Such ignorance was neither inevitable nor helpful. "American forces are operating in a relative vacuum of Iraqi sentiments," a study by the Center for Army Lessons Learned reported several months later. "This contrasts with the British, who have developed a 20-question survey that is continually administered throughout their area of operations."
Recognizing their profound lack of understanding, American commanders launched a major effort in the fall of 2003 to improve U.S. intelligence gathering and a.n.a.lysis. On October 1, Abizaid issued an order to reorganize intelligence operations in Iraq, so that all the data gathered would pour into one new Intelligence Fusion Center. In this new organization, a.n.a.lysts would work side by side with interrogators and the CIA would cooperate with military intelligence. Until the fall, the CIA, the Special Operations units, and the divisions all had separate databases. Now a new database would be created to try to ensure, for example, that someone detained and released in Ramadi would trigger an alert when he was caught a week later in Mosul with traces of explosives on his hands. Most important, networks would be delineated, so that the U.S. effort would go after not just the front-line deliverymen of roadside bombs, but also some of the commanders running the bomb factories, the keepers of safe houses in villages on the outskirts of Baghdad, the financiers sending in new funds and supplies, and the recruiters training people and sending them in across the Syrian border. In the fall, Centcom spent $11 million to create an intelligence architecture for this, a senior official in that headquarters said.
These steps were seen inside the Army as a major success story, and they were portrayed as such to journalists. Yet it was not so, even though it felt that way to many officers, probably to the majority of those involved. "In insurgencies, lots of things are counterintuitive," one expert who consulted with U.S. military intelligence in Iraq said later. That is, the move that seems reasonable may not actually be the wise one. For example, getting better intelligence was a laudable tactical goal, but launching an all-out offensive that used combat methods against the population to obtain it wasn"t, because it undercut the larger strategic goal.
Sanchez later recalled in a legal statement growing out of the Abu Ghraib case, "I was having multiple intel updates, understanding that... our effectiveness against the insurgency was going to come from our ability to harvest human intelligence." This was a comment typical of commanders in Iraq, reflecting the view that U.S. forces were adept at executing strategy and tactics, and only needed better intelligence to act upon. "The only way you"re going to get yourself inside of their decision cycle and their operating system is by getting individuals to talk," Sanchez said.
The problem was that the U.S. military, having a.s.sumed it would be operating in a relatively benign environment, wasn"t set up for a ma.s.sive effort that called on it to apprehend, detain, and interrogate Iraqis, to a.n.a.lyze the information gleaned, and then to act on it. "As commanders at all levels sought operational intelligence, it became apparent that the intelligence structure was undermanned, under-equipped and inappropriately organized for counter-insurgency operations," Lt. Gen. Anthony Jones wrote in an official Army report a year later.
One person in particular was squeezed between the heavy demands and the unprepared military: Brig. Gen. Barbara Fast, the top Army intelligence officer in Iraq. She was under huge pressure to revamp and improve her operation. In effect, she was being told that she she was the weakest link. We are in a war, the feeling grew among commanders, and while our troops and tactics are doing a great job, and our commanders are great guys, still we are in trouble-so it must be because we have lousy intelligence. was the weakest link. We are in a war, the feeling grew among commanders, and while our troops and tactics are doing a great job, and our commanders are great guys, still we are in trouble-so it must be because we have lousy intelligence.
The Army"s recent history with female generals also complicated Fast"s position. In 1997, Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy had been named chief of Army intelligence in what was seen by some subordinates as a gender promotion-that is, a marginally competent officer given her high position because the Army, in a political act, wanted to catch up with other services, which at that point were giving female officers three-star positions for the first time. Kennedy"s major mark on the Army was made in 2000, when she became the first general ever to accuse another of s.e.xually hara.s.sing her. In retirement she became politically active, and she toyed for a time with running for senator from Virginia, eventually deciding against it. She endorsed John Kerry in 2004 and appeared at the Democratic convention in Boston, along with some other retired generals. Fast, by contrast, was seen by peers as a smart operator who had earned her position. "She"s one of the few people who was there under Sanchez who understood what was going on," said an intelligence officer who served under her, and who also found that she was willing to back up subordinates who took unpopular positions or delivered unwelcome news. "She clearly is better than anyone else in [the intelligence branch in] the general officer ranks of the Army."
The key to actionable intelligence was seen by many U.S. commanders as conducting huge sweeps to detain and question Iraqis. Sometimes units acted on tips, but sometimes they just detained all able-bodied males of combat age in areas known to be anti-American. The 4th Infantry Division, operating in the northern and northeastern parts of the Sunni Triangle, soon attracted attention among other commanders for its eager embrace of such tactics. Other commanders were more discriminating. The 82nd Airborne"s Swannack said his division detained thirty-eight hundred people between August 2003 and March 2004, but screened them, and ultimately shipped only seven hundred of them to Abu Ghraib. His staff was wary of the operation at the prison, he recalled: "They saw all these folks going into there, and it was h.e.l.l to get them out of there. I had to personally intervene to get people out of there-they"d just get scarfed up."
