320 e lusive v ictories
political reconciliation occurred at the top of the Iraqi political system.
Neither Shia nor Kurds nor Sunnis displayed willingness to compro-
mise on power sharing, control of oil revenues, or other disputed
issues. Instead, the Awakening led local Sunni tribal leaders to make
deals with the U.S. military, the fi rst step toward incorporating them
into the Iraqi political system. By arranging to put 100,000 armed
Sunni irregulars on the U.S. payroll, Petraeus took the first step in
establishing a bond between erstwhile insurgents and the Maliki gov-
ernment. Better security brought in its wake the restoration of some
public services and the beginning of small reconstruction projects. Left
unresolved was whether these low-level steps could be parlayed into a
broader political settlement.
With Petraeus setting the direction for the war, the president limited
himself to giving fi rm White House support. Th e original surge decision
left open the total number of additional troops to be sent to Iraq. Some
in the military hierarchy sought to hold down the increment to as few
as two brigades. Th ese senior offi cers included Admiral William J. “Fox”
Fallon, the choice to run CENTCOM in tandem with Petraeus in Iraq.
Fallon, who perceived himself as an expert on Iraq and COIN methods,
adopted Rumsfeld-style skepticism toward each request for additional
forces. When Petraeus indicated that he needed the full allotment, Bush
overruled the resistance within the chain of command. He assured
Petraeus, moreover, that he need not worry about having enough time
to complete his mission.
Paradoxically, time was a commodity that Bush had gained as a
consequence of his recent policy and political setbacks. He had dissi-
pated his second-term political capital in his quixotic eff ort to dismantle
Social Security. With no signifi cant domestic agenda left to fulfi ll, he
did not need to think about political strategies that would let him
assemble majority coalitions to support legislative initiatives. The
Republican defeat in the 2006 midterm contests confi rmed that the
remaining two years of the president’s second term would be spent in a
holding pattern. Th is freed him to focus on preserving the policies he
had earlier established. Whether his political foes could force him to
bend on his timetable for Iraq was the only question.
With the help of his diminished cohort of congressional allies,
Bush easily beat back attempts by the now-Democratic Congress to