In June 2006, the presidential meeting with those sympathetic war critics came together at Camp David, atop a ridge in the Maryland foothills just southwest of the Gettysburg battlefield. Eliot Cohen, Michael Vickers, Fred Kagan, and Robert Kaplan-the first three men, smart national security experts; the last, an influential journalist-were generally supportive of the war but critical of its conduct. They were invited to tell the president how it might be better run.

Kagan went to the meeting hoping that it would be "a major turning point." He had believed for years that the war was being mishandled. "Doing the right thing the wrong way" was the phrase that came to characterize the views of his faction of hawks who thought that the decision to invade Iraq had been correct but who were troubled by the U.S. performance since the fall of Baghdad. "Do we have enough troops?" he asked at the meeting.

Cohen, who on the advice of Feaver had given up his customary bow tie for the meeting, agreed that this wasn"t the time to discuss troop cuts, as the generals were doing, but thought Kagan was fiddling too much with the tactical level of operations and wanted the president instead to focus on strategy. "You probably need more people, but the real question is what you do with them," he said. He also urged the president to get the rest of the U.S. government beyond the military more seriously engaged in the effort in Iraq. Cohen knew that Bush had read his Supreme Command. Supreme Command. He wanted to make Bush think about how to deal with his generals-and consider replacing some. For him, the heart of the matter was "different commanders and a different approach." After the meeting, he would lash himself for not hitting this point as hard as he should have. Also, he said, "You know, the Army is in worse shape than you think." Bush didn"t respond. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, also listening, squirmed a bit. Pace had proven a weak chairman, seemingly unwilling to stand up to Rumsfeld when other generals thought he should and instead trying to simply ease the discord at the Pentagon between uniformed military and its civilian overseers. He had a reputation for being a good and decent man, but too pliant. His accomplishment may have been of another sort-keeping the Joint Chiefs from going off the reservation when they split with the president later in the year over whether to change the strategy in the war. He wanted to make Bush think about how to deal with his generals-and consider replacing some. For him, the heart of the matter was "different commanders and a different approach." After the meeting, he would lash himself for not hitting this point as hard as he should have. Also, he said, "You know, the Army is in worse shape than you think." Bush didn"t respond. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, also listening, squirmed a bit. Pace had proven a weak chairman, seemingly unwilling to stand up to Rumsfeld when other generals thought he should and instead trying to simply ease the discord at the Pentagon between uniformed military and its civilian overseers. He had a reputation for being a good and decent man, but too pliant. His accomplishment may have been of another sort-keeping the Joint Chiefs from going off the reservation when they split with the president later in the year over whether to change the strategy in the war.

Nor had Pace been much of a presence in discussions of that strategy. It was the major war on his watch, but he tended to defer to Casey and Abizaid, the two four-star officers directly involved in its prosecution. The irony of all this was that policy formulation was following the prescribed method, with the hierarchy being observed and all the correct bureaucratic players involved, but the system wasn"t really working. That is, it looked good, but it wasn"t leading to a robust discussion by top officials of the necessary strategic questions. Nor were leaders held accountable and quizzed on their failures. It was only months later, when the prescribed system was subverted and the chain of command bypa.s.sed, that a rigorous examination of American strategy in the Iraq war would get under way.

Kaplan used his time to talk about counterinsurgency practices. "Get rid of periodic presence patrols and provide twenty-four/seven security, get out of big bases and deploy smaller units in neighborhoods," he said. He was ambivalent about increasing the number of troops because he believed that those already in Iraq were being used incorrectly.

Vickers, a former CIA officer, had played a key role in outfitting the Afghan mujahadeen in the 1980s in their struggle against the Soviet occupation, a role later immortalized in the book and movie Charlie Wilson"s War. Charlie Wilson"s War. Reaching back to his time then, he emphasized what strategists call the indirect approach-that is, helping a local ally fight rather than having Americans carry the combat load. Draw down your conventional forces and rely more on elite Special Operators, he said. "You"re on borrowed time with the direct approach," said Vickers, according to people who attended the meeting. Reaching back to his time then, he emphasized what strategists call the indirect approach-that is, helping a local ally fight rather than having Americans carry the combat load. Draw down your conventional forces and rely more on elite Special Operators, he said. "You"re on borrowed time with the direct approach," said Vickers, according to people who attended the meeting.

The conversation flowed freely, and the president enjoyed the brisk dialogue, said Feaver, the NSC aide who helped conceive and arrange the meeting. But it didn"t work as he had intended, which was to confront the president and his key advisers with the worried critiques of loyalists. Bush was riding on good news. Not only had a new government been seated, but just a few days earlier, Zarqawi had been found and killed. And as Bush was listening, he knew something his four visitors didn"t-that he would be slipping away from Camp David just minutes later to make a secret trip to Baghdad, his first since Thanksgiving 2003. ("He was almost a little bouncy," Kagan said. "I now recognize that he was very excited about the trip he was about to pull.") So rather than lead to a much-needed review of strategy, the three events effectively combined to reenergize the president"s commitment to the existing one, Feaver said.

Kagan agreed with that a.s.sessment. "I think it [the meeting] had no effect. It certainly didn"t change the minds of the princ.i.p.als. It didn"t generate any follow-up." Rather than a radical change in strategy, he said, "we continued to drift."

Returning from Baghdad, Bush gave a tempered but upbeat a.s.sessment. "I sense something different happening in Iraq," he said in a Rose Garden press conference. "The progress will be steady toward a goal that has clearly been defined. In other words, I hope there"s not an expectation from people that, all of a sudden, there"s going to be zero violence-in other words, it"s just not going to be the case. On the other hand, I do think we"ll be able to measure progress."