Divided conquerors: the major U. S. unit commanders Paradoxically, after focusing too much on the operational level in its invasion plan, the Army focused too little on it during its subsequent occupation, said retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, one of the Army"s most insightful senior officers. Its battlefield orientation didn"t prepare it to discern what the operational level was in a counterinsurgency. "The operational level of war in Iraq was dealing with Iraqis, with nongovernmental organizations, with the media, with the rest of the world," he said. "The center of gravity was the will of the people."
Again and again, the jobs that the Army failed to handle in Iraq in the summer and fall of 2003 would be in that crucial but neglected operational area of counter-insurgency, which simply means that no one was connecting all the dots. Supply convoys raced across the countryside to stock big U.S. bases, undercutting the larger effort, as drivers-worried U.S. troops or Third World contractors-shot at Iraqi civilians to make them keep their distance. Personal security details for CPA officials rocketed through Baghdad, forcing Iraqi cars onto sidewalks, needlessly alienating the capital"s population. Frustrated combat troops used force first, violating a lesson of every successful modern counterinsurgency campaign: Violence is the tool of last resort, especially for troops foreign to the local population. Civil affairs officers, whose job it is to work with local populations, clashed frequently with the commanders of units they were supposed to support because of the different imperatives they faced, with little direction from higher levels of command.
All of these disparate areas were strands that should have been pulled together and coordinated by Gen. Sanchez, the commander with oversight of operations across Iraq. But he failed to do that. U.S. Army divisions operated like fingers without an operational hand or a strategic arm to guide them. Sanchez took a distant stance that gave each division commander leeway to handle the situation in his own area. Normally such decentralization would be welcome, but it works only if guided by a larger strategy that coordinates each unit"s actions. In military shorthand, that direction is called the commander"s intent. Sanchez didn"t provide it. "I"m not sure that General Sanchez had any impact at all," said Hammes, who served with the CPA, one of his last posts before retiring. "I never got a clear commander"s intent" statement from the commanding general.
Indeed, Sanchez"s headquarters spent weeks debating a draft campaign plan but never issued one during his time there. One Army intelligence officer who served in Iraq in 2004 was even more emphatic. "For the first year of the war ... there was no campaign plan issued to military personnel by CJTF-7 to deal with reconstruction of Iraq and to deal with the growing insurgency," he recalled. "Various units subordinate to CJTF-7 essentially did what they thought was the right thing to do, but their efforts were not coordinated by any clear, overarching campaign plan." The result, he said, was that "the divisions were kind of left out there to dry," by themselves.
Andrew Rathmell came to a similar conclusion. "The military leadership ... did not do a good job of conceptualizing the campaign as an integrated political-military effort; sometimes failing to put tactical "kinetic" operations in the broader political context." This meant that tactical successes never added up and reinforced each other, but rather tended to peter out by themselves.
In addition, the Army, having forgotten almost everything it had learned in the Vietnam War about counterinsurgency, hadn"t taught its commanders in such a way that they would arrive at similar and reinforcing answers to the tactical problems they faced. When Maj. Gregory Peterson studied the issue a few months later at Fort Leavenworth"s School of Advanced Military Studies, an elite course that trains military planners and strategists, he found the American experience in Iraq in 2003-4 remarkably similar to the French war in Algeria in the 1950s. Both involved Western powers exercising sovereignty in Arab states, both powers were opposed by insurgencies contesting that sovereignty, and both wars were controversial back home. Most significant for Peterson"s a.n.a.lysis, he found both the French and U.S. militaries woefully unprepared for the task at hand. "Currently, the U.S. military does not have a viable counterinsurgency doctrine, understood by all soldiers, or taught at service schools," he concluded.
The result was that each sector felt like a separate war, with different approaches and rules, showing a lack of coordination that runs against the repeated findings of theorists and pract.i.tioners of counterinsurgency. French Col. Roger Trinquier"s 1961 commentary on the lessons of Algeria is frequently disturbing, especially in its unabashed endors.e.m.e.nt of torture in interrogation and its general embrace of terrorist methods to fight terrorism. But the veteran paratroop commander is more persuasive when he echoes other experts in his discussion of the absolute necessity of strategic coordination in putting down an insurgency.
The struggle against the guerrilla is not, as one might suppose, a war of lieutenants and captains. The number of troops that must be put into action, the vast areas over which they will be led to do battle, the necessity of coordinating diverse actions over these vast areas, the politico-military measures to be taken regarding the populace, the necessarily close cooperation with various branches of the civil administration-all this requires that operations against the guerrilla be conducted according to a plan, established at a very high command level. [Trinquier adds in a footnote: In principle, that of the commander of the theater of operations.]
