his son raised his right arm to salute me. Even though Ray had just left for a top position back home at the Pentagon, he accepted the call to return as commander in Baghdad.
With Ray Odierno.
It gave me solace to know that the next president would be able to rely on the advice of these two wise, battle-tested generals. In our own way, we had continued one of the great traditions of American history. Lincoln discovered Generals Grant and Sherman. Roosevelt had Eisenhower and Bradley. I found David Petraeus and Ray Odierno.
By the time the surge ended in the summer of 2008, violence in Iraq had dropped to the lowest level since the first year of the war. The sectarian killing that had almost ripped the country apart in 2006 was down more than 95 percent. Prime Minister Maliki, once the object of near-universal blame and scorn, had emerged as a confident leader. Al Qaeda in Iraq had been severely weakened and marginalized. Iran’s malign influence had been reduced. Iraqi forces were preparing to take responsibility for security in a majority of provinces. American deaths, which routinely hit one hundred a month in the worst stretch of the war, never again topped twenty-five, and dropped to single digits by the end of my presidency. Nevertheless, every death was a painful reminder of the costs of war.
My last major goal was to put Iraq policy onto a stable footing for my successors. In late 2007, we started work on two agreements. One, called a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), laid the legal predicate for keeping American troops in Iraq after the United Nations mandate expired at the end of 2008. The other, called a Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA), pledged long-term diplomatic, economic, and security cooperation between our countries.
Hammering out the agreements took months. Maliki had to deal with serious opposition from factions of his government, especially those with suspected ties to Iran. In the middle of a presidential campaign, Democratic candidates denounced the SOFA as a scheme to keep our troops in Iraq forever. The CIA doubted that Maliki would sign the agreement. I asked the prime minister about it directly. He assured me he wanted the SOFA. He had kept his word in the past, and I believed he would again.
Maliki proved a tough negotiator. He would obtain a concession from our side**** and then come back asking for more. On one level, the endless horse trading was frustrating. But on another level, I was inspired to see the Iraqis conducting themselves like representatives of a sovereign democracy.
As time passed without agreement, I started to get anxious. In one of our weekly videoconferences, I said, “Mr. Prime Minister, I only have a few months left in office. I need to know whether you want these agreements. If not, I have better things to do.” I could tell he was a little taken aback. This was my signal that it was time to stop asking for more. “We will finish these agreements,” he said. “You have my word.”
By November, the agreements were almost done. The final contentious issue was what the SOFA would say about America’s withdrawal from Iraq. Maliki told us it would help him if the agreement included a promise to pull out our troops by a certain date. Our negotiators settled on a commitment to withdraw our forces by the end of 2011.
For years, I had refused to set an arbitrary timetable for leaving Iraq. I was still hesitant to commit to a date, but this was not arbitrary. The agreement had been negotiated between two sovereign governments, and it had the blessing of Generals Petraeus and Odierno, who would oversee its implementation. If conditions changed and Iraqis requested a continued American presence, we could amend the SOFA and keep troops in the country.
Maliki’s political instincts proved wise. The SOFA and SFA, initially seen as documents focused on our staying in Iraq, ended up being viewed as agreements paving the way for our departure. The blowback we initially feared from Capitol Hill and the Iraqi parliament never materialized. As I write in 2010, the SOFA continues to guide our presence in Iraq.
On December 13, 2008, I boarded Air Force One for my fourth trip to Iraq, where I would sign the SOFA and SFA with Prime Minister Maliki. On the flight over, I thought about my previous trips to the country. They traced the arc of the war. There was the joy of the first visit on Thanksgiving Day 2003, which came months after liberation and a few weeks before the capture of Saddam. There was the uncertainty of the trip to meet Maliki in June 2006, when sectarian violence was rising and our strategy was failing. There was the cautious optimism of Anbar in September 2007, when the surge appeared to be working but still faced serious opposition. Now there was this final journey. Even though much of America seemed to have tuned out the war, our troops and the Iraqis had created the prospect of lasting success.
We landed in Baghdad and choppered to Salam Palace, which six years earlier had belonged to Saddam and his brutal regime. As president, I had attended many arrival ceremonies. None was more moving than standing in the courtyard of that liberated palace, next to President Jalal Talabani, watching the flags of the United States and a free Iraq fly side by side as a military band played our national anthems.
From there we drove to the prime minister’s complex, where Maliki and I signed the SOFA and the SFA and held a final press conference. The room was packed tight, and the audience was closer than at a normal event. A handful of Iraqi journalists sat in front of me on the left. To my right was the traveling press pool and a few reporters based in Iraq. As Maliki called for the first question, a man in the Iraqi press rose abruptly. He let out what sounded like a loud bark, something in Arabic that sure wasn’t a question. Then he wound up and threw something in my direction. What was it? A shoe?
The scene went into slow motion. I felt like Ted Williams, who said he could see the stitching of a baseball on an incoming pitch. The wingtip was helicoptering toward me. I ducked. The guy had a pretty live arm. A split second later, he threw another one. This one was not flying as fast. I flicked my head slightly and it drifted over me. I wish I had caught the damn thing.
I wish I had caught the damn thing.
Chaos erupted. People screamed, and security agents scrambled. I had the same thought I’d had in the Florida classroom on 9/11. I knew my reaction would be broadcast around the world. The bigger the frenzy, the better for the attacker.
I waved off Don White, my lead Secret Service agent. I did not want footage of me being hustled out of the room. I glanced at Maliki, who looked stricken. The Iraqi reporters were humiliated and angry. One man was shaking his head sadly, mouthing apologies. I held up my hands and urged everyone to settle down.
“If you want the facts, it’s a size-ten shoe that he threw,” I said. I hoped that by trivializing the moment, I could keep the shoe thrower from accomplishing his goal of ruining the event.
After the press conference, Maliki and I went to a dinner upstairs with our delegations. He was still shaken and apologized profusely. I took him aside privately with Gamal Helal, our Arabic interpreter, and told him to stop worrying. The prime minister gathered himself and asked to speak before the dinner. He gave an emotional toast about how the shoe thrower did not represent his people, and how grateful his nation was to America. He talked about how we had given them two chances to be free, first by liberating them from Saddam Hussein and again by helping them liberate themselves from the sectarian violence and terrorists.
Having a shoe thrown at me by a journalist ranked as one of my more unusual experiences. But what if someone had said eight years earlier that the president of the United States would be dining in Baghdad with the prime minister of a free Iraq? Nothing—not even flying footwear at a press conference—would have seemed more unlikely than that.
Signing the SOFA and SFA agreements with Nouri al Maliki.
Years from now, historians may look back and see the surge as a forgone conclusion, an inevitable bridge between the years of violence that followed liberation and the democracy that emerged. Nothing about the surge felt inevitable at the time. Public opinion ran strongly against it. Congress tried to block it. The enemy fought relentlessly to break our will.
Yet thanks to the skill and courage of our troops, the new counter-insurgency strategy we adopted, the superb coordination between our civilian and military efforts, and the strong support we provided for Iraq’s political
