The Fourth Star Part 6

Rumsfeld's parting instructions had been to take a few weeks to study the situation, but after only seven days in Iraq, he was in his first video session with the defense secretary, who directed him to begin a major a.s.sessment of the effort to rebuild the Iraqi police and army. Four days later they spoke by phone, followed by another videoconference and another phone call several days after that. In all, Casey partic.i.p.ated in twenty-three phone conversations or video meetings with Rumsfeld during his first two months, an average of one every three days. Rumsfeld was a stickler for chain of command. When Casey was scheduled to update Bush, Rumsfeld required a prebrief so that he could approve any information that went to the president. Sometimes it seemed Casey's staff was doing little more than churning out briefing slides for Washington.

After one videoconference, Casey's senior aide, Colonel Jim Barclay, got a call from General Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. "The secretary liked the briefing," he said, referring to Rumsfeld. "But he wants Casey to stop saying um um so much when he's talking." so much when he's talking."

"Sir, I can't tell him that," Barclay protested. "But hold on. He's right here."

He transferred the call into Casey's Green Zone office, and Pace told Casey himself. After hanging up, Casey and Barclay shook their heads. Like everyone else who worked with Rumsfeld, Casey received periodic one- or two-sentence notes-known as "snowflakes"-on issues that caught the defense secretary's attention. Sometimes Rumsfeld would wonder why it seemed to take so long to plan a raid and arrest a particular insurgent target. Casey rarely worried about individual raids and was puzzled how such picayune details were bubbling up to the secretary's level. One of the first snowflakes asked that Casey start training Iraqis to replace the relatively small number of U.S. special operations troops acting as bodyguards for senior ministers, who were prime a.s.sa.s.sination targets. The lesson was unmistakable: no part of the U.S. effort was too small to escape Rumsfeld's green-eyeshade mentality on troops.

Beneath Casey were two deputy commanders. One was Lieutenant General Tom Metz, who oversaw daily military operations. Shortly after Casey took command, he had identified sixteen key cities that U.S. troops had to clear of insurgents prior to the January elections. Metz's job was to direct those battles, while Casey crafted the overall strategy and made sure the newly sovereign interim government didn't interfere. The two men had been close friends since they were twenty-two-year-old lieutenants in Germany.

The other was Petraeus. Casey's relationship with him was more complicated. The same week Casey arrived, Newsweek Newsweek featured Petraeus on the cover in full battle gear underneath a headline that asked "Can This Man Save Iraq?" Only a couple of months after he had returned home from Mosul, Petraeus had been promoted and sent back to Iraq to oversee the training and equipping of the army and police. "General Petraeus ... is the closest thing to an exit strategy the United States now has," the featured Petraeus on the cover in full battle gear underneath a headline that asked "Can This Man Save Iraq?" Only a couple of months after he had returned home from Mosul, Petraeus had been promoted and sent back to Iraq to oversee the training and equipping of the army and police. "General Petraeus ... is the closest thing to an exit strategy the United States now has," the Newsweek Newsweek article enthused. Casey was annoyed, though not surprised. Rumsfeld was angry. During a stopover in Ireland shortly after the article appeared, his top aide stuffed the offending article enthused. Casey was annoyed, though not surprised. Rumsfeld was angry. During a stopover in Ireland shortly after the article appeared, his top aide stuffed the offending Newsweek Newsweek behind other magazines in the airport gift shop so that the secretary wouldn't see them again. Casey quickly got orders to shut down the Petraeus publicity machine. "From now on, I'm your PAO," he told Petraeus, using the military acronym for public affairs officer. behind other magazines in the airport gift shop so that the secretary wouldn't see them again. Casey quickly got orders to shut down the Petraeus publicity machine. "From now on, I'm your PAO," he told Petraeus, using the military acronym for public affairs officer.

For several months their relationship remained strained. Their leadership styles were completely different. Casey was cautious, often to the point of inaction. "Almost nothing has to be done right now," he counseled subordinates. "When you are talking about a major policy initiative, it needs to be thoughtful and deliberate. Hasty decisions in this type of environment will generally be wrong." In contrast, Petraeus believed that the United States had a narrow window of opportunity that was rapidly closing. It was better to take risks than do nothing.

Casey typically attended meetings with senior Iraqi officials alone or with one aide. Petraeus went everywhere with an entourage of smart young officers that included two Rhodes scholars and a Columbia University Ph.D. His energy, knowledge, and eagerness to fix Iraq shone through in just about every meeting. "Sir, if I could," he'd often interject before launching into a discourse on the problem of the day. It was hard for the new Iraqi leaders to tell whether Casey or Petraeus was in charge.

At an early Iraqi national security council meeting, Petraeus grabbed a seat at the main table with Casey, the prime minister, the minister of defense, the interior minister, and other senior Iraqi officials. "We're fine here at the head table," Casey told him, directing him to a seat against the wall with the other second-tier staffers.

Despite the tension, Casey badly needed Petraeus to succeed. He wanted the troops Petraeus was cranking out to fight alongside U.S. units as they cleared insurgent strongholds prior to the elections, putting an Iraqi face on what were essentially American a.s.saults. By January, Casey hoped, there would be enough police and army units to guard polling stations during the election and allow for cuts in U.S. forces in 2005.

In early August, Petraeus's forces were tested for the first time since the April battles in Sadr City and Fallujah. A U.S. Marine patrol in Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad, unknowingly strayed too close to a house where Muqtada al-Sadr was hiding, provoking a lengthy firefight. After the battle, Sadr's militia fighters quickly seized police stations and government buildings throughout the city. "I was looking for the opportunity for the new Iraqi government to have a success and demonstrate that it could function," Casey recalled. This was it. He ordered two U.S. Army battalions and three of Petraeus's new Iraqi battalions to help the Marines retake the city from Sadr's forces.

The U.S. troops, backed by helicopters and fighter jets, did most of the heavy fighting in the labyrinthlike cemetery around the Imam Ali shrine. The Iraqis were asked to play a supporting role. Still Petraeus was nervous. The troops had walked patrols in Baghdad, but this was the first time that they were being pressed into battle against their Iraqi brethren. A day after they arrived, Petraeus began fielding frantic calls from the Iraqi units' U.S. advisors, reporting that the troops were desperately short of ammunition and rifles. As night fell, he and his small command gathered up all the bullets, mortar rounds, and guns they could find in storage depots and heaved the weapons onto the back of Chinook cargo helicopters.