It was common for observers of U.S. military operations in 2003-4 to note that each division"s area of operations felt like a different war. In the north, Petraeus"s 101st Airborne conducted what was generally seen as a thorough and effective operation, balancing war fighting and nation building. Just to the south, in the Sunni Triangle, there was an increasingly tough little war, especially in the area to the north and west of Baghdad where the 4th Infantry Division was based. The 82nd Airborne and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, operating to the west of Baghdad, posted a mixed record, with some successes and fewer ma.s.s detentions, but also with Fallujah, Ramadi, and the upper Euphrates Valley turning into increasingly tough problems. At the country"s center, Baghdad became an area for a series of terrorist bombings.
"The good side of Rick Sanchez is, because all the division areas were different, he ... kind of left us to figure out what he needed to do, and how to do it," said Swannack, who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq twice-first in the invasion in the spring of 2003, and then in the fall and winter of 2003-4. Sanchez didn"t offer much strategic guidance, he said. "It was pretty much, "You do what you need to do, and I"ll give you the resources."" He would try to raise tough issues with Sanchez by e-mail, but sometimes never received a response. "I don"t know why. Responsiveness to division commanders" issues was weak."
"I never got a visit from anyone from CJTF-7 staff," concurred Maj. Gen. Odierno, who commanded the 4th Infantry Division in the northern Sunni Triangle. "Sanchez visited me once," he added, holding up a lone index finger.
Arguably, that hands-off approach made some sense, because conditions differed so radically in the north and south, and compared to the Sunni belt across the center of the country. But it also led to a kind of incoherence in the effort, and worse still, to the use of tactics that undercut long-term goals. "Failing to define at the strategic levels the kind of war we were actually fighting-and in various locales, battles civilian and military forces were actually winning-unintentionally left many of those local efforts without a higher, guiding, and legitimizing purpose," Maj. Isaiah Wilson later commented.
Petraeus jumps through a window of opportunity Mosul, the biggest city in northern Iraq, could have erupted at any moment in 2003. As a U.S. military intelligence a.n.a.lysis warned at the outset of the invasion, Mosul came with a ready-made civil war, hosting some 110,000 former Iraqi army soldiers and 20,000 Kurdish militiamen happy to fight them. It also was the home base of the Iraqi Islamic Party, which had survived Saddam"s efforts to crush it. The city overflowed with potential enemies of the U.S. occupation, so much so that Saddam Hussein"s sons, Uday and Qusay, chose it as their hiding place.
Despite that troublesome lineup, of all the divisions occupying Iraq in 2003-4, it was the 101st Airborne, commanded by Maj. Gen. David Petraeus and headquartered in Mosul, that was most successful in launching an effective coun-terinsurgency campaign. "The 101st under Maj. Gen. Petraeus is considered most successful in terms of jump-starting the economy and the political process," concluded a 2004 Army War College study.
Mosul and northern Iraq under Petraeus in 2003 offer a glimpse of how the occupation of Iraq might have been conducted more effectively, and in such a way that the hopes of bringing home most U.S. troops relatively soon might have been realized. There was no postinvasion pause in the north. Because the pace of U.S. operations never sagged, there was no breather in which the adversary could gain the initiative. "The eerie silence and absence of U.S. military operational activity that defined the immediate weeks and months of transition ... [were] not present in the northern provinces. There was no hiatus (no "cease fire") in the north," commented Wilson, who served in Iraq first as an Army historian and then as a strategist for Petraeus.
Petraeus had more education about counterinsurgency operations than any other division commander in Iraq. During the 1980s he had earned a Ph.D. in international relations at Princeton, where his dissertation subject had been the effect of the Vietnam War on U.S. military thinking about the use of force. In the course of his research he had read deeply into the French experience in Indochina. While the French didn"t win there or in Algeria, the vanquished often learn more from a war than do the victors. "Counterinsurgency operations, in particular, require close civil-military cooperation," Petraeus wrote in his study. He warned against U.S. military att.i.tudes that impeded "the crucial integration of political and military strategies." Also, he noted that the use of force may be necessary, but by itself "it is seldom sufficient."
Petraeus also took quiet steps to ensure unity of command in his area-a fundamental military principle, to be sure, but something that the U.S. effort overall didn"t enjoy. Unity was particularly important in the intelligence arena, where he had his chief of staff, Col. James Laufenburg, pull together several divergent intelligence elements by creating a joint interagency task force for counterterrorism- an effort made easier because the CIA officer in Mosul was a former subordinate of Petraeus"s with whom he had kept in touch. To ensure that all worked together, Petraeus also fired a warning shot across the bow of the "black" Special Operators in the lOlst"s area. "We"re delighted to have you with us," he told them, "but if you conduct operations without first getting our approval, I"ll request your removal from our area of operations." He took pride in conducting targeted raids with a minimum of violence. In one, 101st troops and a Special Operations unit went after thirty-five suspects simultaneously in Mosul at 2:00 a.m a.m. and caught twenty-three of those they were after, with only a single shot fired.
Petraeus said that his role was "a combination of being the president and the pope." Others saw his role as somewhat less elevated. "Petraeus, up north, was like a politician-he bought everyone off," said Kellogg, the retired Army general who served as a senior CPA official.
