With David
Petraeus, top US commander in Iraq; Admiral
William Fallon, head of CENTCOM (US Central
Command); and "war czar" Douglas Lute in place,
Defense Secretary Robert Gates believed he had
finished his job in refashioning the US
national-security establishment. He was
comfortable with Joint Chiefs of
Staff (JCS) chairman Peter
Pace and with his civilian staff - and ready to
take on his next battle.
"I think that the
secretary had his sights set on straightening out
the national-security mess," a Pentagon official
said. "You know - we have the Pentagon, State
Department, the Department of Homeland Security,
the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] and FBI
[Federal Bureau of Investigation], and no one
talks to each other. The Deputies Committee [the
major deputy secretaries of each foreign-policy
cabinet department, where the major implementing
decisions are made] is simply not functioning. He
wanted to go in there and fix it. And then the
Pace thing happened."
On Wednesday, June
6, just as the controversy over the naming of Lute
as the White House "war czar" had finally abated,
President George W Bush and Vice President Dick
Cheney were told by Senate Armed Service Committee
chairman Carl Levin that Pace would have
difficulty getting reconfirmed for a traditional
second two-year term as JCS chairman. "Bush and
Cheney were told that Pace would just be
shredded," this official says.
Gates had
seen it coming. The Pentagon's congressional staff
had told Gates that Pace was going to have trouble
and that Pace's renomination would not sail
through as expected. The Democrats in the Senate
were expected to ask some embarrassing questions
about the war in Iraq. Bush and Cheney told Levin
that they would pull the Pace nomination.
Immediately, the recriminations set in,
particularly among Pace partisans in the Marine
Corps.
"Pace is taking the fall for these
assholes," a retired marine general said. "If you
know how the war started, if you know anything
about [Ahmad] Chalabi or Cheney or anything like
that, you're gone. Peter Pace is being sacrificed
to the White House failure in Iraq." The
neo-conservative press has also weighed in,
calling the Bush administration's decision
"cowardly".
The Wall Street Journal lit
into Gates: "There's a rumor going around that
Robert Gates is the secretary of defense," the
newspaper's lead editorial noted. "We'd like to
request official confirmation, because based on
recent evidence the man running the Pentagon is
Democratic Senator (and Senate Armed Services
Committee chairman) Carl Levin of Michigan."
Gates was nonplussed and quickly announced
that Pace's replacement would be the current chief
of naval operations, Admiral Michael Mullen - a
riposte that was a mini-declaration of war against
the pro-war press.
Mullen, a tough-minded
and hard-nosed conservative, is known for his
scoffing (if private) dismissal of Washington's
neo-conservatives, though sometimes he can barely
keep it under wraps. During a recent Washington
reception, he was asked by a reporter whether he
would oppose an attack on Iran: "It's your job to
convince the politicians just how stupid that
would be," he said, "not mine."
Accompanying Pace out the door will be
Admiral Edmund Giambastiani (predictably, "St John
the Baptist" to his friends), a former protege of
Paul Wolfowitz - one of the last of the senior
uniformed neo-conservatives.
The
retirement of Pace and Giambastiani completes the
"clean sweep" of the senior military leadership
that marked the tenure of former secretary of
defense Donald Rumsfeld. Since the swearing in of
Gates as Rumsfeld's successor, nearly every major
senior military officer responsible for the war in
Iraq has been replaced.
Petraeus has taken
over in-country (for the discredited George
Casey), Fallon was named to replace the forcibly
retired General John Abizaid (the former head of
CENTCOM), and Pace and Giambastiani have now been
replaced by Mullen and marine General James
Cartwright. Lute is in the White House.
Since the retirement of Colin Powell, four
generals have served as JCS chairman. All have
been weak.
"This has been a purposeful
policy," a former senior army commander said.
"Bill Clinton quietly advised George Bush that the
last thing he wanted was to have a strong
chairman, as Colin Powell was able to dictate
military policy to Clinton because of his
prestige. He really stood him up.