Seeking refuge from the U.S.-led a.s.sault, Sadr and his militia forces retreated inside the Imam Ali shrine, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam. Casey met with the new prime minister, Iyad Allawi, in a small garden outside his residence in the Green Zone. The CIA had sources inside the shrine who were updating them on Sadr's location, and Allawi wanted the troops to attack the mosque and capture or kill Sadr.

General Metz, who had raced down to Najaf to monitor the fighting, warned that the Iraqis needed at least twenty-four hours to come up with a plan. The delay gave Sadr time to negotiate a cease-fire and escape. "It got played as a victory for Sadr much like that stuff does, but it was good," Casey recalled. The Iraqi army forces hadn't crumbled under fire as they had in April. He and Allawi also grew closer during the crisis. "Frankly I didn't expect such a key success so early," Casey wrote in a note to Abizaid after the fight. "Muqtada Sadr gave the interim government its first real test and he lost." He was so hopeful that he suggested to Abizaid that he might be able to reduce the number of U.S. troops in early 2005, after the scheduled January 30 elections.

Not all of Casey's subordinate commanders were as convinced that the United States was on the right track. On August 14, as the Najaf battle was drawing to a close, Casey convened a meeting with his top commanders at Al Faw Palace. Around the table were Metz, Petraeus, Chiarelli, and several other senior officers. The new U.S. amba.s.sador John Negroponte was sitting next to Casey, his position meant to signal that the civilian and military efforts were finally united. Casey started by laying out his plan for the next six months. "We have two priority efforts-training Iraqi security forces and the elections," he told his commanders.

Marine Lieutenant General James Conway, who was responsible for Fallujah and surrounding Anbar Province, complained that Sunni tribes in his province had been given no voice in the new government and saw it as illegitimate. Allawi's ministers, meanwhile, ignored the area. "The silence is deafening," he complained.

Chiarelli was upset as well. Less than two weeks earlier he'd turned out 18,000 people to work in Sadr City laying sewer pipe, wiring houses for electricity, and picking up trash. He saw the turnout as a major victory that he hoped would spur more funding for similar projects throughout Baghdad and the rest of the country. Casey and Negroponte, however, were moving in a different direction. As part of their strategy they shifted $2 billion out of the reconstruction projects that Chiarelli was championing to pay for more equipment for Iraqi army and police forces.

As he headed into the palace meeting Negroponte knew he was going to get an earful on the subject from Chiarelli. Although he'd been in Iraq only six weeks, the amba.s.sador had already grown tired of hearing about Chiarelli's bold plans to fix the emba.s.sy-led reconstruction effort by cutting out U.S. contractors and focusing on smaller projects and jobs for Iraqis. "I am not going to listen to Chiarelli ... b.i.t.c.h about the State Department," he told Casey. Negroponte didn't have a choice, though. Chiarelli was incensed and let it show more than usual. He didn't deny the need for more army and police forces, but he didn't think the money to pay for them should come out of the reconstruction effort, which was already wasting too much money on big-ticket ventures that offered little immediate payoff in Baghdad's neighborhoods. He wondered in conversations with diplomats in the Green Zone whether the United States was pursuing a "bankrupt strategy" by ignoring the crumbling infrastructure and its crippling unemployment. These were driving the insurgency, he insisted.

Chiarelli never got a chance to prove his approach could work. The flare-up in Najaf triggered a new eruption of violence in Sadr City, and his soldiers spent much of the next ten weeks fighting over the same ground they had fought for in April. In the earlier battle Sadr's militia had fought with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Now they were using more-deadly roadside bombs. It seemed as if the cleric could turn up the violence at will. Once calm was restored, Chiarelli restarted his reconstruction program for two months before turning Baghdad over to a new division with different priorities. He returned to the United States convinced that he had been on the right track and penned a long article in Military Review Military Review, an Army journal, laying out his theories. "Will Sadr or his lieutenants attack again? Probably. But support for the attacks will not last if infrastructure improvements continue," he wrote. His article also took a swipe at Casey and Negroponte's strategy, which made training a higher priority than reconstruction. "If there is nothing else done other than kill bad guys and train others to kill bad guys, the only thing accomplished is moving more people from the fence to the insurgent category," he wrote.

Chiarelli's loss in the summer of 2004 had been Petraeus's gain. Most of the $2 billion taken out of the reconstruction budget went directly to his new command overseeing Iraqi army and police development. He felt good, and it wasn't just because of the money. In Najaf his Iraqi units had held together, which was an improvement over the disasters that preceded his arrival. In late September Petraeus put down his thoughts in an op-ed in the Washington Post Washington Post. His article began with a series of caveats. Training and equipping a quarter million Iraqis was a "daunting task." Insurgent violence made it even harder. "Nonetheless, there are reasons for optimism," he wrote. "Today approximately 164,000 Iraqi police and soldiers ... are performing a wide variety of security missions. Equipment is being delivered. Training is on track and increasing in capacity. Infrastructure is being repaired."

Soon after the op-ed appeared, Petraeus's forces suffered a series of humiliating setbacks. In early October the newly formed 7th Iraqi Battalion was rushed to Samarra, a Sunni insurgent haven north of Baghdad, on seventy-two hours' notice to fight in an American-led operation to take control of the city. On the way there, it was. .h.i.t by a car bomb that killed one Iraqi soldier and wounded seven. As the injured were being treated, the commander and several of his aides quit, triggering an exodus of hundreds of rank-and-file troops from the 800-man unit. "They just walked out the gate and didn't come back," said Major Robert Dixon, an American advisor attached to the unit. Other disasters followed. In late October, Petraeus flew his Black Hawk to the Kirkush Military Training Base on the Iranian border to oversee the graduation ceremony for the 17th Iraqi Battalion. A band played as the new troops in their crisp tan-and-black uniforms marched past a reviewing stand. Petraeus gave a short speech. Immediately following the parade the troops were loaded onto buses, trucks, and minivans for two weeks of vacation. Petraeus hopped on his helicopter bound for the Green Zone. The helicopter flew fast and low over the dreary parched landscape, rising and falling to avoid electrical power lines that crisscrossed the desert. Hot autumn air whipped at his face. He felt good; he had produced yet another battalion.

