The Strongest Tribe by Bing West
Author:Bing West [West, Bing]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-759-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-05-06T04:00:00+00:00
CASEY LEAVES
On February 1, the Senate held another hearing, voting 83 to 14 to confirm Casey as the chief of staff of the U.S. Army. His promotion had been in the works for months before Baghdad fell apart. Gates said he was the unanimous choice of the Joint Chiefs, and the staff of the Multi-National Force praised his management skills and thoughtfulness. McCain and several other senators objected, arguing that Casey had failed in Iraq. Senator John Sununu (R-NH) said that a lack of success in the field should not be rewarded. Certainly, the war had gone badly. Before Casey arrived, the military and the White House had jointly ordered the reluctant Marines to seize Fallujah, only to halt the attack due to political turmoil. After Zarqawi and the al Qaeda terrorists seized control of the city during the summer, one of Casey’s first decisions as the new commander had been to order a full assault to retake the city. Two thousand four was a year of flailing. This was followed in 2005 by dozens of offensive operations to drive out the insurgents, who returned to the populated areas when the Americans left. In 2006, Casey focused on training Iraqi forces to take the lead, with American soldiers pulling back to Forward Operating Bases. When Shiite death squads attacked Sunnis inside the capital, the Americans weren’t in the neighborhoods to prevent the slide into chaos.
“The existing strategy, the stay the course,” Hadley said, “everybody agrees is not working—that’s failure slow.” Yet everybody in the military’s top echelon had agreed to the strategy. At a meeting in October of 2005, the top generals in Iraq, including Petraeus, agreed to put Iraqi forces in the lead, later termed “rushing to failure.”
Casey had consulted with his division commanders before telling the NSC in June 2006 that he needed no more troops. Casey had altered the Army’s doctrine of the offensive to accommodate counterinsurgency, although the core tenet of living among the people to separate them from the insurgents had eluded him and his commanders, not least because avoiding casualties had become a military mission. In Anbar, there never was a pullback to Forward Operating Bases. In the Baghdad region, there was ample opportunity for commanders to recommend against the pullback to the FOBs. Casey didn’t make those decisions alone. Raids remained a favorite staple of the battalions, although raids were an admission that the insurgents controlled the population.
Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, defended Casey, saying, “It is not fair that General Casey be tagged with failures, massive failures which were caused by the false policies, the wrong policies, the deceptions, the ignorance, the arrogance, the cockiness of civilian leaders of this administration.”
“From 2004 through 2006, we forced a schedule that demanded three elections,” Casey told me. “Each time the mission of our troops had to change to protect the election. We put in three Iraqi governments, two of which were sectarian. Each time we gained momentum, another election and paralysis in the new government dropped us back.
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