Decision Points

personnel changes. I didn’t want the American people or our military to think I was making national security decisions for political reasons.
    The weekend before the midterms, I met with Bob Gates in Crawford to ask him to become secretary of defense. Bob had served on the Baker-Hamilton Commission, a panel chartered by Congress to study the situation in Iraq. He told me he had supported a troop surge as one of the group’s recommendations. I told Bob I was looking for a new commander in Iraq. He would review the candidates and offer his advice. But I suggested that he take a close look at David Petraeus.
    After two election cycles in which Republicans increased their numbers in Congress, we took a pounding in 2006. We lost majorities in both the House and Senate. The new speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi , declared, “The American people have spoken. … We must begin the responsible redeployment of our troops outside of Iraq.”

    As our review of the Iraq strategy intensified, we focused on three primary options. The first called for us to accelerate the existing strategy of training Iraqi forces while withdrawing our own. The Iraqis would assume increasing responsibility for dealing with the violence, while we would focus on more limited missions, including hunting al Qaeda.
    The second option was to pull our troops back from Baghdad until the sectarian violence burned out. In October, Condi had traveled to Iraq and come back discouraged with Maliki and the other leaders. If they were determined to fight a sectarian war, she argued, why should we leave our troops in the middle of their blood feud?
    The third option was to double down. We would deploy tens of thousands more troops—a surge—to conduct a full-scale counterinsurgency campaign in Baghdad. Rather than pull out of the cities, our troops would move in, live among the people, and secure the civilian population.
    The fundamental question was whether the Iraqis had the will tosucceed. I believed most Iraqis supported democracy. I was convinced that Iraqi mothers, like all mothers, wanted their children to grow up with hope for the future. I had met Iraqi exchange students, doctors, women’s activists, and journalists who were determined to live in freedom and peace. A year after the liberation of Iraq, I met a group of small business owners who had manufactured items like watches and textiles during the Saddam era. To buy materials, they traded Iraqi dinars for foreign currency. When the dinar declined in value, Saddam searched for scapegoats and ordered the men’s right hands cut off. Documentary producer Don North and Houston TV journalist Marvin Zindler heard the story and brought the Iraqis to Texas, where each was fitted for a prosthetic hand by Dr. Joe Agris , free of charge.
    When the Iraqis arrived in the Oval Office, they were still learning to use their right hands. All were grateful to the American people for freeing them from the brutality of Saddam. And all had hope for their country. One Iraqi picked up a pen in his month-old hand and painstakingly scrawled some Arabic words on a piece of paper: “A prayer for God to bless America.”

    Watching this Iraqi man write a prayer for America with his new prosthetic hand.
White House/Eric Draper
    I marveled at the contrast between a regime so brutal that it would hack off men’s hands and a society so compassionate that it would help restore their dignity. I believed the Iraqi man who wrote those words spoke for millions of his fellow citizens. They were grateful to America for their liberation. They wanted to live in freedom. And I would not give up on them.

    In late October, I sent Steve Hadley to meet privately with Prime Minister Maliki in Baghdad. Steve’s assessment was that Maliki was “either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.” Before I made a decision on the way forward, I needed to determine which of these was true.
    On November 29, 2006, I flew to meet Maliki in Amman, Jordan. The Iraqi prime minister’s leadership had frustrated us at times. He had not always deployed Iraqi troops when he said he would. Some in hisgovernment had suspicious ties to Iran. He hadn’t done enough to go after Shia extremists. General Casey was rightly upset that sectarian officials close to Maliki had blocked our troops from going into Shia neighborhoods.
    Yet over his six