The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq

PREFACE

When I first met Capt. Doug Zembiec in 2004, he was sitting on the roof of a shot-up house, nibbling on a cracker and shouting into a headset over the cracks of rifle fire. The fierce battle for Fallujah had been raging for weeks. Black stubble covered his cheeks and his eyes were bloodshot. He flashed a wicked grin and said, Welcome to chaos.

Crouched behind the sandbags lining the rooftop wall, two snipers sat hunched over rifles with telescopic sights. Zembiec pointed to a few insurgents darting across a street several hundred yards away. One sniper fired a .50-caliber shell, big as a cigar, and the recoil rocked him back. The other took a shot with a smaller M14 rifle. The corporal with the M14, he said, has more kills. If we keep knocking them down out there, they’ll get the message.

An All-American wrestler while at the Naval Academy, Zembiec took care of his men, adored his wife and baby daughter, bragged about his dad, shared food with the civilians hiding downstairs, stored the china away from the bullet-shattered windows, and shot at every insurgent. He was a fighter, an infantryman. His men had dubbed him the Lion.

I stayed with Doug and his company inside Fallujah, and several months later caught up with him again on patrols outside the city. We stayed in touch and just missed linking up in May of 2007 in Baghdad, where his unit was hunting down al Qaeda terrorists. Later that month, while leading his team on a raid, the Lion of Fallujah was killed.

From the summer of 2003 until the fall of 2006, we were losing militarily. Sunni and Shiite extremists were threatening to break Iraq apart. Then the tide of war swung. This narrative describes how warriors like Doug Zembiec turned the war around.

There are two broad views of history. By far the more popular is the Great Man view: that nations are led from the top. Leaders like Caesar and Lincoln shape history. Most accounts of Iraq subscribe to the Great Man view. The books about Iraq by senior officials like Bremer, Tenet, Franks, and Sanchez have at their core a wonderful sense of self-worth: History is all about them.

The other view of history holds that the will of the people provides the momentum for change. Leaders are important, but only when they channel, or simply have the common sense to ride, the popular movement. Battle is decided not by the orders of a commander in chief, Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace, but by the spirit of the army.

Iraq reflected Tolstoy’s model. Events were driven by the spirit, or dispirit, of the people and tribes. Iraq wasn’t a Great Man or a generals’ war. There wasn’t a blueprint and scheme of maneuver akin to what guides units in conventional war. The generals were learning at the same time as the corporals. At the top, it was easiest to talk with those officials who had spent time on the lines and didn’t substitute theories to cover up what they didn’t know. Generals Casey, Petraeus, Mattis, and Odierno were remarkably candid, willing to share with a fellow grunt their feelings about leadership and operations. I was struck that all four used the word complex time and again. Iraq was a kaleidoscope. Turn it one way and you think you see the pattern. Then along comes some unexpected event and the pattern dissolves.

This book has two parts. The early chapters bring us through mid-2006, amidst strategic mistakes and a growing frustration among the troops. At that time, many in the States believed the only course was to leave Iraq, despite the consequences. Then came a remarkable U-turn, described in the later chapters. By 2008, the steadfastness of our soldiers and excellent leadership had reversed the course of the war.

A cottage industry has sprung up in academia to study counterinsurgency as if it were a branch of sociology. In this book—a narrative of war—you meet the troops. War is the act of killing. As a nation, we have become so refined and so removed from danger that we don’t utter the word kill. The troops in this book aren’t victims; they are hunters.

Iraq was my second insurgency. As a grunt in Vietnam, I patrolled with a Marine squad and Vietnamese farmers in a Combined Action Platoon, or CAP, in a remote village. Later, as a counterinsurgency analyst at the RAND Corporation, I visited Malaysia and Northern Ireland to look at British techniques and wrote a book, The Village, about fighting in combined units in Vietnam.

In Iraq, over a span of six years I accompanied, or embedded with, over sixty American and Iraqi battalions. In the course of hundreds of patrols and operations, I interviewed more than 2,000 soldiers, as well as generals and senior officials. In this book I also cite campaign plans, because they illustrate how senior staffs assessed the war, and how difficult it was for senior officials in Iraq, let alone the White House, to understand what was going on.

In conventional war, the locations of the battlefields change as the armies move on. In counterinsurgency war, the goal is to control a population that does not move. The adversaries fight on fixed battlefields—the same cities and villages. What changes is time rather than location. To describe the war, I bring the reader back again and again to the same cities in Anbar Province—the stronghold of the insurgency—and the same neighborhoods in Baghdad, the heart of Iraq. These two locales accounted for most of the fighting and most of our casualties.

This narrative describes how the war was fought by our soldiers, managed by our generals, and debated at home. The tone is not gentle toward those at the top, military and civilian, supporters and detractors of the war alike. After Vietnam, I never envisioned that I would again know so many who died so young. What angered me after six years of reporting from the lines was how so many at the top talked mainly to one another and did not take the time to study the war. The same was true of the war’s critics. The turnaround in the war went largely unacknowledged.

The generals, ambassadors, and senators will write their own books. The intent of this book is to deepen the reader’s understanding of the performance of our soldiers and the war’s complexity. It lays out the mistakes and the learning, drawing conclusions and lessons. Our society imposed restraints and expectations that can lead to failure on a future battlefield. At the same time, no reasonable observer could watch how our military adapted without being impressed by the remarkable turnaround.

The confused fighting in Iraq has been distant from our lives at home. Only the families of our soldiers sacrificed. The rest of us stood on the sidelines, applauding the soldiers—whom few of us knew—while criticizing their leadership and their mission. Our domestic politics became ever more divisive and impervious to progress on the battlefield.

