Bush and the surge

Fred Barnes discussion of how President Bush came to order the surge suggest he deserves more credit for the idea than I originally thought. I thought he was accepting a proposal put to him by the military. It turns out there were some on the NSA staff who favored a surge but not many people in the military.

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Some of the president's aides feared the chiefs would raise such strenuous objections to a surge that Bush would back off or, worse, they'd mount a frontal assault to kill the idea. Neither fear was realized. The session in the Tank lasted nearly two hours. When it was over, the chiefs were unenthusiastic. Weeks earlier, when Bush aides had asked them to draft a plan for what a surge would look like militarily, the Pentagon had dawdled. Now, with Bush doing the asking, the chiefs agreed to produce a surge plan. Bush had gotten all he needed from them--acquiescence. The surge was on.

It wouldn't be announced until Bush addressed the nation on January 10, 2007. In the meantime, important details had to be worked out, such as getting assurances from Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki that he wouldn't interfere to protect Shia friends or militias. And when the Pentagon said one or two more Army brigades would suffice, the White House consulted General David Petraeus, whose selection as the new commander in Iraq had yet to be made public. Petraeus said he'd need a minimum of five and that's what he got. "I decided to go robust," Bush said. A senior adviser added: "If you're going to be a bear, be a grizzly."

For an unpopular president facing a Democratic Congress ferociously opposed to the war in Iraq, it was a risky and defiant decision....

... "The cumulative effect of the rise in violence suggested to me we were going to have to do something different."

By early November, the president had a pretty good idea what that something should be. On November 5, the Sunday before Election Day, he met with Robert Gates, deputy national security adviser and eventually CIA director in the administration of Bush's father, at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Bush was looking for a replacement for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose departure was to be announced the day after the election. Gates, president of Texas A&M University at the time, was his first choice.

Gates "informed me in the course of the conversation that, as a member of the Baker-Hamilton Commission, he favored a surge of additional troops in Iraq," Bush said. This matched the president's own view. "I was thinking about a different strategy based upon U.S. troops moving in there in some shape or form, ill-defined at this point, but nevertheless helping to provide more security through a more robust counterinsurgency campaign," he said.

The president had been impressed by a plan developed by his NSC aides with advice from a loosely knit group of retired and active duty Army officers and civilian experts. It called for adding troops, protecting Iraqi citizens, securing Baghdad, and eventually pacifying the country. Bush received a daily written report on Iraq, and as conditions worsened in the fall he began to question NSC staffers informally about his options in Iraq. "Not every meeting in the White House is a formal meeting," Bush told me. "A lot of times decisions can be formulated outside the formal process."

The surge decision certainly was. By the time a formal NSC review began in October, followed by an "interagency" task force that met from mid-November to early January, Bush was quietly but solidly pro-surge. Had another credible plan for victory in Iraq come to his attention, Bush might have latched onto it. None did.

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Somehow the people who knew something about counterinsurgency warfare got the President's ear and he acted boldly to embrace the surge plan. It took top down leadership to implement it and it also required moving the "small foot print" guys out of command positions. The President had been taking their advice and accepting it for years, but the strategy was not producing results.

One of the things that should have been noticed but apparently was not was the fact that violence decreased every time we surged our forces for events like elections. Adding the extra troops and changing the way they were used turned out to be the key to success.

It should be noted that every time the Democrats voted on the plan they always wanted to go back to the failed plan as a prelude to withdrawal. They were dead wrong on the strategy and dead wrong on the effect of the surge.

The Belmont Club also looks at the decision making process.