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4 GATES' WAY FORWARD, Part
1 After
Rumsfeld, a new dawn? By Mark Perry
same time that Gates was talking to
Casey and Abizaid in Iraq, Keane told Bush that
Casey should be brought back to Washington and
replaced by General David Petraeus, the former
commander of the 101st Airborne and the author of
"Field Manuel 3-24", the bible of US
counter-insurgency doctrine.
Keane was a
Petraeus partisan, having served with the
tough-as-nails Petraeus when Keane was a brigadier
general in the early
1990s. Bush hesitated over
appointing Petraeus because he knew that he had a
habit of speaking his mind. But Bush finally
conceded and, after consulting with Gates, he
agreed to Petraeus' appointment.
By the
time Petraeus had been appointed as the new
coalition command in Baghdad, Abizaid had been
sent into retirement and replaced by Admiral
William Fallon, a 40-year navy veteran. Fallon's
appointment as CENTCOM commander was a surprise,
as the billet is usually reserved for the army.
But Gates was impressed by Fallon's credentials.
"He's probably got more service and more
experience than any man in the navy," Joe Hoar
says, "and he's more respected. There's no more
refined bullshit sniffer than Fallon."
Gates had come to the same conclusion, and
was also intent to make CENTCOM a workable
regional command headed by someone who would not
interfere with Petraeus. Gates was impressed with
Fallon's background as a diplomat in the Pacific.
When a Japanese fishing ship was accidentally sunk
by an American navy vessel off Hawaii, Fallon
volunteered to offer apologies to the Japanese
families of the dead.
But Fallon's
appointment to head CENTCOM immediately sparked
fears that he would prepare the navy for an attack
on Iran, speculation fueled by the deployment of
two carrier groups to the Persian Gulf. Fallon did
little to dispel this notion, and when asked by
senators whether he believed Iran would acquire
nuclear weapons he answer decisively:
"Absolutely," he said. "Probably some time in the
next decade."
Fallon has further dispelled
fears that he favors such an attack when rumors
circulated that he recently received a call from
the White House that he consider providing air
cover to enforce a no-fly zone over Darfur. He was
aghast: "With what," he reportedly said. Fallon's
influence at CENTCOM is also much in evidence.
"Historically that place has been run by infantry
and armor," Hoar says. "Well, he's turned that
place upside down." Among the changes: upwards of
2,000 staffers have been sent to other
assignments.
The fight over the
czar While Gates was running around the
Middle East, Republican gadfly and presidential
wannabe Newt Gingrich was circulating one of his
inimitable 18-point leadership papers inside the
White House. In a memo first floated there in
January, Gingrich wrote to Bush that what was
needed to right the listing Iraq military ship was
a "war czar" - a supreme military commander who
could coordinate war planning.
The
appointment of a "war czar" was point number three
on Gingrich's list of recommendations. "The
slowness and ineffectiveness of the American
bureaucracy is a major hindrance to our winning,
and they've got to cut through it," Gingrich later
explained to Washington Post reporters Peter Baker
and Thomas Ricks.
Gingrich, who styles
himself an expert on wartime leadership (he once
told his staff to write an extensive research
paper on the leadership qualities of one of his
heroes - Napoleon, whom he emulates), believed
that an eminent four-star retired officer would be
perfect for the job: reporting only to Bush and
able to stand above the Joint Chiefs.
Gingrich's idea was classically
conservative. Like George Will, John McCain and
others of their ilk ("conservatives without the
neo," as Will has called them), Gingrich had only
hesitantly backed the Iraq War, and then stood
aghast as it was catastrophically managed. While
they criticized the younger Bush's father for
going soft on the conservative social agenda, they
much preferred his management style - and
competence.
They had grown to mistrust the
neo-conservatives around Vice President Dick
Cheney and increasingly viewed them as mindless
ideologues. This slipped by the younger Bush, who
was as attracted to the idea of a war czar as a
mindless puppy to a new squeaky-toy. Bush passed
the memo on to his national security staff, where
it gained the approval of National Security
Advisor Stephen Hadley, who was intent to gain
some relief from the daily battering he was taking
over Iraq.
But Gates and the US military
were less than enthusiastic about the proposal and
when Gingrich's idea became public the chiefs
registered their disapproval in public. The
disapproval came in the form of public
condemnations of the idea from retired officers
close to Pace and new Army Chief of Staff Casey.
"Standing up a war czar is just throwing
in another layer of bureaucracy," retired Major
General John Batiste, who commanded the 1st
Infantry Division in Iraq, told reporters on April
12. "Excuse me - we have a chain of command
already and it's time for our leaders to step up
and take charge." Retired Lieutenant General
Robert Gard, who served as secretary of defense
Robert McNamara's military assistant during the
Vietnam War, was even more outspoken. "I thought
the president was the commander-in-chief. Isn't he
supposed to be his own war czar?"
Gates
was asking the same question. But the more that
Gates thought about the idea, the more it appealed
to him - that is, if he could convince the White
House to appoint a serving officer to the
position. Pace was coming to the same conclusion.
In mid-April, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman
set to work, accessing his well-worn network of
retired officers to recommend to Bush that he rely
on the chiefs to recommend a current serving Joint
Chiefs of Staff officer as his primary military
advisor on the war.
While it is not
certain exactly what influence Pace and the other
officers of the American high command had on the
retired community, we now know that when Hadley
offered the "war czar" position to five retired
officers, they not only turned him down, they did
so publicly - and sometimes embarrassingly.
The betting in Washington is that that
kind of denunciation is simply too unanimous to be
an accident. The first to be offered the job was
Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff and the
author of the "surge" plan who, considering his
access to Bush, might have been expected to take
the job. He politely declined. The second was
retired US Marine Corps General Jack Sheehan, a
former North Atlantic Treaty Organization
commander who is a
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