Our soldiers deserved better. No nation ever fought a more restrained and honorable war. Having changed its strategy, our military has merited a fresh hearing. Al Qaeda in Iraq has been shattered. The Sunni tribes have aligned with the Americans. Iraqi forces have taken the lead against rogue militias. In 2008, the battlefield is under control and violence has subsided.

Iraq remains a long-term project about which reasonable people disagree. Whether critics of the war can acknowledge the gains as well as the defeats is problematical. Political attitudes have hardened into articles of faith. In an election year, Iraq will be an incendiary topic, with politicians making assertions that aren’t true. I hope this book will inform the reader. Understanding the war is the best antidote to demagoguery.

Shortly before he was killed, Doug Zembiec wrote to his family, I honestly believe we can win this one now.

Our soldiers fought to give us a reasonable choice. We can persist in Iraq at reduced cost or we can leave altogether. Regardless of what we decide, we owe it to the Doug Zembiecs to give a fair hearing to what they accomplished.

ONE

HOW TO CREATE A MESS

SUMMER 2003

In late March of 2003, Col. Joseph F. Dunford led 5,000 Marines in a wild dash up Highway One to seize Hantush Airfield, a major base south of Baghdad. Hidden behind dirt berms, Iraqi soldiers fired rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns at the tanks and Humvees roaring by. One machine gun concentrated its fire on a lead Humvee, killing Gunnery Sgt. Joseph Menusa.

When the fighting subsided, Dunford sent out a radio message that he was pushing north to Baghdad. As expected, the Iraqis took the bait and scrambled to block the highway, while Dunford shifted his regiment to fall on Baghdad from the east. At the last minute, higher headquarters ordered him to halt.

That night, I asked Dunford what had happened. He slowly took off his boots, choosing his words. He had brought enough foot powder to go for weeks with two pairs of socks, so you could listen to him without gasping. Higher headquarters changed the mission, he said. The main effort now isn’t Baghdad; it’s the supply lines to the rear. We’re to wait.

The division commander, Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, sent higher headquarters an angry message that the enemy would sniff out the planned feint, resulting in American casualties. We should attack soonest, Mattis wrote. But three days passed before the Marines were allowed to attack, reclaiming the ground where Gunny Menusa had died. The lower levels had opened an opportunity that higher headquarters suppressed. Obstinately, high-ranking officials later denied that there was an alternative not taken. There was never a pause, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the press. Yet inside the Pentagon, Rumsfeld himself had demanded to know why the attack had stopped. Gen. Tommy Franks, in command of the invasion, was equally disingenuous in his memoir, claiming there never was a pause—because air attacks had continued.

Mattis disagreed. I didn’t want the pause. Nothing was holding us up, he told Inside the Pentagon. The toughest order I had to give the whole campaign was to call back the assault force.

Because the campaign ended triumphantly, the incident seemed trivial. Senior levels had ignored the ground commanders, however, a tendency that would persist for several years because the war seemed impossible to lose. As a colonel in the 82nd Airborne Division said to me, There’s no threat that a well-trained platoon can’t handle. To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The challenge, though, wasn’t how to employ a platoon; it was how to change the conditions so that there would be no need for that platoon.

On the political and military level, roads not taken mark the history of this war. America was so powerful it seemed any road would lead to a quick exit. Until December of 2006, there was never a choice of do this or lose. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln knew he had to fire Gen. George B. McClellan or lose the war. In 1943, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower knew he had to refuse British entreaties to invade France prematurely, or lose the war. No such historic choices loomed in Iraq.

Indeed, during the first year of the occupation, the going seemed so easy that we split the team and drove down two roads, getting stuck in the sand in both.

ORGANIZING TO FAIL

After al Qaeda destroyed the Twin Towers in 2001, the American public was in no mood for quibbling. In Afghanistan, the Taliban was smashed quickly, while al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden retreated into Pakistan. Based on incorrect intelligence, the administration concluded that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that he could give to terrorists. Secretary of State Colin Powell argued the case convincingly before the United Nations, and Congress voted to use force.

In the fastest blitzkrieg in history, the American and British forces sped 400 miles from Kuwait to Baghdad, rolling over and around a demoralized Iraqi Army that—having learned from the air bombardment in 1991—abandoned its armor. On April 9, 2003, the massive statue of Saddam was ripped from its pedestal in Firdos Square in Baghdad. Television images of joyous Iraqis dancing beside laughing American soldiers flashed across the globe. President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Powell stood side by side in the Oval Office, savoring the moment. Saddam’s reign of terror had ended, but chaos was about to reign.

Throughout the city, American commanders stood off to one side as mobs rushed like locusts into hundreds of government buildings and stripped them clean. As looters danced by in carnival glee, I asked an American colonel what he was going to do to restore order.

Nothing, he said. I have no such orders. They deserve whatever they can haul away, after what Saddam did to them.

General Franks, in charge of Central Command, was soon to retire. He had achieved victory the good old-fashioned way—with tanks, air, and artillery, just as Kuwait City had been liberated in 1991 and Paris had been liberated in 1944. Once the war was over, he and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had agreed that retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner would serve as the Central Command deputy for Phase IV—the occupation of Iraq.

Yet when fighting petered out in late April, the Phase III commander for combat operations, Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, kept control over all units. Central Command never passed control from Phase III to Phase IV. Garner was supposedly in charge, but the 173,000 soldiers in the invincible coalition did not work for him. He was stranded in Baghdad, his tiny staff out of touch and having to hitch rides to meetings. Garner was a deputy commander with no one to command.

On the Iraqi side, governance had collapsed. Most workers stayed home, electric power was sporadic, and the blast furnace heat of summer was approaching. General Franks flew into Baghdad for a photo op with his conquering generals, while on street corners tanks loitered as looters swarmed past. No one was in charge. Television crews captured the irony of the scene—an American military machine implacable in battle, flummoxed in peace.

For several weeks after Baghdad fell, Central Command was in charge and chose to do nothing. During the invasion, Rumsfeld took pride in showing off a list of fifty things that could go wrong, such as torching of the oilfields or massive oil spills. The error not mentioned was a collapse of the Iraqi government coupled with no American plan to restore it.

The lack of a postwar plan was caused in large part by longstanding Pentagon strategy. For decades, the military had designed force-planning guidance that emphasized fighting and swiftly winning a major war, then withdrawing quickly to be ready to fight somewhere else. This planning method ensured that the budget went to the fighting forces, while ignoring the forces needed for an occupation.

In early May, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Assistant Secretary of State Ryan C. Crocker visited Baghdad and left shocked by the chaos and the American paralysis. Washington responded not by addressing the systemic failures of a detached military and a rudderless administration, but by replacing Garner.

The administration offered Garner’s job to five persons, including former senator Howard Baker (R-TN), a deft politician. Eventually Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, who was acceptable to both Powell and Rumsfeld, took the job. A graduate of Yale and Harvard Business School, Bremer had followed up a successful career in the foreign service by working in private business for former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. Jerry [Bremer] is a good man, Kissinger quipped, but he’s a control freak. This elicited raised eyebrows among those who had experienced Kissinger’s controlling ways and suggested that the administration didn’t know whether a savvy politician or a strong manager was best suited for ruling Iraq.

Bush designated Bremer his proconsul to Iraq, with the mission and resources to establish the new Iraqi government and its security forces. At the same time, he tasked the U.S. military with providing security until the Iraqis took over. The military reported to the secretary of defense, while Bremer bypassed Rumsfeld, using Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, as a back door into the White House. With the approval of the U.S. military, Bush had instituted disunity of command. The divisiveness between Bremer and the military was to grow steadily over the next year, severely hampering the war effort.

Franks applauded, warmly endorsing the sacking of his own deputy. Bremer would have more clout, Franks later explained, because he would be close to the president. The White House provided Bremer with a staff called the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA, an amalgam of young people living in tight quarters behind huge walls, shut off from Iraq. The staff had no identifiable criterion for selection, save a willingness to serve and approval by the White House.

CentCom was still responsible for Iraq’s security. With Rumsfeld’s approval, CentCom appointed Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the most junior three-star in the Army, as the senior commander in Iraq. To support Sanchez in his Baghdad headquarters, a pickup staff called Joint Task Force 7, or JTF-7, was cobbled together from different commands.

THE BAATHIST PURGE

Bremer arrived in Baghdad in early May. Stunned to see looters on the streets, he suggested shooting a few to make an example. He apologized for the remark, though it did illustrate that he was not hesitant or weak-minded. He showed that by swiftly issuing an edict banning from government all Baathists with the rank of colonel or its civilian equivalent.

The Baathist Party was the core administrative strength of Saddam’s regime. Few could gain midlevel jobs such as teachers or town administrators without belonging to the party. In Iraq, the Baath Party union card was reserved mainly for Sunnis. Although Bremer equated them to the Nazis under Hitler, Baathists were less virulent or latently threatening. As a transnational ideology that both predated and survived Saddam’s reign, Baathism was a loose amalgam of socialism and pan-Arabism. In Iraq, millions were Baathists.

Bremer thought he was banning only the top one percent. Saddam, though, had so inflated military grades that colonels commanded battalions of 400 soldiers. Barring the deflated rank of colonel and its civilian equivalent threw out the middle-level managers.

Compounding the problem, de-Baathification was placed in the hands of Ahmed Chalabi, a wily Shiite expatriate with chameleon political adroitness and overarching ambition whose core support lay inside the upper reaches of the Pentagon. De-Baathification became Chalabi’s calling card to ingratiate himself with the Shiite community. He set about his task with energy and self-promotion, and the real and perceived effects of what he accomplished went far beyond what Bremer had intended. In his memoir, former director of central intelligence George Tenet cited 100,000 Iraqis driven to the brink by de-Baathification, a number hotly disputed by Bremer.

THE IRAQI ARMY DISSOLVED

In late April, the U.S. Marines were sent from Baghdad into the south to occupy a dozen cities containing eight million Shiites spread across an area the size of Wyoming. Receiving little direction from the Coalition Provisional Authority, the division commander, Major General Mattis, devised his own plan. Called Mad Dog for his ferocity in battle, Mattis was a bachelor who lived to lead troops. A devotee of military history, he had built a private library with hundreds of obscure titles. To Mattis, the Shiite south was a return to the days of the Banana Wars in the early twentieth century, when small contingents of marines were sent off to obscure Latin American countries to fight guerrillas and train local constabularies. Drawing on those experiences, the Marines had written their own treatise on government. Called the Small Wars Manual, it was full of practical advice—such as how to harness mules—for advancing the principles of John Locke, including how to hold elections. Mattis looked forward to updating the manual. Combat operations were put aside; governance and the restoration of services were now his mission.

His boss, Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, fully agreed. Conway commanded the Marine Expeditionary Force, or MEF, which included the division, an air wing, and a logistics brigade. Conway sent home his artillery and tank units, signaling that the kinetic war was over. No more shooting. Infantry battalions would restore basic services and bring back normalcy. Marines would walk the streets without armor or helmets.

If someone shoots at you, Mattis told his troops, kill him and go back to work. The people are not your enemy. Your job is to establish a functioning government. Reorganize the Iraqi Army to provide local security. The MEF has the list of Iraqi units to be recalled to duty. In our sector, the 3rd Iraqi Division will help us.

On May 20, a tired, dirty Mattis walked into his modest division headquarters after visiting his units. He hated PowerPoint briefings. It was his habit to gather his staff, from PFC to colonel, in a circle to discuss the day’s events. He liked to force sharp questions, insisting everyone stay until someone challenged him. On this evening, a lieutenant asked if the Marines would provide security after the Iraqi Army was disbanded.

That’s not gonna happen, Mattis said. We’re not homesteading here. The Iraqis have their own army.

The next day, Ambassador Bremer dissolved the Iraqi Army. The American divisions on the ground were not consulted. Instead, Bremer had the concurrence of the White House, the Pentagon, and the top level of the U.S. military. President Bush sent Bremer a congratulatory memo—I agree fully; you’re doing a great job! The rationale was that the army was the hated enforcer of the Saddam rule, bloated in size, exploitive of the Shiites who formed its enlisted ranks, and commanded by Sunnis who had to be removed. Besides, the army no longer existed; it had dissolved itself, as unit after unit had deserted. At a press conference in Baghdad, the news was greeted as ho-hum.

That night, the lieutenant asked Mattis when all those out-of-work, pissed-off Iraqi soldiers—estimates ranged up to 400,000—would start an insurgency. He nailed me, Mattis said. That’s what I get for being a wise-ass, challenging smart lieutenants. We generals get too full of ourselves.

IGNORING A CLASSICAL GUERRILLA-TYPE CAMPAIGN

During the summer of 2003, the Sunni insurgency predicted by the lieutenant did emerge. Its fuel was the Sunni belief that they had been disenfranchised. Nine million Sunnis had lost their position of dominance over eighteen million Shiites. The decrees about high-level Baathists and about the army, coupled with Bremer rather than an Iraqi appearing on television as the ruler of the country, convinced many Sunnis that a pogrom loomed. The Americans had the power and the Shiites had the motivation. Persecution was the way top-level Baathists had acted. Now payback was coming.

After the invasion, there was no functioning central government and no representatives to the people. The eighteen provinces were left on their own. The mosques were the centers of social discourse and the imams were widely believed. In the Sunni areas, imams were free to preach hate, gloom, and sedition—and many did.

The insurgency blossomed spontaneously as small cells with no centralized leadership sprang up among tribes throughout the Sunni Triangle, which stretched 350 miles west from Baghdad and 400 miles to the north. Some of Saddam’s coterie had fled to Syria with carloads of cash. They settled into comfortable villas and sent money and instructions back into Anbar Province, a vast expanse of desert and farmland stretching from the outskirts of Baghdad 280 miles west to Syria.

Separate from the Baathists, a small group of al Qaeda–type extremists led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi began a bombing campaign against Shiites and soft targets. In the 1990s, with the bombings of the USS Cole, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, al Qaeda had initiated a campaign of mass killing that reached its apex on 9/11. In Iraq, Zarqawi dispatched suicide bombers to murder mass numbers of innocent Shiites in order to provoke civil war between the Sunnis and Shiites. By blowing up the United Nations building in Baghdad in August, he drove out of the country both the U.N. staff and those of other nations. Eventually he hoped to set up caliphates in the Sunni provinces and strangle the government in Baghdad. Charismatic and energetic, Zarqawi received support and recruits from the more radical imams.

Tribal fighters comprised most of the insurgents. Determined to drive out the infidel invaders and their Shiite collaborators, they saw themselves as the honorable resistance. They had no overarching political goal. These were eighteen-year-olds with AK-47s and no money, no prospect of marriage or sex, no music, no recreation, no job, and no direction given by elders whose status had been demeaned by invaders who didn’t speak the language.

Our military prided itself on maneuver warfare, probing, finding an enemy’s weak spots, and then striking at his central nervous system. Don’t, for instance, fight every Iraqi division on the march to Baghdad; instead, flow around them, rush to Saddam’s lair, and cut the head off the snake. That was the smart way to fight.

Only now our military was facing an enemy that had no head, no central nervous system, no hierarchical command and control that could be destroyed. There was no structure to the Sunni insurgency. It was like swatting bees.

From a palm grove or behind an overpass, rocket-propelled grenades, RPGs, would zip past a Humvee, followed by wild bursts from AKs. The Humvee crew would swivel its .50-caliber machine gun and pound the suspected firing position. When the guerrillas did not rehearse an escape route, they were cut down. With a Darwinian world demanding a quick learning curve, by midsummer the more foolish attacks had petered out, replaced by bombs or improvised explosive devices—IEDs—along the highways and sniping at longer distances, usually from the far side of a canal or deep ditch.

Rumsfeld refused to admit an insurgency had begun, insisting that the resistance was comprised of dead-enders. Each morning the president was shown an easel containing fifty-two cards with the faces of wanted leaders of Saddam’s regime. A succession of raids was netting an impressive rate of arrests. But the number of attacks was increasing even as the number of fugitives in the deck of cards was decreasing.

In mid-July, Gen. John Abizaid acknowledged that he was facing a classical guerrilla-type campaign. An Arabic-speaking Lebanese-American with an advanced degree from Harvard, Abizaid was respected by his peers and liked by his staff. He had a knack for getting along with people, including Rumsfeld, who had selected him to replace Franks, ignoring the decades-old Army-Marine agreement to rotate that command on an even basis between Army and Marine generals. To his staff, Abizaid’s unease with Sanchez as the commander in Iraq was evident. Too decent a leader to take charge away from the man on the ground, in referring to a classical guerrilla-type campaign Abizaid was sending a strong signal to Sanchez. Basic doctrine stressed that raids weren’t the solution to an insurgency.

No observable operational change by the JTF followed. The two-headed coalition command in Baghdad—the CPA and the JTF—had no coherent outreach program and no credible Iraqi leaders to deal with the insurgents. The JTF oversaw the 170,000 soldiers in six divisions—five American and one British—that were spread out among 28 million Iraqis in a country the size of California. In Baghdad, a few key billets were reserved for the Brits, and the 5,000 troops from the United Kingdom in the Basra region at the southern end of Iraq were referred to as British. In the rest of Iraq, the term coalition forces was commonly used, although the Americans comprised 95 percent of the force.

Attacks inside Baghdad during the summer were rare. Over twenty civilians were killed each month, though, as American soldiers, not knowing which driver might be a suicide bomber, repeatedly opened fire on approaching vehicles. It was morally wrenching to pulverize a car, the bullets shattering the windshield and the tires, the car rolling to a stop with the engine smoking, waiting for the bomb blast that never came and walking cautiously forward to prod the blood-drenched driver, head back and mouth open in death. The first human reaction was to blame the driver—why didn’t he have the sense to stop? The second reaction was to distance yourself from the Iraqis. It wasn’t the same as killing an American for running a red light in heavy traffic. Somehow Iraqis were different; they had to be.

In the Sunni Triangle, the security approach was mixed. In Anbar Province to the west, elements of the 3rd Infantry Division, worn out after living in the deserts of Kuwait and Iraq for nine months, adopted a patient, avuncular style with the tempestuous Sunni tribes, balancing a show of armored force with a willingness to stay out of local affairs. Crippling the effort was a lack of local Sunni leaders and the refusal of the CPA to give the military tens of millions of dollars to spend on projects.

North of Baghdad, the 4th Infantry Division tended to focus on raids and sweeps after the dead-enders. These sweeps consistently netted prisoners—some insurgents and some innocents—with mixed results that prompted Thomas Ricks in his classic book, Fiasco, to claim that rough tactics were inflaming the insurgency. The numbers supported Ricks. Each month, coalition forces sent about 1,000 insurgents to long-term prison, while killing hundreds more. Thousands more Iraqis were detained for several days and then released. The 82nd Airborne alone detained 3,500 Iraqis in six months. Yet the JTF estimate of the total insurgency remained fixed at 5,000. Even granting the huge unknowns, the JTF was acknowledging that at the least the insurgency was replenishing its losses.

In the far north, the 101st Air Assault Division, commanded by General David H. Petraeus, shifted gears altogether, replacing military operations with civic action. When Max Boot, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and I visited with Petraeus in August 2003, we were surprised by the scale and the enthusiasm of the effort. Each of the three brigade commanders was acting like a governor in a huge swath of desert and farmland, settling land disputes, adjudicating tribal feuds, and doling out scarce monies for start-up projects. We’re in a race with ourselves, Petraeus told us. Now we’re seen as liberators. Eventually we’ll be seen as occupiers.

A large number of officers from the disbanded army had returned to Mosul, and Petraeus knew it was only a matter of time until many were recruited into the insurgency. Before that happened, he wanted to change underlying conditions to take away their incentives to support an insurgency. To him, that meant creating a class of local leaders, each with a personal stake in the new Iraq. That required money to pay the salaries of municipal workers, police, teachers—anyone in government. It meant opening roads and border crossings with Syria to stimulate trade. It meant handing out start-up funds to aspiring entrepreneurs. Inside his division headquarters, Iraqis owned and operated a restaurant that served excellent roasted chicken.

The slogan on the wall of the division’s operations center read: Money is ammunition. The CPA had on hand billions in Iraqi funds, seized after Baghdad fell. Bremer, though, was parsimonious, doling out small sums and insisting on project proposals that placed senior commanders like Petraeus in a paper-chase loop.

When we arrived, the Iraqis believed in our embodiment of capitalism and democracy, retired Rear Adm. David Oliver, the CPA comptroller, said later. We [the CPA] had the money to give them. Sending our battalions out into the provinces without big bucks was stupid. We blew it.

Petraeus created his own work-around to defang the de-Baathification order. After hundreds of former Baathists signed a pledge of good faith, he rehired them into middle-level management. In Baghdad, there were grumblings that Petraeus had cut a separate peace by his independent wheeling and dealing. In turn, Petraeus warned the CPA that disbanding the Iraqi Army had been a grave mistake.

LOCAL ELECTIONS: THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

In the Shiite south, Mattis had dispatched a battalion to each of seven key cities spread across hundreds of miles. Lacking the helicopter mobility of the 101st, the battalion commanders, to their delight, were on their own. The guidance from Mattis was remarkably similar to that of Petraeus 300 miles to the north. Petraeus had written his Ph.D. thesis at Princeton on counterinsurgency; Mattis studied in his own library. The two men were physically similar, fit and trim, of average height and unimposing mien. Both were energetic combat infantry leaders who loved roaming the battlefields. Had he chosen a business career, Petraeus, with keen political instincts, would have been a CEO making millions. Mattis, less comfortable in social circles, would have made an excellent college football coach, happily exhorting his players while intently studying the field of contact. Both saw their mission as shaping the economic and political conditions of the new Iraq. Both understood this was the role of the CPA. Neither cared about the dividing line. Both viewed the CPA as part of the problem. Like Petraeus, Mattis told his battalions to restart government and restore services.

In Hillah, 100 miles south of Baghdad—home of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—the anti-coalition Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr exhorted his followers to protest the American presence. Faced with an unruly mob, Lt. Col. John Mayer took off his helmet and armored vest and strode into their midst with an interpreter, shouting, Is this the thanks you give to the soldiers who removed Saddam’s boot from your neck? Abashed, the crowd dispersed. The next day, the city council asked Mayer to sit with them.

In Karbala, a city revered by the Shiites, Lt. Col. Matt Lopez organized the elders, appointed officials based on a show of hands in meetings outside city hall, solicited donations and gifts from the States, and settled disputes by holding court once a week. Upon hearing that his battalion was leaving, the council sent a protest letter to Mattis and elected Lopez the mayor.

Battalion 1-7 went to Najaf, the holy city where the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the Howza council of religious elders lived; 1-7 was a high-morale, tightly bonded unit that at the start of the war had seized the Crown Jewel—Iraq’s major oil pumping station—and ended their march to Baghdad with a wild firefight on the grounds of Baghdad University. Arriving in Najaf in early May, the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Chris Conlin, conferred with the political and religious party leaders. Each time he received money, bulldozers, or cranes for a project, he appointed Iraqis as managers.

In late July, Sadr organized a protest, busing in 5,000 supporters to demand that the Americans leave. Shouting and pushing their way down the main street, the protesters angered the local residents. Screams about American devils and a sissy city council were met by vendors cursing beggars and Iranian puppets. Sadr was seen as a troublemaking outsider, while Conlin had warm relations with the religious leaders and the city council. A poll taken in the city showed an astonishing 90 percent approved of the American presence.

After consulting with clerics representing Sistani, Conlin decided to hold elections for mayor and city council, confident Sadr’s standing would diminish when his candidate was crushed. Conlin envisioned a council empowered with legitimacy, authority, and funds provided from the $9.8 billion in Iraqi funds controlled by the CPA.

"I thumbed through my Small Wars Manual, 1939 edition, Conlin told me. I found the instructions in Chapter 14—‘Supervision of Elections.’ So we sat down with the Iraqis and planned an election."

The Joint Task Force enthusiastically endorsed the plan. If Conlin succeeded, the JTF would send his procedures and lessons to the other battalions. Within three months, sixty elections would be held in eighteen provinces. Lieutenant General Conway flew with Conlin to Baghdad to brief Ambassador Bremer.

Bremer sent word he didn’t have time to meet with General Conway, Conlin said. His Excellency sent down an ‘elections expert’ to tell us we were out of our league. Then the ‘expert’ abruptly left because Bremer wanted to see him. It was insulting.

That night the word went out over the classified military Internet—Bremer will decide when, where, and how any election will be held. Sadr, wanted for murder under an Iraqi warrant, remained free to preach sedition because the CPA and the JTF couldn’t agree on how to arrest him. The military stood down their plan for local elections.

Baghdad-centric CPA kept all control, Conlin said. In Najaf, Sadr wouldn’t have been elected dogcatcher. CPA, though, worried the wrong guy might get elected. Guess what? By the time they got around to national elections, Sadr and the wrong guys were organized—and they won.

The CPA could make legitimate arguments against local elections. But the peremptory dismissal of military commanders held in high regard by the Shiites, who kept the CPA at arm’s length, was unfortunate. There were press critiques that Petraeus was trying to buy his way out of a problem, while the Marines were trying to vote their way out of Iraq, indicating that sources within the CPA were unhappy with U.S. generals meddling in political matters.

In the summer of 2003, though, there was no gainsaying the genuine popularity of the American battalion commanders like Lopez, Mayer, and Conlin. The dim-witted grunts wanted to hand Iraq back to Iraqis. Local elections, coupled with funding for local projects and patronage, would have empowered what Petraeus called local stakeholders in the provinces, Sunni and Shiite. It was a road not taken.

IGNORING THE IRAQI ARMY

Forty miles east of Najaf, in the sprawling industrial city of Diwaniyah, Lt. Col. Pat Malay and Battalion 3-5 faced a different problem in July of 2003. The CPA had decided to pay a lump-sum severance to those in the disbanded military. Tens of thousands had poured into the city, swamping the Iraqi disbursing office.

Malay, a strict disciplinarian, stepped in to impose order, Marine-style. On the city’s outskirts, he found an abandoned warehouse with a parking lot 200 yards long, cluttered with junk. Inside a day, the marines pushed, plowed, and shoveled the detritus off the hardtop, which they then marked off with chalk lines, separated by a few rows of barbed wire. At the far end they slapped together a row of plywood offices with wide windows on one side.

The Marines moved in Iraqi officials, together with three shifts of women cashiers and a mound of U.S. dollars. This lured money-changers insisting on absurd rates of exchange for Iraqi dinars. Knowing the Iraqi soldiers would be ripped off, Malay dispatched his squads in Humvees stuffed with millions of U.S. dollars. Once they returned from bases in Baghdad and other provinces with pallets of dinars, Malay announced to the Iraqi soldiers that he was open for business.

Want your money? Line up on the chalk lines, single file, no shoving or you’re sent to the rear of the line. Once at the teller window, show your ID, take your cash, and go home.

No armed American policed a single line. Two sniper teams stood on the roof of the warehouse, visible to all. In three weeks, they had to shoot two men. One, turned away after showing a fake ID, had threatened those who were jeering him with a grenade. The other was a robber who held up a former soldier and tried to escape across an open field, while the outraged soldier screamed at the top of his lungs.

In the third week, a Spanish battalion, due to replace the Marines, took over for a practice run, while Malay observed from inside the factory. Nervous young Spaniards in fresh uniforms and polished boots stood beside the chalk lines, yelling senseless orders at the rough-looking Iraqi men. The horde of former soldiers swayed uneasily. More yelling, more aimless pushing back and forth. The Iraqis had no place to go. No one was giving up his place in line. They weren’t leaving without their money. Some picked up rocks. The Spaniards backed away, gesturing with their rifles.

Malay had seen enough. He ran out, followed by a squad of marines. Okay, good job, okay, he said to the Spanish colonel. "That’s enough for today. Thank you. Gracias."

As the relieved Spaniards walked back to their waiting trucks, Malay faced the thousands of Iraqis. Put down those stones, he yelled, while an interpreter shouted in Arabic. That’s not how veterans behave. What’s the matter with you, scaring those nice young men?

The Iraqis hesitated. Here was a crusty old colonel with pure white hair—no helmet, no armored vest, pistol in holster—reprimanding them, soldier to soldier. He carried authority.

Straighten out that line, he yelled, walking along as though inspecting recruits on a parade deck. Shape up. No more foolishness.

The Iraqis tossed aside the rocks and got back in line. Malay called headquarters, recommending the Spaniards not take over until he finished paying 80,000 Iraqi soldiers, plus 17,000 day laborers. Mattis drove down to take a look around and Malay walked with him among the thousands of Iraqis. Seeing Mattis’s two stars, the soldiers stood erect when Mattis looked at them.

We have our pick of the litter, General, Malay said. Special Forces, rifle battalions, commandos—you say the word and their officers will have them standing tall tomorrow. We can select the best for our own Iraqi Army.

Not our call, Mattis said. CPA determines what to do about the Iraqi Army.

After being snubbed by Bremer, Conway was chagrined that the CPA had brushed aside his plan for bringing back the Iraqi Army. The thing that did not happen in our plan, he later told an interviewer, was to take advantage of the Iraqi army—based upon some early decisions made by the CPA…. I have every confidence we could have called them [the Iraqi soldiers] back into service. Absolutely.

DISUNITY OF EFFORT

The president had bestowed plenipotentiary power on Bremer. He wanted to be in charge, and the president had sent him there to be in charge.

The military, however, didn’t work for Bremer, who had no military background or close connections with the commanders. He wasn’t invited into the military briefings to listen to their frank appraisals or to review their careful staff work. Instead the CPA was viewed, in Mattis’s words, as a weight around the neck of the military…rather than having representatives in each battalion, it provides episodic and contradictory guidance at the operational level and glacial procedures for providing money.

Inside a unified military chain of command, Conlin’s local elections in Najaf would have proceeded. Petraeus would have received the funds to develop stakeholders. As for Malay’s proposal to bring back former soldiers, reconstituting the Iraqi Army would have been the new Marine mission. Conditions were stable enough; not a single marine had been killed. But Bremer, not Abizaid, was in charge of developing a new army. So Abizaid let the 40,000 marines—viewed as an expeditionary rather than an occupation force—go home.

The U.S. military was fond of saying that civilian and military tasks can be smoothly integrated through unity of effort. This tautology (no one advocates disunity of effort) avoided the central issue. The CPA wasn’t just separate from the military; it was at odds with it.

TWO

DESCENT INTO CHAOS

SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 2003

DENYING THE INSURGENCY

The Marines went home in September, having found the Shiite community in the south hospitable. In Karbala, the city council had tried to elect a Marine battalion commander its mayor. In 2003, the criminal activities of Shiite militias and the malign influence of Iran had not yet emerged.

By contrast, in the Sunni Triangle to the north, the insurgency worsened throughout the fall. General Eric K. Shinseki, the chief of staff of the Army, told Congress in February of 2003 that he estimated several hundred thousand soldiers were needed to occupy Iraq. In the fall of 2003, there were 150,000 coalition soldiers—plus 90,000 contractor personnel not shown on the rolls but carrying out military support duties. Perhaps 240,000 were not equivalent to several hundred thousand. But adding more American soldiers would not have made a major difference unless they operated with Iraqi forces under an enlightened counterinsurgency strategy—which did not exist at the time.

Abizaid opposed sending more American troops to Iraq, arguing that he lacked not troops but rather intelligence about where the enemy was hiding. Indeed, more Americans would irritate more Iraqis, leading to less intelligence. This rationale exposed the heart of the dilemma. If the Sunni population viewed the Americans as the invaders and the insurgents as the honorable resisters—the popular image across the Sunni Triangle in the fall of 2003—then the population would not provide intelligence. Nor could the Americans, as counterinsurgency doctrine prescribed, offer the population protection and receive information in exchange. The Americans were the invaders, and there was no Iraqi government.

Once the Sunni officer corps and Baathist officeholders were disbarred, an insurgency of some magnitude was inevitable. The Sunni city closest to Baghdad was Fallujah, thirty-five miles to the west. Thousands of Baathist officers and intelligence apparatchiks fled there as Baghdad collapsed in April of 2003. When the 82nd Airborne Division occupied the city at the end of the month, there was a tragic confrontation with a mob that ended in the killings of two dozen men, women, and children. The 82nd was hastily replaced by a battalion from the combat-seasoned U.S. 3rd Infantry Division that was solicitous of the residents’ concerns, withdrawing its armor to avoid disrupting traffic.

The presence of the American forces acting with restraint did not stop the growth of the insurgency, because the Americans didn’t have Iraqis working with them. In the congested market area called the Jolan, the Americans daily walked right by the cafés where the insurgency was being plotted.

