Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War by Robert M Gates

private. I had been in this dining room on many occasions while working for Bush 41; it’s where we sat to watch the launching of the air war against Iraq in January 1991 on television. I never saw either President Bush in the Oval Office or even in these adjacent rooms without a coat and tie. On the several occasions, I hadbreakfast with Bush 43 in that dining room, I always wanted to order a “real” breakfast—bacon, eggs, toast. But Bush ate a healthy breakfast of cereal and fruit, and so I reined in my proclivity for greasy fare and made do with an English muffin.
    I met privately with the president in that dining room on March 30 and told him I thought we had to turn the corner in Iraq by fall one way or another. I said we needed to get the issue of Iraq off the front burner politically by the presidential primaries in February 2008 so that the Democratic candidates did not lock themselves into public positions that might preclude their later support for sustaining a sizeable military presence in Iraq for “years to come,” which I believed necessary to keep things stable there. I had been talking to Petraeus and the Joint Chiefs, I told him, and we all thought we probably could begin a drawdown of troops in October but pace it so Petraeus could keep most of the surge through the spring of 2008. I again emphasized that whether the strategy could be shown to be working by October or not, a change would be needed by then to accomplish our long-term goal of a sustainable troop presence in Iraq.
    The president said he agreed with me. He also said he didn’t know how long he could hold the Republicans to sustain vetoes. The initiative for any drawdown would have to come from Petraeus, and the president asked, “How will he define success?”
    The president then said, I thought somewhat defensively, that he was not cutting Cheney or Hadley out of this discussion, though he and I needed to talk privately on occasion. He said he would not raise the issue of drawdowns again, but I should feel free to see him or call him.
    I left the breakfast believing we were in agreement on the need to start a withdrawal in October and the initiative had to come from Petraeus. My challenge was to get Dave to agree to that.
    E XTENDING THE S URGE
    Before I could pursue the strategy of extending the surge beyond October, I had to address a painful reality. In January, I had announced several initiatives to give members of the National Guard and Reserves more predictability in their deployments; they would henceforth deploy as units—many had deployed before as individuals to larger, cobbled-together units—and not be mobilized for longer than a year. Thesedecisions had been very well received by Guard and Reserve leaders, the troops themselves, and Congress. At the same time, I understood there was a similar challenge in establishing clear, realistic long-term policy goals for the deployment of active duty forces, particularly for the Army. As early as December 27, 2006, I had asked Robert Rangel and my first senior military assistant, Air Force Lieutenant General Gene Renuart, for the pros and cons of calling up units with a shorter time at home than current policy. In terms of morale (and the forthcoming announcement of the surge), I asked whether we were better off approving such early call-ups only for engineering battalions (in demand especially as part of the counter-IED effort) as a “one-off,” or changing the policy for the whole force in Iraq as long as we had the current level of forces there. Also, I wondered about the domestic and congressional political dimensions of such a change. I was told that unless current policies were altered, the level of deployed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan would require active duty units to redeploy before they had spent a full twelve months at home. This had been a major factor in my decision to recommend significant growth in the size of the Army and Marine Corps. This was even before the