The Fourth Star Part 5

This was Chiarelli's new domain. He was the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, just beginning a yearlong deployment in Baghdad. His was the only division a.s.signed to the capital and had probably the most critical mission in Iraq. The other five major military headquarters, commanded by one-star or two-star generals, were scattered throughout the country. All the commanders, including Chiarelli, reported to General Sanchez, who oversaw all military forces in Iraq. Sanchez, in turn, reported to Abizaid, who was constantly crisscrossing the region.

Chiarelli and his 20,000-soldier division were taking over from the 1st Armored Division, which was finis.h.i.+ng its tour and going home to its base in Germany. The formal handover wasn't scheduled for a few weeks, and many of the soldiers under Chiarelli's command were still arriving, driving up from Kuwait in long convoys through the desert. Reaching Baghdad, they funneled into a half-dozen forward operating bases around different sections of the city. Chiarelli would oversee them from the division headquarters, which at least for the time being was a large green tent on the north end of the airport base, known as Camp Victory.

For decades, he had dreamed of taking command during wartime, never sure his chance would come; now it had, finally. His division, the same one that George Casey's father had led in Vietnam, had a history that reached back into the frontier wars of the nineteenth century and reflected the constant evolution of the American way of war. Once its troopers had moved on horseback wearing Stetsons and yellow kerchiefs. In Vietnam, the division had been known as the 1st Air Cav and was equipped with hundreds of helicopters to seek out the Viet Cong on search-and-destroy missions. Later, as the Army erased the memory of that conflict, the 1st Cav converted into a heavy division, equipped with the latest tanks and precision-guided weapons. In his imagination Chiarelli had once seen himself directing its armored columns on a vast open plain, the Army's vision of modern warfare. His year in Iraq was going to look nothing like that. This was occupation duty in a crowded city of 8 million people, with car bomb attacks, rampant crime, and only a few hours of power a day.

When Chiarelli pressed the Army staff in the Pentagon to let him bring his division's full complement of hundreds of Abrams tanks and personnel carriers, he was told the heavy armor was unnecessary for his mission. His troops were supposed to be manning checkpoints and patrolling in Humvees. Inside their tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, they wouldn't be able to interact with civilians. One other big concern was that the tanks and Brads sent the wrong signal to the Iraqis and the rest of the Arab world. Their presence on the streets made it appear as if the liberated capital was under siege.

"Why not let me leave the armor over there and park it if it's not needed?" Chiarelli had asked his superiors in Baghdad and Was.h.i.+ngton. Eventually General Sanchez told him he could bring over about a third of his armored vehicles-less than he'd wanted but better than nothing.

Before leaving Fort Hood in Texas, he had drilled into the nearly 20,000 soldiers under his command that their primary mission would be not fighting but improving daily life for ordinary Iraqis. He sent his officers to the Texas capital, Austin, to spend several days observing a big city's sewage, trash collection, and power systems. He flew them to London for briefings on the British counterinsurgency operations in Northern Ireland, and later to Jordan for a weeklong course on Arab society and culture.

He had turned fifty-four a few days earlier. In his middle age, he was beefy and imposing, no longer the slightly plump and easily awed officer he had once been. Along with his desert fatigues and body armor, he wore the wraparound sungla.s.ses and high suede boots favored by tankers. In his battle garb he resembled a stiff-gaited robot warrior, as most soldiers did, but in fact he was the most compa.s.sionate of generals, always struggling to control his overflowing emotions. In his journal a few weeks earlier Chiarelli had recorded his feelings about leaving his wife, Beth, at Fort Hood. By the time he came home, Patrick, the youngest of his three children, would be in college, out of the house for good. "Day 1," he wrote on the day he departed for Iraq. "Got out of own bed for the last time in a year at 0600, very difficult ... Toughest thing I have ever done ... Knowing I will never live in the house again with Pat makes me tear up ... I will never forget Beth whispering in my ear through tears that she was afraid to be alone."

As difficult as leaving had been, Chiarelli didn't view the coming year, as many in the military did, as something to be endured. He was fascinated by the Middle East, and there was no way he would hold himself aloof. "Drank camel's milk and ate dates with a Kuwaiti in the desert today. Carpet on the desert and all, it was an experience," he wrote in a journal entry from Kuwait, the division's last stop before Iraq.

Now that he was on the ground, he was plunging ahead. His first appointment after the short flight to the Green Zone that morning was in the Republican Palace, where the CPA had its headquarters, with James Stephenson, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development's mission in Iraq. For weeks, Chiarelli's aides had been sending Stephenson e-mails telling him that the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division wanted to see him as soon as he arrived. A craggy-faced veteran aid worker who went by the nickname "Spike," Stephenson couldn't imagine why. His job was to rebuild Iraq, or, more accurately, to keep tabs on the big U.S. engineering firms that had won USAID contracts to undertake mammoth infrastructure projects. The Army officers he had encountered defined their job as capturing or killing shadowy insurgents, and he expected that Chiarelli would be little different. When this imposing general walked into his ground-floor office in body armor and goggles, with a Kevlar helmet under his arm, Stephenson was pretty sure they didn't have a lot to discuss.

Chiarelli removed his gear and the two men sat in frayed chairs facing each other. "What can I do for you?" Stephenson inquired. Chiarelli launched into a ten-minute description of the problems in Baghdad and what he thought needed to be done. The way to tamp down the violence in the capital, he said, was to deliver as quickly as possible more hours of electricity, cleaner streets, running water, and, if possible, jobs. Iraqis had to see their lives getting better. "USAID is critical for what I want to do because the expertise resides with you," he said. As the division commander, he had millions of dollars at his disposal but was limited, in most cases, to expending no more than $10,000 at a time. To do what he had in mind, he needed help from USAID, which had more money, as well as expertise in writing big contracts and planning construction projects. It wasn't the first time a military officer had proposed to work together, but Chiarelli was the first who actually seemed to understand what USAID did. Still, Stephenson could tell Chiarelli didn't understand how things worked in the Green Zone. The general acted like there was a big pot of money that he could tap for new sewage lines, power stations, health clinics, and other projects around the city. It wasn't that simple. Congress had approved $18.6 billion the previous fall to help rebuild Iraq's shattered infrastructure, and Stephenson's portion of that was more than $2 billion. But most of that money had already been earmarked for just one company, Bechtel Corporation, which had won contracts to do a few large projects that would take years to finish. The projects were generating few jobs for average Iraqis and would do little anytime soon to change the crus.h.i.+ng realities of life in Baghdad. Stephenson didn't like the approach, but those decisions had been made in Was.h.i.+ngton. After Stephenson explained this, they parted, promising to talk again. But Stephenson was being polite. There were too many obstacles to the kind of joint venture Chiarelli had in mind. "I thought he had the right ideas. I just couldn't see how I could help him," he recalled.