"Plainly stated, the 101st Airborne waged a different war in the north than was waged in other parts of the country," Maj. Wilson wrote. "Winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people was the guiding purpose of all civil-military actions in the north." While other divisions conducted "anti-insurgency" operations, aimed at killing the enemy, he concluded, the 101st waged a "counter-insurgency" campaign, meant to undercut support for the enemy.
Petraeus"s campaign began pretty much as did those of other division commanders. "When we arrived in Mosul, it was chaotic," he said. "I mean, there was no order. There was no police on the street, they were looting, they were looting everything they could put their hands on. The province governate building was completely sacked. We went into Mosul with real force, huge, sixteen hundred soldiers in a single lift, I think the longest air a.s.sault in history, [and] established really overwhelming force in the city." The first week saw a spate of small fire-fights. But by the end of that time the 101st "had established a position of real dominance." He was determined to capitalize on that position. "We had, in a sense, almost a degree of omnipotence, and you had to exploit that-the window of opportunity is there, you had to jump through it."
He and his planners knew that they were in "a race against time. We were very conscious that any army of liberation has a half-life connected to it, where it turns into an army of occupation. And what we wanted to do, of course, was to extend that half-life as long as we possibly could, by good deeds and by getting the word out on those good deeds."
The story that Petraeus tells with some pride about this period involves not a firefight or a raid but how he ensured that government employees were paid. The 101st had picked up a rumor that the manager of a major bank in Mosul had saved a huge amount of Iraqi government money from being looted. The cash was in an underground vault that had been purposely flooded to protect it, with the stacks of currency sealed in plastic. Petraeus had the manager brought to him and sat across a table from him. "I understand you were able to safeguard some money," he began.
The Iraqi leaned forward and said softly, "Yes, I did."
"I understand you have enough to pay the salaries of the government workers," Petraeus said.
"Yes, we do," the banker confirmed.
Great, thought the general. "Let"s go ahead and do it," he said, "let"s pay the workers."
The banker shrugged. "I"d love to, but I don"t have the authority," he replied. "Who has the authority?" Petraeus asked. "Baghdad, the minister of finance," the Iraqi said.
"Well, sorry to inform you, I was just down in Baghdad, and there really is no ministry of finance functioning at this point," Petraeus said. "Yes, that"s too bad," the banker sadly agreed.
"Well, what are we going to do?" Petraeus politely asked. It was an insightful question to pose. Had he had wanted to, Petraeus simply could have ordered his combat engineers to blow the door off the safe and take the money. But, thinking strategically, he was searching for Iraqi solutions to the problems he encountered.
"Well, you have the authority," the banker finally said.
"You"re right," Petraeus agreed. He had learned what the banker needed. So Petraeus pulled out a sheet of his stationery, which stated on its letterhead that he was "Commanding General, 101st Airborne Division (Air a.s.sault)," and wrote out an order telling the banker to meet the government payroll.
The banker read over the order, then looked up, a mite skeptical. "What, no seal?" he asked. The Americans hadn"t known that Iraqi officials always applied official seals to doc.u.ments. The next day Petraeus sent an aide to find an Iraqi shop to make an official seal of the Commanding General, 101st Airborne, replete with the two stars of a major general.
Petraeus and his subordinate commanders and staff devised a strategy based on three principles. First, "this is a race against time." Second, "the real goal is to create as many Iraqis as possible who feel they have a stake in the new Iraq," which created a yardstick by which to measure any proposed move: Will it give Iraqis a stake? The third principle governed the division"s tactics: "Will this operation produce more bad guys than it takes off the street by the way it"s conducted?" Understanding this, one of the lOlst"s company commanders, Capt. Daniel Morgan, recalled that he decided to handle detainees differently than they were treated elsewhere. "My company did not blindfold our detainees. We did upon arrival into Mosul, but we realized within a month-June 2003-that this was of no significance, and hurt us."
Petraeus also decided that cordon and sweep operations, in which every military-age male in a given area was rousted, were pointless. He thought most Iraqi men, even insurgents, so valued their household privacy that they would surrender peacefully rather than subject their families to intrusive nighttime searches. So he had the 101st conduct cordon and knock searches, in which suspects were surrounded and then invited to turn themselves in. In addition, he said, there were so many phony tips pa.s.sed by Iraqis feuding with each other that this softer approach helped sort out those tips without unnecessarily insulting Iraqi dignity.
During the summer of 2003, a common rumor among Iraqis was that the night-vision goggles used by American troops could enable them to peer through the clothes of women. When a brigade commander in the 101st, Col. Ben Hodges, heard this from sheikhs in his area, rather than just tell them it was false, he decided to show them by putting on an exhibition where a variety of U.S. military observation and imaging devices would be laid out for them to examine and use. The 101st staff laughingly referred to this as the First Annual Tigris River Valley Sheikhfest-and then was pleasantly surprised to see the meeting repeated and evolve into a formal Tigris River Valley Commission in which regional issues could be discussed every month.
