Surge: My Journey With General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War by Peter R. Mansoor

Author:Peter R. Mansoor [Mansoor, Peter R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Military, Iraq War (2003-2011), United States, 21st Century, Middle East, Iraq
ISBN: 9780300199161
Google: 9dQ_AQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2013-10-29T00:24:42.263524+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Testimony

I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I am a realist.

And Iraq is all hard, all the time.

—General David Petraeus

The testimony by Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General David Petraeus to Congress in September 2007 was the key political moment of the surge. Time was running out on the Washington clock as the American people tired of the seemingly unwinnable conflict in Iraq. Democrats, now the majority party in both houses of Congress, hoped to use the hearings as a springboard to mandate a withdrawal timeline for U.S. military forces and an end to American involvement in the war. Although the surge had succeeded in reducing the levels of violence in Iraq, most of the advances had come in the two and a half months before the hearings—not enough time for the American people or their elected representatives in Congress to grasp the shift in momentum (and mostly after the data cutoff date for the National Intelligence Estimate and General Accounting Office study on Iraq that were delivered to Congress shortly before Petraeus and Crocker testified). Iraqi political leaders were still deadlocked on the important issues that divided them, including control of oil revenues, provincial versus federal powers, and revision of the draconian de-Ba’athification decree of 2003. Congress was ready to assign Iraqi political leaders a failing grade. But Iraqi politicians were still talking, and political discourse in Baghdad continued. We didn’t know whether they would succeed, but we did know that if the United States pulled its support, the Iraqi state would probably dissolve. As General Petraeus explained to Secretary of Defense Gates shortly after he took command, the surge had to be extended in time and space or it would fail. The consequences should Iraq collapse would be enormous. With continued support, there was still hope that the Iraqi people could come together to solve their differences through a political process, so those with the most votes and not the most guns would determine the future course of the country.

The September hearings would determine whether U.S. forces would receive more time to implement the counterinsurgency concepts ushered in by the surge and allow the other factors improving security in Iraq to run their course. Unless more time was put on the Washington clock, the surge would indeed fail and the war would be lost.

Before General Petraeus could render his report to Congress, he had to convince his own bosses that the surge was working. In the case of Admiral William “Fox” Fallon, the head of U.S. Central Command, this task was not easy. Fallon had been extremely skeptical that additional forces could change the trajectory in the Iraq War. He had repeatedly slow-rolled requests for more troops, requiring a full-scale effort by General Petraeus and his staff to overcome the obstacles to the provision of the resources necessary to fully implement a population-based counterinsurgency campaign.1 In spring 2007 Fallon went a step further and appointed a two-man study team, led by Rear Admiral James “Sandy” Winnefeld (now the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and Dr.

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