A few hours later, his executive officer rushed into his Green Zone office. Three of the minivans carrying forty-nine of the new recruits had been stopped at a fake checkpoint. The soldiers were ordered out of the vans, forced to lie facedown in the sand, and executed with a bullet to the back of the head. "It was just a horrible experience," Petraeus recalled. "We felt like they were our guys. These weren't just some Iraqis. These were our troopers. I'd seen them graduate. I'd been out there." A few days later he got another grim report from Mosul: dozens of soldiers, also going home on leave, were found headless on the side of the road. Many of the officers on Petraeus's staff blamed themselves for the deaths. They should have realized that troops, who were required to turn in their rifles before they went home on leave, were easy targets.

a.s.sa.s.sinations weren't Petraeus's only problem. He depended on unarmed civilian contractors to ferry new AK-47s, body armor, and helmets to Iraqi bases. Soon insurgents were targeting them, too. "It was just a battle. Everything was a flat-out fight. Every single logistical convoy and delivery of equipment," he recalled. When he commanded the 101st in Mosul, Petraeus had a ma.s.sive staff made up of topflight officers. His new training command was an undermanned pickup team that had been thrown together without vital equipment such as armored Humvees or sufficient radios.

In November, as U.S. soldiers and Marines gathered on the outskirts of Fallujah, Petraeus's units were once again thrust into the fight. In the months since the Marines' aborted April a.s.sault, Fallujah had become a car bomb factory under the control of radical fighters. Casey was determined to seize it from the insurgents prior to the January elections and believed that Petraeus's troops had to play a role in the attack to blunt the inevitable claim in the Middle East that U.S. troops and warplanes were destroying a Muslim city.

As the Iraqi units prepared to move to Fallujah, hundreds of terrified soldiers deserted. Major Matt Jones, who worked as an advisor, recalled that 200 soldiers in his Iraqi battalion quit before they even left their base. One of the deserters was the battalion commander. "He stole his pistol and his staff car-a Chevy Lumina-and an AK-47. We never saw him again. That wasn't exactly a good day for morale," Jones said.

Many of the units that made it to Fallujah were nowhere near ready to fight. General Conway, the Marine officer leading the attack, was dumbfounded when he saw the Iraqi troops, and immediately called Petraeus. "Why did you send me all these guys without any boots and kit?"

"What are you talking about?" Petraeus replied. "We issued all that stuff to them."

"Well, you may have. But they don't have it. What you got is a bunch of guys running around in flip-flops and running shoes."

Petraeus raced out to Fallujah with one of his Iraqi generals to try to figure out what had happened. The Iraqi soldiers he found looked miserable, hungry, and cold. "Didn't we issue you this stuff?" he demanded. "Where is it?" When they'd gone home on leave they gave the equipment to their younger brothers and sisters, the Iraqis explained. "Our families needed the blankets," one of the recruits told him.

Back in Baghdad, Petraeus comforted himself by reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence's account of the Arab revolt during World War I. Lawrence had dealt with many of the same problems-poor leadership, desertions, and shortages of equipment. He found himself drawn to one scene in which Lawrence emerges from his tent to find that his Arab allies, whom he had been fighting with for months, are gone. They'd gone to visit their families, leaving him alone in the desert. "That just resonated with me," Petraeus recalled.

The Iraqis' failures were frustrating to Casey, who felt that Petraeus's briefings to Bush and Rumsfeld in the summer and early fall had overstated the progress that he was making. "Look, you have got to be very careful when you are talking to civilian leaders," he snapped after one video teleconference with the president, who had dialed in from his Crawford, Texas, ranch. "Don't be so optimistic." Frustrated with the setbacks, Rumsfeld began demanding more-frequent updates. Casey and his staff, in turn, began demanding more and more data as well. Petraeus never complained, but his staff bristled at the second-guessing.

In June Abizaid had a.s.sured Petraeus that he would get whatever he needed for the new training command. Yet it had taken months to get him the U.S. staff he'd been promised. His initial staffing request sat for almost two months in Baghdad before it was forwarded to the Pentagon. It took another two months to find the soldiers to fill it. In October the Army began sending over soldiers from the 98th Division, a reserve unit based in upstate New York. Petraeus placed some of the new arrivals in his headquarters and made the others combat advisors. The critically needed advisors were supposed to toughen up the Iraqi formations.

The reservists, however, were ill prepared to lead foreign forces in combat. Most were drill sergeants who spent two weeks each summer on active duty, putting American teenagers through basic training. Many of these part-time soldiers had joined the 98th because they thought the unit would never deploy overseas. Now they were being asked to fight alongside inexperienced Iraqi units and live on Spartan bases-a mission typically handled by elite Special Forces teams.

Petraeus's staff knew they had a problem when the soldiers started unpacking shipping crates filled with their broad-brimmed drill sergeant hats, easel boards, flip charts, and urinal disinfectant cakes. They had a.s.sumed they were going to run basic training, teaching Iraqis how to shoot, march, and care for their equipment-not be pressed into battle with them. In late 2004, Brigadier General James Schwitters, Petraeus's deputy in charge of the Iraqi army training effort, told Petraeus that only about a third of them were effective in their jobs. Most of the advisors didn't even know how to operate an AK-47, the rifle of choice for the Iraqi military. Schwitters was one of the Army's most experienced, unflappable professionals. He had commanded Delta Force, where his troops gave him the radio call sign "Flatliner," a reference to a dead person's electrocardiogram reading. Nothing seemed to unhinge him. His a.s.sessment of the American soldiers advising the Iraqi army battalions was blunt but accurate.

Outwardly and with Casey, Petraeus adopted a can-do att.i.tude. He was going to figure out how to make it work with the soldiers that he had been given. He and Schwitters created a training academy north of Baghdad to teach the advisors the basics of fighting with foreign troops. Both men knew, though, that the solution was far from ideal, and not the proper way to conduct a mission that Bush and Rumsfeld were saying was the most important in Iraq. In truth, the Pentagon and Casey had no idea how difficult it was to rebuild a military in a country that was being torn apart by an insurgency. In the Balkans, where there was no fighting, the United States had handed the mission of training army and police forces off to private contractors, its NATO allies, or the relatively small Special Forces. The most relevant lessons when it came to rebuilding a foreign military were from Vietnam, but that war had been long forgotten.

