Page 122 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ARE PERSISTENT

assigned to the Treasury Department, where he worked on Social Security
reform and Treasury issues related to the Middle East. When his assignment
drew to a close, Treasury Secretary John Snow offered him a permanent
position as deputy assistant secretary for Africa and the Middle East, and
he accepted.
In December 2006, a bipartisan study group headed by former Secre-
tary of State James Baker and former U.S. Representative Lee Hamilton
released its final report with its recommendations for proceeding—or not—
with the war in Iraq. Among other things, the group recommended that the
United States begin withdrawing its troops from Iraq. But President Bush
did not agree with the Baker–Hamilton report, and he directed Deputy
National Security Advisor J. D. Crouch to lead a group in formulating an
alternative response.
“The president asked each of the national security agencies to appoint
two people at the undersecretary level to this group, and I was one of those
appointed,” Saeed said. “He basically said that he wanted our calendars
cleared for a month, and we were to do nothing else but work on that issue.
There were about fifteen of us. The cabinet secretaries were all involved,
including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace, Director of
National Intelligence John Negroponte, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson,
and then the rest of us. We basically looked at different proposals about
how to proceed. All these options were debated in front of the president,
and then the president made the decision that a troop surge was the right
thing to do. On January 7, 2007, he gave a speech announcing the surge.”
News of the planned surge was met with widespread and thunderous
disapproval, but President Bush defied the naysayers and carried it out any-
way, sending an additional 20,000 troops to Iraq. It appears that his dogged
persistence paid off: In mid-2008, the numbers of multiple-fatality bomb-
34
ings and resulting deaths in Iraq plummeted from presurge levels. Not
only are U.S. and coalition troops safer, Iraqi civilians are safer too. “I think
this was one of those examples where a leader—in this case, President
Bush—needed to know when to listen and when to stop listening,” Saeed

34 Michael E. O’Hanlon and Jason H. Campbell, Iraq Index: Tracking Variables of Recon-
struction and Security in Post-Saddam Iraq, Brookings Institute, July 17, 2008. Available from
www.brookings.edu/saban/~/media/Files/Centers/Saban/Iraq%20Index/index20080717.pdf.

107