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Bob Woodward:
Military
Brass Opposed Surge
(CBS: 60 Minutes Sept. 7, 2008) A year and a half since the
surge in Iraq, violence is the lowest it has been since the invasion.
The idea of throwing another 30,000 troops into Iraq was a desperate
gamble in a dark time. And only now are we finding out just how much
opposition there was by the nation's top military leaders. That's
among the revelations in a new book by Washington Post Associate
Editor Bob Woodward.
"The War Within" is Woodward's fourth insider account from the Bush
White House.
60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley sat down with
Woodward for his first interview in advance of the book's release and
asked him about the war within the administration after the surge was
proposed by civilians in the White House.
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Asked what the generals at the Pentagon thought when presented with the
idea of a surge, Woodward told Pelley, "They think that it won't work. And
the president actually at one point goes and meets with them. And the Army
chief of staff, General [Peter] Schoomaker, says 'You can't add five
brigades, it will take many more,' 'What about another crisis?' 'We don't
have troops for this,' 'What about the damage your doing to the force, the
young kids who see nothing but endless rotations?'"
 "What
does General Casey, sitting in Baghdad, think of having additional
troops?" Pelley asked.
"He thinks that Baghdad is a troop sump-a place you can put endless
numbers of troops in. And he does not want to add force," Woodward said.
"The president, who has said in public, endless times, that he relies on
his generals to tell him what they need, is actually going his own way
here," Pelley remarked.
"That's right," Woodward agreed. "The records of the joint chiefs show
that the idea of five brigades came from the White House, not from anybody
except the White House."
"The War Within," published by CBS-owned Simon & Schuster, tracks the
growing alarm inside the White House in 2006, as U.S. casualties mounted
during Iraq’s plunge toward civil war. The book is based on more than 150
interviews, including recorded conversations with the president. Mr. Bush
told Woodward that he was frustrated with his commanders - and asked for
enemy body counts so he could keep score.
"I ask that, on occasion, to find out whether or not we were fighting
back. Because the perception is that our guys are dying and they're not,
because we don't put out numbers. We don't have a tally. On the other
hand, if I'm sitting here watching the casualties come in, I'd at least
like to know whether or not our soldiers are fighting," the president
explained in one of Woodward's recorded interviews.
"It gets so intense that in one of the secure video conferences between
Washington and Baghdad the president says to Casey, 'George, we're not
playing for a tie.' And Casey's knuckles, according to witnesses,
literally go white as he's gripping the table. And he says, 'No Mr.
President. We are not playing for a tie.' And this is Bush's concern that
we're not going out and killing; in fact, Casey told one colleague
privately that the president's view is almost reflective of 'Kill the
bastards. Kill the bastards,' and that way we'll succeed," Woodward told
Pelley.
"You've obtained a number of documents, classified secret that the
president was receiving in this period of time. What was the president
hearing about what was going on in Iraq?" Pelley asked.
"On July 20th, the top secret special compartmented information report
that went directly to him quotes from an intelligence report saying,
'Violence is so out of hand, so extensive that it is self-sustaining,'"
Woodward said.
Woodward reports that a secret study for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2006
concluded that the U.S. was losing the war, but the president didn't give
a hint of that in public.
"Absolutely we're winning," the president said. "We're winning and we will
win unless we leave before the job is done."
"Why do you think that the president didn't level with the American people
in this dark period in this war?" Pelley asked.
"Because he wanted it to work," Woodward explained. "Did not wanna deflate
the morale of the troops. And there was a political election coming up.
The November 2006 Congressional elections. It was a raw, political
calculation that if you tell the public - or let it get out - that they
are reconsidering what they're doing, that they're acknowledging that it's
not going well, all political hell would break loose."
 At
the time, top military advisors were urging the president to reduce U.S.
forces so Iraqis would do more of the fighting. But the president asked
his national security advisor, Steven Hadley, to work on a different
strategy, and three weeks after the ’06 election, Mr. Bush was moving
towards a fateful decision.
"The president traveled to Amman, Jordan, to meet with Prime Minister
Maliki, and behind closed doors he said what to him?" Pelley asked
Woodward.
"He said, 'I am prepared to send tens of thousands of more troops here.
And I need your cooperation. I need your endorsement of this idea.'
Maliki’s a little resistant, but eventually, they hammer home, and get
Maliki to go on board with this," Woodward said.
"So the president has told Maliki, 'There's gonna be a surge of thousands
of troops.' Has the president told General Casey, his top man in Baghdad,
that?" Pelley asked.
"No, no. The military is kind of on the outside of this, because they are
adhering to the strategy of drawing down," Woodward said.
