The Fourth Star Read online

  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 assault. 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-Shiite split and the relationships 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 classified 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 Washington 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 Washington 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 assignment 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 Massachusetts, 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 assignment for several weeks.

  Unexpected as it all was, Casey wasn’t daunted by the new assignment. 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 entitled 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 assignment required Senate confirmation, but he was uncontroversial, the compromise choice everyone could support. Senator Hillary Clinton pronounced 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 assumption 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 assess the situation before reporting back, he told Casey. But there was one parting order he did want to pass 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 attitude 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 ambassador, 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. Classic 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 assumed, 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 assumption 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 hashing out ideas and turning them over in his mind—or, even better, puzzling out his thoughts on paper. He’d set glasses on top of his head, pull out a red pen, and revise documents 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.

  Rumsfeld’s parting instructions had been to take a few weeks to study the situation, but after only seven days in Iraq, he was in his first video session with the defense secretary, who directed him to begin a major assessment of the effort to rebuild the Iraqi police and army. Four days later they spoke by phone, followed by another videoconference and another
phone call several days after that. In all, Casey participated in twenty-three phone conversations or video meetings with Rumsfeld during his first two months, an average of one every three days. Rumsfeld was a stickler for chain of command. When Casey was scheduled to update Bush, Rumsfeld required a prebrief so that he could approve any information that went to the president. Sometimes it seemed Casey’s staff was doing little more than churning out briefing slides for Washington.

  After one videoconference, Casey’s senior aide, Colonel Jim Barclay, got a call from General Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “The secretary liked the briefing,” he said, referring to Rumsfeld. “But he wants Casey to stop saying um so much when he’s talking.”

  “Sir, I can’t tell him that,” Barclay protested. “But hold on. He’s right here.”

  He transferred the call into Casey’s Green Zone office, and Pace told Casey himself. After hanging up, Casey and Barclay shook their heads. Like everyone else who worked with Rumsfeld, Casey received periodic one- or two-sentence notes—known as “snowflakes”—on issues that caught the defense secretary’s attention. Sometimes Rumsfeld would wonder why it seemed to take so long to plan a raid and arrest a particular insurgent target. Casey rarely worried about individual raids and was puzzled how such picayune details were bubbling up to the secretary’s level. One of the first snowflakes asked that Casey start training Iraqis to replace the relatively small number of U.S. special operations troops acting as bodyguards for senior ministers, who were prime assassination targets. The lesson was unmistakable: no part of the U.S. effort was too small to escape Rumsfeld’s green-eyeshade mentality on troops.