Petraeus's other big worry was Mosul. He had poured his heart into stabilizing the city, and still referred to himself as a Moslawi, or citizen of Mosul. "I go back and it's like the return of the prodigal son," he told a Newsweek Newsweek reporter in June 2004. "There's even a street in Mosul named for the 101st Airborne, and you know it's authentic because there are two misspellings in [the street sign]." In the fall of 2004 his project was coming apart. Petraeus had turned over the city in early 2004 to Brigadier General Carter Ham, who led a force about one-third the size of the 101st. Ham also received far less reconstruction money than Petraeus. "I wasn't as aggressive as I needed to be in asking for money," Ham would say years later. His other handicap was that he wasn't Petraeus. "Petraeus has this big room-filling personality," he recalled. "That just isn't me." After Petraeus had departed, the political deals that he had brokered began to unravel. He had urged Ham to make sure that the provincial governor, Ghanim al-Ba.s.so, a Sunni Arab, stayed in his job. "From day one the message from the council was that Governor Ba.s.so had to go," Ham recalled. Ba.s.so was fired a few days after Petraeus left. The next governor, who was appointed by the council, was a.s.sa.s.sinated in June 2004 after only a few months in office. reporter in June 2004. "There's even a street in Mosul named for the 101st Airborne, and you know it's authentic because there are two misspellings in [the street sign]." In the fall of 2004 his project was coming apart. Petraeus had turned over the city in early 2004 to Brigadier General Carter Ham, who led a force about one-third the size of the 101st. Ham also received far less reconstruction money than Petraeus. "I wasn't as aggressive as I needed to be in asking for money," Ham would say years later. His other handicap was that he wasn't Petraeus. "Petraeus has this big room-filling personality," he recalled. "That just isn't me." After Petraeus had departed, the political deals that he had brokered began to unravel. He had urged Ham to make sure that the provincial governor, Ghanim al-Ba.s.so, a Sunni Arab, stayed in his job. "From day one the message from the council was that Governor Ba.s.so had to go," Ham recalled. Ba.s.so was fired a few days after Petraeus left. The next governor, who was appointed by the council, was a.s.sa.s.sinated in June 2004 after only a few months in office.

In late August 2004 Petraeus visited northern Iraq, ostensibly to inspect a new regional police training center. His real goal was to check on Mosul, and he arranged to spend two days there, visiting Ham and his former Iraqi cohorts. A few weeks earlier, a female law professor whom Petraeus helped place on the Mosul city council had been found tortured and killed in her home. Attacks were on the rise, and the police chief and new provincial governor were feuding. Petraeus visited a police station in downtown Mosul and gave a pep talk. Afterward, Mohammad Barhawi, the Mosul police chief, warned him that foreign jihadists were infiltrating the city and that he was having trouble with the governor, who was trying to drive him from his job.

Before he left, Petraeus stopped by the governor's office. "I lost fifty-three soldiers in Mosul and it pains me enormously to see you two bickering," he told him. "This is a time when all Moslawis have to pull together." As night fell he headed to his helicopter, which was waiting for him with its rotors spinning. Petraeus turned to his a.s.sistant, Sadi Othman, a skillful translator who had stayed with Petraeus for years. "You can't go home again," he said ruefully.

Three months later, insurgents attacked Mosul's police stations. Petraeus was in his Baghdad office when Barhawi called in the midst of the battle, begging for help. The Iraqi's voice, normally strong and deep, trembled with fear. There was little Petraeus could do but try to stiffen Barhawi to fight back. "You've got to hang in there," he told him. "This is your opportunity to show what you're made of." Petraeus had equipped Mosul's SWAT team with new vehicles, body armor, and heavy machine guns. It had far more firepower than the insurgents could ever muster. "Just get out there with your machine guns and your SWAT team and you can fight these guys off," he said, trying to sound as calm as possible.

Ham suspected that Barhawi had been cooperating with the insurgency for months and might have been involved in the a.s.sa.s.sination of the Mosul governor. Petraeus was more sympathetic; he believed that Barhawi, a former general in Saddam's elite Republican Guard, was a good man who was under intense pressure from the enemy to surrender or switch sides. "We knew he was a former special operations guy and all this stuff, but in the early days when Mosul had nothing he stood up and was ready to lead," he recalled. Since Barhawi had become chief, insurgents had kidnapped his sister, blown up his house, and shot him in the calf. Even after he had been wounded in the fall of 2003, he continued to run the Mosul police force from his hospital bed. But as Petraeus hung up the phone, he could tell that his friend had nothing left. Barhawi fled to Kurdistan with a sack full of cash. The police, whom Petraeus had touted as a model, collapsed as insurgents took over nearly all of the city's two dozen stations.

In the weeks after the Mosul uprising Petraeus looked tired and dispirited. He was working sixteen to eighteen hours a day and guzzling coffee to stay awake. He believed that a commander should never express doubt in front of his troops. "You might put your head down privately somewhere, but then when the door opens you've got to show determination and total commitment. You've got to be unyielding," Petraeus often said. But his slumped shoulders and bloodshot eyes betrayed him. For the first time in his accomplished career he was failing.

Baghdad November 14, 2004 Abizaid knew things weren't going well and that relations between Casey and Petraeus had been strained. He wanted to try to fix things and thought he could, if the three of them could talk it out. They were three of the most experienced generals in the Army, solid professionals and dedicated soldiers. He knew the Middle East and what it took to bring stability to its fractured societies. Petraeus had probably thought and studied more about counterinsurgency than anyone. Casey knew the Army and its capabilities like few other officers. If the three of them could think through the problems, they might be able to devise a new way forward. They met around the mahogany conference table in Casey's Al Faw Palace office. "Between the three of us we need to figure this out in a nonaccusatory manner," Abizaid said. "We are missing something philosophically. This is the only war we have got. We have to win it."

It was a meeting that could easily have happened in Saigon in 1968, the last time the United States found itself in a war against a vicious insurgency with no victory in sight. A few days earlier the Marines had taken Fallujah, flattening the Sunnis' stronghold in a block-by-block operation. The huge attack had destroyed the insurgency's primary safe haven and knocked the enemy off balance. But Abizaid took little encouragement from the victory. A year and a half after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqis were still unwilling or unable to fight for their own country. Ninety-five U.S. troops had been killed and 560 wounded in the battle. By contrast, only eleven Iraqi soldiers died in the fighting and just forty-three were wounded, he said.

"The feeling in D.C. is, 'What the f.u.c.k are the Iraqis doing?'" Abizaid said.

In a weird paradox, the more American troops fought to stabilize the country, the more resentment they generated among ordinary Iraqis, frustrated at the presence of U.S. troops in their neighborhoods. They had to do something to change the dynamic, Abizaid said. There was only one real course: they had to figure out a way to get Iraqi troops to take more responsibility for maintaining order. Abizaid was quick to rea.s.sure Petraeus that the Iraqis' failures weren't his fault. Many of the men sent to act as advisors didn't have the experience or skills to train soldiers for combat. "Dave, I think we have missed the mark," Abizaid conceded. "We didn't give you the best and the brightest. We put the third team out on the field." The key to fixing the Iraqi forces was using the best and most experienced U.S. troops as combat advisors, he argued.

