efforts meaningless. Robb believed he had sent a clear messageóhe would not sign on unless a "surge" option was included.

Chapter 13

T
he man who walked into the Pentagon on Tuesday, September 19, had a private appointment with Secretary Rumsfeld. On first glance, you might swear he worked with his large hands and measured his hours in sweat. At 6-foot-3 and 240 pounds, he had a boxer's faceóred and ruddy and hard, framed by tightly cropped hair. He was retired Army General Jack Keane, a 37-year veteran and former vice chief of staff, the number two man in the U.S. Army.

At 63, though no longer on active duty, Keane couldn't shake the dread that accompanied his thoughts about the Iraq War. As a paratrooper in Vietnam, he had seen the multiple confusions of that war shatter his beloved Army and drain his country of spirit, resources and moral authority.

Few had more command experience than Keane. He had led a full corps of 50,000 soldiers. He'd become a Rumsfeld favorite among the generalsóno small feat, given the mutual contempt between Rumsfeld and many of his military officers. In 2002, Keane had agreed to Rumsfeld's request to become the chief of staff of the Army, but he had later changed his mind and retired because his wife, Terry, was seriously ill with Parkinson's disease. Rumsfeld had shown him compassion and understanding.

Like many, Keane found Rumsfeld abrasive, dismissive and distrustful of the uniformed military leaders. But he believed Rumsfeld was right about the need for dramatic change within the military, especially in the Army. As a member of the Defense Policy Board, an outside group of advisers that received regular top secret briefings, Keane stayed up to date on Iraq. He shared his frustrations over the war with a fellow policy board member, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who urged him to lay out his concerns to the secretary.

When Keane got to Rumsfeld's office, he found General Peter Pace as well. The three men sat around a small conference table.

Keane said he had been reluctant to come. "I just don't want to be another critic. You have many of them," he began.

"I don't want to be another burden. I hate armchair know-it-alls who believe they have a better idea than those who are actually doing it. That's not me. Newt Gingrich thought we should talk, and I think that's probably why you asked me to come in."

Rumsfeld nodded.

"I don't want to waste your time. Everybody is working so hard and sacrificing so much to get it done and do what is right. I'm here as a member of the teamóthe Defense Policy Board, which I take very seriously." He explained that he had attended many staff briefings, made trips to Iraq, and been involved in the assessments in 2004 and 2005.

"We're edging toward strategic failure," Keane said. "And I want to discuss some things to minimize and reduce that risk." It was a stark assessment, and he tried to soften it. "Strategic failure in the sense that the government is fractured and if it does fracture it'll lead to civil war." In 2003 and 2004, the U.S. military strategy was offensive. "Its principal purpose was to kill and capture insurgents. And we backed into that strategy, as you know, in the spring and summer of '03"óthe months after the invasion.

Rumsfeld was taking notes.

"We were a conventional army. The preeminent land force in the world. Well trained for big wars but ill prepared for counterinsurgencies. And the commanders initially started off executing what they know, which was using conventional tactics against an unconventional enemyÖ. We also had no unifying strategy, no campaign plan, all through '03 and most of '04." This was the period when the junior three-star officer in the Army, Ricardo Sanchez, was the Iraq commander.

Then a campaign plan was developed and approved in 2004 and 2005, Keane said. "It has multiple lines of operationósecurity, governance, training the Iraqi security forces, economic recovery, infrastructure and information operations. But it is really a defensive strategy, and it's also a short-war strategy."

"What do you meanóshort-war strategy?" Rumsfeld asked.

It was designed for us to get out as soon as possible, Keane said. "It relies heavily on establishing an effective government and franchising the Sunnis, isolating the insurgents and bringing them intoÖthe political process. It makes sense. I believed it at the time."

The military approach focused on turning security over to the Iraqi security forces as quickly as possible, Keane said.

"The other part is to protect ourselves in the processóthe force protection of our own troops." Another part was to eliminate al Qaeda sanctuaries. "Despite these efforts and despite capturing Saddam and killing his two sons, and despite holding three elections, and despite writing a constitution and installing a permanent government and despite the improvement in the Iraqi security forces and also killing Zarqawi, the fact is, the harsh reality is, the level of violence has increased every year in the contested areas.

"Security and stability are worse. It threatens the survival of the government and the success of our mission. And what's wrong? What's wrong is our strategy. We never adopted a strategy to defeat the insurgency."

What do you mean? Rumsfeld asked.

"Well, we don't have a mission to defeat the insurgency. If we did, we should be protecting the population. And the fact that we're not protecting the population has exposed it to al Qaeda, to the Sunni insurgents and the Shia militia that take advantage of it. And that's why we have the bloodbath we have today." He said the Iraqis were not yet capable of handling security. "That's the problem," he said. "We put our money on that horse." And the horse had come up lame.