In fact, the Camp David meeting would have a far greater long-term effect than anyone could know at the time. In the following months, three of the four worried loyalists who had trekked to the presidential retreat would become deeply involved in revamping Iraq strategy. Cohen took the position of counselor at the State Department, where he became a major strategic voice in the government, not just advising the secretary of state but also officials at the Pentagon and at the White House. Vickers, another of Cohen"s former students, became chief of overseeing Special Operations and strategy at the Pentagon. Bush, still taken with Vickers"s role in arming the Afghan rebels, pinged the Pentagon twice to hurry the clearance process for him. Kagan wouldn"t go into the government but would help redesign U.S. strategy in Iraq, both figuring out what to do and then helping sell the new approach to top White House officials.

THE BATTLE OF BAGHDAD BEGINS.

After the Camp David meeting the situation in Iraq turned sharply worse. The period from mid-2006 to mid-2007 would prove to be the bloodiest 12 months that American troops had seen thus far in the war, with 1,105 killed. Iraqi civilian deaths are harder to determine but were clearly a multiple of that figure. In the summer and fall of 2006, Shiite militias carried out a concerted campaign that pushed Sunnis out of much of Baghdad, which until then had been a mixed city, with Sunnis predominating west of the Tigris River and Shiites to its east.

The battle of Baghdad effectively began at sunrise on Sunday, July 9, when Shiite militiamen, some of them masked, appeared in the Sunni neighborhood of Jihad, near the Baghdad airport. They set up checkpoints on main streets and killed those pa.s.sersby whose ident.i.ty cards indicated they probably were Sunni. They shot up a vegetable market. They also went into homes they believed were occupied by Sunnis. All told, about 50 people were slaughtered. "This is a new step. A red line has been crossed," said Alaa Makky, a Sunni member of parliament. "People have been killed in the streets; now they are killed inside their homes."

The next day, Monday, Saleh Muhammed, a resident of the Sunni neighborhood of Amiriyah in far western Baghdad, called the police emergency line to report that the leading Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army, was attacking the quarter"s Malouki mosque. He was surprised by the dispatcher"s response: "The Mahdi Army are not terrorists like you. They are people doing their duty. And how could you know that they are the Mahdi Army-is it written on their foreheads?"

A wave of Sunni retaliation followed. Two car bombs exploded in Sadr City, the city"s biggest Shiite neighborhood, home to about 2 million people, killing or wounding nearly 30. On Wednesday, gunmen kidnapped a group of people, apparently Shiites, at a bus station in Muqdadiyah, and murdered 22 of them. The following Sunday, a cafe filled with Shiites was blown up north of Baghdad, killing 26. On Monday morning, death squads a.s.saulted the marketplace in the mostly Shiite southern Baghdad suburb of Mahmudiyah. They fired heavy machine guns, burned cars, threw grenades, and entered a cafe to shoot 7 elderly men in the head. At least 40 people were killed. On Tuesday, a minibus loaded with explosives blew up near a Shiite mosque in Kufa, killing 53 day laborers and wounding at least 130 more. Hundreds more Iraqis were dying in smaller incidents. Police in the tough southern Baghdad neighborhood of Doura said 425 people were killed in that area alone during the week after the Jihad marketplace ma.s.sacre. Altogether, more than 3,000 Iraqis were slain during July, the United Nations estimated. It was the deadliest month in three years.

Army Capt. Don Makay, who fought in southwest Baghdad, recalled that during his tour, every Sunni mosque in his area was attacked, in one case, he thought, with the involvement of the local commander of the National Police. From July through October, the number of murdered bodies dumped near Sunni districts "rose considerably," wrote another Army captain, Michael Comstock, in his study of the ethnic-cleansing operation. Other Iraqis were luckier, receiving "night letters" that contained a bullet and an order to vacate their homes within a day or two.

The core of the Iraqi state was rotten. The Iraqi army was heavily Shiite, and even worse, the National Police were thoroughly infiltrated by Shiite militias. These forces didn"t have to carry out the cleansing themselves. All they had to do was go into a Sunni neighborhood and demand in the name of pacification that all heavy weapons be relinquished. After that was accomplished, they could tip off the Shiite militias, who might arrive that night or the next morning, ready to take on the newly defenseless population. As one foreign diplomat in Baghdad summarized the legitimate complaint of Sunnis, "You come and denude us of weapons, and the next day the militias visit."

Nor did the gunmen need to kill everyone-just enough to intimidate the rest. This is how Capt. Eric Haas summarized the tactics of Jaysh al-Mahdi, Moqtada al-Sadr"s radical Shiite militia: "JAM/Shia militia group kidnaps a Sunni male from a mixed-sect market; takes Sunni male to the edge of Sunni-dominated neighborhood; takes Sunni male from the vehicle shot in the back of a head with a pistol; Shia militia drives off."

Crueler tactics, such as using power tools to drill holes in the kneecaps or heads of victims, also became common. "People are killed here every day, and you don"t hear about it," Capt. Lee Showman told the Washington Post" Washington Post"s Josh Partlow. "People are kidnapped here every day, and you don"t hear about it." As the ethnic-cleansing campaign intensified, the number of Iraqis seeking refuge in neighboring nations spiraled, with an estimated 2 million leaving the country. An equal number were cla.s.sified as internally displaced, with much of that movement occurring in 2006.

But the militias" work was hardly done once the Sunnis had been driven out. The next step was to turn the neighborhood into a paying concern. First the vacated houses would be rented to Shias. Then kidnapping and extortion rings would raise money from shop owners and other holders of wealth. Shiite party banners would festoon the altered area. Local police would be intimidated, co-opted, or replaced with Shiite militia members who would cooperate. The explicit support and a.s.sistance of all civilians in the area was demanded. "Leave, join or die" was the summary offered by Army Capt. Josh Francis. At this point the area might become less violent, but that wasn"t necessarily a positive sign. Instead, it might just mean that the job was done and that the newly quiet neighborhood then could be used as a base from which to begin launching attacks on adjacent Sunni areas.

Sgt. Victor Alarcon watched as his battalion in the 1st Infantry Division lost 20 troops in an unsuccessful effort in 2006 to prevent the destruction of what had been a bustling middle-cla.s.s Sunni neighborhood. "I don"t think this place is worth another soldier"s life," he said near the end of his tour.