A summary written by the staff of the 101st Airborne noted that by January of 2004, the north of Iraq appeared in remarkably good shape. There was an average of just five "hostile contacts"-bombs, ambushes, drive-by shootings-a day in the division"s operating area. That figure included attacks not just on U.S. troops but also on Iraqi security forces. By contrast, there were about twenty-five meetings a day between commanders in the division and local Iraqi leaders or managers of key facilities.
But the city would encounter far more trouble after the 101st went home in the spring of 2004 and was replaced by a far smaller, less effective unit. Not all officers thought that Petraeus was blameless for that. "He had eighteen thousand soldiers up there, and the enemy was just biding its time and building capacity, waiting him out," argued one skeptical military intelligence officer. That view seems unfair: Mosul was quiet while Petraeus was there, and likely would have remained so had his successor had as many troops as he had-and as much understanding of counterinsurgency techniques. Also, it is notable that the population-oriented approach Petraeus took in Mosul in 2003 would be the one the entire U.S. Army in Iraq was trying to adopt in 2006.
Divisions go their own way To the west of Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack got mixed reviews for being aggressive but "very selective," recalled Keith Mines. "They didn"t just go bouncing around." But, he told his family at the time in an e-mail, "their answer to everything is more firepower, while my answer to most everything is to get them back in their barracks and send me out with a suitcase of money."
In the capital itself, the 1st Armored Division was led by Brig. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who generally was seen as handling a difficult job well, under the global spotlight of Baghdad.
North of Baghdad, Odierno"s 4th Infantry Division operated in the northern part of the Sunni Triangle. His unit proved to be almost the opposite of Petraeus"s 101st Airborne. As the Marines had suspected when turning over the area north of Baghdad, Odierno and his division would take a combative posture in Iraq. "Odierno, he hammered everyone," said Kellogg, the retired Army general who was at CPA. Odierno"s brigades and battalions earned a reputation for being overly aggressive. Again and again, internal Army reports and commanders in interviews said that this unit-a heavy armored division, despite its name-used ham-fisted approaches that may have appeared to pacify its area in the short term, but in the process alienated large parts of the population.
"The 4th ID was bad," said one Army intelligence officer who worked with them. "These guys are looking for a fight," he remembered thinking. "I saw so many instances of abuses of civilians, intimidating civilians, our jaws dropped."
"Fourth ID fueled the insurgency," added an Army psychological operations officer. He said that it frequently was manipulated by the insurgents into firing at innocent civilians. "Guys would come up from Fallujah, set up next to a farmhouse, set off a mortar, and leave. And the 4th ID would respond with counterbattery fire. The 4th ID"s CG [commanding general] fostered that att.i.tude. They were cowboys."
"They are going through neighborhoods, knocking on doors at two in the morning without actionable intelligence," said a senior officer. "That"s how you create new insurgents."
A general who served in Iraq, speaking on background, said flatly, "The 4th ID-what they did was a crime."
But on most days there were relatively few outside observers watching the 4th ID. It was operating in the dank palm groves and the hot, dusty towns of the Tigris River Valley north of Baghdad, an area that was never welcoming for reporters and that grew increasingly difficult for civilian or military travel in the fall of 2003 and after. In one of his letters home, Lt. Col. Steve Russell, a battalion commander in the 4th ID, offered his rationale for the strong-arm tactics he sometimes employed. "We would not win the people of Tikrit over," he said. "They generally hate us. We are kind and compa.s.sionate to those that work with us but most detest us as a general rule. But they do respect power. Some have questioned our forcefulness but we will not win them over by handing out lollipops-not in Tikrit. Too many of my bloodied men bear witness to this. They are the "Beer Hall" crowd of Munich in 1945."
Lt. Col. David Poirier, who commanded an MP battalion attached to the 4th Infantry Division and was based in Tikrit from June 2003 to March 2004, said that the division"s approach was indiscriminate. "With the brigade and battalion commanders, it became a philosophy: "Round up all the military-age males, because we don"t know who"s good or bad."" He recalled that one brigade commander in the 4th ID "blew up a house a guy was building" and called it a "demonstration of force." Poirier was upset in part because the owner of the house had been helping him with operations in the nearby town of Samarra. "They didn"t seem to care," he recalled.
Col. Alan King, who had moved from the 3rd ID to the CPA, had a similar impression of the 4th ID"s approach. "Every male from sixteen to sixty" that the 4th ID could catch was detained, he said. "And when they got out, they were supporters of the insurgency."
