In My Time - Dick Cheney [233]
McMaster’s track record was encouraging, and his case was thoughtful and convincing. I also knew the strategy he described was being worked on by one of the brightest minds in the military. In January 2006, during a stop at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, I had visited with General David Petraeus, an army three-star with a Princeton Ph.D. Petraeus got highest marks from many people, including Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, then Rumsfeld’s deputy at the Defense Department. Petraeus had just returned from Iraq, where he had been in charge of training Iraqi security forces and was beginning work on revising the army’s counterinsurgency manual. After Petraeus completed his manual, I received a draft, and it was as clear and cogent as Petraeus himself. I realized that changing the mission in Iraq to emphasize counterinsurgency would require a greater American troop presence, but I thought the idea deserved serious consideration.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Pete Pace had been impressed with Colonel McMaster’s work in Tal Afar and brought him and several other colonels back to Washington for a ninety-day assignment to do some creative thinking and make recommendations to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the way ahead in Iraq. The group came to be known as the Council of Colonels and worked inside the Pentagon to develop a strategy for victory.
That fall, at least three other reviews of our policy were under way. At the direction of the president, Deputy National Security Advisor J. D. Crouch was overseeing a process for Steve Hadley that brought together senior officials from the State Department, Defense Department, the joint staff, the intelligence community, and the NSC to conduct a review to provide recommendations directly to the president.
In one of our regular small group meetings in Steve Hadley’s office in the West Wing where we discussed our most important and sensitive national security policy matters during the second term, with Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Pete Pace; Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell; Deputy NSC Advisor, JD Crouch, and Secretary of State, Condi Rice. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)
John Hannah and Robert Karem represented my office in the process. Outside the government, retired four-star general and former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army Jack Keane and Fred Kagan, formerly a professor of military history at West Point, were working at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, on a proposal for a counterinsurgency strategy and troop surge. And the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, created by Congress, had been working since March to come up with a new approach.
Not only was the increased violence in Iraq leading to real concern in Washington; it was also putting a strain on our relations with the new Iraqi government. Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki and other Iraqi Shiite leaders believed that the violence being caused by the Shiite militias was simply a response to Sunni attacks—which, he noted, the Americans had failed to prevent. I knew that many Iraqis viewed the Americans as powerful enough to do whatever we wanted, and so when we didn’t stop attacks, they suspected there was a reason. Was Maliki thinking we had bought into the Sunni idea that the Shia militias were the primary enemy in Iraq? Did he think we were turning our back on the Shia?
We discussed this issue at length in our October 21 secure videoconference with our team in Baghdad. If we were going to get the Iraqis into the fight and help them stand up and take responsibility for governance and their own security, we had to avoid a rift with the Maliki government.
In Baghdad with the new Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki