Decision Points

it the right way. I had gathered facts and opinions from people inside and outside the administration. I had challenged assumptions and weighed all the options carefully. I knew the surge would be unpopular in the short term. But while many in Washington had given up on the prospect of victory in Iraq, I had not.
    At nine o’clock on the evening of January 10, 2007, I stepped before the cameras in the White House Library. “The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people—and it is unacceptable to me,” I said. “Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely. They have done everything we have asked them to do. Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.
    “It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq. … So I’ve committed more than twenty thousand additional American troops to Iraq. The vast majority of them—five brigades—will be deployed to Baghdad.”

    The reaction was swift and one-sided. “I don’t believe an expansion of twenty thousand troops in Iraq will solve the problems,” one senator said. “I do not believe that sending more troops to Iraq is the answer,” said another. A third pronounced it “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.” And those were just the Republicans.
    The left was even more outspoken. One freshman senator predicted that the surge would not “solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” Capturing the view of most of his colleagues, a
Washington Post
columnist called it “a fantasy-based escalation of the war in Iraq, which could only make sense in some parallel universe where pigs fly and fish commute on bicycles.”
    Condi, Bob Gates , and Pete Pace testified on Capitol Hill the day after I announced the surge. The questioning was brutal from both sides of the aisle. “This is the craziest, dumbest plan I’ve ever seen or heard of in mylife,” one Democratic congressman told General Pace. “I’ve gone along with the president on this, and I bought into his dream,” a Republican senator told Condi. “At this stage of the game, I just don’t think it’s going to happen.” Afterward Condi came to see me in the Oval Office. “We’ve got a tough sell on this, Mr. President,” she said.
    Amid the near-universal skepticism, a few brave souls defended the surge. Foremost among them were Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, a lifelong Democrat who had been cast aside by his party for supporting the war; Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a member of the Air Force Reserves; and Senator John McCain of Arizona.
    McCain and I had a complex relationship. We had competed against each other in 2000, and we had disagreed on issues from tax cuts to Medicare reform to terrorist interrogation. Yet he had campaigned hard for me in 2004, and I knew he planned to run for president in 2008. The surge gave him a chance to create distance between us, but he didn’t take it. He had been a longtime advocate of more troops in Iraq, and he supported the new strategy wholeheartedly. “I cannot guarantee success,” he said. “But I can guarantee failure if we don’t adopt this new strategy.”
    The most persuasive advocate of the surge was General Petraeus. As the author of the Army’s counterinsurgency manual, he was the undisputed authority on the strategy he would lead. His intellect, competitiveness, and work ethic were well known. On one of his visits home, I invited the general to mountain bike with me at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. He was mainly a runner, but he had enough confidence to accept the challenge. He held his own with the experienced riders of the presidential peloton.
    After the ride, I stepped inside a building at Fort Belvoir to take a call from the prime minister of Japan. I heard a noise in the background. I peeked out the door and saw Petraeus leading the peloton through a series of post-ride push-ups and crunches.
    Petraeus’s rise had attracted some resentment. I had heard gossip from several people warning that he had an outsize ego. Back in 2004, when Petraeus was leading the effort to train Iraqi security forces,
Newsweek
had run a cover with a close-up photo of him above the headline “Can this man save Iraq?” When I raised the topic with him, he smiled and said, “My classmates from West Point are never going to let me live thatdown.” I appreciated his self-deprecating remark. It was a good complement to his