Maj. Mark Gilmore gave this dismal summary of his time in one Baghdad neighborhood: "When we got there, it was mixed Sunni and Shia. When we left, it was Shia. . . . When we left, it wasn"t even worth counting the Sunnis because there weren"t that many left."

THE FIGHTING in Iraq wasn"t just sectarian. Two other major players in the tragedy of Iraq were also escalating their activities at this time: al Qaeda in Iraq, and Iran.

In August, Col. Peter Devlin, the senior Marine intelligence officer in Iraq, filed a secret report concluding that the U.S. military had lost al Anbar, in western Iraq, and that al Qaeda was now the dominant factor in the province. "The social and political situation has deteriorated to a point that MNF [MultiNational Forces] and ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al Anbar. . . . Underlying this decline in stability is the near complete collapse of social order in al Anbar." What"s more, al Qaeda in Iraq, which was mainly made up of nihilistic Iraqi religious extremists but also included some foreign fighters, who frequently were used in car bombings, had elbowed aside other centers of power in the province and made itself Anbar"s "dominant organization of influence." (Devlin"s a.s.sessment is reprinted in full as the first doc.u.ment in the appendix.) To the north of Baghdad, al Qaeda in Iraq, sometimes referred to by the U.S. military as "AQIZ," launched a swift and viciously effective campaign. "Using a small, localized cell of hardcore believers, AQIZ successfully coerced and intimidated the local populace over time through a four phased plan: clandestine organization, psychological preparation of the people, expansion of control, and consolidation of power," Army Capt. James Few wrote in a study of the terrorist takeover of the town of Zaganiyah.

A mukthar, mukthar, or town elder, sought an audience with al Qaeda leaders in the town of Nukisa to complain about the behavior of the organization"s recruits. He was beaten in public, the humiliation intended to demonstrate that there was a new sheriff in town. In November 2006, while American forces were focused on the deterioration of security in Baghdad, al Qaeda members in the town made their move, launching a complex attack on the local Iraqi police station, with a car bomb followed by an a.s.sault by fighters. "Over the next two weeks, ISF stopped patrolling the area, and CF [coalition forces] designated Zaganiyah as "No-Go" terrain," Few wrote. The al Qaeda cell then consolidated its hold, destroying the home of an Iraqi working as an interpreter for the Americans and beheading a captured Iraqi soldier and a local Shiite. They also dug fighting positions around the town and deeply buried more than 160 bombs, establishing a defensive belt. or town elder, sought an audience with al Qaeda leaders in the town of Nukisa to complain about the behavior of the organization"s recruits. He was beaten in public, the humiliation intended to demonstrate that there was a new sheriff in town. In November 2006, while American forces were focused on the deterioration of security in Baghdad, al Qaeda members in the town made their move, launching a complex attack on the local Iraqi police station, with a car bomb followed by an a.s.sault by fighters. "Over the next two weeks, ISF stopped patrolling the area, and CF [coalition forces] designated Zaganiyah as "No-Go" terrain," Few wrote. The al Qaeda cell then consolidated its hold, destroying the home of an Iraqi working as an interpreter for the Americans and beheading a captured Iraqi soldier and a local Shiite. They also dug fighting positions around the town and deeply buried more than 160 bombs, establishing a defensive belt.

Meanwhile, Iran, capitalizing on the cover provided by violence and counting on the Americans to be distracted, quietly launched its own offensive in Iraq. Devastating "explosively formed projectiles," the most lethal type of roadside bomb, began appearing in great numbers in late 2006. These high-tech bombs operate by melting a disk of metal into a spray of high-velocity drops that cut through armored vehicles, frequently killing three or four soldiers in one blast. U.S. intelligence officials said all the devices were imported from Iran. During 2007 they would become the greatest threat to U.S. troops, inflicting 73 percent of all American casualties.

Asked what he would do differently in 2006 if he could, Abizaid, the top American commander for the Middle East, said, "We didn"t react quickly enough to Shia and Sunni violence," or, he said, to the misdeeds of the Iraqi police.

"FORWARD" INTO FAILURE Finally, in the summer of 2006, the U.S. military and its Iraqi allies launched a major counteroffensive aimed at improving security in the capital. Dubbed "Together Forward," the operation involved some 42,500 Iraqi police and army personnel backed up by 7,200 U.S. troops. The Iraqi forces were instructed to erect new checkpoints, enforce extended dusk-to-dawn curfews and new restrictions on carrying weapons, and step up the frequency of their foot patrols. Posters were distributed showing an Iraqi soldier in tan battle fatigues holding the hand of a smiling Iraqi boy. But the Americans were operating more and more from big bases, removing themselves from the population and from the civil war being waged beyond the tall cement walls of their isolated bastions. They also continued to judge their actions all too often by input, such as the number of patrols conducted, rather than by output, such as the reduction in violence.

The offensive never really got off the ground. "They were dead in the water by midsummer," said Krepinevich, the counterinsurgency expert.

For Brett McGurk, a staffer on the National Security Council who was in Baghdad that summer, the failure was a turning point in his view of the approach the U.S. military was taking. "Gaziliyah was probably the best example of a clearly failing strategy," he recalled. "We go in, MNF-I reports its metrics (buildings cleared, violence reduced), we leave, and violence in Gaziliyah hits all-time highs." His conclusion was that "it was clearly a failed recipe-the question was whether we could do anything about it."

Fred Kagan, the defense a.n.a.lyst who had been at Camp David as the summer began, later said the offensive was doomed from the start, because it relied excessively on Iraqi police forces, which he said were part of the problem, not the solution. "They were not and could not be effective bulwarks on their own against sectarian violence of which they were a part," he wrote.

American commanders would, in fact, blame Iraqi units for the failure. "The loyalty of the Iraqi security forces, particularly the police, was the overriding issue that kept this from being a success," Gen. Casey said in an interview. A secondary flaw, he said was the slowness with which the Iraqi government moved to conduct follow-on economic aid projects. "It was never clear whether it was incompetence or sectarian bias."

