In My Time - Dick Cheney [230]
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Surge
I left my home in St. Michaels, Maryland, early on Monday, June 12, 2006, for the fifty-minute helicopter flight to Camp David. The national security team was gathering for a review of our Iraq war strategy, and as the Camp David landing zone came into sight, I thought through some of the questions we needed to address: Is there more we could be doing to defeat the insurgency? Do we need more troops? Are the Iraqis convinced that we’ll see this through? What does it take to win?
In the conference room at Laurel Lodge we all sat on one side of the table facing the video monitors on the wall, where Generals John Abizaid and George Casey and Ambassador Zal Khalilzad began the brief with an update of our operations on the ground in Iraq. We’d had a major success on June 7, when American forces located and killed Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. General Stan McChrystal had built a top-notch special operations unit that had been tracking senior al Qaeda operatives and taking down terrorist networks. McChrystal’s men had been tracking Zarqawi for some time when they received confirmation he was staying in a house near Baqubah, Iraq. An F-16 dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs on the house, killing Zarqawi. After the attack, U.S. forces raided seventeen other locations in and around Baghdad, where they found valuable intelligence information.
This was good news. Zarqawi, who had found refuge in Iraq after 9/11, had led a campaign of violence in Iraq—kidnappings, suicide bombings, public beheadings—and with the bombing of the mosque at Samarra, he had launched a frenzy of sectarian bloodletting. Killing him was an important achievement, but as I listened to Abizaid and Casey brief on our operations, I had a nagging concern. They were carrying out a strategy that defined success based on turnover of responsibility to the Iraqis, and there was a danger, in a setting that had grown so violent, of withdrawing prematurely—before Iraqi military and police were capable of defending and securing their own sovereign territory.
We were confronting an extraordinarily complex set of forces inside Iraq. At the heart of much of the bloodshed was al Qaeda’s strategy, which was to kill as many Shia and Americans as possible—and the more ruthlessly the better, so that the Shia would strike back and we would respond to the mayhem by leaving. Disaffected Sunnis, fearful of their future in an Iraq run by a coalition government of Shia and Kurds and worried that Shia were using their power in the new government to exact sectarian revenge, filled the ranks of the insurgency. They joined in the killing of American and Iraqi security forces, as well as Iraqi civilians. As the violence dragged on, Shiite militia and death squads became increasingly active, targeting Sunnis and battling one another for power. Tens of thousands had become part of the Jaysh al Mahdi militia, which was controlled by Muqtada al Sadr, a radical anti-American Shiite leader. Our forces had seriously degraded the capabilities of Sadr’s militia in engagements in Najaf and Karbala in 2004, but particularly after the dome of the Askariya mosque was reduced to rubble, he and his army contributed significantly to the violence in Iraq.
The Iranians were playing a deadly role, providing support to a number of the Shiite militias, including Muqtada al Sadr’s. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, sometimes in cooperation with Lebanese Hezbollah, trained and equipped the Jaysh al Mahdi as well as certain Shiite “special groups” loyal to Iran. They used these groups to smuggle all sorts of weapons, including rockets, mortars, sniper rifles, and explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, into Iraq. The EFPs, which used shaped charges, could pierce the armor of our vehicles and had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of our troops.
Remnants of Saddam’s regime were still active and operating primarily out of Syria. Saddam’s Baathist elite had fled the country with countless millions in