In My Time - Dick Cheney [235]
I went through a series of recent events I feared might signal to the Iraqis that the Americans had lost the will to see this through. The press was portraying the Republican loss in the midterms as a referendum on Iraq policy. The new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and the new majority leader of the Senate, Harry Reid, had been very clear that they would push for withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. Senator Joe Lieberman had essentially been purged from Democratic ranks because of his support for the war. U.S. public opinion polls had gone south on Iraq and were now pretty consistently showing a majority opposed to continued military action there. And the president had announced Don Rumsfeld’s departure. All these events were giving an overall impression to anyone paying attention that the Americans might well be getting ready to bail on Iraq. I was very concerned, especially about how all this would be read by Iraqis who wanted the United States to stand with them to secure their country. I maintained contact with a number of Iraqis, and increasingly they were voicing concern to me about the security situation and America’s will to prevail.
The next morning, when we had our weekly secure videoconference with our military commanders and our ambassador in Iraq, the president asked Ambassador Khalilzad what the mood was there. Zal said people were worried that America was getting ready to leave. He confirmed some of my worst concerns about the situation.
I was also worried about the message we were sending to our troops and their families. They were the constituency that mattered more than any other, and this was the first time since we’d created the all-volunteer force that our soldiers had been committed in an unpopular war. Their morale and that of their families was crucial, and as criticism mounted, we had to be absolutely clear, internally and publicly, that we would not compromise our fundamental mission for political reasons. There is a sacred trust between our soldiers and their civilian leaders, and no matter how loudly we were being criticized in the press or how vehemently the Democrats were attacking us, we had to remember what mattered—giving our troops a mission they could carry out to fight and win in Iraq.
With troops in Iraq during one of my last visits as vice president. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)
BY THE FALL OF 2006 we had lost over 2,500 brave Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq. If we adopted a counterinsurgency strategy and surged more forces, our troops would be going into the enemy’s strongholds, moving out of their forward operating bases. Increased contact with the enemy was the only way to win, but our generals had been clear—this new strategy would likely bring more casualties, at least in the near term. Sending American troops into harm’s way is the toughest decision that a commander in chief has to make, and as I thought about a surge, which George W. Bush might be deciding on soon, I thought about our soldiers and their families and the deep gratitude our nation owes them. Over the course of my vice presidency, I met many families of the fallen. Most often, through their unimaginable pain, their message to me was, Don’t let our son have died in vain. Finish the job.
Our soldiers understand, sometimes better than the politicians in Washington, why they are fighting. I remember the wife of a member of one of our special operations units telling me that on every one of his missions, her husband carried with him a patch from the New York City Fire Department—he was fighting for those who had died on 9/11. Her husband’s missions were secret, and he couldn’t talk about them, but she said she wished she could somehow reach out to the wives and loved ones of the firefighters and policemen and all those who were killed on 9/11 and tell them her husband and thousands of others were hunting down the terrorists responsible for those attacks.
Many of our wounded soldiers are hospitalized