"It is not black and white," Odierno said at a meeting of the a.s.sociation of the U.S. Army. Being too gentle also carried risks, he implied. "We"d go in, do a raid on a house, and we wouldn"t search any of the families, and as we were leaving, they would hand weapons from under their dresses to their men, who would shoot at us." So, he said, "yeah, initially, we probably made some mistakes." But, he continued, "we adapted quickly." One of the problems, he added, was that only one side in the fighting-his-was required to play by rules. "They were not constrained." He elaborated on his views in an article in the Army"s Field Artillery Field Artillery magazine. He made the point, worth noting, that his troops faced a population more hostile than in the rest of Iraq: "From June 2003 to January 2004, we had three times more than the combined number of attacks in the rest of the Iraqi theater." magazine. He made the point, worth noting, that his troops faced a population more hostile than in the rest of Iraq: "From June 2003 to January 2004, we had three times more than the combined number of attacks in the rest of the Iraqi theater."
He wrote that he often responded with heavy firepower. "We used our Paladins [155 millimeter self-propelled howitzer systems] the entire time we were there," he said. "Most nights we fired H&I fires [hara.s.sment and interdiction, meant to stop the enemy from being able to operate freely], what I call "proactive" counter-fire." His conclusion was that "artillery plays a significant role in counterinsurgency operations." That a.s.sertion is at odds with the great body of successful counterinsurgency practice, which holds that firepower should be as restrained as possible, which is difficult to do with the long-range, indirect fire of artillery.
The decentralization under Lt. Gen. Sanchez sometimes extended even further down, to the levels of brigades and battalions. In the 4th Infantry Division in particular, noticed an Army intelligence officer, there were two brigade commanders whose sectors were side by side in the Sunni Triangle yet used vastly different approaches. On the west bank of the river, around Samarra and Balad, was Col. Frederick Rudesheim. "Rudesheim said, "I really want to support civil affairs." He gave them augmentation [additional troops], security. He said that civil affairs was his bread and b.u.t.ter." Meanwhile, on the east side of the Tigris River, around Baqubah, Col. David Hogg was operating on a war footing that focused much more on action against the insurgents and intimidation of others. Targeting insurgent mortar positions, he said, "Hogg was firing H&I every night, and he didn"t have a lot of time for civil affairs." (Hogg confirmed that during July 2003, he had fired some 160 rounds of 155 millimeter high-explosive artillery sh.e.l.ls and 40 heavy 120 millimeter mortar rounds, but didn"t respond to requests for a follow-up interview.) Hogg said that his forces were there to "kill the enemy, not to win their hearts or minds," recalled Maj. Christopher Varhola, an Army Reserve specialist in civil affairs who worked in a large swath of Iraq.
Bombs vs. sweeps in the Sunni Triangle The insurgency remained all but invisible except during its attacks. It issued no statements. Unlike other insurgencies, such as in Algeria in the 1950s, it had no visible leaders or spokesmen, no diplomatic offices operating in friendly Arab capitals. All that was really known of it was its location and tactics. Most of the insurgency was in the Sunni Triangle, the area dominated by Sunni Muslims-who were a minority in Iraq but had ruled the country for decades-that extended west of Baghdad to Ramadi and then up the Euphrates River, north from the capital along the Tigris to Samarra and Bayji, and northeast to Baqubah. Tactically, the insurgency was generally low tech.
The U.S. wasn"t a colonial power in Iraq, seeking to hold on to a restive province, but it sometimes acted like one. "This is the way an administration caught with its plans down habitually reacts under such circ.u.mstances," Alistair Home wrote in A Savage War of Peace, A Savage War of Peace, the cla.s.sic history of the French war in Algeria in the 1950s. "Whether it be the British in Palestine, Cyprus or Northern Ireland, the Portuguese in Mozambique, or the French in Indo-China. First comes the ma.s.s indiscriminate round-up of suspects, most of them innocent but converted into ardent militants by the fact of their imprisonment." the cla.s.sic history of the French war in Algeria in the 1950s. "Whether it be the British in Palestine, Cyprus or Northern Ireland, the Portuguese in Mozambique, or the French in Indo-China. First comes the ma.s.s indiscriminate round-up of suspects, most of them innocent but converted into ardent militants by the fact of their imprisonment."
Compare Home"s words to those of the International Committee of the Red Cross in describing the way U.S. troops conducted cordon and sweep operations in Iraq.
Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property. They arrested suspects, tying their hands in the back with flexicuffs, hooding them, and taking them away. Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped and sick people. Treatment often included pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles. Individuals were often led away in whatever they happened to be wearing at the time of arrest-sometimes in pyjamas [sic] [sic] or underwear-and were denied the opportunity to gather a few essential belongings, such as clothing, hygiene items, medicine or eyegla.s.ses. or underwear-and were denied the opportunity to gather a few essential belongings, such as clothing, hygiene items, medicine or eyegla.s.ses.
Through their lack of discrimination, such tactics tend to have powerful unintended negative political effects on the population. Not only do they alienate those affected, they also show that the military force conducting the operation is ignorant, because supportive and neutral natives are caught up with hostile ones. "This does two things," concluded a 2005 study by Hicks & a.s.sociates, a small but influential Pentagon consulting firm. "For potential government collaborators, it makes them less sure that the government will protect them from harm. For potential insurgents, it makes them less worried that they will be caught if they join the insurgents."
