[Marxism] Bush administration sharply divided over Iraq strategy

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Among Top Officials, 'Surge' Has Sparked Dissent, Infighting

By Peter Baker, Karen DeYoung, Thomas E. Ricks, Ann Scott Tyson, Joby 
Warrick and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers and Researcher Julie Tate
Sunday, September 9, 2007; A01

For two hours, President Bush listened to contrasting visions of the 
U.S. future in Iraq. Gen. David H. Petraeus dominated the conversation 
by video link from Baghdad, making the case to keep as many troops as 
long as possible to cement any security progress. Adm. William J. 
Fallon, his superior, argued instead for accepting more risks in Iraq, 
officials said, in order to have enough forces available to confront 
other potential threats in the region.

The polite discussion in the White House Situation Room a week ago 
masked a sharper clash over the U.S. venture in Iraq, one that has been 
building since Fallon, chief of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees 
Middle East operations, sent a rear admiral to Baghdad this summer to 
gather information. Soon afterward, officials said, Fallon began 
developing plans to redefine the U.S. mission and radically draw down 
troops.

One of those plans, according to a Centcom officer, involved slashing 
U.S. combat forces in Iraq by three-quarters by 2010. In an interview, 
Fallon disputed that description but declined to offer details. 
Nonetheless, his efforts offended Petraeus's team, which saw them as 
unwelcome intrusion on their own long-term planning. The profoundly 
different views of the U.S. role in Iraq only exacerbated the schism 
between the two men.

"Bad relations?" said a senior civilian official with a laugh. "That's 
the understatement of the century. . . . If you think Armageddon was a 
riot, that's one way of looking at it."

For Bush, the eight months since announcing his "new way forward" in 
Iraq have been about not just organizing a major force deployment but 
also managing a remarkable conflict within his administration, mounting 
a rear-guard action against Congress and navigating a dysfunctional 
relationship with an Iraqi leadership that has proved incapable of 
delivering what he needs.

Although the administration has presented a united front, senior 
officials remain split over whether Bush's strategy will work in the 
long term. Bush gambled that a "surge" of 30,000 troops in the streets 
of Baghdad and the western province of Anbar would establish enough 
security to give "breathing space" to Iraq's sectarian leaders to find 
common ground.

But as Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker deliver progress reports 
to Congress tomorrow, the questions they are likely to face are the same 
ones asked internally: How long should the troop buildup last? When 
should U.S. forces start to come home? Should the United States stand by 
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki or seek another leader? What are 
the hidden risks of the emerging alliance with Sunni tribal leaders? 
What is the best outcome Washington can hope for at this point?

Amid the uncertainty, the overriding imperative for Bush these past 
eight months has been to buy time -- time for the surge to work, time 
for the Iraqis to get their act together, time to produce progress. In 
Washington's efforts to come to grips with the war it unleashed, the 
story of these months is one of trying to control the uncontrollable. 
And now as a result of a casual idea by Petraeus that hardened into an 
unwelcome deadline, the administration finds itself at a pivotal moment.

"All the outreach and consultations did not reset as much time on the 
Washington clock as we had hoped," said Peter D. Feaver, who was a 
National Security Council strategic adviser until July. "Rather than 
buying us more time, the D.C. clock seemed to accelerate after the 
president's speech."
A Strategy With Few Supporters

The president was somber as he took his place behind the lectern in the 
White House library the night of Jan. 10. It was an awkward address. He 
stood alone in the corner talking into a camera. His subdued tone, 
appropriate for ordering thousands more men and women into battle, 
worried some aides who feared it was not persuasive.

It did not take long to figure out just how unpersuasive it was. As Bush 
said good night and headed upstairs to bed, the reviews came in heavily 
negative, even among Republicans. The notion that the president was 
sending even more troops to Iraq after an antiwar public turned control 
of Congress over to the Democrats exasperated many in the capital. The 
visceral reaction induced near-panic among some in the White House.