As Abizaid searched for a historical parallel his mind drifted back to what he recalled from studying Vietnam. It was hardly an inspiring example, given the South Vietnamese army's collapse in 1975, but it was the last time the Army had tried to rebuild a military on anything like the scale it was doing in Iraq. In the early 1960s the Pentagon had created a special command to select, train, and oversee U.S. officers advising South Vietnamese units. Maybe it was time to build a similar advisory command in Iraq, Abizaid said. He suggested filling the advisory jobs with lieutenant colonels from the Army War College. These were officers who had promising careers ahead of them and in most cases had already done a tour in Iraq or Afghanistan. "That could be what we want," Casey agreed. They'd need to clear it with the Pentagon first.

Abizaid also was worried that the United States wasn't finding tough Iraqi leaders who were willing to stand up to the insurgents. "In the Middle East there is usually one guy who holds a unit together," he told Petraeus. He wanted to step up efforts to lure Sunnis and even some of Saddam's former military commanders back into the army. "I don't sense that we have a Sunni outreach program that isn't AC-130-based," he said, referring to the heavily armed ground attack planes that had killed hundreds of insurgents in Fallujah. Petraeus said that they were trying but were running into resistance from the predominantly Shiite interim government, which feared a Sunni coup. "They are afraid of Sunni leaders," he said. The meeting ended with more questions than answers. Everyone was coming to the conclusion that the insurgency would continue for several more years and that the Iraqi security forces would not be able to handle the fight anytime soon. "It's tough to make a nation of sheep move forward," said Abizaid. "But that is our deal; that is our challenge."

More immediate problems intervened, as they always did. Every six months Casey got an a.s.sessment of military operations in Iraq. He usually asked one of the British generals to write it, believing that a foreign officer would be more willing to give him the honest a.s.sessment he needed. The December 2004 review was brutal. There was more and more hard evidence that the strategy wasn't working, at least not on the ambitious timetable that he had laid out in August. U.S. military operations over the previous six months had eliminated insurgent safe havens in a dozen cities. The Shiite uprising in Sadr City had finally been beaten down by Chiarelli's men. Despite those military successes, conditions were worsening. Since October, more than 300 Iraqi government officials had been a.s.sa.s.sinated as part of a campaign aimed at hollowing out the ministries. Polling data showed that 40 percent of the Sunnis in Baghdad supported the armed opposition, more than supported the current interim government. If the Sunnis didn't turn out to vote in January, there was very little chance that the elections would produce a representative government that could win over insurgent sympathizers, the six-month a.s.sessment warned.

It wasn't only Casey's staff that had doubts. The CIA station in Baghdad was issuing dire warnings that the country was too unstable for elections. Even Amba.s.sador Negroponte wondered if it wouldn't be prudent to postpone. "I think it may be too risky," he suggested one evening over dinner in Casey's residence, a small villa across the lake from Al Faw. Casey insisted that they had to go forward and asked Negroponte to sleep on it. The next morning Negroponte dropped his objections. In an effort to ease worries, Casey temporarily boosted the number of troops in the country to 150,000, the highest number since the invasion.

At 7:30 a.m. on Sat.u.r.day, December 12, 2004, Casey strode into the small auditorium for his morning briefing. Behind him about thirty staffers sat in five tiers of stadium-style seating. Each morning all his major subordinate commands updated Casey on the last twenty-four hours, their presentations projected on three large flat-panel screens at the front of the room. That morning Casey received the normal update on the security situation in major cities and towns, each of which was a.s.signed a color grade-red, orange, yellow, or green-depending on the insurgency's strength. Casey noticed that Fallujah was rated orange, which meant that the insurgent threat there was still significant. It had been nearly a month since a Marine-led force had essentially destroyed the city in ten days of brutal house-to-house fighting. Although a few holdout insurgents still took occasional potshots, the city was essentially devoid of life, insurgent or otherwise. Casey asked his staff to rea.s.sess Fallujah to determine if it still belonged in the orange category. The next day the staff upgraded it to yellow.

Did anyone have a problem with revising the a.s.sessment? Casey asked. No one in the room protested. But Major Grant Doty, a slim, bespectacled strategist who was watching the briefing by live video from his desk elsewhere in the palace, was frustrated. "This is the most f.u.c.ked-up thing in the world," he thought. The staff had changed the color rating on Fallujah just to make Casey happy. He started typing an e-mail to the general, noting that he was "shocked and disappointed" by the change in the city's status. "I think this is a mistake and was in response to the false perception that this is what you wanted, and they were going to give it to you," he continued. It really didn't matter whether Fallujah was rated yellow or orange, Doty thought. But changing it because the commander suggested doing so indicated a much larger problem. It all smacked of Vietnam, when officers inflated body counts so that headquarters could feel good about how the war was going.

Casey didn't reply directly to the e-mail, but Doty noticed that in the weeks afterward he began getting invited to more meetings with the boss. When Casey would make day trips to units around the country, he started bringing along Doty, too. Doty wasn't sure if his contrarian e-mail was the reason for his new access, but he thought it might be. Unlike many senior generals, Casey was open to second-guessing from his staff, even if he didn't always act on it.

It wasn't the first time Doty had approached Casey with advice. A few weeks earlier he'd sent Casey an e-mail critiquing the boss's performance during a CNN interview. Casey needed to drive home an overall theme or message in his interviews with the national media, Doty had told him. A printout of the e-mail had come back with the words "exactly on!" written in Casey's cursive scrawl at the top.

Doty, a former instructor in West Point's Social Sciences Department with a master's degree from Yale University, had arrived in August and was a.s.signed to Casey's "initiatives group," a small team that was supposed to come up with unconventional ideas for the commander. In twenty years in the Army, Doty had frequently felt like an outsider. He thought the war had been a mistake, but he had vowed to himself that he would do what he could to help. He resolved to make himself a bit of a pest, someone who questioned a.s.sumptions and fought bureaucratic tendencies.

Since Casey had arrived, the American officers in the palace had been telling themselves that they were figuring out how to win. They had constructed a strategy, dubbed it counterinsurgency, and thought they were on their way to victory. But Doty wasn't convinced. The United States was in a brutal fight, unlike anything it had trained for, and yet people on the staff weren't questioning and debating. The incident in the morning briefing with Fallujah proved it. He wanted Casey to be flexible and improvisational and to foster the same spirit in his officers. He advised Casey to go to the briefing early one day and ask people what they were reading. If it didn't have something to do with Iraq or Arab culture, Casey should tell them to read something that did. He suggested building a library and stocking it with cla.s.sic accounts of past counterinsurgency wars. He could start with David Galula's dissection of the French army's war in Algeria against Arab guerrillas or Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy Street Without Joy, which chronicled the debacle in Vietnam. Casey heard him out, but Doty left unsure what would come of his efforts. Casey was hard to decipher, and Doty hadn't said everything he really thought-that the United States was settling into a delusion that it was winning.