Family members were sometimes taken into captivity to force suspects to turn themselves in. "The families know what"s going on," Col. Hogg said one day in late July 2003, standing in the ankle-deep khaki-colored dust at the front gate of his base and wearing his full battle gear of body armor, helmet, and pistol. "So we picked up the family of a Republican Guard lieutenant general last night," he said, puffing on a Dominican cigar. "He wasn"t there. We brought in his wife and daughter, and left him a note: "We know where you are. We know what car you drive. If you want your family released, turn yourself in."" This really wasn"t hostage taking, he contended. "It"s an intelligence operation with detainees"- pointing toward a difference that wasn"t immediately apparent. "These people have information. The wife denied her husband was in the military until we showed her his general"s uniform."
Hogg oversaw a typical sweep one day in late July, on a hunt for Taha Yasin Ramadan, a relatively low-ranking member of the U.S. government"s most-wanted list. On the deck of cards designed to familiarize U.S. troops with those fugitive leaders, Ramadan, who had provided security for higher ranking members of the regime, was designated the ten of diamonds. He owned a walled compound of about sixteen one- and two-story buildings in a sprawling palm plantation on the hot, humid lowlands on the east bank of the Tigris, just west of the small town of al Jadidah. The temperature was 108F, and the settlement felt like a village lost in the jungle. The raid began with two buglike OH-58 Kiowa helicopters darting over the complex, on the lookout for fleeing men or counterattackers. There was a short burst of AK-47 fire in the distance-probably a prearranged warning signal, Hogg guessed. About 125 U.S. soldiers rolled into the compound. "We"re not afraid, we didn"t do anything," protested an elderly Iraqi man. The wives and children sat and watched while about two dozen men were rounded up, handcuffed with plastic flexicuffs, and placed under the branches of some apple trees.
The residences inside the compound were searched. The soldiers entered a rough one-story structure with unfinished walls of dark cement. A middle-aged woman dressed in black and holding a baby met the soldiers in the living room with shouts. "Saddam is under my feet!" she wailed, looking at once terrified and angry. "Saddam is a dog!" She wiped a tear from her cheek with the heel of her hand.
A soldier turned to an interpreter. "Tell her," he ordered, "that if her brother didn"t do anything, he is coming back." Two other women stood in a corner, watching, and wept silently. A boy sat near them, wide-eyed.
First Sgt. Andre Harris, a twenty-two-year-veteran of the Army from Miami, stopped to shake his head in deep frustration at the difficulty of communication. Regaining his equanimity, he said, "At the very minimum, we"re making a statement."
Hogg poked his head into the room and encouraged the soldiers: "Remember, if you ain"t fishing, you ain"t catching."
Hogg"s major complaint at the time was about the media"s coverage of U.S. military operations, which he saw as negative. "I don"t think they"re fully reporting the success we"re having," he said, genially. "We"ve put a lot of bad guys away, either through detaining or killing them. That is having a positive side effect with Iraqis, who are coming to us more, telling us more, working with us more." Like many commanders, Hogg thought the media just didn"t understand how much progress had been made by the U.S. military. "I think we"re fixing to turn the corner," he said that hot day in July 2003. "I think the operations over the next couple of weeks will get us there."
At the time, dozens of roundup operations like this were being conducted every day by U.S. forces. "The reality, at least in this company, is we"ve been doing raids and cordon searches nearly every day," said Capt. Brian Healey, who commanded an infantry company in Hogg"s brigade. "The past six weeks, our patrols have gotten more aggressive, more frequent. Instead of doing [that is, searching] just one house, for example, we"ll do a whole street." That way, he noted, they could unearth weapons that an insurgent had asked or forced a neighbor to hide for him.
But there also was unease being expressed about this heavy-handed approach, both inside the U.S. military and among Iraqis talking to U.S. officers. "Hogg was an excellent brigade commander," recalled Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek, commander of the 402nd Civil Affairs Battalion, which moved to Baqubah that fall to work for Hogg. But Holshek thought that in the summer and fall of 2003, Hogg"s tactics were unnecessarily aggressive, and even counterproductive. He said he tried a few times, unsuccessfully, to figure out how to make that case. "In places like Fallujah and Baqubah, tactical commanders began to learn when conducting raids and sweeps that, in the process of kicking down doors in the middle of the night to find "bad guys" (and often kicking down the wrong doors), entering the private s.p.a.ce of the house where the women and children were, then tying up and interrogating (i.e., humiliating) the man in the house in front of his family, the premier cultural value of family honor was violated," Holshek later wrote.
Hallenbeck remembered being taken aside by a sheikh in Mosul. The Iraqi leader emphasized that he considered it essential for the Americans to succeed. "If you leave," he told Hallenbeck, "my Mercedes will be right behind the last truck in your convoy." He knew he wouldn"t survive without them. "But d.a.m.n it," the sheikh continued, "you have got to stop these middle-of-the-night knock-on-the-door searches, throwing people on the ground, making them see red."
