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The main issue continued to be the political alienation of the Sunni elite from the Iraqi government and their unwillingness to cooperate with U. This event triggered a civil war between Sunni and Shiite Arabs across Iraq. Violence continued to rise throughout the country after the attack. Sunni insurgents continued the fight against coalition forces, but al Qaeda—affiliated terrorists also added the Shiite population to their target list.
The insurgent bombing of the golden dome in Samarra was designed to further ignite sectarian conflict—a goal that it accomplished. Shiite militias ramped up death squad activity and began the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad. By late , Sunni Arabs realized that they were losing the war. They also chafed under the influence of AQI, which attacked, mutilated, and killed Iraqis who did not behave according to its strict rules.
This situation led some Sunni Arabs, in particular several tribes in Anbar Province, to seek rapprochement with the coalition. This development, combined with a new COIN approach manifested through the Surge, enabled the coalition to tamp down violence in an attempt to provide the conditions needed for Iraqi elites to develop a political solution to the conflict. During , the Iraqi government attempted to control the situation. On March 16, the Council of Representatives met for the first time.
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Ibrahim al-Jafari, the former prime minister in the Iraqi Transitional Government, was nominated as the candidate for prime minister under the permanent government of Iraq. He was a divisive figure who failed to obtain enough support and reacted to terrorist attacks with heavy-handed tactics employed by increasingly Shiite-dominated security forces. Evidence suggests that Jafari directed a campaign of sectarian cleansing that further inflamed the communal struggle and brought Iraq to the brink of civil war.
On April 22, Nouri al-Maliki, a compromise candidate, was approved as the prime minister. Although Maliki had the support of the majority of the Council of Representatives, he was a Shiite, which limited Sunni Arab support and diminished Kurdish support for his government. The year was a watershed year for the review of U. This was a fortunate pairing.
The result was the December edition of FM , Counterinsurgency.
Although this was a big step toward conceptualizing counterinsurgency, it had both supporters and critics. Its ability to fight wars consisting of head-on battles using tanks and mechanized infantry is in danger of atrophy. A critique more specific to Iraq was that the doctrine was not appropriate for a civil war where the United States had to act as an honest broker rather than taking sides with the government. Because of continued controversy over Iraq, publications discussing the situation proliferated through the year.
As part of ongoing efforts to embrace and codify an approach to the situation in Iraq, the Bush administration continued to publish strategies, doctrines, and studies. On March 16, , President George W. Bush published a new National Security Strategy. This policy document reflected the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq with three tracks political, security, and economic and three pillars to the security track clear, hold, and build.
The ISG would work through , observing spiraling violence and working to identify strategic options for the President. As the situation deteriorated, the studies and recommendations continued. President Bush would not suffer from a lack of advice.

Although each analysis provided a different list and used varying phraseology, the options boiled down to five:. Although President Bush did not favor one option over the others at this point, he did make it clear that he wanted to win the war. On July 11, , the U.
This report stated:. Second, it only partially identifies which U. Third, it neither fully addresses how U. In addition, the elements of the strategy are dispersed among the [National Strategy for Victory in Iraq] and seven supporting documents, further limiting its usefulness as a planning and oversight tool. As the studies piled up, showed that there would be no end in sight for U.
Government was still looking for a way to prosecute the war successfully. Kagan and Vickers were in opposition, with Vickers explaining how Iraq could be won with fewer troops and Kagan as a proponent for additional troops and a clear-hold-build approach.
By the end of May and beginning of June, it became obvious the NSC would not get the bottom-up review it desired. Instead, the administration relaunched the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq. The result of this interim approach was that there was still no full review of U. As early as March 13, , he had directed the MNF-I staff to look at the changing nature of violence 54 and was asking if something had changed to cause the coalition to alter what it was doing.
As the military part of this plan, the government of Iraq and coalition attempted to gain control of Baghdad. Altogether, nearly 50, Iraqi and Coalition troops were involved in the operation—21, Iraqi police, 13, Iraqi national police, 8, Iraqi army soldiers, and roughly 7, Coalition forces. At the same time, General Casey was reexamining his approach. One of his primary focuses in July was to rethink strategic priorities in Iraq.
In spite of his desire to transition, by late July he recognized that he would need to keep more coalition troops in Iraq longer than originally intended. Our strategy is to remain on the offense, including in Baghdad. Coalition and Iraqi forces will secure individual neighborhoods, will ensure the existence of an Iraqi security presence in the neighborhoods, and gradually expand the security presence as Iraqi citizens help them root out those who instigate violence.
