Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [360]
There was no shortage of work to be done in regaining the momentum toward Iraqi control that had slipped during the occupation. We had lost almost a year in training Iraq’s army and police forces because of bureaucratic differences and misplaced priorities. After reorienting the emphasis toward internal security, Abizaid and I made a priority of increasing the number of Iraqi security forces. Consistent with this goal, Ambassador Negroponte shifted substantial reconstruction funds away from infrastructure projects toward the training of Iraqi army and police forces.
I also pushed for more coalition forces to be involved in Iraq to lessen the burden on our troops. We could continue to bear the brunt of the difficult work, such as clearing and holding Iraqi neighborhoods, but other countries could pick up some of the slack by providing force protection at military bases and working at logistic hubs in Kuwait. If deploying troops to Iraq was politically too sensitive, I suggested that some countries replace American troops in places like the Sinai, Kosovo, and Bosnia, so we could focus more of our resources in Iraq and Afghanistan.2 I had pushed hard for a Muslim military contingent to go to Iraq to belie the propaganda aired on Al-Jazeera that America was waging a war against Islam.3 Turkey’s parliament had at one point agreed to deploy two divisions of troops. But suspicious of their neighboring countries, Iraqi leaders rejected the idea—to the detriment of Iraq’s security and to U.S.-Turkey relations.
Some critics contended we were using Iraqis interchangeably with our own forces, as if we thought a recently trained Iraqi soldier was as capable as a U.S. Marine or Army soldier.4 That was not so; we never envisioned the Iraqi security forces becoming the equivalent of the U.S. military. I did think we could aim for a competent, capable Iraqi force that, over time, could earn the respect and support of the Iraqi people. I believed that training and equipping Iraqis to secure their own country was the best strategy to achieve a government reasonably capable of dealing with the challenges it faced.*
Unlike most twentieth-century counterinsurgencies, such as that waged by the French in Algeria, the goal of the United States wasn’t an Iraq that was disarmed and unable to resist occupation. To the contrary, we wanted an Iraq that we could leave behind fully independent and capable of defending itself with a well-trained and well-armed police force and army. We had a major interest in ensuring the Iraqis were successful. But ultimately we knew that we couldn’t succeed for them. If more Iraqis didn’t stop insurgents from taking refuge in their neighborhoods, building car bombs in their garages, and destroying power lines and reconstruction projects, and start providing more intelligence tips to Iraqi security forces, then the Iraqi people were doomed to live in a destroyed, violence-engulfed country.6
After some difficult months under a two-star general whose efforts resulted in only modest progress, we needed a three-star general who could aggressively accelerate the development of local forces. To reorient the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and make their training and equipping a top priority, I settled on an Army general who had excelled as a division commander during the major combat operations stage.
David Petraeus began his career at West Point, where he would later return as a professor armed with a Princeton Ph.D. He was by many accounts ambitious and driven. His experience