"The concern of some people -- me -- was the floor was going to break 
politically," said Peter H. Wehner, then White House director of 
strategic initiatives. "We put all our eggs in the surge-Petraeus 
basket. The speech just didn't seem to move anything, and, if anything, 
it seemed to deepen the problem."

The surge was born of a review Bush launched after the midterm 
elections. Over the weeks that followed, the president came to agree 
that his strategy was heading to what he later called "slow failure." 
But rather than heed calls for withdrawal, he opted for a final gambit 
to eke out victory, overruling some of his commanders and the Joint 
Chiefs of Staff and ushering in a new team led by Fallon, Petraeus, 
Crocker and a new defense secretary, Robert M. Gates.

The logic escaped many. The day after Bush's speech, Gates and Secretary 
of State Condoleezza Rice were pummeled during hearings on Capitol Hill. 
The two tried to assure lawmakers that the troop buildup would be 
short-lived. "We're thinking of it as a matter of months, not 18 months 
or two years," Gates testified. Asked about Maliki, Rice said, "I think 
he knows that his government is on borrowed time."

So was Bush. "There was a real question about whether we'd be able to do 
this at all," said a White House aide. Within five weeks, the House had 
voted to oppose the troop buildup, and Democratic leaders were vowing to 
tie Bush's hands. Most worrisome was the discontent among Republicans. 
"It could have potentially strangled this strategy in the crib," Wehner 
said.
Early Turning Points

While Bush played defense in Washington, he also needed to turn up the 
pressure in Baghdad. The strategy would never work, Bush aides knew, 
unless Maliki stepped up. National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley 
had outlined in a memo last fall the deep White House skepticism about 
the prime minister's intentions and abilities to take on Shiite militias.

Bush instituted videoconference calls with Maliki every two weeks, 
prodding him to seek accord among Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions. At 
first, the Americans noticed some change. Maliki, who previously had 
blocked U.S. forces from taking on the Mahdi Army militia of radical 
Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, gave Petraeus the green light to go after 
anyone responsible for attacks. He also deployed three Iraqi brigades in 
Baghdad, as promised.

Sadr fled for Iran in February, concerned that U.S. forces would target 
him. It was a "very personal" decision, not a strategic one, said a 
senior U.S. intelligence official. "He fled because he feared for his 
safety." With Sadr out of the picture, his power base weakened, and 
supporters began fighting among themselves. Some decided to become more 
politically active and stop mobilizing against U.S. forces. Others began 
attacking Sunnis.

More striking was the emerging shift in Anbar; al-Qaeda and Sunni 
insurgents had grown so dominant in the western province that military 
intelligence had all but given up on the area months earlier. Bush 
benefited from good timing. As he introduced his new strategy, Marine 
commanders had already made common cause with local Sunni tribal leaders 
who had broken with the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, also 
called AQI.

Why the sheiks turned remains a point of debate, but it seems clear that 
the tribes resented al-Qaeda's efforts to ban smoking and marry local 
women to build ties to the region. "Marrying women to strangers, let 
alone foreigners, is just not done," Australian Lt. Col. David 
Kilcullen, a Petraeus adviser, wrote in an essay.

The sheik who forged the alliance with the Americans, Abdul Sattar 
Buzaigh al-Rishawi, traced the decision to fight al-Qaeda to Sept. 14, 
2006, long before the new Bush strategy, but the president's plan 
dispatched another 4,000 U.S. troops to Anbar to exploit the situation. 
As security improved, the White House eagerly took credit.

The "Anbar Awakening" represented perhaps the most important shift in 
years, but it generated little debate at the White House. Long before 
the tribes switched sides, the administration conducted a policy 
exercise on how to team up with former insurgents. But when such an 
alliance occurred, it bubbled up from the ground with no Washington 
involvement. "We're not smart enough to know the course that these 
matters might take," Rice conceded to an Australian newspaper last week.