An additional 6, Iraqi security forces and 5, coalition forces were sent to Baghdad. Yet OTF II placed a far greater emphasis on the pace of clearing operations, rather than holding and rebuilding cleared neighborhoods. Even with the incapacity of the coalition to stem the violence, the U. In the end, however, insufficient forces were on hand to secure Baghdad, and many Iraqi security force units and leaders proved to be either undependable or excessively sectarian.
By September , old doubts in Washington were compounded by the failure of both the political and military plans for Iraq. This review was quiet, reflecting the desire of the Bush administration to avoid a public discussion in the run-up to the midterm elections in November. Few even in the NSC knew about it. Instead of presenting a clear alternative, the Joint Chiefs temporized. Although Hadley did not return with a specific answer, he did return with a classified memorandum for President Bush.
The government needed to revisit the entire logic of the operations in Iraq and develop a series of options.
The White House made it clear going into this process that there was no tolerance for defeat and withdrawal. Each one of the organizations produced papers for the review, which took place out of the public eye. The NSC staff used its part of the review as an excuse to examine the assumptions that it had created for the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.
This turned out to be a sobering exercise. In the end, the NSC team lost faith in some assumptions and actually believed the opposite of others.
The above the line options reportedly included declaring that with Saddam Hussein gone and Iraq a sovereign nation, the Iraqi people could govern themselves, telling Iran and Syria to stay out, assisting in accelerating an aggressive federalism plan, moving toward three separate states—Sunni, Shia, and Kurd—or trying a Dayton-like peace process. Although President Bush desired to keep the review out of the election, the election nevertheless had a large impact on the review.
The day after the Republicans lost control of Congress in the mid-term, President Bush announced that he had accepted the resignation of Secretary Rumsfeld and was nominating Robert Gates as his successor. Although everyone now knew that a strategic review was under way and that there would be a new approach, the President had not yet made up his mind on which approach to take.
There was no shortage of options covering the spectrum, from the full withdrawal that Congress wanted to doubling down and going for a win. As several commentators have mentioned about the Bush decisionmaking process, different staffs would work out an entire problem and then, having reached consensus, would brief the President.
This review was different. During the Iraq relook, as appropriate, key actors took individual issues to the President rather than reaching overall consensus first. All proposals logically flowed from this statement. This report considered four options: precipitate withdrawal, stay the course, more troops for Iraq, and devolution to three regions. It also made 79 specific recommendations. The report also stipulated Iraqi milestones and new efforts for national reconciliation and governance.
The report had supporters and detractors. On December 7, Foreign Affairs hosted a roundtable to discuss it. Different actors took different lessons from the report. People who wanted to withdraw used it to demand withdrawal. People who wanted a more Iraqi-centric political approach used it to demand that. Overall, the Iraq Study Group provided bipartisan top cover for the President to use should he choose to begin the withdrawal of U. It was dead on arrival in the Bush White House. Another event generated more viewpoints for President Bush to consider.
Defense intellectuals Stephen Biddle and Eliot Cohen were also invited.
As a background to his thoughts, on December 18, —ironically, the day that Secretary Rumsfeld left office—the Pentagon reported that attacks were averaging a week, the most since the reports began in With this in mind, on December 20, the President publicly articulated for the first time that the United States was not winning the war in Iraq. This wide spread of input from disparate actors gave President Bush a variety of options: end the Iraq operation, do less and allow the Iraqis to assume more responsibility for the war effort, continue along the current path, do more of the same, undertake a different approach with the same force structure, and significantly increase activity while changing the overall approach.
While the President was deep into examining strategic alternatives, his senior military advisors, particularly the Joint Chiefs of Staff and commanders in the region, were against larger U. General Abizaid and General Casey were united against a significant troop increase because they shared a viewpoint that held U.
In the end, the President chose to go for the win. We consulted Members of Congress from both parties, our allies abroad, and distinguished outside experts. Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have. Our military commanders reviewed the new Iraqi plan to ensure that it addressed these mistakes. They report that it does. They also report that this plan can work. The President next talked about how the United States would change its strategic approach:.
So America will change [its] strategy to help the Iraqis carry out their campaign to put down sectarian violence and bring security to the people of Baghdad.