t he p erils of o ptimism 305from what happened in Iraq. Amid the escalating violence, Rumsfeld
said repeatedly (in his favorite metaphor) that the United States needed
to take its hand off the bicycle seat and let the Iraqis ride on their own,
with all the risks that implied. Otherwise, their dependency on the
United States would persist, and they would never learn to resolve their
diff erences and fi nd political solutions. He also said it might take
several decades for a viable democracy to emerge there, a more sober
and realistic assessment than the scenario that guided the original
postwar planning. From Rumsfeld’s perspective, Casey had it right
when he emphasized the American training mission and prepared to
disengage U.S. troops from active combat.
Deteriorating conditions in Iraq did not dislodge the secretary of
defense from his dominance of American policy. Within the military,
rumblings of discontent could be heard, but the Joint Chiefs remained
docile. Rumsfeld’s successive choices as JCS chairman, Generals Richard
Myers and Peter Pace, proved compliant agents of his will and rarely
pushed back against his edicts or policies. Military leaders worried
that the armed forces were being worn down by repeated deployments,
a concern that led them to embrace the Abizaid-Casey plan for Iraqi
training and American disengagement rather than focus on other ways
to bring the war to a successful conclusion. Condoleezza Rice, who
replaced Colin Powell as secretary of state soon after Bush won
reelection in 2004, saw the indicators of a downward spiral and searched
for ways to reverse the trend. When she learned about the positive
results the army had achieved in Tal Afar in 2005, she declared in a
congressional hearing that “clear, hold, and build” was now the admin-
istration’s policy. Rumsfeld immediately countered that the policy was
still to shift responsibility to the Iraqis as soon as possible, which meant
that any holding of ground would have to be done by them. Although
the president seemed to endorse the Tal Afar model, he evidently did
not appreciate that it was an exception to the operational approach
favored by his fi eld commanders. He never used the example to call for
a reconsideration of the Rumsfeld commitment to training and tran-
sition to Iraqi control, and Rice backed down.
Bush opted not to challenge or question the policies established by
Rumsfeld, Bremer, or the generals. Partly his refusal may have been an
expression of an innate stubbornness and a refusal to admit that the