Casey woke on January 30, the day of the elections, a little after 3:00 A.M. A.M. He wanted to take a quick aerial tour of Baghdad and get to the Green Zone before the polls opened at 7:00 a.m. His helicopter lifted off in darkness from Al Faw Palace and made a few lazy loops over west Baghdad. It was a cold, wet morning, typical of January. He and Prime Minister Allawi had banned all vehicle traffic in Iraq's major cities in an effort to prevent car bombs and limit the enemy's movement. To keep the insurgents off balance, they had made the announcement one day prior to the balloting. Working furiously in the weeks before the election, U.S. special operations units also had captured some key insurgent leaders tied to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terrorist movement. But there was no way of telling whether it would be enough. He wanted to take a quick aerial tour of Baghdad and get to the Green Zone before the polls opened at 7:00 a.m. His helicopter lifted off in darkness from Al Faw Palace and made a few lazy loops over west Baghdad. It was a cold, wet morning, typical of January. He and Prime Minister Allawi had banned all vehicle traffic in Iraq's major cities in an effort to prevent car bombs and limit the enemy's movement. To keep the insurgents off balance, they had made the announcement one day prior to the balloting. Working furiously in the weeks before the election, U.S. special operations units also had captured some key insurgent leaders tied to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terrorist movement. But there was no way of telling whether it would be enough.

As the sun rose over Baghdad, Casey took in the city with his aide, his executive officer, and Doty. From the air the Iraqi capital looked almost deserted-no cars, no trucks, and, unusual even for that hour, almost no people on the streets. He had spent the previous seven months preparing for this moment. Now there was nothing left for him to do. "Is anyone going to show?" he wondered.

His helicopter touched down in the Green Zone around six-thirty, and Casey moved briskly to his office and turned on the BBC's televised coverage. Around seven Ghazi al-Yawer, Iraq's portly president, strode into a polling place in his crisp white dishdasha and with a flourish dropped his ballot into a box. Casey waited anxiously for the next two hours. Small numbers of people were turning out to vote, and he worried the election would be the disaster that the CIA was predicting. At 10:00 a.m. his division commanders, who were scattered around the country, updated him via video teleconference. Most were reporting a light turnout. The best news came from Baghdad, where Chiarelli reported that hundreds of people were walking to polling sites from Abu Ghraib, a Sunni enclave just west of the capital. A few minutes later, Chiarelli excitedly interrupted the briefing. "It's not hundreds of people coming in from Abu Ghraib, it's thousands of people," he said. A cheer of joy, mixed with relief, went up from the dozens of people in the briefing room with Casey.

The U.S. command reported a record number of attacks on the day of the elections, but the vast majority of them were minor or ineffective. U.S. forces stayed largely out of sight, leaving security duties around the polling stations in Baghdad and other big cities to Iraqi army and police units. By late afternoon cable news outlets were beaming back to the United States pictures of long lines of ecstatic Iraqis holding up their purple-stained fingers to prove that they had cast votes in the country's first free election in more than three decades. Later that afternoon Casey took off in his helicopter for a two-hour tour of Baghdad and the neighboring cities. Throngs of people filled Baghdad's streets. Many of them were lined up outside polling sites, playing soccer, or celebrating. Casey asked his pilots to fly out to Fallujah. There the scene was different. The streets were mostly empty. In all of Anbar Province, the heart of the Sunni insurgency, only about 2,000 people voted.

Around 6:00 p.m. Casey was preparing to meet with his staff when Rumsfeld called. "George, when the eyes of the world were on you, you stood and delivered," the defense secretary told him. "Thank you, Mr. Secretary," Casey replied. "I'll pa.s.s that on to everybody." Petraeus telephoned Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who had been one of the leading advocates for the invasion. More than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen had turned out to help guard polling places, he said. For the first time since the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi tanks were out on the capital city's streets. Given the past month's failures, this was great news. Wolfowitz asked Petraeus to send photos of soldiers and tanks. He wanted to show the American people that the Iraqis were finally taking responsibility for their own country.

As the day drew to a close Casey stood and addressed his staff. "What a historic day," he said as the applause welled up from his men. He then returned to his quarters and called Sheila, who was crying tears of joy and relief for him. When he hung up, Casey and his aide, Major Tony Hale, walked out onto the patio behind his quarters at Camp Victory and smoked cigars. Hale brought out a bottle of grappa, an Italian brandy, and they toasted their success. "From then on, I thought, 'This will work,'" Casey recalled years later.

The next morning Casey spoke with Abizaid by phone. The two friends chatted amiably while Casey's staff listened: "Yeah, John, I know. Great outcome, great outcome," Casey said. In the Pentagon's daily summary of U.S. press clippings there wasn't a single negative article, he noted. Doty, sitting on the black leather couch in Casey's small Green Zone office, couldn't resist puncturing the euphoria a bit. Turning to Casey, he recalled the end of the movie Patton Patton. World War II is over. Patton, played by the actor George C. Scott, walks his dog. He is only a few months from his death. In the background, Scott's deep, rough voice recalls that when victorious Roman generals returned from war they were honored with a parade. The conquering general would ride in a triumphal chariot. Just behind him stood a slave who would whisper in his ear, "All glory is fleeting. All glory is fleeting."

"Maybe I should be the slave at the end of Patton Patton whispering, 'All glory is fleeting,'" Doty said. whispering, 'All glory is fleeting,'" Doty said.

Casey shot Doty an annoyed look. He knew the elections weren't going to solve all of Iraq's problems. Only the Shiites and Kurds had really turned out to vote. Most Sunnis, who made up the bulk of the insurgency, had boycotted the elections and would almost certainly continue to fight. But after seven exhausting, frustrating months, he needed a moment to savor his victory.

CHAPTER TEN.

The Bunker in Jadiriyah Al Faw Palace, Camp Victory March 4, 2005 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was furious. "I am not sure I am ready to move this forward to the president," he growled at Casey over the video hookup from the Pentagon. Rumsfeld was referring to Casey's strategy to accelerate the training of Iraqi army and police forces so that U.S. troops could start coming home. Casey had been briefing the defense secretary on the plan since January.

The idea was relatively straightforward. The tough fighting in the fall of 2004 had shown that Iraqi units operating with small teams of embedded U.S. advisors performed better than Iraqi units fighting alone. Casey was proposing to expand the teams to every brigade and battalion in the Iraqi army and as many police units as possible. With such close partnership, the Iraqis would progress faster and soon take over the lead in fighting the insurgency. The initial concept was from Abizaid, but he'd also warned Rumsfeld in an earlier e-mail that it would bring significant new risks: U.S. advisors would be living with Iraqi troops in "isolated and exposed places." To make it work, the teams would have to be filled with tough, resourceful soldiers.

