Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War by Robert M Gates Read Free Book Online

knowledge of Saddam’s behavior in the 1980s and early 1990s—it seemed highly likely to me that he had resumed working on weapons of mass destruction, that the sanctions were largely ineffective, and that the man was a very dangerous megalomaniac. So I supported Bush 43’s decision to invade and bring Saddam down.
    However, I was stunned by what I saw as amazing bungling after the initial military success, including failing to stop the looting of Baghdad, disbanding the Iraqi army, and implementing a draconian de-Baathification policy (Saddam ran the Baath Party) that seemed to ignore every lesson from the post-1945 de-Nazification of Germany. I was equally surprised that, after Vietnam, the U.S. Army seemed to have forgotten as quickly as possible how to wage counterinsurgency warfare.
    I gave a speech on May 1, 2003, less than six weeks after the war began, that summed up my views:
The situation we face now [in Iraq] reminds me a little of the dog catching the car. Now that we have it, what do we do with it?
I believe the postwar challenge will be far greater than the war itself. Only in recent days has the American government begun to realize the extraordinary potential power of the Shia Muslim majority in Iraq, and the possibility that a democratic Iraq might well turn out to be afundamentalist Shia Iraq.… The Kurds will, at minimum, demand autonomy in the north. And what happens to the [minority] Sunni Muslim population in the center, having oppressed both the Kurds and the Shia … for so long? Finally, the challenge of rebuilding Iraq, providing food and services, and rebuilding the economy after a dozen years of privation and decades of Baathist socialism will be no small task—though I believe a more easily achievable task than our political aspirations for the country.
For all these reasons, I believe the United States should agree to begin replacing our forces with a large multinational peacekeeping force—perhaps from NATO—as quickly as the security situation allows.… We will be making a big mistake if we keep a hundred thousand or so American soldiers in Iraq for more than a few months.
    Even as the security situation continued to deteriorate, the Iraqis—with a lot of help from us and others—held what were broadly considered two reasonably fair elections in 2005, one on January 30 and another on December 16, both with a pretty good turnout, considering the circumstances. Forming a coalition government composed of several Shia parties, the Kurds, and politically acceptable Sunnis after the December election, however, was a major challenge. As those negotiations were dragging on, the bombing of a historic Shia mosque, the Askariya Shrine at the Golden Mosque of Samarra, on February 22, 2006, ignited horrific sectarian violence that escalated around the country. By October some three thousand Iraqi civilians were being killed every month. Attacks against U.S. troops increased from an average of 70 per day in January 2006 to an average of 180 per day in October.
    As the security situation in Iraq deteriorated through 2006, the political situation in Washington did as well. The president’s approval ratings further declined, public opinion polls on the war turned increasingly negative, and a Congress that had prided itself for decades on bipartisanship in national security matters became increasingly divided about the war along party lines—most Democrats opposed, most Republicans supportive (but increasingly uneasy).
    The growing divide at home and the deteriorating situation in Iraq prompted Congressman Frank Wolf, a longtime Republican from northern Virginia, early in 2006 to propose creating a bipartisan group of well-known Republicans and Democrats from outside the governmentto see if a new strategy could be developed for the United States in Iraq that could win the support of the president and both parties in Congress. He proposed that it be funded—to the tune of a little over a million