Bart's Blog

O'Sullivan, a former aide to State Department official Richard Haass with a
PhD from Oxford, has all the credentials of a Middle East expert

- monographs on terrorism, appearances as the Brookings Institution, a stint
with Jay Garner in Baghdad. Yet in all that time she never met a real
Islamist. At one point during her final weeks on the job, she apparently
took it on herself to invite Lebanese leader Samir Geagea to Washington,
believing a photo-op of Bush and the Lebanese militiaman would strengthen
the government of Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.

It was only when Geagea was in the air, on his way to France, that
O'Sullivan was told that Geagea's visit would spark controversy. Blamed for
the deaths of thousands during the Lebanese civil war, Geagea's invitation
was embarrassingly rescinded.

Hadley's difficulties meant that Gates still had problems to solve - but he
had made some headway. He was satisfied with his Baghdad trip and his
meetings with Petraeus. Changes were on the way, including a very sensitive
one that, according to high-ranking military officers in the Pentagon, had
been on the minds of a number of senior officers.

While Major General William Caldwell had served well as spokesman for the
multi-national forces in Iraq, there were growing concerns that he had
leaked information to the press that should have been reported through US
security channels - including a February report that Iran had been supplying
weapons to Iraqi insurgents. The weapons, and their serial numbers, had been
given to a number of reporters and then aired.

The information came from a "high-ranking US commander", the reports said.
Some military officers in the Pentagon identified the leakers as Caldwell -
and were enraged.

The officers thought it was inappropriate for a senior officer to give out
that kind of information, whether true or not. Pace, in particular, was
privately angered by Caldwell's leak and implied as much in a number of
press interviews. The heads of press organizations were also beginning to
question Caldwell's intentions. Was it appropriate for a high-ranking
military officer to be playing politics with sensitive information of the
kind that was so inflammatory that it might be used for political purpose to
start a war?

It is not known whether Gates talked to Petraeus about Caldwell, or to
anyone. But Petraeus wanted his own man in Caldwell's job, and believed
strongly that the US military needed to be more open, and blunt, about its
operations. In May, Caldwell was replaced. There was no blood on the floor.

There were only a few steps left before Gates completed his clean sweep of
the upper reaches of the American high command. But before moving any
further, the secretary of defense decided that he would check in with the
network of retired military four-star generals that comprise a powerful, if
unofficial, lobbying force in Washington.

Through May and into early June, Gates had lunch with a large number of some
of the most eminent of these former commanders. Among the most prominent was
General George Joulwan - as respected a former commander as any. Gates
called Joulwan into the secretary's dining room in mid-May, just prior to
the naming of a "war czar" to seek his advice on what to do about Iraq.

"They would clear out everyone and George would come in and the secretary
and George would sit for an hour or two and Gates and Joulwan would sit and
have a discussion," a senior officer says. "And Gates would listen and smile
and nod. And mostly he agreed." Joulwan is a decorated Vietnam veteran (he
was even called "general" by his classmates at West Point) and a former
commander in Bosnia. Even in retirement, Joulwan spends time shuttling back
and forth to eastern Europe, where he has maintained ties to senior
commanders in the new NATO states of Poland and Romania. He is a constant
presence on American television. He is most comfortable at an easel, telling
audiences about how he designed strategies that brought down the Cali cartel
in South America and integrated Eastern European militaries into NATO. "He
does go on," a colleague says.

Joulwan may well be the most connected retired military man in Washington.
With his shock of black hair, he falls forward on his feet and buttonholes
anyone who will listen to his liturgy about the "proper way to get things
done". He stabs the air with his finger: "There are only two things that
matter when it comes to running operations like Bosnia or Iraq or I don't
care where it is," Joulwan says. "And that is absolute unity of command and
absolute clarity of instructions. These commanders have got to demand of the
civilians that the mission be laid out. That's what I did in Bosnia. I said,
'Well you write it right down here and you say what you want and then we can
get it done'. Otherwise it is never clear.

According to Pentagon officials, Joulwan focused on that - rather than
personnel - in his talks with Gates. "George could see the chaos, because he
lived through it in Bosnia and in Vietnam," a colleague says, "and it just
scared the bejesus out of him. And so he insisted on that with Gates. And he
told him, 'No matter what you do with the White House, you insist that they
make it clear to you what they want'."

For the US military, unity of command is nearly liturgical - a commandment
that dates from George Washington. The principle is so deeply rooted that a
leading military think-tank recently conducted a day-long simulation that
stipulated two teams (a "red" enemy team and a "blue" US team), in which the
military US team was saddled with a number of nearly insurmountable
premises: a weak president, an unengaged secretary of state, and a broken
national security establishment. The task of the blue military team was to
find ways to compensate for the broken national security establishment. One
of the ways to do that is to make certain that the top-down command
structure of the US military remains intact - that orders are obeyed
exactly, and "by-the-book" - a command structure that many senior officers
now believe was nearly catastrophically missing during the Rumsfeld years.