The alliances generated angst among Maliki and other Shiite leaders in 
Baghdad, who wondered whether such groups would turn against them. 
"There were a couple times we got from Maliki very, very alarming, 'What 
are you guys doing?' " messages, recalled another top official.
Buildup Expands; Concerns Grow

As Petraeus settled into his new command, he decided to press for 8,000 
additional support troops beyond the 21,500 combat forces the president 
had committed. Just a week earlier, Gates had told Congress that only 
2,000 or 3,000 more might be needed. As he reviewed a briefing sheet in 
preparation for more testimony, Gates was annoyed to see a larger 
request buried on the page. He fumed that "this is going to make us look 
like idiots," said a defense official. But Gates got Petraeus the troops.

More critical was the defense secretary's decision to extend deployments 
in Iraq from 12 months to 15 months. The generals told Gates that the 
extra brigades flowing to Iraq had stretched the military close to the 
breaking point. "We ran out of forces, that's what happened," said a 
senior Army official. To keep the buildup going, and to offer 
predictability for troops and families, Gates approved the longest 
overseas combat deployments since World War II.

In doing so, Gates -- who three months earlier said no one thought the 
surge would last 18 months -- enabled it to last almost that long. 
Although that was not the stated reason for the deployment extension, in 
effect the change redefined the buildup into a longer mission than first 
envisioned. Bush aides and U.S. military planners in Iraq then began 
assuming that the extra forces would remain at least through April 2008 
-- even as Congress was trying to force a timetable for withdrawal.

Lawmakers were not alone. Fallon, who took command of Centcom in March, 
worried that Iraq was undermining the military's ability to confront 
other threats, such as Iran. "When he took over, the reality hit him 
that he had to deal with Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and a whole 
bunch of other stuff besides Iraq," said a top military officer.

Fallon was also derisive of Iraqi leaders' intentions and competence, 
and dubious about the surge. "He's been saying from Day One, 'This isn't 
working,' " said a senior administration official. And Fallon signaled 
his departure from Bush by ordering subordinates to avoid the term "long 
war" -- a phrase the president used to describe the fight against terrorism.

To Bush aides, Gates did not seem fully on board with the president's 
strategy, either. As a member of the congressionally chartered Iraq 
Study Group before his selection to head the Pentagon, Gates embraced 
proposals to scale back the U.S. presence in Iraq. Now that he was in 
the Cabinet, he kept his own counsel.

But he consulted regularly with former national security adviser Brent 
Scowcroft, a noted critic of the Iraq war; told Army audiences privately 
that a troop decrease was inevitable; and tried to avoid Sunday talk 
shows during the fight over the war spending bill to preserve relations 
with lawmakers, according to administration sources. "With Fallon, it's 
pretty much in your face," said a senior official. "Gates is quieter."

A Pentagon official said Gates is "very concerned about all of our 
energy" being devoted to Iraq, an "overcommitment that is consuming and 
distracting us from everything else. On the other hand, he knows there 
can't be another Saigon. There's this balance."

He was not the only skeptic. More than half a dozen retired four-star 
generals turned down Hadley in his search for a "war czar" who could 
knock heads and make sure requests from the field survived the 
Washington bureaucracy.

At the same time, in late April, Gates visited Petraeus as Congress was 
about to pass war-funding legislation mandating troop withdrawals, a 
bill Bush would veto. Under pressure to show results, Gates and Petraeus 
played for time. A day after Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid 
(D-Nev.) declared that "this war is lost," they decided that Petraeus 
and Crocker would give an update in September.

They hoped that would buy them another five months. What they didn't 
anticipate was that a simple progress report would become a 
make-or-break moment.
Increasing Pressure on Maliki

By that point, there was not much political progress to report in Iraq. 
Bush became aggravated by Maliki's inability to forge agreements to 
address grievances fueling sectarian strife, such as allowing low-level 
members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party back into government, passing a 
law governing oil revenue distribution and setting provincial elections.

