Sayle, Timothy Andrews, Engel, Jeffrey, Brands, Hal and Inboden, William, Edited by, The Last Card, Inside George W. Bush’s Decision To Surge In Iraq, Cornell University Press, 2019
The Last Card, Inside George W. Bush’s Decision To Surge In Iraq provides the most comprehensive view of how the Bush administration decided to order the Surge in 2007. It consists of two halves. The first is interviews with 28 members of the White House starting with President Bush himself along with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and various members of the National Security Council, State Department, and Pentagon. The second part is a series of articles by academics trying to evaluate the decision making process and giving some views of whether the Surge worked or not. It’s those firsthand accounts of most of the major players within the government that makes this a must read for those interested in the Surge.
The first part of the book goes through how members of the Bush administration began to realize that the war was going in the wrong direction. Each person interviewed had their own opinion of what changed their mind but three of the more important events were the February 2006 bombing of the Askari shrine by Al Qaeda in Iraq and the failure of Operation Together Forward I and II to secure Baghdad. The explosion of sectarian violence after the Askari incident shocked many in the administration while the two operations made it apparent that the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) were not up to the job of protecting the country. This made many realize that their previous assumptions that the U.S. presence was the cause of instability in the country and therefore the ISF needed to be developed so that the Americans could eventually withdraw were not true. This highlights that it wasn’t one event but rather several that eventually made the majority of civilians within the White House realize things had to change.
By the spring of 2006 President Bush realized that Iraq was not working out as planned and that a new policy was needed. The administration’s decision making process was complicated because Bush and the National Security Council (NSC) were the first to realize the problems going on but they needed to bring along the rest of the agencies who had opposing views. The State Department, the Pentagon and the military all thought the U.S. should either withdraw or pull back from providing security and let the Iraqis work out their differences through violence. The NSC and the president had to go through a painstaking process of getting all these different groups to eventually agree on the Surge.
The interviews also go over how there were a series of starts and stops in this process. For instance in early 2006 Bush wanted Defense Secretary Rumsfeld out so that a new strategy could be forged but then several ex-generals began criticizing the secretary in the media and the president didn’t want to be seen as giving into them so he kept Rumsfeld on for another 6 months. He was like the gorilla in the room because he was staunchly opposed to any change in the war and intimidated other members of the White House. Another time the NSC organized a meeting at Camp David to go over what was going on in Iraq hoping that would push the president to formally call for a review but then he went to Iraq the next day to back new Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and thus stick with the old plan. These moves effectively killed any major movement within the administration towards formulating the surge.
All those interviewed praised Bush as the one who was able to pull his advisors together to get the Surge to happen. He knew that if he just ordered a troop increase there would be opposition within his administration which could undermine the effort. He realized that he had to persuade people like Secretary of State Rice and the military to agree with his point of view. That’s one of the most fascinating points is the politics involved within the White House that had to be played out.
There are other interesting points brought up in the book as well. For one, from 2003-06 Bush deferred to the military on the war and believed their rosy reporting that things were going as scheduled with the development of the ISF and an eventual withdrawal. Everyday Bush was getting briefed on Iraq and could see that the violence was growing but still thought that things were going in the right direction.
Second, before 2006 the administration believed that politics would lead to security in Iraq. They held up events such as the three elections in 2005 as signs that Baghdad was moving towards a democracy and that would eventually convince the insurgents to give up and join the political process. There appeared to be no analysis of what the elections or constitution actually did within Iraq. For instance the first election led to an almost complete Sunni boycott the exact opposite of the American assumptions. The constitution was written almost exclusively by Shiites and Kurds and the Sunnis were almost able to vote it down. The fact that violence kept on escalating also seemed to be dismissed for the hope of a better tomorrow.
Third, many in the administration didn’t understand what the U.S. strategy was in Iraq. For one, the NSC and State Department believed that the main problem was that the White House wasn’t explaining their strategy to the American public as if winning over the U.S. would make things in Iraq better. Then several members of the White House didn’t seem to know what the policy was. Karl Rove one of Bush’s top advisers attacked Representative Jack Murtha for calling for a withdrawal when that was what the U.S. was trying to do.
Fourth there was a debate amongst the officials and scholars about the length of time it took to forge the Surge. It took 7-8 months for the new plan to be forged. Meghan O’Sullivan of the NSC complained that having all the different agencies conduct their own independent reviews instead of a unitary process dragged things out. Bush also didn’t ever express any urgency in coming up with a new plan despite the war failing. One of the scholarly chapters however points out that the Johnson administration took 5 months in 1965 to decide to send U.S. combat troops to Vietnam and they did not have as many divisions as the Bush White House did. Many of the interviewees said the process was perfect and couldn’t have taken any shorter time to be completed. That might have been motivated by their desire to support their decision and the president however.
If one wants to understand what the Bush administration was thinking and the steps they went through to forge the Surge and some analysis of that decision than there is no better source than The Last Stand. The interviews are priceless on that matter for what they reveal about the White House’s thinking. Some of it is very striking on how the president and others didn’t understand Iraq or what the U.S. was doing. Not only that but the other chapters provide context and overviews of the war, and whether the process and the Surge worked or not. They bring up interesting debates. That along with all the facts revealed make this an invaluable resource.
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