Chiarelli, the number two U.S. commander in Iraq, added," I was under the impression that we would get two additional Iraqi brigades, and they didn"t show up." In addition, Abizaid said, the American liaison connection to Iraqi forces needed to be strengthened.

Some in Iraq said that Chiarelli and Casey should have known that the Americans couldn"t rely on Iraqi forces to carry a large part of the burden. "They ordered these Kurdish units to come down," recalled Maj. Matt Whitney, who at the time was an adviser to the Iraqi Ground Forces Command, a top headquarters. "One of them mutinied. They look for troops in the south and they wouldn"t come either. They looked for two more units from the north and they didn"t come." He wasn"t surprised by this, because many Iraqi units thought they were supposed to defend the area where they were based. They had neither the training nor the equipment to pack up and move around the country. "General Casey was frustrated because he couldn"t get Iraqi units to deploy, although we never built that army to deploy. Somehow he was surprised by this."

Together Forward not only didn"t work, it backfired on Gen. Casey, because it undercut the confidence of Bush administration officials in his ability to deliver. "In July, when Baghdad Security Plan One tanked, they said, "We didn"t have enough reliable Iraqi units, they didn"t show up,"" recalled Feaver, one of the National Security Council staffers working on Iraq. "Over the summer, doubts began to grow among White House officials working on Iraq. By September the NSC staff initiated a quiet but thorough review of strategy with an eye to developing a new way forward."

McGurk, the NSC staffer, returned to the White House with doubts not just about the approach but about the people implementing it. He "had lost all faith in our security strategy. MNF-I and the emba.s.sy were locked in a corrosive cycle of finger-pointing . . . with n.o.body asking serious questions about what to do differently."

A new iteration, Together Forward II, was launched on August 8. It did nothing to stop the big bombings. Casey called in additional troops from his theater reserve and sent those reinforcements to help clear the city, block by block. The notion was that Iraqi forces then would hold those areas. "Clear, hold, and build" was a phrase that grew out of Col. H. R. McMaster"s successful campaign in the northern Iraqi city of Tall Afar, one of the few bright spots in the war that year. A visiting State Department official picked up the phrase and pa.s.sed it along to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who used it in congressional testimony. Rumsfeld resisted the phrase, even after the White House adopted it. He argued that it was the job of the Iraqis or the State Department to oversee holding and building, but grudgingly seemed to accept the idea as at least a rhetorical necessity.

There was little reason to believe that the plan to clear, hold, and build in Baghdad would work any better the second time around. Brig. Gen. John Campbell started in Baghdad as the a.s.sistant commander of the 1st Cavalry Division on the day Operation Together Forward II began. He watched as attacks rose steadily despite U.S. efforts. "They went through and cleared, and tried to hold that with Iraqi forces," Campbell said. "The issue was, we didn"t have enough ISF, both in quant.i.ty and quality."

The failure to hold meant that the U.S. military was simply repeating the pattern of 2003-5 that Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency a.n.a.lyst, had labeled "kiss of death" operations, in which American forces moved into an area, found cooperative locals, and then, after some improvement of security, pulled out of the area. "Then," Kilcullen grimly concluded, "insurgents kill those who cooperated with us."

White House officials were also concluding that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was impeding success, especially because it wouldn"t allow actions to be taken against Shiite militias, Feaver said. Indeed, after U.S. Army units launched a raid into Sadr City in early August, resulting in a two-hour-long firefight, Maliki angrily appeared on television to apologize for the operation. "This won"t happen again," he promised. Chiarelli said that Maliki constantly impeded U.S. operations during the summer and fall of 2006. Near the end of the year, for example, U.S. Special Operators would pick up in Baghdad one of the most senior leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard"s Quds Force, the guard"s wing for foreign Islamic revolutionary operations. He was believed to be involved in planning attacks on U.S. forces and was found at the compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of an influential Shiite political party that was a big part of Maliki"s ruling coalition and one of the most prominent politicians in Iraq. U.S. officials were furious when a few days later, Maliki"s government sent the Quds man back to Iran.

August ended with two days of ferocious bombings, with 27 people killed in the Shorja market, Baghdad"s largest bazaar, on the thirtieth, and then 66 killed the next day as a huge explosion flattened an apartment building in a Shiite neighborhood. Meanwhile, Shiite militiamen battled U.S. troops both in Sadr City and in the southern city of Diwaniyah. The same month saw a 33-day Israeli war with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon end in what was widely seen as a military and political setback for Israel, an outcome that only further worried a.n.a.lysts a.s.sessing the American position in Iraq.

Despite the growing violence, Casey continued to insist on a policy that emphasized transition to Iraqi forces. Late in August, he predicted that Iraqi forces would be able to provide security in the country pretty much on their own by late 2007 or early 2008. "I can see-over the next twelve to eighteen months-I can see the Iraqi security forces progressing to a point where they can take on the security responsibilities for the country with very little coalition support," he said.

Chiarelli, the number two officer in Iraq, and so commander of day-to-day operations, occupies an ambiguous position in this tale. As the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division in Baghdad during his previous tour, he had done a far better job than most in understanding the principles of counterinsurgency. There were rumors of disagreement between Casey and him over the way forward. Publicly he was entirely supportive of Casey, reiterating in mid-September the view that sending additional U.S. troops was not the answer. "I feel that given the conditions we"ve got in Baghdad, we"ve got the force posture exactly where it needs to be," he said. On the face of it, there would appear to be little else that he could do, given his subordinate position. Yet just a few months later, Lt. Gen. Odierno would arrive to take over from Chiarelli in that number two slot and effectively challenge Casey as Chiarelli had never done, conducting his own strategic review that ultimately would reverse almost every tenet of American strategy in Iraq. Chiarelli struggled with the number two position; Odierno would redefine it.

