304 e lusive v ictories
Shiite leaders who evinced little interest in national reconciliation. After
the voting, the violence spiked yet again, signaling that Sunni rejection-
ists would not trust their fate to any political process that curbed their
dominant status. Later elections failed to yield political progress, even
when Sunni participation increased. Weak Shiite prime ministers—fi rst
Allawi, then Ibrahim al-Jafari after the 2005 election, and fi nally Jawad
al-Maliki in April 2006—lacked their own independent power base and
were reluctant to antagonize Shiite fi gures such as Sadr who controlled
their own militias. It was a formula for political deadlock and gover-
nance failure, which together fed popular frustration and contributed
to the incessant violence.
On the military side, senior American fi eld commanders could fi nd
no eff ective response to the bloodshed. Sanchez gave way to General
George Casey, with Abizaid continuing at CENTCOM. American
commanders, turning back to lessons learned during Creighton
Abrams’s tenure in Vietnam, began to introduce counterinsurgency
(COIN) techniques that aimed to win over the population. For the
foot soldiers, though, frustration mounted: many were on their second
tour in Iraq, and despite their sacrifi ces, they could see no evidence of
progress. Indeed, if anything, conditions grew worse, the number of
violent incidents increasing over time, IEDs becoming more lethal,
areas cleared once having to be swept yet again as the insurgents
returned. Occasionally an American commander achieved a notable
local success, such as in early 2005 when Colonel H. R. McMaster and
his 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment decided not merely to clear Tal Afar
but to remain in place and forge relationships with the local Sunni
community. But Casey and Abizaid did not see how to reconcile such
episodes with their larger operational design and so did not build on
the results. Th e American commanders instead concluded that the best
path lay in training a new Iraqi army to take over security responsibil-
ities as the United States drew down its force in Iraq.
Rumsfeld embraced the Abizaid-Casey approach, a practical
expression of his oft-stated view that the United States ought to leave
the Iraqis to work out their own future. From the planning of the
invasion through the mounting insurgency, the defense secretary never
wavered in his conviction that the U.S. military ought not to be used
for nation building. After the invasion, he began to distance himself