Left on their own, the American soldiers didn’t know who was an insurgent and who was a farmer. Rarely was an Iraqi both. During the Vietnam era, Hollywood had created a myth about the farmer who hoes by day and shoots by night. A real farmer is too tired to do both. Combat is not a pickup game. The Viet Cong fighters lived in the bush and exacted a price in rice from the surrounding villages.

Iraq was somewhat different. The insurgents did not have to rely upon intimidation to get food. A common joke under Saddam was You pretend to work, and the regime pretends to pay you. Pay consisted of free electricity, subsidized fuel, and free monthly sacks of grain and rice. This deal continued under the CPA, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unemployed men who didn’t have to work to subsist. They could join the Shiite militia or the Sunni insurgency full-time and still be fed. They lived at home, hung out at the local mosque, joined the local gang, indulged in all sorts of fancies as the Humvees cruised by, and eagerly grabbed their rifles and ran out whenever shooting started.

The Iraqi intelligence service had been disbanded. The CIA had lists of those at the top, like the fifty-two unfortunates in the deck of cards. They stood out, and would be hunted down. But what of all the street gangs that were sprouting up? It takes years to build up human networks and sift out how much you can trust agents and informers on a city-by-city basis. The Americans had some lists and conducted serial raids at night. That was a hit-and-miss affair because Iraqi addresses were notoriously inaccurate. There was no numbering system. Soldiers rushed into the wrong house, where the frightened occupants pointed to another house, where the same frustrating procedure would repeat itself.

A strategic contradiction plagued the counterinsurgent effort. On the one hand, Abizaid’s belief that American soldiers were an antibody in the Iraqi culture meant our soldiers had to be removed as soon as possible, an imperative that dovetailed with Rumsfeld’s goal. On the other hand, an insurgency grew when there was no government presence among the population. Since the CPA was the only government and the local Iraqi police and soldiers sympathized with the insurgents, not placing American soldiers on the streets guaranteed the growth of the insurgency.

Lieutenant General Sanchez resolved the contradiction by concluding that no insurgency existed. At the end of September, he told a press conference, I don’t think I’ve got any indication that it [resistance to the occupation] is beginning to take hold with the populace.

INADEQUATE FORCES

Supported by a president uninvolved in details, Bremer made up his own doctrine as he went along. After testifying articulately about a Marshall Plan to revitalize Iraq, he received $18 billion from Congress. He set aside $14 billion for development, mostly large infrastructure projects that contributed few funds for reducing unemployment. Backed by a JTF that saw no indication of resistance, resources for security were limited to $3.3 billion, or 18 percent of the total request.

Bremer explained in his memoir that he had three red lines for creating the new Iraq: 1) a written constitution before elections; 2) an uncorrupt police force attentive to civil rights; and 3) an army that would play no role in internal affairs. Steve Casteel, the senior police adviser, explained the rationale: It’s as simple as, when have you ever seen the police lead a coup? If you build a strong police force, you have a republic. If you build a strong military, you have a banana republic.

Having disposed of history in two sentences, the CPA retreated into the womb of the Green Zone, a fortified palace compound in the center of Baghdad. The CPA and JTF envisioned putting 85,000 trained police on the streets within a year, a ratio of 3 cops per 1,000 citizens. In New York City, the ratio is 5 per 1,000. On paper, 1,500 retired police from the United States and Europe were to be the trainers. By October, twenty-four police trainers had shown up in the Green Zone. Two retired cops were dispatched to Anbar, a province the size of Wyoming where tribal Sunnis in a dozen cities were launching 200 attacks a month. The math worked out to one police adviser per one million Iraqis.

Washington’s bureaucratic politics were no more sensible. Condoleezza Rice, concerned that both Rumsfeld and Bremer went their independent ways, persuaded the president to let her establish the Iraqi Stabilization Group within her National Security Council staff. She brought into the White House Ambassador Robert Blackwill, known for his quick intellect and sharp elbows.

By October of 2005, the Pentagon was seriously upset at the CPA for the small size and slow training of the police and the new Iraqi Army. Abizaid ordered Sanchez to use the American divisions to train Iraqi battalions recruited locally, called the ICDC, or Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. The Iraqi Army being trained by the CPA for border defense cost ten times more than the ICDC force Abizaid wanted for counterinsurgency. When I discussed the security situation with Secretary Rumsfeld at the Pentagon in November, he was enthusiastic about expanding the ICDC at a greatly accelerated rate. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz constantly nagged Bremer to support the ICDC. Bremer responded by referring to the Pentagon as a six-thousand-mile screwdriver—and by dripping out funds through a spigot.

In the absence of local Iraqi soldiers in units like the ICDC, it was impossible to withdraw the American soldiers without conceding the population to the insurgents. Nevertheless, the president’s goal was to reduce U.S. forces from 131,000 to 100,000 by the following April, and in the meantime to pull back into large bases to reduce vulnerability. Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commanding the 4th Infantry Division north of Baghdad, later told me, For the first eighteen months of the war, I believed Secretary Rumsfeld’s vision [of a quick exit] made sense. It was only later that I questioned it. Alarmed by the shrinking number of American soldiers on the streets, Bremer and Ambassador Blackwill, visiting from the National Security Council in November, complained to Sanchez. He testily informed them that he took his orders from General Abizaid, not from civilians.

Inside the cities, fewer American patrols meant that the marketplaces and the streets were left in the control of insurgent gangs. An excellent highway system allowed insurgents to drive sixty kilometers, conduct an attack, and return safely home, avoiding the well-known government checkpoints. In the countryside, coalition foot patrols wandered across the vast terrain for days and never encountered an insurgent.

As lethality and momentum increased on the enemy side, force protection on the coalition side morphed from a constraint into its own mission. Minimizing