In My Time - Dick Cheney [241]
On January 10, 2007, the president announced in a speech to the nation that he was committing twenty thousand additional troops—five brigades—to Iraq, and most of them would go to Baghdad. He was also increasing American forces in Anbar, the home base of al Qaeda in Iraq, by four thousand. The brigades would deploy over time so that it would be summer before we reached full strength.
The president’s decision was particularly courageous against the drumbeat of criticism we were facing from outside the administration. On December 17, 2006, former secretary of state Colin Powell had said that America was “losing in Iraq” and a “surge cannot be sustained.” Days after the president’s speech, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel declared the surge “a waste of our troops and a waste of our treasure,” and Senator Barack Obama predicted that rather than solving sectarian violence, the surge would increase it.
Shortly after the additional troops began arriving in Iraq, critics declared that the surge had failed. Perhaps most memorably, in April 2007 Senator Harry Reid said, “This war is lost, and the surge is not accomplishing anything.” While even members of his own party thought Reid had gone too far in declaring America’s defeat, there was certainly hand-wringing on both sides of the aisle, especially among members worried about reelection and concerned that we weren’t seeing results quickly enough.
Inside the White House and the Pentagon, senior officials began to look for ways to placate the Congress and a hostile media. Although the president had just signed up for the surge, some of his advisors were already talking about bringing at least one brigade home by the end of the year. This was a political recommendation, totally divorced from the situation on the ground, which according to Generals Petraeus and Odierno would require the surged brigades well into 2008.
On Tuesday morning, May 22, a David Ignatius column appeared in the Washington Post titled “After the Surge: The Administration Floats Ideas for a New Approach in Iraq.” It quoted administration officials on the need to revamp policy in order to attract bipartisan support and to take into account the fact that the surge might not have the stabilizing effect we had hoped. I was very concerned when I read the piece, and I raised it with the president in the Oval Office. “Whoever is leaking information like this to the press is doing a real disservice, Mr. President,” I said, “both to you and to our forces on the ground in Baghdad.” We shouldn’t be suggesting that our war policy was being tailored for political purposes, pieced together to include elements simply because they would attract Democratic support, I said. And we shouldn’t be cutting our commanders off at the knees, suggesting that their strategy would fail before the forces were even in place. “We have to correct this,” I said, “particularly with our generals in the field. They have to know they have the full backing of the president and his top officials and that we will not start pulling troops out before the mission is complete.”
A short time later Steve Hadley came into my office and closed the door. He told me that he was the source for Ignatius and that he’d talked to him at the instruction of the president. That gave me a moment’s pause, but then I thought it was just as well I hadn’t known. I might have been less forceful about making a case that deserved to be made forcefully. This wasn’t a time for mixed messages.
A little before 7:00 a.m. on Saturday, May 26, 2007, I boarded Air Force Two for the short flight to New York, where I was scheduled to deliver remarks at the U.S. Military Academy’s commencement ceremonies. The day’s papers were laid out on the table in my cabin, and as I scanned the front-page headlines, a story by David Sanger in the New York Times caught my attention. “White House Is Said to Debate ’08 Cut in Iraq Combat Forces by 50%,” it read. In language