"After
Powell retired, Rumsfeld and Bush made certain
that they never had a man of Powell's caliber in
the chair. That's how we eventually ended up with
Pace. He was a good man, no doubt about it, but
Mullen is a real shift. He's Gates' choice. He's a
real leader. He can say 'no'. and he intends to."
There are other changes. In Iraq, General
Rick Lynch has taken control of the 3rd Infantry
Division, which has started to move into the
insurgency area south of Baghdad. The Americans
have been there before, but this time Lynch has
privately vowed that things will be different and
more low-key. The Americans will take on al-Qaeda
and leave the people alone.
"This
hearts-and-minds stuff is bullshit," an Iraq
commander recently rotated back to the US said.
"Every time an American soldier meets an Iraqi
there's trouble, friction. Our job is to stay out
of their homes and lives, not interfere in them."
In al-Anbar and now in Diyala province,
American soldiers and some CIA officers have been
quietly arming Sunni insurgents.
"They
don't even like us a little bit," a Pentagon
official admitted, "but if they'll kill the real
radicals, that's fine with us."
The
strategy has caused some consternation at the
higher reaches of the Pentagon, but it is part and
parcel of Gates' view that there is no military
solution in Iraq without political accommodation.
He knows that the guns given to the Sunnis today
could be pointed at the Americans tomorrow.
"We're petrified," a Pentagon official
admitted. But changes are being made - if slowly.
The lessons of Operation Iraqi Freedom and
its aftermath are starting to be felt. Deep in the
bowels of the Pentagon, where the future of the US
military is decided, mid-level officers are
crunching mobilization numbers and facing some
stark realizations.
"Some marines are on
their third tours in Iraq," one marine colonel
said. "It is just untenable. We're facing a Marine
Corps that is damned near eviscerated. We can't
ask these guys to do much more."
When the
Bush administration floated the idea several weeks
ago that there might be a surge beyond the
"surge", with US troops peaking to 180,000 or more
by the middle of 2008, Pentagon planners nearly
rebelled. The numbers simply weren't there and the
equipment is falling apart.
"What are we
going to fight them with, spitwads?" a Pentagon
major recently asked.
Then too, war
planners on the military's Joint Staff have been
diligently passing around Colonel Gregory
Fontenot's assessment of Operation Iraqi Freedom,
a 500-page tome on the US military's performance
in the Iraq war. Its flat tone belies the
underlying sense that things did not go as well in
"OIF" as the Bush administration would have us
believe. In many ways, that failure led to the
current crisis, leading many in the Pentagon to
conclude that no amount of military might can ever
reverse a disastrous political decision.
"Individual Americans fought well and with
courage," said US Military Academy graduate Ed
Deagle, a military analyst who has studied
Fontenot's work, "but in key situations, the
military failed to anticipate, failed to plan,
failed to estimate, failed to perform."
You have to read between the lines of the
Fontenot report to understand what US military
commanders now know: "At any other time, and
against any other army, we might have been
defeated. So we're starting to learn those lessons
and apply them." Robert Gates is leading that
effort.
This is not to say that the United
States is about to win the Iraq war. It's not. And
it won't. But a shift, small and perceptible -
away from escalation and confrontation - has
begun. There are people, powerful people, in
Washington who are still committed to confronting
Islam, whose default position is the deployment of
another division, another aircraft carrier. But
there are others now, also powerful, who oppose
them.
As General Joseph Hoar has put it,
"Perhaps we are finally, finally learning that
this idea that Americans can walk down the street
and be safe in Iraq is ludicrous. And perhaps we
are also learning that we cannot drag a Muslim man
out of his house in front of his family, in front
of his wife and children, and humiliate him and
expect to be considered a great power and a great
people. Maybe, just maybe, we are starting to
learn that too. And it's about time."
Mark Perry is co-director of Conflicts
Forum and the author of the recently released
Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight
Eisenhower in War and Peace (Penguin Press,
2007).
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