With major shifts underway in Iraq and in the region, and with the network
of retired officers now firmly behind him in advocating that the "war czar"
be picked from among the crop of currently serving officers, Gates
recommended to the president that he appoint the Joint Chief of Staff's
director of operations as the assistant to the president and deputy national
security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bush checked Lute's record and noted that he had opposed the "surge", so he
had his doubts, but after he and Hadley had interviewed him he agreed with
Gates' assessment and Lute's appointment was announced on May 15.

As always, the soft-spoken Gates explained the appointment in terms that
were far more blunt than perhaps Bush would have liked: "One of the
arguments that we hear frequently - and frankly are very sympathetic with -
is that we and the State Department are about the only parts of the
government that are at war," Gates said. "This kind of position is intended
to ensure that where other parts of the government can play a contributing
role, that in fact they understand what the president's priorities are and
make sure that the commanders in the field, the ambassador in the field,
gets what he needs."

For his part, Lute was unapologetic for opposing the "surge", saying simply
that he agreed with the president's policy. Even so, like Petraeus and
Fallon, Lute is convinced that a military victory in Iraq is impossible
without political reconciliation. He has broad support in this from all
parts of the high command.

"He's not afraid to get tough with the bureaucracy," a uniformed colleague
says. "He will run the war. He won't be a supreme commander, of course, but
he'll be a supreme coordinator - and we desperately need one." Lute is also
one of the ablest political generals in the Pentagon, having served ably
with both Abizaid and Petraeus and was apparently blunt with Bush and
Hadley, telling them about his doubts about their policies. "He told them he
didn't agree with a lot of what they were doing," a colleague related, "and
said, 'so take it or leave it', and they were shook by that. But they took
it."

With David Petraeus, top US commander in Iraq; Admiral William Fallon, head
of CENTCOM (US Central Command); and "war czar" Douglas Lute in place,
Defense Secretary Robert Gates believed he had finished his job in
refashioning the US national-security establishment. He was comfortable with
Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) chairman Peter Pace and with his civilian staff
- and ready to take on his next battle.

"I think that the secretary had his sights set on straightening out the
national-security mess," a Pentagon official said. "You know - we have the
Pentagon, State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA
[Central Intelligence Agency] and FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], and
no one talks to each other. The Deputies Committee [the major deputy
secretaries of each foreign-policy cabinet department, where the major
implementing decisions are made] is simply not functioning. He wanted to go
in there and fix it. And then the Pace thing happened."

On Wednesday, June 6, just as the controversy over the naming of Lute as the
White House "war czar" had finally abated, President George W Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney were told by Senate Armed Service Committee chairman
Carl Levin that Pace would have difficulty getting reconfirmed for a
traditional second two-year term as JCS chairman.

"Bush and Cheney were told that Pace would just be shredded," this official
says.

Gates had seen it coming. The Pentagon's congressional staff had told Gates
that Pace was going to have trouble and that Pace's renomination would not
sail through as expected. The Democrats in the Senate were expected to ask
some embarrassing questions about the war in Iraq. Bush and Cheney told
Levin that they would pull the Pace nomination.

Immediately, the recriminations set in, particularly among Pace partisans in
the Marine Corps.

"Pace is taking the fall for these assholes," a retired marine general said.
"If you know how the war started, if you know anything about [Ahmad] Chalabi
or Cheney or anything like that, you're gone. Peter Pace is being sacrificed
to the White House failure in Iraq." The neo-conservative press has also
weighed in, calling the Bush administration's decision "cowardly".

The Wall Street Journal lit into Gates: "There's a rumor going around that
Robert Gates is the secretary of defense," the newspaper's lead editorial
noted. "We'd like to request official confirmation, because based on recent
evidence the man running the Pentagon is Democratic Senator (and Senate
Armed Services Committee chairman) Carl Levin of Michigan."

Gates was nonplussed and quickly announced that Pace's replacement would be
the current chief of naval operations, Admiral Michael Mullen - a riposte
that was a mini-declaration of war against the pro-war press.

Mullen, a tough-minded and hard-nosed conservative, is known for his
scoffing (if private) dismissal of Washington's neo-conservatives, though
sometimes he can barely keep it under wraps. During a recent Washington
reception, he was asked by a reporter whether he would oppose an attack on
Iran: "It's your job to convince the politicians just how stupid that would
be," he said, "not mine."

Accompanying Pace out the door will be Admiral Edmund Giambastiani
(predictably, "St John the Baptist" to his friends), a former protege of
Paul Wolfowitz - one of the last of the senior uniformed neo-conservatives.