Rumsfeld's problem wasn't with the strategy. He was angry at what he considered a grave bureaucratic sin. Casey had shared a version of his plan with the U.S. emba.s.sy in Baghdad. His instinct was to work closely with the amba.s.sador and his staff. The amba.s.sador, in turn, had informed the State Department, and somehow Rumsfeld had found out about it. "Please explain how this happens, that the world gets papered with a military proposal from Emba.s.sy Baghdad that hasn't been considered or approved at our level, despite the fact that the president has repeatedly said that he wanted to be involved in it," Rumsfeld had written in an e-mail to Casey and Abizaid two days before the videoconference. Whenever Casey opened his mouth Rumsfeld cut him off. "You act like the whole world started with you and Petraeus," he scolded at one point. Casey kept his cool. The best way to handle an angry Rumsfeld was to let him vent.

The defense secretary wasn't much of a counterinsurgency strategist, but he was an expert bureaucratic infighter who wanted to control the flow of information to the president. He didn't want the State Department to see the plan until it was shown to Bush. By that point, it would be too late for Condoleezza Rice and her aides to muck around with it. Working for Rumsfeld was a mixed blessing. He defended his subordinates from meddling by other agencies like an angry pit bull. He was frequently warm, charitable, and funny. But his rabid defense of his bureaucratic turf was also isolating. It would cut Casey off from the growing frustration in the White House and the State Department as violence rose and the president began to lose confidence in his leadership. It also prevented Casey from getting feedback that might have exposed the flaws in his plan.

After barking at Casey, Rumsfeld dropped his objections and arranged for him to brief the president. Casey and a few key aides sat in the secure videoconference room at Al Faw. Abizaid joined in from Qatar. Bush partic.i.p.ated from the White House. The average counterinsurgency war lasted between nine and thirteen years, Casey explained to Bush. There was no way that U.S. forces were going to be in Iraq for that long. Therefore they had to train Iraqis to take over by increasing the number of advisory teams. As Iraqi troops took on more responsibility U.S. troops could pull back, reducing the stigma of the American occupation and bolstering the legitimacy of the government.

The president had reservations. The new approach seemed to focus more on shifting the fight to the Iraqis than on defeating the insurgency. "George, we're not playing for a tie. I want to make sure we understand this, don't we?" Bush said. He had grand visions for Iraq. He still wanted to transform it into a model democracy and, in contrast to Rumsfeld, was in no rush to hand it off to a bunch of incompetent Iraqi troops.

Bush's critique not only caught Casey by surprise but stung him. "Mr. President, we are not playing for a tie," Casey shot back with a rare edge to his voice. "I just can't accept that. We are playing to win." He was used to hostile questions from Rumsfeld. But this was different. The president was questioning his commitment. He was, in effect, suggesting that Casey was sending soldiers to their deaths for a strategy that he didn't think would acttually win. After the briefing, Abizaid tried to ease the tension. "George, you shouldn't yell at the president," he said half jokingly.

In June Casey flew back to Washington with Abizaid to secure Bush's final approval for his new strategy. The war wasn't going well. Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a physician who spoke so softly that he often seemed to be whispering, had been sworn in as interim prime minister. Casey had hoped that Jaafari, a Shiite, would reach out to rival sects and ethnic groups and unite the country, but so far he was disappointed. "This guy is a political wind sock," he told Abizaid. Violence rose as Sunnis, who felt disenfranchised by the January election, turned to extremists. In May there were a record 142 car bombs. When Casey landed in Washington he was dreading his meeting with Bush. "G.o.ddammit, I just don't feel like I am prepared," he groused to his senior aide.

The president put him at ease. "Thanks for pushing back at me. I appreciate that," Bush said, referring to the tense videoconference. He approved Casey's new strategy. Actually fielding the advisory teams at the heart of the new approach would prove tougher than Casey had antic.i.p.ated, however. The Army staff in the Pentagon initially balked at finding 2,500 majors, lieutenant colonels, and senior sergeants for the teams. It didn't sound like a lot of extra manpower. But the Pentagon generals complained that to fill the request they would have to strip combat brigades of their leaders. Instead of a.s.signing seasoned officers to the teams, as Abizaid and Casey wanted, the Army would instead rely heavily on inexperienced reservists.

At the White House that day, though, everyone was still hopeful. After the president had signed off on the strategy, Casey updated him on the plans for the latter half of 2005. They were still on track for a const.i.tutional referendum in October 2005 followed by another national election in late December. "You know, Mr. President, George will be gone by then," Rumsfeld interjected, noting that the general's official orders were for only twelve months and expired in August.

The president thought for a minute. "Eisenhower didn't leave the war after a year."

"Eisenhower lived in London," Abizaid playfully shot back from across the table.

"I shouldn't be asking you this ...," Bush said. Rumsfeld rose to his feet, stood behind his Iraq commander, and began to chant enthusiastically, "Oh, yes, you should, Mr. President! Yes, you should!"

With Rumsfeld egging him on, Bush asked Casey to stay in Iraq through at least the end of 2005. Casey later got his official orders extending his time for six more months-the first of three such extensions. Three decades earlier Casey's father had been only a few months away from finishing his second tour in Vietnam when he received new orders a.s.signing him to stay in Vietnam and take command of the 1st Cavalry Division. Shortly after he was extended, he died in the helicopter crash. As Casey studied his new orders, he thought of his dad and had a fleeting feeling that he might be killed before he made it home. He didn't mention it to anyone until he left Iraq for good.

Petraeus, meanwhile, had his own Washington problems. In early 2005 Rumsfeld had dispatched a team led by General Gary Luck, a retired former head of U.S. forces in Korea, to look into the effort to rebuild a new army and police force. They arrived in Baghdad convinced that the effort was on the verge of collapse. Petraeus did in fact need help-lots of it. His staff was made up of inexperienced National Guardsmen and whomever he could grab from Sosh and the 101st Airborne Division. His task was ma.s.sive. But he bristled at the suggestion that he needed a lifeline from Washington. Petraeus had always believed that he could make up for a lack of resources with more effort. War was about will, perseverance, force of personality, and determination. No one possessed those qualities in greater abundance; he'd proven it his entire career. It wasn't in his nature to admit that he was failing. As Jack Galvin had observed twenty years earlier, he never admitted mistakes.

