Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [374]
A senior public official confronts a test when presented with setbacks in a war. I had seen unconvincing overconfidence from Lyndon Johnson when the Vietnam War started to turn in 1966, and we certainly didn’t want to repeat that performance. The President and I saw it as our jobs to balance our concerns with what progress we saw, but without sounding like Pollyanna. If a broad majority in a democracy loses faith in the effort—and there was no mistaking in 2006 that Americans were losing confidence—it cannot be sustained.
As we gathered at Camp David for the June 12 NSC meeting, it was increasingly clear that despite Zarqawi’s death, the sectarian strife had not abated and insurgents seemed determined to wage more spectacular attacks. In light of this and the weakening support at home, Bush wanted to discuss any and all available alternatives. I supported that fully.
Abizaid and Casey argued to continue a steady drawdown of our forces. Even after a rise of violence in Iraq that year, their aim was to continue reducing American forces as Iraqi security forces stood up. I too was reluctant to place still more of the burdens in Iraq on Americans rather than on the Iraqis themselves.
Another option discussed at Camp David was the State Department’s proposal to draw forces out of Baghdad and major cities, and in effect out of conflict. The idea amounted to letting the sectarian bloodshed work itself out on the theory that American soldiers should not be drawn into an Iraqi civil war. Rice advocated this approach on the grounds that sectarian violence was an Iraqi problem and the Iraqis had to confront it. There was some logic to it, but the State Department approach seemed to be a path toward a staged withdrawal not dissimilar from our departure from Vietnam. There was one important difference: The ascendant Viet Cong and North Vietnamese would not follow us home. If we left Iraq to al-Qaida, we would be certain to have consequences at home with a greater likelihood of terrorist attacks in our cities.
There was another possibility: a counterinsurgency strategy that would put Iraqis in the lead. At the Camp David meeting, we discussed a proposal suggested by Michael Vickers, a former Army Special Forces officer. Vickers had worked for the CIA where he had played a role in arming the Afghan resistance to the Soviet Union.* Prior to the Camp David meeting, Vickers had prepared a memo for the President. “One of the many paradoxes of modern counterinsurgency,” Vickers wrote, “is that less is often more.” He argued, as Abizaid had, that a successful strategy emphasized intelligence, the “dis-criminate use of force,” a focus on building popular support for the government, protecting the local population, and placing an emphasis on political reconciliation—including amnesty and rehabilitation for insurgents. In contrast, he argued that counterinsurgency strategies that focused on “large-scale sweep and kill-capture operations” without emphasizing building up indigenous capacity to fight the enemy tended to be unsuccessful.
Noting that insurgencies are “protracted contests of wills,” Vickers’ paper stated that the problem we had faced over the most recent three years in Iraq was that “we have pursued a direct approach to counterinsurgency that has eroded American public support for the war (our center of gravity) more than it has reduced Iraqi support for the insurgency (our enemy’s center of gravity).” As a result, he noted, the insurgency had grown. Increasing force levels, he argued to the President, was “highly unlikely to be decisive.” Insurgents would still control the initiative, and could always temporarily decline to fight. Instead, he considered it “imperative” to shift to an indirect approach, requiring that we “begin and continue the drawdown of U.S. forces while the insurgency is still raging.” Our emphasis, instead, should be on providing “additional resources for Iraqi security forces,” including an increase in U.S. advisers.9
I found the Vickers proposal to be persuasive, including his emphasis on accelerating