The president decided the new strategy needed a new team; he replaced many
in the military leadership. Woodward reports that even the influence of
Vice President Dick Cheney diminished sharply.
"When the president decides to replace or fire Rumsfeld, he doesn't
consult Cheney," Woodward explained. "He calls him in privately after a
meeting, day or two before the announcement that Rumsfeld is gonna be
replaced, and he says, 'I'm replacing Rumsfeld.' Cheney’s surprised and
says, 'With whom?' He says, 'With Bob Gates.' And Cheney's pretty open and
says, 'Well I disagree, but it's obviously your call.'"
The president also replaced General Casey. The new general in charge of
Iraq was David Petraeus, an early advocate of a surge. Woodward says that
in a private meeting in the Oval Office, the president told Petraeus he
was sending in nearly 30,000 additional troops.
"He says, 'You know we're committing these five brigades. It's double
down,' using a gambler’s term," Woodward told Pelley. "And Petraeus says,
'No Mr. President. It's not double-down. It's all in.'"
Playing the new hand, Petraeus created small bases throughout Baghdad, put
troops on patrol in neighborhoods, and largely calmed the streets. In
western Iraq, in Anbar province, the heart of the insurgency, Sunni tribal
leaders, tired of al Qaeda, started coming over to the American side.
But beyond all of that, Woodward reports, for the first time, that
there is a secret behind the success of the surge: a sophisticated and
lethal special operations program.
"This is very sensitive and very top secret, but there are secret
operational capabilities that have been developed by the military to
locate, target, and kill leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq, insurgent leaders,
renegade militia leaders. That is one of the true breakthroughs," Woodward
told Pelley.
"But what are we talking about here? It's some kind of surveillance? Some
kind of targeted way of taking out just the people that you're looking
for? The leadership of the enemy?" Pelley asked.
"I'd love to go through the details, but I'm not going to," Woodward
replied.
The details, Woodward says, would compromise the program.
"For a reporter, you don’t allow much," Pelley remarked.
"Well no, it’s with reluctance. From what I know about it, it's one of
those things that go back to any war, World War I, World War II, the role
of the tank, and the airplane. And it is the stuff of which military
novels are written," Woodward said.
"Do you mean to say that this special capability is such an advance in
military technique and technology that it reminds you of the advent of the
tank and the airplane?" Pelley asked.
"Yeah," Woodward said. "If you were an al Qaeda leader or part of the
insurgency in Iraq, or one of these renegade militias, and you knew about
what they were able to do, you'd get your ass outta town."
"There's another revelation in your book about U.S. intelligence, and that
is just how closely we are watching the Iraqi prime minister. Supposedly
our ally, Nouri al Maliki," Pelley commented.
"There is significant surveillance of Maliki. And as one source told me,
'We know everything he says.' And others I've talked to about that say,
'You can't literally know everything.' But we know a great deal," Woodward
said.
Asked if there's any indication that Maliki knows the U.S. is watching him
that closely, Woodward said, "Some people think that he should know, and
that he might know. Others think he’s gonna be shocked."
"Well, he knows now," Pelley remarked.
"It’s part of the hidden story here," Woodward replied.
Another part of that story, according to Woodward, is the
president's frustration with the attitude of the Iraqi people. "He has a
meeting at the Pentagon with a bunch of experts. And he voices, he just
said, 'I don’t understand that the Iraqis are not appreciative of what
we've done for them,' namely liberating them," Woodward said.
"But tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis had been killed, in the invasion
and through the occupation. He didn’t understand why they might be a
little ungrateful about what had occurred to them?" Pelley asked.
"His beacon is liberation," Woodward said. "He thinks we've done this
magnificent thing for them. I think he still holds to that position."
"The president suggests to you, in your interview, that he believes he's
already outmaneuvered whoever the next president is. Foreclosed their
options on what to do about Iraq," Pelley said.
"He and the secretary of defense, Gates, both by appointing Petraeus as
central commander, in other words the boss of the whole Middle East. And
no matter who becomes president, they're not going to be able to replace
him. Petraeus is what my old boss at the Post used to call 'fireproof' -
he's done so well that he can't be fired. And there is some satisfaction
people in the Bush administration take with that," Woodward explained.
"Satisfaction" because they believe Gen. Petraeus will resist a quick
withdrawal from Iraq.
"General Petraeus is sitting with 140,000 troops, in Iraq now, when
conditions are definitely better. But Petraeus says, 'It's still
reversible and fragile, because so many bad things have happened,'"
Woodward said.
"You know, I'm curious, did you ask the president what advice he would
give the next president about the war?" Pelley asked.
Said Woodward, "Yes, and pressed on what is the essence of what you would
say, he said: 'Don't let it fail.'"
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