Sadi Othman, who would become one of Petraeus"s closest advisers in Iraq, said that in retrospect, neither American officials nor Iraqi leaders understood just how dangerous the situation was in 2006. "I think people knew the situation was bad, but they didn"t know it was very, very bad," he said in 2008. "The Americans didn"t get out of the Green Zone. The government of Iraq didn"t get out. And we didn"t have troops on the streets. So when people said things were okay, they weren"t lying. They were innocent."

Chiarelli, in a 2008 interview, disputed Othman"s a.s.sertion. In fact, he said, he had gone to Maliki in July "to tell him how bad it was." The prime minister"s chilling response, he recalled, had been "It was a lot worse in Saddam"s time." American officers interpreted this to mean that Maliki didn"t intend to do anything to curtail the violence, which was Shiite payback against Sunnis for what had happened before.

Meanwhile, political pressure was building for a radical shift away from Casey"s approach. In September the Iraq Study Group, which had been appointed by Congress to review policy in the war and to make recommendations to improve it, arrived in Baghdad to check its views against the thinking in the Green Zone, the heavily guarded enclave in the center of Baghdad that housed the headquarters of the American effort in Iraq. Many of the study group"s members, such as former congressman Lee Hamilton and former secretary of state James Baker-its two chairs-were more familiar with politics and diplomacy than warfare. Another member, Robert Gates, was destined to become defense secretary just four months later, but n.o.body knew that then. At the time, there were just two members of the group who knew the military establishment well: former defense secretary William Perry and former senator Charles Robb, a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War and a longtime member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Both Perry and Robb had come to think that current U.S. strategy couldn"t continue and were mulling advocating a troop escalation.

Before heading to Baghdad, Perry had distributed a memorandum to the group making an argument for such a "surge" in troops in Iraq. "We thought we couldn"t get enough troops to surge the whole country, but we could maybe have an effect in Baghdad," he recalled. (President Bush said in 2008 that when he interviewed Robert Gates in November 2006 about becoming defense secretary, Gates told him that he also had favored such an increase.) When the group met with Casey and Chiarelli, the generals threw cold water on the idea of a troop increase. "They were very explicit," Perry said. "Both Casey and Chiarelli said this would not be useful, as they saw the problems in Iraq." The officers offered three arguments: First, it would give the Iraqi government the impression that the Americans would solve their problems. Second, it would decrease the leverage the Americans had. Third, whatever improvement it provided wouldn"t last. "They made the point that wherever you put American troops, it would stabilize the situation-but when they left, it would destabilize the situation."

Perry worried that the group was being given what he called a "party line," so he asked for separate one-on-one meetings to get the generals" personal views. In those private sessions, he said, "Both stuck to their guns."

Faced with the opposition of the top U.S. military leadership on the ground, Perry withdrew the idea. When he wrote the first draft of the military section of the group"s report, he left out the idea of a surge. "It would have been in there if they had responded differently," he said. Ultimately, the group"s report straddled the idea, rejecting a major increase but conditionally supporting "a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad . . . if the U.S. commander in Iraq determines that such steps would be effective."

Chiarelli said later that he wasn"t against getting additional forces. "In fact, I already knew where I would put a brigade," he said in an interview at the Pentagon in 2008 shortly before he pinned on a fourth star and became the vice chief of staff of the Army. But, he added, he knew that it would take time to bring in additional troops. "I thought we could push violence down a lot faster if we went to Maliki" and delivered a strong message: Your policies, such as not delivering services to Sunnis, are exacerbating sectarian tensions. "We need to use our leverage with Maliki," was his recommendation. At any rate, he remembered, when he arrived in Iraq at the beginning of 2006, he had been told that during that year, the U.S. combat presence would be nearly halved, from 108 bases to 50, and from 15 brigades to as few as 8.

In sum, Casey and Chiarelli were sticking to their approach, even though there was little evidence of it working. The U.S. strategy, concluded Anthony Cordesman, a defense a.n.a.lyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was "deeply flawed in timing and resources. It was based on a grossly exaggerated estimate of political success, an almost deliberately false exaggeration of the success of the economic aid effort and progress in developing the ISF."

Francis "Bing" West, a former Marine and Pentagon official who had a son fighting in Iraq, put it even more bluntly: "The strategy was a hope posing as a plan."

By late 2006, agreed Philip Zelikow, who at the time was counselor at the State Department, there was essentially "a strategic void" in Iraq.

Oddly, the White House also decided that this was a good time to attack critics of the war as appeasers and worse. Rumsfeld said they were morally and intellectually confused, not unlike those who had opposed confronting Hitler in the late 1930s. Cheney said those who disagreed with his administration"s approach were abetting terrorists. Bush, a mite more generously, conceded that the detractors were "sincere" and "patriotic," but said "they could . . . not be more wrong."

That White House move was an inept political tactic, because it made it appear that the president was divorced from the realities of Iraq and dismissing the legitimate worries of those who believed-with ample evidence-that the war was being mishandled and that it, in fact, was rapidly spinning out of control. During the winter of 2005-6, there had been about 500 attacks a week on U.S. and allied forces. By late in the summer of 2006, there were almost 800. Some 1,200 roadside bombs were detonated in August. The number of roadside bombs was at an "all time high," conceded Maj. Gen. William Caldwell IV, the U.S. military spokesman in Iraq. The bombings continued like a daily drumbeat, contributing to the capital"s monthly civilian death toll of about 1,000.

In one of the most horrific incidents, on September 23, a bomb exploded as people waited in line to buy gasoline, sending women engulfed in flames running through the streets. Witnesses reported that two young girls embraced each other as they stood in the inferno burning to death. "This deployment, every patrol you"re finding dead people," Staff Sgt. Ian Newland told Army Times. Army Times. "It"s like one to 12 a patrol. Their eyes are gouged out. Their arms are broken. We saw a kid who had been shot 10 to 15 times." Newland"s company arrived in Baghdad in August, and over the next 15 months it would lose 14 men, the most of any Army company to fight in Iraq. In the first week of October 2006, some 24 soldiers and Marines were killed, most of them in Baghdad, and nearly 300 more were wounded. The violence was also spreading, with Shiite militias fighting Iraqi police to the south of the capital and confronting Sunni militias to the north. "It"s like one to 12 a patrol. Their eyes are gouged out. Their arms are broken. We saw a kid who had been shot 10 to 15 times." Newland"s company arrived in Baghdad in August, and over the next 15 months it would lose 14 men, the most of any Army company to fight in Iraq. In the first week of October 2006, some 24 soldiers and Marines were killed, most of them in Baghdad, and nearly 300 more were wounded. The violence was also spreading, with Shiite militias fighting Iraqi police to the south of the capital and confronting Sunni militias to the north.

