[lrd]

Continued

For his part, Lute was unapologetic for opposing the "surge", saying simply that he agreed with the president's policy. Even so, like Petraeus and Fallon, Lute is convinced that a military victory in Iraq is impossible without political reconciliation. He has broad support in this from all parts of the high command.

"He's not afraid to get tough with the bureaucracy," a uniformed colleague says. "He will run the war. He won't be a supreme commander, of course, but he'll be a supreme coordinator - and we desperately need one." Lute is also one of the ablest political generals in the Pentagon, having served ably with both Abizaid and Petraeus and was apparently blunt with Bush and Hadley, telling them about his doubts about their policies. "He told them he didn't agree with a lot of what they were doing," a colleague related, "and said, 'so take it or leave it', and they were shook by that. But they took it."


With David Petraeus, top US commander in Iraq; Admiral William Fallon, head of CENTCOM (US Central Command); and "war czar" Douglas Lute in place, Defense Secretary Robert Gates believed he had finished his job in refashioning the US national-security establishment. He was comfortable with Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) chairman Peter Pace and with his civilian staff - and ready to take on his next battle.

"I think that the secretary had his sights set on straightening out the national-security mess," a Pentagon official said. "You know - we have the Pentagon, State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] and FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], and no one talks to each other. The Deputies Committee [the major deputy secretaries of each foreign-policy cabinet department, where the major implementing decisions are made] is simply not functioning. He wanted to go in there and fix it. And then the Pace thing happened."

On Wednesday, June 6, just as the controversy over the naming of Lute as the White House "war czar" had finally abated, President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were told by Senate Armed Service Committee chairman Carl Levin that Pace would have difficulty getting reconfirmed for a traditional second two-year term as JCS chairman.

"Bush and Cheney were told that Pace would just be shredded," this official says.

Gates had seen it coming. The Pentagon's congressional staff had told Gates that Pace was going to have trouble and that Pace's renomination would not sail through as expected. The Democrats in the Senate were expected to ask some embarrassing questions about the war in Iraq. Bush and Cheney told Levin that they would pull the Pace nomination.

Immediately, the recriminations set in, particularly among Pace partisans in the Marine Corps.

"Pace is taking the fall for these assholes," a retired marine general said. "If you know how the war started, if you know anything about [Ahmad] Chalabi or Cheney or anything like that, you're gone. Peter Pace is being sacrificed to the White House failure in Iraq." The neo-conservative press has also weighed in, calling the Bush administration's decision "cowardly".

The Wall Street Journal lit into Gates: "There's a rumor going around that Robert Gates is the secretary of defense," the newspaper's lead editorial noted. "We'd like to request official confirmation, because based on recent evidence the man running the Pentagon is Democratic Senator (and Senate Armed Services Committee chairman) Carl Levin of Michigan."

Gates was nonplussed and quickly announced that Pace's replacement would be the current chief of naval operations, Admiral Michael Mullen - a riposte that was a mini-declaration of war against the pro-war press.

Mullen, a tough-minded and hard-nosed conservative, is known for his scoffing (if private) dismissal of Washington's neo-conservatives, though sometimes he can barely keep it under wraps. During a recent Washington reception, he was asked by a reporter whether he would oppose an attack on Iran: "It's your job to convince the politicians just how stupid that would be," he said, "not mine."

Accompanying Pace out the door will be Admiral Edmund Giambastiani (predictably, "St John the Baptist" to his friends), a former protege of Paul Wolfowitz - one of the last of the senior uniformed neo-conservatives.

The retirement of Pace and Giambastiani completes the "clean sweep" of the senior military leadership that marked the tenure of former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. Since the swearing in of Gates as Rumsfeld's successor, nearly every major senior military officer responsible for the war in Iraq has been replaced.

Petraeus has taken over in-country (for the discredited George Casey), Fallon was named to replace the forcibly retired General John Abizaid (the former head of CENTCOM), and Pace and Giambastiani have now been replaced by Mullen and marine General James Cartwright. Lute is in the White House.

