In My Time - Dick Cheney [242]
A few hours later under a hazy blue sky I helped present diplomas to the impressive young cadets of the West Point Class of 2007. Their class motto was “Always Remember. Never Surrender.” I found myself wishing that we in Washington could speak so clearly.
On May 30, toward the end of our weekly secure videoconference with our team in Iraq, the president asked our new ambassador Ryan Crocker and General Petraeus whether they had anything they wanted to add before signing off. General Petraeus, to his great credit, raised the issue of the press reports suggesting that the administration thought the surge might fail and was looking for ways to bring troops home early. He said that he and General Odierno had been sitting out there in Baghdad reading these reports, looking at each other across the table, and wondering what was going on back in Washington.
In Baghdad with three of the generals who led us to victory in Iraq, Commander of U.S. forces, General David Petraeus, his deputy and successor, General Ray Odierno, and General Stan McChrystal, who commanded our special operations forces. (Official White Hosue Photo/David Bohrer)
Bringing up the news stories was a gutsy thing to do, and he did it in a way that was direct but totally nonconfrontational. Exactly right.
The president was getting some bad advice from those on the staff urging a political compromise for our Iraq strategy. I thought it would be helpful if he spent some time with Jack Keane. On Thursday, May 31, when I’d been scheduled to have my regular weekly lunch with the president, I suggested bringing Jack along, and I asked Steve Hadley to join us as well.
Jack traveled to Iraq frequently, and he and I had an informal arrangement that he’d stop by my office after he got back from a trip. I wanted to be sure he had the opportunity to pass along information he thought the president should have. Because of ongoing resistance inside the Pentagon and at Central Command to the surge strategy, I also wanted to ensure that General Petraeus’s thoughts and concerns made it all the way up the chain of command.
Jack was just back from his second trip to Iraq since General Petraeus took over, and as we sat around the table in the president’s private dining room, Jack began by talking about how proud he was of the caliber of our forces. They were the most competent and capable military force in history, he said, and they believed deeply in what they were doing. And even though the president’s decision to surge forces meant longer deployments, more time away from home and families, and higher casualty rates initially, the sense of duty and commitment and pure competence among our forces in the field were just superb.
In 2006, he said, the enemy had the momentum, but now because of the surge, we had it. He pointed to what was happening in Anbar Province among the Sunni sheikhs. They were forming their own groups, which came to be known as Concerned Local Citizens, or CLCs, and signing on with the Americans to fight al Qaeda. One of the first questions the CLCs were asking our troops was “Are you here to stay this time?” When they believed we were, they got into the fight with us to restore safety and security in their own towns.
Keane said it was clear that the surge was working, but leaks like those in the New York Times the previous weekend weren’t helpful. To the military leadership in the field such stories looked like a signal that the civilians were getting ready to pull the