Charging through the halls of the palace, Chiarelli told his aides that every time he visited the Green Zone he wanted to see Stephenson. There was a pure optimism about Chiarelli, a fundamental faith in everybody's motives until he had evidence to the contrary. For years Beth, his wife, would teasingly call him "Skippy," the straightforward American soldier who always tried to do the right thing and thought most everyone else did, too. Most Iraqis, he believed, were not that different from Americans. They wanted peaceful, normal lives, with schools and doctors for their families, and they would stop fighting each other if their basic needs were met. These convictions sprang from growing up in Seattle, with grandparents who were Italian immigrants and wanted better lives for their children. His ideas could seem at times wildly at odds with the realities of the Middle East. Abizaid, for one, thought Chiarelli didn't appreciate the tribal, sectarian, and ethnic antagonisms that were a major source of Iraq's violence. When Chiarelli briefed him on his plans for a ma.s.sive public works program in Baghdad, Abizaid showed little interest. "It was really hard for me to understand whether Abizaid thought what I was doing was right or wrong," he later admitted.

In some ways it was the breadth of Chiarelli's ambitions that made him unusual. Anyone with any experience in Iraq knew it was prudent to think small-to "stay in your lane," as the phrase went. But Chiarelli never did. He had read as many books as he could find about counterinsurgency, talked at length with the commander of the outgoing division about Baghdad, and carefully studied what Dave Petraeus had done in Mosul. Petraeus's model was a starting point. But Baghdad had more than three times as many people as Mosul and was more violent. Fixing the capital's problems, Chiarelli believed, demanded far-reaching changes not just from the military but also from the civilians running the reconstruction effort. During his time in the Social Sciences Department at West Point he'd acquired a trait common to many Sosh alums: he thought that he could parachute into a place, identify an intractable problem that was well above his rank, and then articulate a solution so perfect that everyone would rush to embrace it. In Iraq his goal was to "totally reprioritize what we were doing," he recalled.

He'd spent only three days in country, but he was already convinced most of the civilians in the Green Zone were fooling themselves about what it was really like outside the walls: "Bremer is a mini-Rumsfeld. He is quoting statistics, as he nears the end of his stay, that make him look good and are not based in reality-'unemployment in Baghdad is 11 percent.' Give me a break," he jotted in his journal. "CPA is more than dysfunctional, enough said." He noted as well that Bremer had ordered the closing of Al Hawza Al Hawza, a newspaper published by supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr, a fiery anti-U.S. cleric. The paper had recently published an editorial with the headline "Bremer Follows the Steps of Saddam." Within hours of the closure, hundreds of Sadr's followers were protesting in the streets near the newspaper's offices. "The decision to shut down the Al H Al H newspaper will prove to be a big mistake," Chiarelli predicted. His instincts about the mood in the capital were right. newspaper will prove to be a big mistake," Chiarelli predicted. His instincts about the mood in the capital were right.

Baghdad April 4, 2004 The first reports came in a little before seven o'clock in the evening. An American patrol escorting sewage trucks in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City had been ambushed. The patrol consisted of nineteen men, along with a translator, in four Humvees. Two of their vehicles already had been knocked out by the enemy gunfire. The embattled platoon had sought refuge in a house down a side street and was still taking fire. Chiarelli was at the division headquarters near the Baghdad airport when he got word of the attack. "Sir, there's at least one kid in bad shape, and his platoon is still pinned down," Colonel Robert Abrams reported over the radio. Abrams was already on his way to Forward Operating Base War Eagle, the American outpost on the outskirts of Sadr City.

It had only been a few days since Bremer had shuttered Al Hawza Al Hawza, the tiny Baghdad newspaper loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. The United States followed that move by arresting one of the firebrand cleric's top deputies. Most commanders considered Sadr, the son of a martyred s.h.i.+te cleric, to be little more than a street thug who had used his father's name to build a following in east Baghdad's slums. His impoverished supporters weren't willing to die for him in large numbers, U.S. intelligence reports insisted. The reports were wrong.

"Terrorize your enemy," Sadr proclaimed following the newspaper closure and the arrest of his aide. "G.o.d will reward you well for what pleases him. It is not possible to remain silent in front of their violations." In Sadr City, hundreds of armed men, many dressed in black with green scarves wrapped around their heads, stormed police stations and piled trash at intersections to block patrols. Ragtag police and army units deserted en ma.s.se. When he heard about the spreading anarchy, Chiarelli could have jumped in his Black Hawk and flown the ten miles to the city's east side, where the firefight was unfolding. But he stifled the urge. From everything he could tell, Lieutenant Colonel Gary Volesky, the battalion commander at War Eagle, was on top of it. He didn't need a two-star general showing up to interfere. Nor was Chiarelli in a position to start issuing orders anyway. His soldiers were deployed all over Baghdad, but he wasn't scheduled to take formal command for another two weeks. Until then, the 1st Cav reported to the outgoing commander, Major General Marty Dempsey of the 1st Armored Division. The temporary arrangement meant that Chiarelli's soldiers, the troopers he had spent months training, were fighting for their lives only a few miles away, but he could only monitor the battles over the radio.

So he sat or paced in his headquarters, a tangle of nerves. The incoming reports provided only sketchy information. When the radio went quiet, Chiarelli left his air-conditioned tent to grab a quick smoke, a habit he had reacquired since arriving in Iraq. He knew that his staff was taking its cues from him, and tried to keep his composure. He told them not to keep pestering the battalion for updates; the battalion didn't need headquarters making their lives more difficult. Walking outside, Chiarelli called Dempsey by cell phone. "I know my guys are in good hands with you, Marty," he said.

But in Sadr City the rescue was failing. Minutes after the first call for help, three convoys of Humvees and trucks sped out of War Eagle. As soon as they entered Sadr City black-clad fighters crouched on rooftops unleashed a torrent of fire that tore through their unarmored vehicles, forcing them all to turn back. In one instance sixteen soldiers traveling in an open-bed truck had been cut to ribbons. One was dead and all the rest were wounded. Colonel Abrams called Chiarelli from War Eagle and gave him a preliminary casualty count, warning that the numbers were going to rise. Start sending dustoff helicopters for the wounded, the colonel advised, and keep them coming. At War Eagle's makes.h.i.+ft aid station casualties were everywhere, some on stretchers and some on bare ground.