Internal Army surveys of the morale of soldiers underscored the feeling of loss. In both 2004 and 2005, studies by an official Mental Health Advisory Team had reported that morale was improving among troops involved in combat. But a September 2006 a.s.sessment found a sharp decline.

On October 19, Gen. Caldwell, the U.S. military spokesman, acknowledged that the renewed security effort in the capital was failing. "Operation Together Forward has made a difference in the focus areas, but has not met our overall expectations of sustaining a reduction in the levels of violence," Caldwell said. "We find the insurgent elements, the extremists, are in fact punching back hard. They"re trying to get back into those areas. We"re constantly going back in and doing clearing operations again."

Caldwell"s admission might have been the worst point of the entire war, at least so far. The U.S. military had played its ace in the hole-"the sole superpower" had a.s.serted itself in Iraq"s most important city-yet had not been able to reverse the deteriorating security of the capital. What"s more, not only had U.S. commanders taken their best shot and failed, they apparently were going to continue on the same unpromising course of handing off control to Iraqis who didn"t seem competent or much interested in the stability the Americans wanted.

In the midst of all this, in the fall of 2006, Iraqi army and police forces finally hit their targeted size of about 325,000 total-but the U.S. wasn"t able to stand down as they stood up, as the president for years had said would happen, repeating the phrase as late as June of the year. Paradoxically, as the number of Iraqi soldiers and police grew, so did the violence in the streets of the capital. From August through October 2006, the number of attacks in Iraq grew by 22 percent, according to the U.S. military database, which almost certainly undercounted the total but probably was accurate in tracking the direction of the trend.

The Americans seemed to have run out of both troops and ideas. The one possible bright spot in that bankrupt approach was that it created the conditions for the strategic surprise that Petraeus and Odierno would launch a few months later, as they showed both new flexibility and determination. Given the track record of the previous four years, no one in Iraq saw that one coming.

The downward trend continued. In October 2006 an American soldier was kidnapped. American intelligence officials suspected he was being held in Sadr City, the stronghold of Moqtada al-Sadr"s militia, the Jaysh al-Mahdi, or JAM. The U.S. Army, searching desperately for the missing soldier, erected a series of checkpoints along the Ca.n.a.l Road, the broad boulevard that parallels the south side of a densely packed neighborhood slum. Maliki told Casey to lift the checkpoints. "If that"s your order, we"ll do it," Casey responded. "But people will say you don"t care about American soldiers, and that you kowtowed to Sadr. Third, the Sunnis will read this as a pro-JAM action. Can you accept that?" Maliki said he could.

Casey was reading a history of the Vietnam War at the time and thought of the weak and chaotic governments that American officials had dealt with in Saigon back then. "How do you save a head of state when he is diametrically opposed to the policy you are trying to save him with?" he thought to himself.

Then he called his deputy, Chiarelli, and told him to lift the checkpoints. "This was going on all the time with Maliki," Chiarelli recalled. "We had certain things we could do in Sadr City, but not what we needed to do."

Maj. Gen. David Fastabend, hearing about the order to remove the checkpoints, called another general and said, "This is the singular moment of defeat. If you want to know when we lost, this was it." The ethnic cleansing continued as Shiite militias pushed Sunnis westward. "You"d find dumped bodies every day," recalled Maj. David Voorhies, who was advising an Iraqi army unit that he believed was infiltrated by Shiite militias. "You"d see murders, a lot of extra-judicial killings, a lot of kidnappings, a lot of demonstrations would arise. Eventually those areas would collapse . . . on Amiriyah and Gaziliyah, which were really the last two big Sunni neighborhoods in west Baghdad."

The failures of the summer and fall of 2006 may have given the U.S. military establishment the push it needed to realize that everything it had tried over several years wasn"t working, and that-despite the a.s.surances of commanders in Iraq-a very different approach was needed. A major split was developing inside the military about what the next step in Iraq should be. Some called for an accelerated transition to Iraqi control, but others said that would just lead to an intensified civil war. Others called for backing out of Iraq and letting the Iraqis sort it out, and others responded that that move could lead to regional war. And a few, here and there, were thinking about increasing the number of troops and using them differently. One of the significant consequences of this split was that, really for the first time in the war, the Bush administration could no longer blandly state that it was following the advice of the military. By late 2006, there simply no longer was a consensus view to follow. "We may need more resources, but first we need a strategy," Eliot Cohen and Francis "Bing" West would write a few months later.

Even more significantly, the doubts White House staffers had held about the top American general in Iraq had reached the president. Bush usually was affable in his conversations, but in mid-November, "the president was noticeably cold," Casey recalled. So, after three years of war, Bush and his aides would be forced into a serious review of their strategy in Iraq. Finally, they would begin to ask some of the basic questions that they had neglected to address before the invasion.

WASHINGTON WINCES.

Back in Washington, Jack Keane, the old general who was more influential in retirement than most officers are while on active duty, was growing increasingly concerned as he watched the two Baghdad security operations sputter to a halt. "We had two bites of this apple in Baghdad, and we failed both times," he said. "I knew that our chances to succeed in Iraq were just slipping by us." He decided it was time to share his worries with the Bush administration.

The White House was ready to listen to him. Gen. Casey may not have known it, but the failures of the Together Forward operations were the beginning of the end for his command in Iraq. Behind closed doors, the outlook appeared even worse. "Even in the military, there"s a concern right now that wasn"t previously," said one worried Marine colonel. "Folks that took things at face value in the past are asking more questions."