Petraeus led Luck's team through a three-hour briefing. It rapidly turned contentious, with Luck interrupting several times to ask him what he needed to speed the development of the Iraqi forces. Soon the exasperated general was waving his wallet at Petraeus. "Dave, here, take my wallet," he said in his southern drawl. "I am not here to criticize you. I am here to help you."

When that failed, Luck tried a new line of questioning. How many Iraqi battalions would it take to secure Iraq without the United States? The answer, Petraeus said, depended on a host of factors-the enemy's strength, politics, and the quality of the battalion and brigade commanders.

"Come on, Dave! What's the requirement?" asked Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, another member of Luck's team. Petraeus, his voice tight and angry, repeated his earlier caveats. But Odierno wasn't going to let it go. "What is the requirement?" "What is the requirement?" he demanded again. he demanded again.

After the meeting, Odierno spoke privately to Petraeus. The two generals had sped up the career ladder ahead of their peers and had both commanded divisions in northern Iraq in 2003. Petraeus's 101st Airborne Division was everyone's favorite success story. Odierno's 4th Infantry Division was cited as an example of the overaggressive failed tactics in the early days of the war. The criticism actually had seemed to burnish his reputation with Rumsfeld, who favored a hard-nosed approach. "Look, you need to understand that Washington is impatient," said Odierno, who stood six feet four inches tall and had the body of an offensive lineman. He towered over his much smaller colleague.

"I got it," Petraeus replied. "But there is hardly a Ministry of Defense here. There is hardly a Ministry of the Interior. There is no training and doctrine command." His biggest problem was finding Iraqi commanders who wouldn't abandon their troops in the middle of a firefight. He needed time.

"The best leaders we have found so far are from a jail alumni a.s.sociation," Petraeus told Odierno. He was referring to an unplanned unit that the interim interior minister had created and named the Special Police Commandos. "This is the force that will save Iraq," the minister had boasted to him in the fall of 2004. At first Petraeus had been skeptical; the Iraqis regularly made grand promises that never panned out. When he finally went to see them he'd been impressed. Several hundred commandos, clad in mismatched uniforms and led by tough sergeants, were training at a bombed-out base just beyond the western gate to the Green Zone. Iraqi units typically did a horrible job maintaining their equipment, but the commandos' weapons, scrounged from Saddam-era stockpiles, were clean and well oiled. Petraeus had been knocking his head against a wall for months trying to build a unit like the commandos, with little success. Out of nowhere a seemingly outstanding unit had appeared only a few hundred yards from his headquarters. It was almost too good to be true-a desert mirage.

"How did you pick these guys?" Petraeus asked the commander of the unit, Major General Andan Thavit, who also happened to be the interim interior minister's uncle.

"I knew them all in jail. Every one of us was arrested by Saddam," Thavit replied. He had been a two-star general in Saddam's intelligence service until an unsuccessful 1995 coup attempt landed him on death row. Before his nephew summoned him to Baghdad, the jowly sixty-three-year-old general had been sitting at home. Now he ruled his men with a mixture of fear and charisma. Thavit wore black leather jackets regardless of the weather and chain-smoked. When commandos entered his spa.r.s.e office, they stamped their right boot, flashed an exaggerated salute, and stood rigidly at attention. He frequently threatened to cut off the t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es of any of his soldiers caught stealing. No one was entirely sure if he was kidding.

Petraeus supplied them with uniforms, ammunition, and a fleet of camouflage-painted Dodge Ram pickups with machine guns bolted to the back. The commandos raced off to fight insurgents. In Mosul, occupying police stations that had been overrun in the November 2004 fighting, they withstood a four-hour barrage that killed twelve commandos but didn't break the unit. Without them, Mosul never would have been able to partic.i.p.ate in the January elections, Petraeus said.

The commandos were not perfect soldiers, by any means. They looted constantly. "Every time they'd move from one place to another they'd take a lot of stuff with them. It was just very unprofessional conduct," Petraeus recalled. In early 2005 there were persistent but unproven rumors that they were abusing prisoners. In the spring Petraeus obtained pictures of detainees who had been beaten in the commandos' custody. He was furious. "I know you guys think you know [how to handle Iraqis] better than we do and that a little abuse is accepted," he told Thavit angrily. "It is not acceptable." Thavit promised to stop immediately.

At the time Petraeus had other problems. His command was now responsible for training and equipping more than 100 battalions, the growing commando force, and more than 130,000 regular police. To meet the growing demand he figured he needed to add about 150 U.S. troops to his 550-soldier training outfit. The request, however, languished at Casey's level for months. Finally Petraeus demanded a meeting with Casey's chief of staff, Marine Corps Major General Tim Donovan, who had to sign off on the request before it could be sent to the Pentagon. For the next five hours he and his staff went through all 150 positions in the manning doc.u.ment with Donovan, justifying the need for each one. They jokingly dubbed the marathon session "Operation Breaking of the Will." A few days later, Donovan ran into Petraeus at Al Faw Palace and told him that he was going to have to trim the request a bit more. "G.o.ddammit, chief, you are s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g us," Petraeus yelled, slamming his fist into the wall.

Abizaid had promised Petraeus whatever he needed, but he wasn't getting it. Petraeus didn't directly blame Casey for the struggles he was having finding troops for his staff. After a rocky start, the relationship between the two generals had warmed. Instead he guessed that both Casey and Abizaid were under pressure from Rumsfeld to bring down troop numbers. Even a request for a measly 150 soldiers was going to set off alarms in the Pentagon.

Casey was was under pressure from Rumsfeld to cut forces, but some of the pressure was also self-generated. He firmly believed that the longer the United States stayed in Iraq, the longer radical groups such as Al Qaeda would pick away at its forces. Sooner or later the attacks would exhaust the patience of the American people. The only way to win was to pare back troop levels and make the Iraqis do more. Casey knew that his subordinate commanders, including Petraeus, weren't going to volunteer to get by with fewer soldiers. Iraq was a "troop sump," he said, meaning there was an almost endless supply of tasks to be done in the country. If he didn't set tight limits, he believed, the force would grow forever. under pressure from Rumsfeld to cut forces, but some of the pressure was also self-generated. He firmly believed that the longer the United States stayed in Iraq, the longer radical groups such as Al Qaeda would pick away at its forces. Sooner or later the attacks would exhaust the patience of the American people. The only way to win was to pare back troop levels and make the Iraqis do more. Casey knew that his subordinate commanders, including Petraeus, weren't going to volunteer to get by with fewer soldiers. Iraq was a "troop sump," he said, meaning there was an almost endless supply of tasks to be done in the country. If he didn't set tight limits, he believed, the force would grow forever.