Out in the city a rescue effort consisting of seven tanks broke through to the stranded soldiers. Of the original nineteen soldiers who had been ambushed, seven were wounded and one was dead. Seven rescuers were killed and more than sixty were wounded, most by shrapnel and bullets that tore through their vehicles. About 500 Sadr supporters died during the two-hour fight.

That night, as the casualty toll was still climbing, Chiarelli stepped outside his headquarters tent, his eyes welling in the dark. He thought about the families who would shortly be notified that their sons and husbands were dead. He thought about Beth, who, as the wife of the division commander, had the difficult job of doing what she could to ease the pain of those families. And he thought about his mission. No one had imagined his men would be in full-scale battles on the streets of Baghdad. There had been only one major attack on U.S. troops in Sadr City the previous year. What was happening? "You didn't expect to be in that kind of fight," he recalled.

He went back inside and placed a call to General Eric s.h.i.+nseki, the retired former chief of the Army who had been belittled by Bush administration officials for suggesting that it would take several hundred thousand troops to stabilize Iraq. s.h.i.+nseki had been one of Chiarelli's mentors and as much as anybody was responsible for his rise to command of the 1st Cavalry Division. No one was at s.h.i.+nseki's home back in the States, so he left a message, his voice choking up on the answering machine. "Sir, I just wanted to tell you we got into a really hard fight. I wanted you to hear it from me."

At seven the next morning Chiarelli choppered out with Dempsey to War Eagle. He stopped in first to see Volesky. "We'll make it through," Chiarelli said, embracing his battalion commander. Then he headed off alone to the aid station. Mounds of bloodied uniforms and boots were still piled outside. The badly wounded had been evacuated hours earlier, but dozens more with less serious injuries were still laid out on stretchers. The sight of bloodied soldiers was not something Chiarelli had ever experienced before. He walked down the rows of prostrate men, telling them they had performed heroically and handing out coins with the 1st Cav insignia on them. He didn't want to be the general who flew in after the action and gave out trinkets, but there was not much more he could do. One of the wounded, a young enlisted soldier, looked up at Chiarelli. "Sir, why didn't we bring our tanks?" he asked. Chiarelli had no answer that would suffice. He wanted to tell the soldier that he had fought with the Army to bring some armored vehicles. But even those few tanks were still in transit, not scheduled to arrive in Baghdad for a couple of more weeks. "We didn't know," he finally told the soldier. "We didn't know."

He didn't get around to recording his thoughts about the battle until four days later: "Rough couple of days. Sunday night we lost 7 soldiers (+1 from 1AD)," he wrote, using an abbreviation for the 1st Armored Division. In his leather-bound notebook, he copied out the names of the dead soldiers.

The memories of the April 4 battle stayed with him-the powerless feeling as he sat in his headquarters while his men fought and bled on the streets, the inevitable second-guessing about whether he had done everything he should have to prepare them. "1AD was in command," he wrote in his diary. "Nevertheless, I would not have done anything different." There was one thing, though: a day after the battle, Chiarelli drafted a sharp request to bring over the rest of his armor from Texas. When the Pentagon failed to respond, he kept pestering his superiors. "Our request for additional tanks and Bradley's is not going over well. No one will call me," he wrote in an e-mail at one point. "What I find concerning is the number of people outside Iraq who are arguing against our request without giving us the benefit of the doubt."

Sometimes it seemed as if the whole of the U.S. military had decided the war was over, while his men were fighting block-by-block battles. Every day helicopters marked with red crosses would land at the Combat Support Hospital in the Green Zone, carrying the wounded. Around this time, in a move to reduce personnel, the Army medical team had been cut in half in Baghdad. That meant fewer doctors to treat wounded 1st Cav soldiers. At the Green Zone hospital, he jotted bitterly in his journal, "they have 21 beds and of those 17 are filled by Iraqi prisoners."

In the late afternoons he often walked over to the hospital to visit his soldiers in the recovery wards. He began carrying index cards in his breast pocket with the names, hometowns, and parents' names of every soldier in his division killed in action, a stack that grew and grew during his year in Iraq, eventually numbering 168. He went to all of their memorial services, and when he had a spare few minutes, he'd study the cards.

The fighting, which began in early March in Sadr City, quickly spread across a wide arc south and west of Baghdad. Needing more troops to handle the uprising, General Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq, canceled the departure of the 1st Armored Division and wheeled its troops south of Baghdad to reclaim the s.h.i.+te-dominated towns where Sadr's supporters had seized police stations and government buildings. Meanwhile, an even bloodier battle was going on with Sunni insurgents in Fallujah, where the Bush administration had ordered the Marines to storm the city in response to the brutal murder of four American contractors there. Abizaid had argued for postponing the moves against Sadr until after the Fallujah attack. "I am not sure we should be going on two different fronts in this environment," he told Sanchez, who disagreed. In a decision that proved disastrous, Abizaid backed his field commander.

Only days into the Fallujah a.s.sault President Bush suspended it after Sunnis in the fledgling governing council threatened to quit. Abizaid, who was in Baghdad at the time, disagreed with the decision, arguing that it would embolden Muslim extremists. But it wasn't his call. He told Bremer and Sanchez that he would deliver the president's order in person.

On April 9 his helicopter touched down amid an insurgent mortar barrage at the U.S. base on the outskirts of Fallujah. Inside the headquarters building, the Marines launched into an update that lasted only a few seconds before Abizaid stopped it, telling them that a decision had been made to halt operations. One seat in the room, reserved for the division commander leading the attack, was empty. Major General James Mattis, a smart and fierce officer who went by the radio call sign "Chaos," had been out visiting his troops when his convoy was ambushed. He strode into the headquarters about thirty minutes late, his pants spattered with the blood of his wounded driver. When Abizaid delivered the bad news he exploded. Mattis had been reluctant to launch the a.s.sault initially, asking for more time to pick off the enemy with snipers and build contacts in the city, but had been overruled. Now he believed his Marines were only days from taking the city. "If you are going to take Vienna, take f.u.c.king Vienna," he snarled at Abizaid, updating a famous quote from Napoleon Bonaparte.

Abizaid knew what it was like to be in a firefight and lose troops, and he'd expected that Mattis would be upset. But the Marine's fury caught him off guard. Part of him wanted to tell Mattis that he'd argued strongly for giving the Marines time to finish the a.s.sault and that the president had overruled him. He resisted the urge. He listened to his subordinate general yell, then nodded and walked away without a word. Once the civilians had made their decision, Abizaid believed it was his job to execute it as if it were his own.