Bush had been using his biweekly videoconferences with Maliki to shore 
up the Iraqi leader, but he also used the calls to make clear that U.S. 
patience had grown short. He pressed Maliki several times on the oil law 
in particular, irritated that the Iraqis had told him repeatedly that 
they had a deal, only to see it unravel.

Amid heated congressional debate last spring, the White House again 
confronted the question Hadley had raised in his memo in the fall: Could 
Maliki deliver? "There were some who argued that Maliki was not the best 
guy for the job," said a State Department official. "But the answer came 
back that if you change the prime minister, then any prospect of 
progress on the political front stops completely while they try to form 
a new government."

Bush rejected suggestions to help oust Maliki, reasoning that he was the 
product of a democratic system that the United States helped establish 
in Iraq, aides said. Moreover, as officials contemplated alternatives, 
they concluded there was no better potential leader. "There's no Nelson 
Mandela in Iraq," Crocker, the ambassador, told colleagues back in 
Washington. "Saddam killed them all."

But Bush agreed to increase pressure on Maliki by codifying 18 
benchmarks set in war-funding legislation, such as the oil law and 
de-Baathification changes, and asked deputy national security adviser 
Meghan O'Sullivan to go to Baghdad to help the prime minister and other 
leaders reach consensus.

Meanwhile, the Maliki government pressed the Americans to sit down with 
Iranian officials in hopes of stopping Tehran from funding and arming 
Shiite militias. Bush had rejected proposals by the Iraq Study Group and 
others to talk with Iran, but Rice decided it was time.

When Rice told Crocker to get ready for talks with Iran, he asked her 
the "blindingly obvious" question of whether Vice President Cheney would 
allow it, a U.S. official said. Rice, according to the official, told 
Crocker that it "wasn't your lane," adding, "I'll work it back here. 
That's not your problem."

Rice overcame resistance from Cheney for talks with both Syria and Iran, 
and Crocker met an Iranian envoy in Baghdad. In the end, the talks led 
nowhere. Around the same time, Sadr, the cleric, decided to leave his 
seclusion in Iran and return to Iraq, arriving in a showy motorcade to 
deliver a trademark anti-American sermon. But he has been unable to 
assert as much control as before, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

Anbar now looked even more successful, and while Americans had 
originally considered the situation unique, they began considering ways 
to replicate it. As part of the new Bush strategy, Rice had established 
10 provincial reconstruction teams around Iraq to work with local 
officials rather than rely on the ineffectual central government. In 
speeches, Bush began hailing "bottom up" reconciliation.

Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, Petraeus's deputy, sent a memo to U.S. 
commanders in Iraq urging them to seek local deals similar to those in 
Anbar through reward money and nonlethal aid such as radios, clothes and 
telephones. "Reconciliation is local," he wrote, "and there is no 
one-size fits all solution to this complex problem."
A Skeptic Takes Charge

By the time Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute arrived at the White House as the 
war czar overseeing Iraq and Afghanistan, the president's aides were in 
the throes of writing an interim report on the benchmarks, due to 
Congress on July 15. Like many of his former colleagues at the Pentagon, 
Lute had been a skeptic of the surge. Now he was charged with making it 
successful.

He showed up the first few days wearing his uniform before realizing 
that it would be better to switch to a suit. Unlike his predecessor, 
Lute briefed the president at 7 a.m. every day, giving him clout to 
resolve thorny matters. He told his staff to narrow their priorities 
from 100 issues to the top 20.

His first task was the draft report to Congress, which he deemed 
excessively positive. It said twice as many benchmarks had satisfactory 
progress as had unsatisfactory, despite the Iraqi government's failure 
to meet most political and economic goals.

On one benchmark, the State Department wanted to say the Iraqis were 
making satisfactory progress spending their own money on reconstruction, 
while the Treasury Department disagreed. Lute deemed that the goal was 
not being met. "He said we've got to call a ball either out or in, and 
this one was out," recalled one official involved. The White House 
eventually split the difference, judging that benchmark as "partially met."

