Neocons Push the Surge
That is essentially the account that Bush offers in his memoir, in the context of presenting the "surge" as one of his finest hours as the Decider, albeit with the guidance of leading neocons.
In June 2006, Bush wrote, he received a special briefing from outside experts:
"Fred Kagan, a military scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, questioned whether we had enough troops to control the violence. Robert Kaplan, a distinguished journalist, recommended adopting a more aggressive counterinsurgency strategy.
"Michael Vickers, a former CIA operative who helped arm the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s, suggested a greater role for Special Operations. Eliot Cohen, the author of Supreme Command, a book about the relationship between presidents and their generals ", told me I needed to hold my commanders accountable for results."
In other words, the seeds of the "surge" came from neocons, including "journalist" Robert Kaplan, who took it upon themselves to advise the commander-in-chief on escalating the killing in Iraq.
This neocon advice clashed with the judgment of the commanders in the field, whose recommendations Bush famously pronounced he would follow.
By mid-2006, the commanders were seeing a turning point in the violence that was ripping Iraq apart. Sunni militants had begun rejecting al-Qaeda extremists; Zarqawi was killed in an air raid; the sectarian violence had caused a de facto ethnic cleansing with Sunni and Shiites retreating to safer enclaves; a classified program was targeting and killing insurgents in greater numbers.
The field commanders, including the senior general in Iraq, George Casey, favored an accelerated drawdown of U.S. forces and an exit plan for combat troops, rather than an expanded and open-ended stay. The commanders had Rumsfeld's support.
Bush wrote: "General [George] Casey told me we could succeed by transferring responsibility to the Iraqis faster. We needed to "help them help themselves,' Don Rumsfeld said. That was another way of saying that we needed to take our hand off the bicycle seat.
"I wanted to send a message to the team that I was thinking differently. "We must succeed,' I said. "If they can't do it, we will. If the bicycle teeters, we're going to put the hand back on. We have to make damn sure we do not fail.'"
To impose this new strategy, Bush sought new leadership both in Iraq and at the Pentagon, sounding out Gates as a replacement for Rumsfeld.
"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."
Sealing the Deal
Once Rumsfeld was dumped and Gates was appointed (to the misguided acclaim of Official Washington), Bush and the neocons pressed ahead with the escalation. Bush wrote:
"Over weeks of intense discussion in November and December, most of the national security team came to support the surge. Dick Cheney, Bob Gates, Josh Bolten, and Steve Hadley and his NSC warriors were behind the new approach."
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