Pressure was clearly building for an overhaul of American strategy in Iraq, but a major obstacle stood in the way at the top of the Pentagon. Not long before he was fired, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld insisted that the strategy of pa.s.sing responsibility to the Iraqi forces was working and needed no change. "The biggest mistake would be to not pa.s.s things over to the Iraqis, create a dependency on their part, and instead of developing strength and capacity and competence," he said at a press conference the day after Caldwell spoke in Baghdad. "It"s their country. They"re going to have to govern it, they"re going to have to provide security for it, and they"re going to have to do it sooner rather than later. And that means they"ve got to take pieces of it as we go along, even though someone may inaccurately characterize it as a strategic mistake, which it wouldn"t be at all."

Bush would back up Rumsfeld, saying he was flexible about tactics but wasn"t contemplating a change in strategy or goals. "Are we winning?" asked a reporter at an East Room news conference a few days later.

"Absolutely, we"re winning," Bush insisted. At the same time, he said, "I know many Americans are not satisfied with the situation in Iraq. I"m not satisfied either. And that is why we"re taking new steps to help secure Baghdad and constantly adjusting our tactics across the country to meet the changing threat."

Feaver, the White House aide, cringed at Bush"s "winning" comment. "That wasn"t the way it felt from where I sat." He recalled that at this time, Karl Rove, the president"s political adviser, was also speaking up, telling others, "We need a new face on Iraq"-by which he apparently meant that Rumsfeld should leave.

Support for the war was eroding rapidly among the Republican Party faithful. Back in February, John Warner, the courtly Virginia Republican who was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had expressed "a high degree of confidence" that a new government would take charge and that by the end of the year the conflict "won"t be the same." But as October opened, Warner returned from Iraq with a far grimmer a.s.sessment: "The situation is simply drifting sideways."

Something had to give, said Senator Olympia Snowe, a centrist Maine Republican. "I don"t believe we can continue based on an open-ended, unconditional presence."

Senator Lindsey Graham, a conservative South Carolina Republican and a close friend of John McCain"s, was mulling a different strategy. "The American people are beginning to wonder if the Iraqi people can get this right," he said. "People have begun to wonder about the basic premise, that the Iraqi people are capable of solving their problems politically. We"re at a real crossroads. The level of violence in October just shows you we don"t have enough security to ensure long-term success."

Others argued that the situation was even more dire than that. "Basically, the bottom has fallen out of support with the general public," former Republican congressman Vin Weber said later that October, just before the election. "The public is on the verge of throwing up its hands over Iraq. They are right on the edge of believing that success isn"t possible."

A LIGHT IN RAMADI.

Near the end of Gen. Caldwell"s press conference on October 19, a few minutes after the spokesman had announced the failure of the Baghdad security plan, one reporter had inquired about some odd reports coming out of Ramadi, 60 miles to the west of Baghdad. Specifically, inquired the man from Reuters news agency, why were armed civilians marching in the streets? What was going on out there? Caldwell responded that he hadn"t heard about that and would look into it.

It was a good question, because Ramadi had been one of Iraq"s most dangerous cities for years. This time, to the astonishment of anyone focused on Baghdad, the armed men were not members of al Qaeda in Iraq but allies of the Americans, albeit tentative ones. Ramadi, the capital of turbulent al Anbar Province, had begun to provide a counterexample to Baghdad. That turnaround, led by Col. Sean MacFarland, would take place even as the senior Marine intelligence officer in the country p.r.o.nounced the province lost. Ramadi in 2006 would become the link between the first successful large-scale U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, in Tall Afar in 2005, and the "surge" counteroffensive in Baghdad in 2007.

By chance, MacFarland"s unit first had been a.s.signed to replace the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tall Afar, in the far northwest of Iraq, and had spent several months there before moving south to Ramadi. What MacFarland and his subordinates had seen there was very different from how the U.S. military had operated in Iraq for several years. The new approach made sense to him. Under Col. H. R. McMaster, an innovative officer unafraid to chart a different course, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment had slowly and patiently approached Tall Afar, a medieval feeling town of about 250,000. After the U.S. military reduced its presence in northern Iraq in 2004, Islamic extremists had begun to seep in from Syria and make contact with local allies. By mid-2005 they had intimidated the locals with terror tactics and made the town a base from which to send suicide bombers and other attackers 40 miles easy to Mosul, the most important city in northern Iraq. "Give the enemy credit," said Maj. Chris Kennedy. "As soon as we started pulling back, the enemy identified that as a weak point."

McMaster, who is both a rugby player and a Ph.D. in history, began by telling his soldiers to treat Iraqis with dignity and respect. "Every time you treat an Iraqi disrespectfully, you are working for the enemy," he instructed them-neatly summarizing counterinsurgency theory in a way that any nineteen-year-old infantryman could grasp. In a marked contrast to the att.i.tude found in some other units, his standing orders required his soldiers to "Treat detainees professionally; do not tolerate abusive behavior." He met with sheikhs and clerics who had ties to the insurgency and apologized for past American mistakes: "When the Americans first came to Iraq, we were in a dark room, stumbling around, breaking china. But now Iraqi leaders are turning on the lights." And, he added, the time for honorable resistance had ended.

Then, after months of preparatory moves in the desert around the city, cutting off lines of retreat and safe havens, McMaster attacked Tall Afar. Rather than just stage patrols from his big base outside the city, he moved his people into it, establishing 29 outposts in its neighborhoods. In sum, it was a model of a counterinsurgency campaign, the first large-scale one conducted in the war. It was an example the U.S. military needed badly. In far northwest Iraq, a Marine battalion commanded by Lt. Col. Dale Alford carried out a similar campaign, establishing outposts in the area of al Qaim and cutting deals with local sheikhs. However, these examples weren"t imitated by other commanders, probably because they were at odds with the strategy set by Gen. Casey and his boss at Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid. Working on the theory that the U.S. military presence was an irritant to Iraqi society, the generals were trying to oversee a transition to Iraqi forces and so wanted an ever-shrinking American "footprint." By contrast, McMaster injected thousands of U.S. troops into the middle of a city, implicitly saying that they were not the problem but part of the solution, that American troops weren"t the sand irritating Iraqi society, but could be the glue that held it together.

