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weapons of mass destruction (WMD) when sanctions were lifted.”1 He remained intent on reconstituting his WMD programs and kept many of them “on the shelf,” which would allow him to begin producing biological and chemical weapons within several weeks’ time.2 Instead of pointing out these facts, the White House decided not to dispute the matter to avoid “relitigating” the past and changed the subject to democracy promotion. Some assumed that the justification for the war and the need to remove Saddam were self-evident. “[O]ne of the biggest mistakes of the Bush years,” senior Bush adviser Karl Rove later acknowledged, was not “engaging” with administration critics, which “let more of the public come to believe dangerous falsehoods about the war: that Bush lied, that Saddam Hussein never had and never wanted WMD, that we claimed Iraq had been behind 9/11.”3 The damage from this error in judgment was substantial. It allowed critics to whitewash Saddam’s record and political opponents to build a deceitful narrative about the rationale for going to war.

In the weeks leading up to Saddam’s death in December 2006, Democrats who had gained control of Congress were poised to finally succeed in their efforts to cut offwar funding, which would bring U.S. involvement in Iraq to a forced end. President Bush knew that if they prevailed, it would ensure the defeat of the U.S.-led coalition and victory for the jihadists, insurgents, and other enemies of a potentially peaceful and responsible Iraq. He believed that the outcome would be not only a military calamity, but would also force the United States to endure the humiliation of a precipitous withdrawal while plunging Iraq into a further humanitarian disaster.

Bush realized that a political strategy with the new Congress was now as important as a military strategy. The President was frustrated that progress was too slow, but he believed that with some additional time and patience, the situation could improve. His challenge was to convince the opposition party, led by incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, that the administration had developed a promising new approach and deserved additional time. The President undoubtedly hoped that the sweeping personnel changes underway—new commanders at CENTCOM and in Iraq and a new secretary of defense—offered a concrete demonstration to the public that the commander in chief was pursuing a different course. Accordingly, President Bush took one of the boldest political and strategic maneuvers in recent American history: the 2007 surge.

Talk of executing a surge of additional U.S. troops began in November 2006 with a White House review of Iraq strategy led by J. D. Crouch and Bill Luti, both of whom had come to the NSC from the Defense Department. At the same time, officials in the Pentagon were undertaking our own review. Assistant Defense Secretary Peter Rodman and I sought to develop a DoD position that recognized the approach we had taken over the last year was not working “well enough or fast enough.”4 Though I had largely removed myself from policy making after the announcement of my resignation, I continued to oversee this review in the hope that the administration’s new course would have the support of the country’s top military officials.

We drew up a working paper in early December summarizing the options that the Pentagon’s civilian and military leaders were considering. “[F]ailure in Iraq will place the American people in even greater danger,” my cover memo for the paper began.5 We suggested further accelerating the buildup of the Iraqi Security Forces and renewed efforts at befriending the Sunnis, now that the Awakening movement in Anbar province was blossoming.6 We also suggested new efforts to curb Iran’s hostile involvement, particularly its training of sectarian Shia militia death squads and its clandestine attacks on U.S. troops.

The Defense Department’s summary paper was developed from a memo I had written the previous month to provide Bush with some “illustrative new courses of action.”