At Sanchez's headquarters the mood was grim. "We had accomplished the seemingly impossible task of uniting everybody in the country against us," recalled Colonel Casey Haskins, a member of Sanchez's staff. Mortar attacks into the Green Zone suddenly came in daily barrages, and attacks on supply convoys headed north from Kuwait soared. One day in early April, eighty trucks were lost. In the dining halls, the once-plentiful array of choices dwindled. By mid-April, the hot breakfast entree was sliced hot dogs. Lunch consisted of Meals Ready-to-Eat, the packaged rations issued to soldiers in combat. Hoping to quash rumors about possible evacuations, Bremer had an aide rea.s.sure the CPA staff that plenty of supplies had been stockpiled. But the briefing only stoked rumors of a possible evacuation. A worried Spike Stephenson quietly began putting together a contingency plan for getting his staff out of the country.

Chiarelli worried, too. On April 13 he noted in his diary: "We have lost an additional 6 soldiers, including an Apache and crew. Things remain tense." In long talks every night, his field commanders in the 1st Cavalry Division reported killing dozens of insurgents, losses so severe that any ordinary foe would have surrendered. Volesky, whose battalion had suffered so many casualties on April 4, had devised a crude but effective tactic for rooting out the enemy. He would dispatch several tanks to Sadr City after nightfall, knowing the sound of the rumbling engines would bring the insurgents running with their AK-47s and grenade launchers. As the Iraqis drew near, American infantrymen, hidden on nearby rooftops and equipped with night-vision goggles, opened fire-a b.l.o.o.d.y payback for the mauling that had been inflicted on Volesky's men. Sadr's men kept fighting into May. A year after the United States had deposed Saddam Hussein, raw sewage still flowed down streets, unemployment was off the charts, and electricity was intermittent at best. There was a seemingly endless pool of men and boys willing to battle the Americans. When they weren't fighting, Sadr's operatives could flood the streets with thousands of demonstrators.

"Do these people even want us here?" a frazzled Bush asked Abizaid in a mid-April videoconference. "Can you find anybody to thank us for giving them democracy and freedom?"

"Part of the problem is that there is no strong Iraqi leaders.h.i.+p," Abizaid replied. Iraqi soldiers and police officers weren't going to fight for American commanders, he insisted. They needed to establish a legitimate government as quickly as possible.

Chiarelli didn't have as much experience with the Middle East as Abizaid did, but he grasped what was happening. The most important battle was not over who would control the streets; it was over who would win the allegiance of the people living there. And as lopsided in the Americans' favor as the street skirmishes were, Chiarelli feared he was losing the bigger battle.

In mid-April, he went one evening with Colonel Kendall c.o.x, his chief engineer, to the walled compound in the Green Zone that served as Bechtel's headquarters in Iraq. Chiarelli had wanted to meet with Bechtel since learning from Spike Stephenson that the San Francis...o...b..sed engineering firm controlled nearly $2 billion in USAID reconstruction projects. He was ushered into the company's dining facility, an air-conditioned double-wide trailer. A white bedsheet had been thrown over a large table at the rear of the trailer and set with real silverware and china in his honor. Around the table were places for Chiarelli and c.o.x, a handful of Bechtel executives, and Stephenson. After dinner, Cliff Mumm, a grizzled Bechtel engineer who had spent decades in the field, laid out the company's plans for rebuilding Iraq's main power plants, sewage-treatment facilities, and large bridges. Most of the American-run projects he was describing had stalled because Bechtel had been forced to send its workers out of the country until security conditions improved. Mumm argued for using U.S. troops to guard Bechtel's work sites.

"Stop, just stop!" Chiarelli bellowed. "I know you are a good company and you are doing wonderful things. But none of this-nothing-is going to get built unless I get the sewage off the streets of Sadr City. If I don't clean up the streets, I'm going to get run out of Baghdad, and you are going to be right ahead of me!" In the days leading up to the meeting, he and c.o.x had painstakingly compiled a list of all of Bechtel's and the other big contractors' projects by going from office to office at the CPA. The effort was a mess. In late 2003 the Bush administration told the CPA that it had three weeks to put together a plan to spend $18.4 billion in reconstruction money. Short on time, the CPA funneled most of the money into a small number of expensive infrastructure projects. One of Bechtel's biggest was the overhaul of sewage-treatment plants that served Baghdad. CPA didn't set aside any money to connect the plants or most of the other big water and power projects up to actual houses. Instead it a.s.sumed that foreign donors would come up with $2 billion to $3 billion to cover those bills. By the spring it was clear to Chiarelli that the foreign money wasn't ever going to arrive.

Having cut off the Bechtel executive, Chiarelli hijacked the rest of the dinner with his own PowerPoint briefing. His main slide consisted of stick-figure Iraqis standing between crudely drawn houses and big squares representing sewage-treatment plants and power stations. The pipes and the power lines emanating from the plants stopped before they reached the homes.

"Rather than spending money to build a sewage-treatment plant, let's start at the other end," Chiarelli said. "Let's start in the guy's front yard and improve his life, and if that means we continue to dump raw sewage in the Tigris River, so be it. It's been dumped in there forever; the Iraqis aren't upset about it. What they are upset about is the sewage in their front yard."

He suggested using the money that had been set aside for mammoth infrastructure projects to lay cheap sewage pipe, repair pumps, buy generators, and rehabilitate electrical substations. At least those kinds of projects would make life more bearable, and they could be done with local contractors, which would create jobs for Iraqis. He had already divided up his engineering brigade into five battalions that lived at each of the forward operating bases around Baghdad and could help with the smaller projects. But to really have an impact he needed more money and more engineering expertise. There was little that Bechtel, which was committed to the CPA's list of fanciful projects, could do to help him.

A few weeks later he and Spike Stephenson from USAID got fifteen minutes with Bremer to make a similar pitch. The occupation chief wore his customary white b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rt with rolled-up sleeves, khakis, and combat boots. On his desk was a wooden plaque bearing the message "Success Has a Thousand Fathers." Early in the occupation when visitors noted that he'd left off the other half of the aphorism-"But Failure Is an Orphan"-Bremer confidently replied, "Failure is not an option." Ever since the April uprisings, failure had become a grim reality. He blamed the collapse on Rumsfeld, Abizaid, Sanchez, and the rest of the military, who he thought hadn't committed enough troops to contain the spiraling violence. Knowing that Bremer's time for them was short, Chiarelli and Stephenson hurriedly explained that they had devised an initial list of projects in the Sadr City neighborhood that they could accomplish for about $162 million. They planned to spend the money on small-scale projects that created jobs and were actually visible to people. These were the kind of projects that could turn the tide in the violent slum.