McMaster"s organization also began to grasp the significance of Iraqi tribal power. One of MacFarland"s officers, Capt. Travis Patriquin, a bright, bushy-haired, Special Forces veteran who spoke Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese, was particularly intrigued by this. Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, his counterpart in the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, told him about an officer"s encounter with a sheikh of the Shammar tribe. "Sheikh, why do you smuggle sheep and benzine in from Syria?" the officer asked.

The sheikh had responded, "Why did you put the Syrian border in the middle of my sheep? We were here first."

Yingling told Patriquin about the Shammar tribe"s view of the world. "He understood it very well, and got a good laugh out of the story," he recalled.

A few months later MacFarland was ordered to move his unit, the 1st brigade of the Army"s 1st Armored Division, to Ramadi. A soft-spoken officer from an Irish Catholic neighborhood in Albany, New York, MacFarland knew that every brigade a.s.signed to that violent provincial capital had lost about 100 soldiers during its tour of duty, even as the city steadily declined into chaos. "I"ll be G.o.dd.a.m.ned if I lose one hundred soldiers here and have nothing to show for it," the brown-haired cavalryman, a 1981 graduate of West Point, vowed to himself.

His orders were to "fix Ramadi but don"t do a Fallujah"-a reference to the intense battles for that city just to the southeast in 2004. "But I really wasn"t sure how I was going to "fix Ramadi." "

All the conventional responses had been tried and none had worked, so three years into the war, MacFarland was willing to take a gamble on something different. Anbar Province had at first been all but ignored in the planning for the 2003 invasion, then treated as an "economy of force" operation, and then saw two bruising battles for control of Fallujah in 2004. In a low point just before MacFarland"s brigade arrived, a protest broke out at a graduation ceremony for 978 Iraqi soldiers, most of them Sunnis, at nearby Camp Habbaniyah. Provoked by word that they would be ordered to deploy outside their home province of al Anbar, some soldiers began tearing off their uniforms before the astonished eyes of the Iraqi and American officials in attendance for the event, which they had hailed in speeches as a major step in the formation of the Iraqi army. At the time, U.S. military spokesmen attempted to minimize the significance of the event. "It was actually a very small number of graduates," claimed one, Army Lt. Col. Michael Negard. But Carter Malkasian, a counterinsurgency adviser to the Marine Corps in Anbar, later disclosed that a full two-thirds of the soldiers refused to deploy, and more than that ultimately deserted.

On top of that, the Iraqi battalion that MacFarland was counting on for help had mutinied upon being informed that it would be deployed to Ramadi. Of several hundred men in the Iraqi unit, only about 140 showed up, he recalled-and most of them refused to leave the base to go on patrol. "We basically just sent them home," he said.

MacFarland"s audaciously different approach to Ramadi ultimately would become an out-of-town tryout for the surge that came eight months later in Baghdad, not so much in troop numbers, but-far more important-in the strategy of moving into the population and the tactics of how to do that successfully. The two major differences are that Ramadi is overwhelmingly Sunni, and so didn"t have sectarian fighting, and also is a fraction of the size of the capital.

In 2005 al Qaeda in Iraq had mounted a ferocious campaign against about 12 tribal leaders who competed with the terrorist group for the loyalty of al Anbar"s population by forming the Anbar People"s Council. "This was the first broadly based opposition to al Qaeda," recalled Marine Brig. Gen. John Allen. "Al Qaeda recognized the threat and attacked almost immediately," conducting a focused and efficient a.s.sa.s.sination campaign. In one month, half the sheikhs in the council were dead, with the remainder fleeing the country. The Americans really hadn"t come to the aid of the sheikhs, who had multiple ties to the Sunni insurgency.

"There was a large safe haven there. . . . Al Qaeda was calling the shots," MacFarland said. "Zarqawi was known to go out there, for instance. I mean, this was where al Qaeda went when they got pushed out of Fallujah." In retrospect, he estimated that he faced perhaps 5,000 fighters in the city.

When MacFarland"s unit arrived in Ramadi, it was. .h.i.t by bombs, grenades, mortars, and rifle fire an average of 25 times a day. It was replacing a unit from the Pennsylvania National Guard that had retreated from parts of the city. "My predecessor was just trading artillery fire with the rocket and mortar fire," he remembered. "Al Qaeda had the run of the town. . . . The enemy basically controlled the center part of the city." Every night, insurgents were planting an average of eight roadside bombs in and around the town. The National Guardsmen had stopped patrolling in areas where they had been hit hard, he said, leaving parts of the city map that, he joked, were labeled, HERE BE MONSTERS.

The city wasn"t even on life support. "There was no mayor, there was no city council, and there were no communications like we had in Tall Afar," he said. "Basically, all services had stopped."

Sheikhs were telling reporters that they no longer felt safe being around Americans. "Today, there is no tribal sheikh or a citizen who dares to go to the city hall or the U.S. base, because Zarqawi issued a statement ordering his men to kill anyone seen leaving the base or city hall," said the head of one tribe, Bashir Abdul Qadir al-Kubaisat. The U.S. military a.s.sessed that of the 21 tribes in the area, only 6 would cooperate with it.

Desperation may be one of the stepmothers of invention. "There was really no place to go but up," MacFarland recalled. "I was willing to try whatever made sense." Other units were moving away from the cities, concentrating their forces on big bases. He decided to go in the opposite direction. His commanders, who were Marines, were skeptical, having seen dialogues with tribal leaders start up and then peter out before, but they let him take a flyer. "I had the backing of my bosses, but not a lot of guidance. I felt like if it failed, it would be my failure."