Page 3 of
4 GATES' WAY FORWARD, Part
1 After Rumsfeld, a new
dawn? By
Mark Perry
well-known critic
of the administration's Middle East policies.
Sheehan was shocked when he received Hadley's
telephone call. "He didn't say 'no', he said 'hell
no'," one retired Marine colonel says.
Sheehan was even more outspoken with the
press. When asked why he turned down the position,
he grunted his response: "The very fundamental
issue is, they don't know where the hell they're
going," he responded. "So
rather than go over there [to the White House],
develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said,
'No, thanks'."
The third retired commander
that Hadley called was former air force General
Joseph Ralston, who also declined. Ralston was
surprised by the offer. Ralston had served as the
Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman from 1996 to
2000 and was expected to succeed John
Shalikashvili when Shalikashvili retired. But the
talented Ralston withdrew from consideration when
it was discovered he had had an extramarital
affair with a Central Intelligence Agency officer
while separated from his wife.
When
official Washington learned that Hadley had
offered Ralston the job they wondered whether
Hadley had remembered the incident - did he think
that the Senate, which would have to confirm the
appointment, had forgotten it? Did they think
Ralston wouldn't be asked.
Two other
commanders also turned down Hadley's offer: air
force General John P Jumper (who had retired as
air force chief of staff in 2005) and marine
General Charles Wilhelm as blunt as Sheehan, with
more combat ribbons. Wilhelm had apparently seen
too many failed operations (in Vietnam, Somalia
and Haiti to name just three) to undertaken
another.
By the third week of April, it
was clear that the White House would have to turn
to Gates, Pace and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for
their recommendation. Pressure was building inside
the National Security Council for a solution:
Hadley was under increasing strain, and two key
assistants - J D Crouch, the deputy national
security advisor and one of the most outspoken
proponents of the "surge" strategy inside the
White House and Meghan O'Sullivan, the
administration's top national security council
official for Iraq and Afghanistan - had announced
they would be leaving.
More critically, at
a time when Bush was being pressed to defend the
"surge", new CENTCOM chief Fallon was expressing
troubling public doubts that the war in Iraq could
actually worsen - despite the "surge". His views
were buttressed by an entire host of retired
military officers, who said that the solution to
the Iraq crisis was more political than military.
Even more surprising, those views were
echoed by Gates and Petraeus. At the same time
that Bush and Hadley were searching vainly for a
war czar, Gates was on yet another trip through
the Middle East, and blithely punched holes in
White House claims that the "surge" would provide
a military solution to the Iraq debacle. The US
commitment to Iraq was "not open-ended", Gates
said on April 18 in Baghdad.
The next day,
Petraeus echoed the sentiment, saying the security
situation in Baghdad "has lost a little traction".
To Hadley and the rest of the national security
staff the message from Gates seemed hardly subtle:
there would be a "war czar" all right - but he
would come from the military.
Abandon
ship Gates returned to Washington from his
mid-April trip to the Middle East more convinced
than ever that the administration's new "war czar"
needed to be a currently serving high ranking
commander. His first days at the Pentagon did
nothing to dissuade him from that view.
The national security establishment was
more chaotic than ever - with few hands-on
officials actually running the Iraq War. While
Hadley's most outspoken critics have had a field
day excoriating the former lawyer and assistant
secretary of defense (he served under Cheney at
the Pentagon during the first Bush
administration), as one of the nation's weakest
National Security Council chiefs, Gates knew that
Hadley was working 18 hour days.
The
reason for the additional pressure came from the
resignation of Hadley's assistant, Crouch, Bush's
deputy national security adviser and a key
architect of the administration's "surge"
strategy, who announced his resignation May 4. Not
many senior military officers were unhappy to see
Crouch go. The former Missouri deputy sheriff was
known for his impractical military suggestions,
derived in part from his time on the board of
advisors of Frank Gaffney's ideologically driven
Center for Security Policy.
Hadley's
headaches had also worsened when earlier
O'Sullivan said she would be leaving the White
House. That was bad news for Hadley, though
officials at the Pentagon shrugged. One Pentagon
official says that O'Sullivan's loss was hardly
felt. As he relates: just prior to Iraqi
politician Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's visit to
Washington in March, O'Sullivan was told the
Shi'ite leader had strong ties to Iran. "She was
shocked," this official remembered. "She just
didn't have a clue."
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
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