"I'll give you money when you get the place secure," Bremer curtly told him.

"Sir, I can't get it secure until you give me some money so that I can get people to work," Chiarelli replied. His troops were spread too thin across Baghdad to lock down the capital. In Sadr City, for example, there were about 2.5 million people packed into a slum that had been built for about 300,000. He was trying to control the place with a 600-soldier battalion. There was no way he could fight 2 million people, he said. He needed to win their allegiance or at least their tolerance with some small, visible successes.

"Do you agree with this?" Bremer asked Stephenson, who said he thought the plan was worth a try. Bremer was just weeks from leaving the country and had nothing to lose. He gave them enough money to get started on their project list.

A few days later, a dozen of Stephenson's USAID staffers clambered onto Black Hawks at the Green Zone landing pad and flew to 1st Cav headquarters near the airport. Most had never been in a military helicopter before and fumbled with shoulder and lap belts before takeoff. It was a field trip of sorts, organized by Chiarelli to introduce them to his brigade commanders and vice versa. The two groups gathered outside under a canopy, the scruffy aid workers in cargo pants and hiking boots next to the Army officers in their tan uniforms and short haircuts. "We didn't give a s.h.i.+t about the war," recalled Kirkpatrick Day, one of the USAID staffers who attended. But conditions in Baghdad and elsewhere had gotten so bad that it had become almost impossible for Day and his fellow aid workers to leave the Green Zone and do the humanitarian work that had brought them to Baghdad.

Chiarelli stood in front of the group, welcomed them, and told the story of the April 4 battle in Sadr City and the casualties his men had suffered in the days since the fight. "He's tearing up and his voice is cracking as he's talking about what his men had been through and what needed to be done," Day recalled. The son of a Navy pilot, Day had grown up in military bases around the world and had spent the previous few years doing postconflict reconstruction work in Kosovo and East Timor. He was unflappable and experienced at operating in chaotic foreign cultures in a way that the 1st Cav officers weren't. In Baghdad, he headed the Office of Transition Initiatives, a small arm of USAID whose mission was to do quick projects. In forty-eight hours he could write a contract for millions of dollars and, working with a cell phone and a list of contacts, put more than a thousand men to work. It was just what Chiarelli had in mind. The jobs program, which began in Sadr City in mid-June, paid workers $4 or $5 a day for picking up trash, cleaning out clogged sewers, or some other project from the list that Chiarelli's and Stephenson's staffs had put together. Soon there were thousands of men working across Baghdad.

Chiarelli, who was hearing from his battalion commanders that attacks were dropping steeply in areas where they were spending money, had his staff sort through daily situation reports from the field and prepare charts that proved the program was suppressing violence. When Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz came through Baghdad that summer to meet with the division commanders, Chiarelli spent an hour showing him that data, and made sure Day was on hand at his headquarters. "That young man, sir-Kirk Day-is a G.o.dd.a.m.ned hero," he told Wolfowitz as the scruffy Day slumped in his chair. Wolfowitz in turn convinced Congress to put up an additional $200 million for the jobs program. Day, however, had his doubts about what he and Chiarelli were really accomplis.h.i.+ng. "These are not real jobs," he reminded him. Maybe the temporary work kept some of the men from joining the insurgency, but those gains could be as fleeting as the work unless a real economy replaced the taxpayer-funded illusion they were creating.

It was was an illusion-and Chiarelli, despite his enthusiasm for the program, knew it. His goal to "totally reprioritize" the U.S. effort demanded that he take on the contractors, the emba.s.sy, and the fledgling ministries. Soon he was summoning representatives from all three groups to his headquarters for weekly meetings, where he and Colonel c.o.x, his engineer, would harangue contractors who were falling behind schedule on big projects in the capital. When he learned that several ventures had been delayed for months because contractors were required to abide by peacetime federal contracting rules and were making Iraqi subcontractors follow Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards, he was irate. "What I'm getting is not what I require," he bellowed at representatives of Black and Veatch, an engineering firm that was responsible for repair and cleaning of the main sewage line running south through Sadr City. "And we're paying the price in soldiers." an illusion-and Chiarelli, despite his enthusiasm for the program, knew it. His goal to "totally reprioritize" the U.S. effort demanded that he take on the contractors, the emba.s.sy, and the fledgling ministries. Soon he was summoning representatives from all three groups to his headquarters for weekly meetings, where he and Colonel c.o.x, his engineer, would harangue contractors who were falling behind schedule on big projects in the capital. When he learned that several ventures had been delayed for months because contractors were required to abide by peacetime federal contracting rules and were making Iraqi subcontractors follow Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards, he was irate. "What I'm getting is not what I require," he bellowed at representatives of Black and Veatch, an engineering firm that was responsible for repair and cleaning of the main sewage line running south through Sadr City. "And we're paying the price in soldiers."

On July 23, he poured out his frustrations at a meeting in the Republican Palace with Ronald Neumann, a senior diplomat. "We are blowing our window of opportunity," he insisted. Other than Day's modest program, the reconstruction effort was failing. A recent bidders' conference, where the contractors solicited bids on upcoming projects from local firms, had been a "total disaster," Chiarelli complained. The projects had been posted in English on a U.S. government website, completely ignoring the fact that Iraqis spoke Arabic and rarely had Internet access, even if they were lucky enough to have electricity to run a personal computer, he said. Neumann, who had once served as amba.s.sador to Algeria, replied that he'd had similar problems with Bechtel there, and he recommended calling the CEO if Chiarelli wanted quick action. But Chiarelli had something else in mind: why not cut out the big contractors entirely and route reconstruction money directly through his division? "I can go from identifying a project to breaking ground in less than a month, working with Iraqi contractors," he declared. "It takes the big contractors six months."

He didn't even need Bechtel's engineering expertise, he boasted. His men had found a group of engineers at Baghdad University who had trained in Europe, spoke decent English, and didn't require any security to move around the capital. He'd also stumbled upon a plan for revitalizing infrastructure that the city government had drafted in the late 1970s just prior to the Iran-Iraq War. Most of the projects had never been completed. He'd only been in Iraq for five months, but Chiarelli was sure that he and his battalion commanders, who lived on small bases scattered throughout the city, knew what Iraqis wanted far better than the emba.s.sy or the contractors stuck in the Green Zone. The U.S. government, for example, liked building schools in Iraq, but Chiarelli insisted that they were a waste of money. "You know, when a guy is unemployed sitting at his house surrounded by sewage, no water and no electricity, it might make him feel good for a couple of days to walk his kid to school, but sooner or later he's going to get tired of that," he said.

