In My Time - Dick Cheney [232]
I respected General Casey, but I couldn’t see a basis for his optimism. Violence was ongoing—and, in fact, in the months ahead it would escalate dramatically. The neighborhoods that had been cleared would be reinfiltrated, and Operations Together Forward would be widely regarded as failures. I asked what we could do to reduce the number of attacks and suggested we consider having U.S. forces take on a bigger role. This was a concept General Casey continued to resist, in large part because he and General Abizaid, as well as some in the Pentagon civilian leadership, assumed that U.S. forces were an irritant that inflamed the insurgency and made the violence worse. They continued to argue that the solution was to “take our hand off the bicycle seat” and put the Iraqis in charge as quickly as we could.
ON AUGUST 24, 2006, I asked Colonel Derek Harvey, a retired army intelligence officer, to come to the Vice President’s Residence to brief me. Colonel Harvey was then working at the Defense Intelligence Agency and was one of the very best sources on the nature of the enemy we faced. He had spent a great deal of time working in Iraq, studying the insurgency and its networks. John Hannah, my national security advisor, kept in touch with Derek as he provided regular updates for me on the situation on the ground in Iraq. Derek had briefed me several times over the previous years and also provided his in-depth analysis to the National Security Council. As we looked for a way forward, I felt his assessment of the causes of the insurgency and the role played by former elements of Saddam’s regime was key to understanding how we might change our strategy to defeat the enemy.
As I looked for alternatives to our current strategy, I kept hearing about Colonel H. R. McMaster, a veteran of the first Gulf War. He had been awarded a Silver Star for his leadership in the famed tank battle of 73 Easting in the southeastern desert of Iraq. McMaster and his unit had destroyed several Iraqi Revolutionary Guard units while suffering no casualties of their own. McMaster had also had a remarkable success in the war in which we were currently engaged. In 2005, in command of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, he had succeeded in bringing stability to the town of Tal Afar, where Sunnis had been kidnapping and killing Shia and Shia were leaving the beheaded corpses of Sunnis in the streets. McMaster, on his own initiative, had employed a classic counterinsurgency strategy, isolating the insurgents from the townspeople and providing security while helping the local population to establish political and economic institutions.
I asked for a briefing from Colonel McMaster, and he came to the Vice President’s Residence on September 28, 2006. An accomplished soldier with a Ph.D. in history, McMaster joined me in the library on the main floor of the vice president’s house and gave me his assessment of where things stood in Iraq and what we needed to do to win.
Despite the success of the enemy in inciting sectarian violence, he said, we could make tremendous progress—but not if we withdrew prematurely from critical areas. He urged that we avoid the trap of considering handoff to the Iraqis an end in itself. Instead, we should define the conditions we wanted to achieve before transitioning authority. These should include defeating the insurgency in any area we were handing over, so that economic and political development