Lute also arrived at a time of renewed political alarm inside the White 
House, as leading establishment Republicans, including Sens. Richard G. 
Lugar (Ind.), Pete V. Domenici (N.M.) and George V. Voinovich (Ohio) 
broke with Bush's policy. Aides urged Bush to emphasize that the troop 
buildup would lead to eventual withdrawals once security was 
established. The president rejected that, concluding that if he "showed 
leg," as one aide put it, it would only encourage more Republicans to 
defect.

Another new arrival in the West Wing set up a rapid-response PR unit 
hard-wired into Petraeus's shop. Ed Gillespie, the new presidential 
counselor, organized daily conference calls at 7:45 a.m. and again late 
in the afternoon between the White House, the Pentagon, the State 
Department, and the U.S. Embassy and military in Baghdad to map out ways 
of selling the surge.

 From the start of the Bush plan, the White House communications office 
had been blitzing an e-mail list of as many as 5,000 journalists, 
lawmakers, lobbyists, conservative bloggers, military groups and others 
with talking points or rebuttals of criticism. Between Jan. 10 and last 
week, the office put out 94 such documents in various categories -- 
"Myths/Facts" or "Setting the Record Straight" to take issue with 
negative news articles, and "In Case You Missed It" to distribute 
positive articles or speeches.

Gillespie arranged several presidential speeches to make strategic 
arguments, such as comparing Iraq to Vietnam or warning of Iranian 
interference. When critics assailed Bush for overstating ties between 
al-Qaeda and the group called al-Qaeda in Iraq, Gillespie organized a 
Bush speech to make his case.

"The whole idea is to take these things on before they become 
conventional wisdom," said White House communications director Kevin 
Sullivan. "We have a very short window."
Eight Months Later

Petraeus was doing his part in Baghdad, hosting dozens of lawmakers and 
military scholars for PowerPoint presentations on why the Bush strategy 
had made gains. Many Republicans and even Democrats came home impressed, 
and suddenly even critics were agreeing that Petraeus had made some 
progress in security even though the Iraqi political situation remained 
a mess. Petraeus also persuaded intelligence officials to revise some 
key judgments of a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to reflect 
security gains.

Some visitors suspected a skewed picture. "We only saw things that 
reinforced their message that the surge was working," said Rep. Jan 
Schakowsky (D-Ill.).

But Bush understood that the "breathing space" had yielded little 
political reconciliation. As summer wore on, Bush grew blunt in his 
conference calls with Maliki. As one aide recalled, "He would say, 'Hey, 
you told me you were going to do X, Y and Z. What happened? Are you 
going to get agreement on these key pieces of legislation or not?' "

In Baghdad, Crocker and O'Sullivan pressed Maliki to reach consensus 
with four other Iraqi leaders representing Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. In 
late August, the five announced agreement on a path forward on stalled 
legislation such as de-Baathification. A week later, Bush made a 
surprise visit to Anbar where he met with Maliki and the others to 
congratulate them, then met with the sheiks to highlight the success of 
the U.S.-tribal coalition.

The trip energized Bush and his team. Even Gates said he was more 
optimistic than he has been since taking office. While the secretary had 
been "cagey" in the past, a senior defense official said, "he's come to 
the conclusion that what Petraeus is doing is actually more effective 
than what he thought."

But the trip did not end the debate. Fallon has made the case that 
Petraeus's recommendations should consider the political reality in 
Washington and lay out a guide to troop withdrawals, while Petraeus has 
resisted that, beyond a possible token pullout of a brigade early next 
year, according to military officials. The Joint Chiefs have been 
sympathetic to Fallon's view.

In an interview Friday, Fallon said he and Petraeus have reached 
accommodation about tomorrow's testimony. "The most important thing is 
I'm very happy with what Dave has recommended," he said. As for the 
earlier discussions, he begged off. "It's too politically charged right 
now."

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