Decision Points

stunned Shia radicals like Moqtada al Sadr and their backers in Iran. Above all, the Basra operation established Maliki as a strong leader. The prime minister had reached a major decision point of his own, and he had made the right call.
    A few weeks after the Iraqi government’s offensive in Basra, Petraeus and Crocker returned to Washington to testify in April. This time, therewere no antiwar ads in the newspapers and no prolonged battle for funding. NBC News, which in November 2006 had officially pronounced Iraq in a state of civil war, stopped using the term. There was no grand announcement of the retraction.
    Calling our gains in Iraq “fragile and reversible,” General Petraeus recommended that we continue withdrawing troops until we hit pre-surge levels, and then pause for further assessment. As Ryan Crocker put it, “In the end, how we leave [Iraq] and what we leave behind will be more important than how we came. Our current course is hard, but it is working. … We need to stay with it.” I agreed.

    It was a measure of the surge’s success that one of the biggest military controversies of early 2008 did not involve Iraq. In March, Admiral Fox Fallon—who had succeeded John Abizaid as commander of CENTCOM—gave a magazine interview suggesting he was the only person standing between me and war with Iran . That was ridiculous. I asked Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen and Vice Chairman Hoss Cartwright what they would do if they were in Fallon’s position. Both said they would resign. Soon after, Fox submitted his resignation. To his credit, he never brought up the issue again. At our last meeting, I thanked him for his service and told him I was proud of his fine career.
    I had to find a new commander to lead CENTCOM. There was only one person I wanted: David Petraeus. He had spent three of the past four years in Iraq, and I knew he was hoping to assume the coveted NATO command in Europe. But we needed him at CENTCOM. “If the twenty-two-year-old kids can stay in the fight,” he said, “I can, too.”
    I asked General Petraeus who should replace him in Iraq. Without hesitation, he named his former deputy commander, General Ray Odierno. I first met Ray years earlier when I toured Fort Hood as governor of Texas. Six foot five with a clean-shaven head, the general is an imposing man. He was an early proponent of the surge, and he helped the strategy succeed by positioning the additional troops wisely throughout Baghdad.
    For General Odierno, winning in Iraq was more than his duty as asoldier. It was personal. When Ray was home on leave in December 2004, I welcomed his family to the Oval Office, including his son, Lieutenant Anthony Odierno, a West Point graduate who had lost his left arm in Iraq. His father stood silently, beaming with pride, as his son raised his right arm to salute me. Even though Ray had just left for a top position back home at the Pentagon, he accepted the call to return as commander in Baghdad.

    With Ray Odierno.
White House/Eric Draper
    It gave me solace to know that the next president would be able to rely on the advice of these two wise, battle-tested generals. In our own way, we had continued one of the great traditions of American history. Lincoln discovered Generals Grant and Sherman. Roosevelt had Eisenhower and Bradley. I found David Petraeus and Ray Odierno.

    By the time the surge ended in the summer of 2008, violence in Iraq had dropped to the lowest level since the first year of the war. The sectarian killing that had almost ripped the country apart in 2006 was down more than 95 percent. Prime Minister Maliki, once the object of near-universal blame and scorn, had emerged as a confident leader. Al Qaeda in Iraq had been severely weakened and marginalized. Iran’s malign influence had been reduced. Iraqi forces were preparing to take responsibility for security in a majority of provinces. American deaths, which routinely hit one hundred a month in the worst stretch of the war, never again topped twenty-five, and dropped to single digits by the end of my presidency. Nevertheless, every death was a painful reminder of the costs of war.
    My last major goal was to put Iraq policy onto a stable footing for my successors. In late 2007, we started work on two agreements. One, called a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) , laid the legal predicate for keeping American troops in Iraq after the United Nations mandate expired at the end of 2008. The other, called a Strategic