Could he absorb $100 million? Neumann asked. "Easily," Chiarelli replied. To do what he wanted actually required about $500 million, but $100 million was a start. In his frustration he was, in effect, proposing to unite the civilian and military efforts in Baghdad. Not only would his division fight the insurgency, it would control the reconstruction budget, an approach that had been tried in the latter years of Vietnam. General Creighton Abrams had dubbed it the "one war" strategy. The meeting ended with the diplomats promising Chiarelli they would raise the issue with Amba.s.sador John Negroponte, who had served in Vietnam as a young foreign service officer and had taken over from Bremer a couple of weeks earlier.

On August 3 Chiarelli had perhaps his best day in Iraq. He and Kirk Day put 18,000 people to work in Sadr City building a landfill and laying PVC pipe to begin removing the ankle-deep sewage that usually collected in the sprawling neighborhood's streets. Five months had pa.s.sed since his troops fought the pitched battle with Sadr's militia. Now the slum was quiet. A jubilant Chiarelli toured the area and talked with the laborers who filled street after street. "I have these pictures of 18,000 people at work," he'd recall years later. "Sadr City was moving in our direction." For at least that one day he was sure he was winning the war.

CHAPTER NINE.

All Glory Is Fleeting Al Faw Palace, Camp Victory July 1, 2004 Okay, who's my counterinsurgency expert?" asked General George Casey, sounding impatient. It was his first day in command and his first meeting with the staff he had inherited from General Sanchez, who had left Iraq for good that morning. A dozen Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine officers sent to Iraq from posts around the world stared at him, stumped by his question. Finally Air Force Major General Steve Sargeant spoke up. He had spent his career flying jets, an experience that was largely irrelevant to a fight against low-tech Iraqi guerrillas. "I guess that must be me, sir," said the general, who was in charge of strategic plans at headquarters. The Air Force officer's hesitant answer drove home to Casey how little progress the military had made during its first year in coming to grips with the kind of war it was fighting.

In the four years prior to his arrival in Iraq, Casey had held some of the most critical jobs in the U.S. military, overseeing U.S. Army forces in Kosovo in 2000 and serving on the Pentagon's Joint Staff after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He had managed to be well liked by Clinton administration officials and by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In many ways, Casey was the model Pentagon general: steady, apolitical, and hardworking. He didn't make bold decisions or draw attention to himself. He was an efficient manager who knew how to make big bureaucracies run and how to antic.i.p.ate problems.

He'd been only occasionally involved in the Iraq war before arriving in Baghdad. In the lead-up to the invasion, Rumsfeld's insistence that the Iraqis would have to take charge of rebuilding their country had stifled most serious postwar reconstruction planning. From his position on the Joint Staff, Casey sensed that there was going to be a need for the U.S. military to oversee the rebuilding effort. Just three months before the invasion he a.s.sembled a small group of active and retired officers that was rushed to the Middle East to deal with electricity generation, clean water, and other expected postwar problems. The small pickup team consisted of only fifty-eight people and was better suited to a relatively peaceful mission than to the chaos in Iraq. But with Rumsfeld's aversion to nation building, it was probably the best anyone could do.

After the 2003 invasion, Rumsfeld selected Casey to be the Army's vice chief of staff, a job that came with a promotion to four stars. He sat through hundreds of hours of meetings focused on troop rotation schedules for Iraq, plans to start bringing soldiers home, and the hurried push to buy more armor for the thin-skinned Humvees that were being shredded by insurgents' bombs. To Casey initially the occupation didn't seem all that different from the 1990s peacekeeping operations. The two missions had much in common. But in the Balkans the military had pressed the Clinton administration to ensure that its aims in the war-torn country were limited. Its job was to enforce a peace agreement between warring parties. In Iraq the task was far tougher. The military was essentially being asked to rebuild a society and defeat a ruthless armed resistance.

It wasn't until he arrived in Iraq that Casey started to understand the huge challenge he faced. Casey's headquarters at Al Faw Palace were located on the western outskirts of Baghdad. On the morning he took command, his palace office was mostly empty except for a few pictures of his wife, sons, and grandchildren. Video screens, flags, and maps covered the walls. A chandelier dangled from the elaborately carved, pastel-colored woodwork on the ceiling.

Saddam Hussein had built the palace in 1992 as a present to himself following the 1991 Gulf War. When Baghdad fell a dozen years later, the U.S. military moved into the sprawling building and its surrounding grounds. The hulking stone structure sat in the middle of a weed-choked lake. The only approach to its heavy wooden doors was a two-lane bridge. In the first year of the war the Army had remade the complex into a version of the military bases it had left behind in the United States. To house the 50,000 soldiers who lived and worked at Victory, it bought thousands of small trailers, which the Army called "containerized housing units," and arranged them in neat rows. Troops dined on leathery steaks and Baskin-Robbins sundaes in dining halls the size of airplane hangars, each decorated with sports memorabilia s.h.i.+pped from back home. They could shop in large post exchanges, stocked with luxuries such as flat-screen television sets, DVD players, and the latest video games.

Inside the palace, staff officers worked in modular cubicles in marble ballrooms and former bedroom suites. Fluorescent lights were nailed to the walls to augment the glow from crystal chandeliers. Outside the palace the smell of fuel and raw sewage hung in the air. Generators droned, tank and Humvee engines roared, and helicopters thumped. The ma.s.sive base violated just about every rule of counterinsurgency strategy, which preaches the importance of small groups of soldiers living among the people and providing security. But the Army didn't know much about counterinsurgency when it built Victory Base Complex in 2003. It built what it knew.

On his way into Iraq, Casey had been told by officers in Kuwait that if he wanted to understand the enemy he needed to seek out a colonel in the palace named Derek Harvey. Harvey was a forty-nine-year-old intelligence officer who spoke Arabic and had an advanced degree in Islamic political thought. For months he'd been interviewing prisoners, poring over interrogation transcripts, and meeting with Sunni tribal leaders. Almost no one seemed interested in his work when Sanchez was in charge, which the short-tempered Harvey considered astounding. A couple of days after Casey arrived in Baghdad, he invited Harvey to step outside on one of the balconies at his new palace headquarters. "Do you smoke?" Casey asked, holding up two cigars. Harvey nodded, and they walked out onto a stone balcony overlooking the palace's man-made lakes.

Harvey gave his new commander a tutorial on the insurgency, interrupted only by the drone of helicopters and the lapping of greenish water against the palace walls. The insurgency was being led by former Saddam loyalists who were well organized and had access to lots of money and ammunition. Their forces were being augmented by foreign jihadists whose numbers were on the rise following the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and the failed Fallujah a.s.sault. To win, the United States had to kill former Saddamists. But it also had to co-opt more moderate Baathists and win over the Sunni tribal leaders whom Saddam had pacified with bribes.