The retirement of Pace and Giambastiani completes the "clean sweep" of the
senior military leadership that marked the tenure of former secretary of
defense Donald Rumsfeld. Since the swearing in of Gates as Rumsfeld's
successor, nearly every major senior military officer responsible for the
war in Iraq has been replaced.

Petraeus has taken over in-country (for the discredited George Casey),
Fallon was named to replace the forcibly retired General John Abizaid (the
former head of CENTCOM), and Pace and Giambastiani have now been replaced by
Mullen and marine General James Cartwright. Lute is in the White House.

Since the retirement of Colin Powell, four generals have served as JCS
chairman. All have been weak.

"This has been a purposeful policy," a former senior army commander said.
"Bill Clinton quietly advised George Bush that the last thing he wanted was
to have a strong chairman, as Colin Powell was able to dictate military
policy to Clinton because of his prestige. He really stood him up.

"After Powell retired, Rumsfeld and Bush made certain that they never had a
man of Powell's caliber in the chair. That's how we eventually ended up with
Pace. He was a good man, no doubt about it, but Mullen is a real shift. He's
Gates' choice. He's a real leader. He can say 'no'.

and he intends to."

There are other changes. In Iraq, General Rick Lynch has taken control of
the 3rd Infantry Division, which has started to move into the insurgency
area south of Baghdad. The Americans have been there before, but this time
Lynch has privately vowed that things will be different and more low-key.
The Americans will take on al-Qaeda and leave the people alone.

"This hearts-and-minds stuff is bullshit," an Iraq commander recently
rotated back to the US said. "Every time an American soldier meets an Iraqi
there's trouble, friction. Our job is to stay out of their homes and lives,
not interfere in them."

In al-Anbar and now in Diyala province, American soldiers and some CIA
officers have been quietly arming Sunni insurgents.

"They don't even like us a little bit," a Pentagon official admitted, "but
if they'll kill the real radicals, that's fine with us."

The strategy has caused some consternation at the higher reaches of the
Pentagon, but it is part and parcel of Gates' view that there is no military
solution in Iraq without political accommodation. He knows that the guns
given to the Sunnis today could be pointed at the Americans tomorrow.

"We're petrified," a Pentagon official admitted. But changes are being made
- if slowly.

The lessons of Operation Iraqi Freedom and its aftermath are starting to be
felt. Deep in the bowels of the Pentagon, where the future of the US
military is decided, mid-level officers are crunching mobilization numbers
and facing some stark realizations.

"Some marines are on their third tours in Iraq," one marine colonel said.
"It is just untenable. We're facing a Marine Corps that is damned near
eviscerated. We can't ask these guys to do much more."

When the Bush administration floated the idea several weeks ago that there
might be a surge beyond the "surge", with US troops peaking to 180,000 or
more by the middle of 2008, Pentagon planners nearly rebelled. The numbers
simply weren't there and the equipment is falling apart.

"What are we going to fight them with, spitwads?" a Pentagon major recently
asked.

Then too, war planners on the military's Joint Staff have been diligently
passing around Colonel Gregory Fontenot's assessment of Operation Iraqi
Freedom, a 500-page tome on the US military's performance in the Iraq war.
Its flat tone belies the underlying sense that things did not go as well in
"OIF" as the Bush administration would have us believe. In many ways, that
failure led to the current crisis, leading many in the Pentagon to conclude
that no amount of military might can ever reverse a disastrous political
decision.

"Individual Americans fought well and with courage," said US Military
Academy graduate Ed Deagle, a military analyst who has studied Fontenot's
work, "but in key situations, the military failed to anticipate, failed to
plan, failed to estimate, failed to perform."

You have to read between the lines of the Fontenot report to understand what
US military commanders now know: "At any other time, and against any other
army, we might have been defeated. So we're starting to learn those lessons
and apply them." Robert Gates is leading that effort.

This is not to say that the United States is about to win the Iraq war.

It's not. And it won't. But a shift, small and perceptible - away from
escalation and confrontation - has begun. There are people, powerful people,
in Washington who are still committed to confronting Islam, whose default
position is the deployment of another division, another aircraft carrier.
But there are others now, also powerful, who oppose them.

As General Joseph Hoar has put it, "Perhaps we are finally, finally learning
that this idea that Americans can walk down the street and be safe in Iraq
is ludicrous. And perhaps we are also learning that we cannot drag a Muslim
man out of his house in front of his family, in front of his wife and
children, and humiliate him and expect to be considered a great power and a
great people. Maybe, just maybe, we are starting to learn that too. And it's
about time."

Mark Perry is co-director of Conflicts Forum and the author of the recently
released Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War
and Peace (Penguin Press, 2007).