Since the retirement of Colin Powell, four generals have served as JCS chairman. All have been weak.

"This has been a purposeful policy," a former senior army commander said. "Bill Clinton quietly advised George Bush that the last thing he wanted was to have a strong chairman, as Colin Powell was able to dictate military policy to Clinton because of his prestige. He really stood him up.

"After Powell retired, Rumsfeld and Bush made certain that they never had a man of Powell's caliber in the chair. That's how we eventually ended up with Pace. He was a good man, no doubt about it, but Mullen is a real shift. He's Gates' choice. He's a real leader. He can say 'no' and he intends to."

There are other changes. In Iraq, General Rick Lynch has taken control of the 3rd Infantry Division, which has started to move into the insurgency area south of Baghdad. The Americans have been there before, but this time Lynch has privately vowed that things will be different and more low-key. The Americans will take on al-Qaeda and leave the people alone.

"This hearts-and-minds stuff is bullshit," an Iraq commander recently rotated back to the US said. "Every time an American soldier meets an Iraqi there's trouble, friction. Our job is to stay out of their homes and lives, not interfere in them."

In al-Anbar and now in Diyala province, American soldiers and some CIA officers have been quietly arming Sunni insurgents.

"They don't even like us a little bit," a Pentagon official admitted, "but if they'll kill the real radicals, that's fine with us."

The strategy has caused some consternation at the higher reaches of the Pentagon, but it is part and parcel of Gates' view that there is no military solution in Iraq without political accommodation. He knows that the guns given to the Sunnis today could be pointed at the Americans tomorrow.

"We're petrified," a Pentagon official admitted. But changes are being made - if slowly.

The lessons of Operation Iraqi Freedom and its aftermath are starting to be felt. Deep in the bowels of the Pentagon, where the future of the US military is decided, mid-level officers are crunching mobilization numbers and facing some stark realizations.

"Some marines are on their third tours in Iraq," one marine colonel said. "It is just untenable. We're facing a Marine Corps that is damned near eviscerated. We can't ask these guys to do much more."

When the Bush administration floated the idea several weeks ago that there might be a surge beyond the "surge", with US troops peaking to 180,000 or more by the middle of 2008, Pentagon planners nearly rebelled. The numbers simply weren't there and the equipment is falling apart.

"What are we going to fight them with, spitwads?" a Pentagon major recently asked.

Then too, war planners on the military's Joint Staff have been diligently passing around Colonel Gregory Fontenot's assessment of Operation Iraqi Freedom, a 500-page tome on the US military's performance in the Iraq war. Its flat tone belies the underlying sense that things did not go as well in "OIF" as the Bush administration would have us believe. In many ways, that failure led to the current crisis, leading many in the Pentagon to conclude that no amount of military might can ever reverse a disastrous political decision.

"Individual Americans fought well and with courage," said US Military Academy graduate Ed Deagle, a military analyst who has studied Fontenot's work, "but in key situations, the military failed to anticipate, failed to plan, failed to estimate, failed to perform."

You have to read between the lines of the Fontenot report to understand what US military commanders now know: "At any other time, and against any other army, we might have been defeated. So we're starting to learn those lessons and apply them." Robert Gates is leading that effort.

This is not to say that the United States is about to win the Iraq war.

It's not. And it won't. But a shift, small and perceptible - away from escalation and confrontation - has begun. There are people, powerful people, in Washington who are still committed to confronting Islam, whose default position is the deployment of another division, another aircraft carrier. But there are others now, also powerful, who oppose them.

As General Joseph Hoar has put it, "Perhaps we are finally, finally learning that this idea that Americans can walk down the street and be safe in Iraq is ludicrous. And perhaps we are also learning that we cannot drag a Muslim man out of his house in front of his family, in front of his wife and children, and humiliate him and expect to be considered a great power and a great people. Maybe, just maybe, we are starting to learn that too. And it's about time."

Mark Perry is co-director of Conflicts Forum and the author of the recently released Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace (Penguin Press, 2007).