They talked for almost three hours. Casey peppered him with questions about the Sunni-s.h.i.+te split and the relations.h.i.+ps between the foreign fighters and the Sunni tribes. Before parting, Harvey told Casey that the war was very different from the peacekeeping missions that Casey had overseen in the 1990s. "We don't understand the fight we're in," he warned his new boss.

The enormous mess he'd inherited didn't fully hit Casey until he started to read some of the awards for valor given to soldiers and Marines who had fought in the spring battles in Sadr City, Fallujah, and Najaf. In the Pentagon he had pored over the cla.s.sified accounts of the uprisings. But the dry reports didn't capture how close some units, such as the soldiers from Chiarelli's 1st Cav Division, had come to being overrun. Casey was a fifty-six-year-old general who had never been in combat, taking command of a foundering war effort. He knew he'd have to learn fast.

He had not planned on going to Iraq. Six months earlier, on Christmas Eve 2003, he and his thirty-one-year-old son, Ryan, had rushed out to do some last-minute Christmas shopping at the Pentagon City shopping mall, just across the river from the White House. Casey's relentless work ethic had helped him vault ahead of other Pentagon generals. Like most Was.h.i.+ngton workaholics, he typically put off his Christmas shopping to the last possible minute. As he wandered through Ann Taylor, sorting through the racks of women's sweaters, he spotted General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who waved him over. Myers mentioned a new idea to deal with the worsening situation in Iraq. Abizaid had cornered him on a recent trip to Iraq and suggested putting a four-star general in Baghdad to command the overall military effort. "We really need it. We just can't be cheap here," Abizaid insisted. The new four-star wouldn't replace the overwhelmed Sanchez, who was a three-star. Instead he and his staff would focus on crafting a long-term counterinsurgency strategy and working with political leaders. Beneath him, Sanchez's headquarters would handle the day-to-day military operations and troop movements.

Ryan stood just out of earshot as Casey talked to Myers, who was surrounded by the chairman's plainclothes bodyguards. When they were finished Casey mentioned to his son that they were looking to send a new general to Iraq. "Are you interested?" Ryan asked him.

"I already have a job," he replied wistfully. He'd just been sworn in as vice chief a few months earlier, but Ryan could tell that his father would much rather be leading troops than overseeing bureaucracies and waging budget wars. "That's the difference between you and Wes Clark," he said, referring to the hyperambitious former general who had been an early mentor to Casey and was now weighing a run for president. "Clark would say he wanted the job and push for it. You would just wait for someone to offer it to you." They quickly dropped the conversation and went back to the sweater racks.

A couple of months later Casey was told to put together a short list of candidates for the Iraq job. On a warm spring evening he went over to Quarters One and handed the names to General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief. They sat on the veranda in rocking chairs, with the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument and Lincoln Memorial in view.

"Your name's not on here," Schoomaker said after a moment.

"I thought you wanted me to stay here," Casey replied.

"This may be more important," the chief said. "Could you do it?"

"Yeah, absolutely."

Casey's name went on the list. Rumsfeld initially wanted his military aide for the job. But with the Abu Ghraib scandal in all the newspapers, anyone who was that close to the defense secretary had little chance of Senate confirmation. Abizaid also had considered taking the job himself. When he learned that Casey was in the mix, he quickly latched on to him as the best choice.

Since their time together in Bosnia, Abizaid and Casey had remained close. They both commanded 15,000-soldier divisions in Germany in 2000. When Abizaid's unit was deployed in Kosovo, Casey called him from the bleachers at Fenway Park. "Hey, John, guess what I'm doing right now?" he said, holding the phone up so Abizaid could hear the crowd noise. A few months later, when Casey's troops were in Kosovo, Abizaid made sure to phone Casey from the stands of the brand-new ballpark in San Francisco, where he was watching his beloved Giants. In 2001 and 2003, when Abizaid twice left positions on the Pentagon's Joint Staff, Casey was selected as his replacement both times. Although Casey was a few years older than Abizaid, he looked to his friend almost as a mentor. Abizaid was smart and witty and had a reputation as a big strategic thinker. A part of Casey wanted to be seen by his Army peers in the same light.

Rumsfeld had dealt with Casey on the Joint Staff and liked him. Bush went along with the consensus, and Abizaid quickly called Casey with the good news.

When he arrived home at eight-thirty that evening, Sheila was on the third floor, unpacking boxes at their home at Fort McNair. Although he had been in the vice chief job for several months, the Caseys' move into the stately, century-old residence that came with the job had been delayed by renovations to the house. "Honey, we need to talk," he said, motioning her toward a chair. He hadn't even told his wife that he was being considered for the position. Not sure how to break the news, he blurted it out: "I'm going to Iraq." He might be leaving in only a few days. Sheila burst into tears. Why hadn't he told her he was up for the job? she asked as they embraced. "It happened pretty quickly," he explained.

"I don't have a good feeling about this, George. It brings back memories of your dad," she told him.

"I know."

His father's death was not something Casey talked much about, even with his wife. After the Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened on the National Mall, it had taken Casey some time before he felt ready to see it. When they found his father's name, George had been overcome, unable to speak more than a few words until he and Sheila returned to the car. As they drove home, he told Sheila that visiting the wall had been the most emotionally wrenching moment of his life.

Several years later, when he was promoted to four-star general, Casey's family gathered at Fort Myer, where he was living at the time, for his promotion ceremony. After the party, his brother and sisters all walked down to their father's grave, retracing the steps they had taken on the day he was buried thirty-three years earlier. George and his mother held back. The next morning they made their own quiet pilgrimage to the grave site. They could only imagine how overjoyed the elder Casey would have been to see his son rise to four-star rank.

Now George was off to war. Sheila could have told him no and, despite how badly he wanted the job, he would have turned it down. He had walked away from Delta Force without bitterness, and he had always promised Sheila that anytime she wanted to leave the Army all she had to do was tell him and they would be out. But she didn't. This was the life they had made for themselves, and she knew the a.s.signment was one he had yearned for all these years. Soon they moved to the kitchen and talked for hours, not about whether he would go but about everything that needed to be done beforehand. One of the first things, she reminded him, was to telephone their two grown sons. Sheila didn't want them hearing about it on the nightly news. And, she reminded him, he had to talk to his mom, knowing that telling her was the kind of difficult conversation her taciturn husband might avoid.

"Did you call your mom?" she asked the next day.

Yes, but there had been no answer, Casey replied, so he had left a vague message on her answering machine.

"George, you have to tell her it's important or she'll never call!" Sheila chided.

When his mother did finally telephone from her house in Ma.s.sachusetts, it was Sheila who answered. George was out. "I might as well tell you," she said. "George is going to Iraq."

"Okay," his mother replied, with no trace of emotion in her voice. She rushed down that weekend to see him off. Later Casey found out he wouldn't be leaving until July. There was too much preparation to do, and the Senate wasn't going to vote on his new a.s.signment for several weeks.

Unexpected as it all was, Casey wasn't daunted by the new a.s.signment. He wasn't an Arabist who had prepared his whole career for a job in the Middle East, but Abizaid was, and he would help. Casey had never been in combat, but he did have experience running big organizations and was confident that he could come up with a winning war strategy. He told himself he had more experience with the political and military problems of reconstructing war-ravaged countries than most Army officers. In Kosovo he'd even dealt with a tiny insurgent uprising in which some of the Kosovar Albanian rebels in the Presevo Valley region of the province launched a series of covert attacks on the Serbian police. He had dealt with it by sealing off the valley and negotiating with the local mullahs, who helped him secure the surrender of the head of the Albanian rebel group.

He hadn't interviewed with either Rumsfeld or Bush before being chosen. No one asked him for his ideas about what needed to be done, and he hadn't thought about it very much. Schoomaker had given him a book ent.i.tled Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam that had been written by a young officer from the Sosh department. It was the first book Casey had read on guerrilla war. His new a.s.signment required Senate confirmation, but he was uncontroversial, the compromise choice everyone could support. Senator Hillary Clinton p.r.o.nounced him boring. "Boring is good, General Casey, and I applaud you on that," she told him. "Clearly, you're a master at it. And it goes to the heart of your success." that had been written by a young officer from the Sosh department. It was the first book Casey had read on guerrilla war. His new a.s.signment required Senate confirmation, but he was uncontroversial, the compromise choice everyone could support. Senator Hillary Clinton p.r.o.nounced him boring. "Boring is good, General Casey, and I applaud you on that," she told him. "Clearly, you're a master at it. And it goes to the heart of your success."

"I'm going to have to think about that for a minute," he replied, drawing chuckles from the half-empty hearing room. The only nervous moment came when Casey was asked how long it would be until the 140,000 American troops were home. The Army was proceeding on the a.s.sumption that it could be in Iraq another three years, until early 2007, he said in an answer that he had prepared ahead of time, but he stressed that was only an estimate, not a prediction. There was no real way of knowing how much longer the war would last. It was a safe response, and the lawmakers moved on to other topics. That evening, the Senate voted unanimously to confirm him.

His sole meeting with Rumsfeld before leaving lasted just twenty minutes. The seventy-one-year-old defense secretary greeted Casey warmly and offered him a seat at the small round table in his third-floor Pentagon office. A military aide served coffee in white and gold Pentagon china. Although President Bush was still giving triumphal speeches about bringing democracy to the Muslim world, Rumsfeld made it clear he wasn't particularly interested in remaking Iraq. Like the senators from the confirmation hearing, he wanted Casey to figure out a way to bring American troops home soon. Take a few weeks to a.s.sess the situation before reporting back, he told Casey. But there was one parting order he did want to pa.s.s along: to resist the temptation to do too much. Military officers thought they could fix everything, Rumsfeld warned, and the more the United States tried to do for the Iraqis, the less they would do for themselves and the longer U.S. forces would be stuck there.

"I understand, Mr. Secretary," Casey replied. He told the story of his attempt to arrange the return of Muslim refugees to the villages of Dugi Dio and Jusici while serving in Bosnia, a six-week experiment that collapsed when weapons were found in the homes of the deputy mayor. The experience had taught him that can-do Americans can't want peace more than the people they are trying to help. Rumsfeld seemed satisfied that they understood each other. Casey thought so, too, but he didn't want to forget their conversation. He jotted the word att.i.tude att.i.tude in the green notebook he carried. It was a small reminder not to disregard what he had learned in Bosnia-not to fall into the trap of thinking he could fix everything wrong with Iraq. in the green notebook he carried. It was a small reminder not to disregard what he had learned in Bosnia-not to fall into the trap of thinking he could fix everything wrong with Iraq.

He departed from Andrews Air Force Base a few days later, without talking to Bush. Casey and Sheila had gone to the White House for a private dinner with the president and Laura Bush, but that had been a social occasion, with no real discussion of Iraq. Bush had told himself he would not micromanage his generals, the way Lyndon Johnson had done. Just as some parts of the Army had vowed never to refight Vietnam, so too had the president. But Bush took his own maxim to the extreme, leaving his commanders without any real instructions except for the advice they got from Rumsfeld. While the president was insisting that the United States was in a life-or-death struggle to change the Middle East, Rumsfeld was essentially telling his top commander that he shouldn't try too hard.

Baghdad August 2, 2004 When Casey sat down to compose a quick e-mail to Abizaid after his first month in command, much seemed possible. "There is a strategic opportunity for success," he wrote in early August 2004. No one had given him a mission statement, so he and John Negroponte, the new amba.s.sador, had composed one in Casey's Pentagon office before they left. The goal was to leave behind an "Iraq built on the principles of representative government, respectful of the rights of its citizens and the rule of law, able to maintain order at home, defend its borders, and establish peaceful relations with its neighbors." To get there Casey and Negroponte spent their first month sketching out a campaign plan that had been decided on quickly, without exploring a lot of alternatives. Cla.s.sic counterinsurgency theory held that to defeat insurgents, military forces had to win the trust and support of the people. "I came at it a little differently," Casey recalled. "I said, 'Yeah, it's the people, but the way we're going to get to the people is through a legitimate Iraqi government.'" And the key to producing a legitimate government, he a.s.sumed, was the national elections scheduled for January. The voting would channel the insurgents into politics; every effort should be made to ensure they happened on time, he insisted. The a.s.sumption that fair elections would blunt the insurgency was widely held among senior U.S. officials at the time. Unfortunately, it was completely wrong.

There was a bit of the Jesuit in Casey, probably the product of his Catholic education at Boston College High School and Georgetown. He enjoyed has.h.i.+ng out ideas and turning them over in his mind-or, even better, puzzling out his thoughts on paper. He'd set gla.s.ses on top of his head, pull out a red pen, and revise doc.u.ments word by word for hours. "I can't help myself," he muttered when at the end of a long day one of his subordinates suggested that a general must have better things to do than editing a PowerPoint slide.