"Many of the arrests were done with a boot on the head, in front of his woman," said Hammes. "You"ve created a blood debt when you do that."
A year later, an official Pentagon investigation would come to much the same conclusion. "Line units conducting raids found themselves seizing specifically targeted persons, so designated by military intelligence," the Pentagon"s Schlesinger report found. "But lacking interrogators and interpreters to make precise distinctions in an alien culture and hostile neighborhoods, they reverted to rounding up any and all suspicious-looking persons-all too often including women and children. The flood of incoming detainees contrasted sharply with the trickle of released individuals." This indiscriminate approach actually hindered the American goal of improving intelligence, the report noted: "Processing was overwhelmed. Some detainees at Abu Ghraib had been held 90 days before being interrogated the first time."
The results of U.S. tactics The U.S. military was badly prepared for handling a flood of prisoners. By late autumn, Abu Ghraib contained some ten thousand prisoners. U.S. military intelligence officials later estimated that most of those detained were more or less innocent, and that the vast majority-perhaps 90 percent-had no intelligence value. The detention facilities available were so limited, Sanchez said in a legal statement, "that you had to put them all in there, and it was this challenge of having, at any given time, ten to twelve [thousand], 13,000 of these people that had to be segregated and isolated and prioritized and interrogated in order for us to be able to identify the way these cells were working."
What wasn"t widely understood at the time, or even now outside the military, is that the overcrowding at the prison, and some of the resulting lapses in supervision, resulted directly from tactical decisions made by Sanchez and his division commanders, most notably the 4th ID"s Gen. Odierno. In the fall of 2003 they were stuffing Abu Ghraib with thousands of detainees, the majority of them bystanders caught up in the sweeps.
When Fast, the top Army intelligence officer in Iraq, questioned the 4th ID"s indiscriminate approach, she was told by its intelligence officer that Odierno didn"t care, according to a subsequent Army report. "The division commander did not concur with the release of detainees for fear that a bad one may be released along with the good ones," Maj. Gen. George Fay wrote.
Fast said in a statement to investigators that Odierno"s att.i.tude was "We wouldn"t have detained them if we wanted them released." (Odierno said in an interview that he remembers saying that the intelligence people in Baghdad needed to develop a system so that before they released people, they checked with the division, because his division had caught at least ten suspected insurgents who had been sent to Baghdad and then released. "What I said was, "When we sent them to Baghdad we thought they were bad guys, so if you want to release them, please ask us."") Brig. Gen. Karpinski, the reserve MP officer overseeing detentions across Iraq, drew a distinction between the operations run by Swannack and Odierno. "Mobile interrogators" attached to each division were supposed to interview and screen detained Iraqis, shipping to the Abu Ghraib prison only those who offered the prospect of having some intelligence value. "The 82nd"s interrogators did it right," she said in 2005. "They"d interview twenty-five and send three to me. Odierno"s guys would grab twenty-five, and send twenty-five, or fifty, by including a bunch from his holding pen. The 82nd was the best. Petraeus was pretty good. But the 1st AD would send a lot, and the 4th ID was the worst." (During its first, yearlong tour in Iraq, the 4th ID would detain about ten thousand Iraqis, of whom Gen. Odierno estimated it sent between one thousand to two thousand to Abu Ghraib, which seems low, given the total prisoner numbers cited by Sanchez.) Sanchez, frustrated by his puzzling enemy, on September 14 approved twenty-nine interrogation techniques to be used at the prison and elsewhere. It was the first time that an interrogation policy had been set in Iraq by the U.S. military, another reflection of the lack of expectation of an insurgency. His memorandum listed a dozen interrogation techniques not in standard usage by the Army, five more even than were being used at Guantanamo Bay. Even in approving them, his memorandum noted that other countries believed that the detainees were prisoners of war, and that some of the methods being discussed were inconsistent with the Geneva Conventions governing their treatment. Centcom reviewed his decision, and a month later scaled it back, telling him it was "unacceptably aggressive," according to a subsequent Pentagon inquiry. He was told to drop ten of the twenty-nine interrogation procedures he had approved. His superseding memo incorporating that order was issued on October 12.
Friendly fire worsens Fallujah"s woes As the war intensified in the summer, it brought with it a series of incidents in which newly wary U.S. troops fired on civilians, such as carloads of families hurrying to get home before curfew. A Reuters cameraman was killed because a soldier thought the device on his shoulder, seen from a distance, looked like a launcher for a rocket-propelled grenade. In the most consequential of these incidents, on September 12, a platoon from the 82nd Airborne mistakenly became embroiled in a night firefight with Iraqi police near Fallujah. Eight Iraqi police officers died in the clash, which was caused by a lack of coordination with the police and their shortage of proper equipment. A BMW had shot up a police station. Iraqi police gave chase in a truck and pa.s.sed American troops; then, giving up, they turned around. When the truck, which had a heavy machine gun mounted on it, made its U turn, the platoon thought it was coming under attack. Eventually, Jordanian police working at a nearby hospital also got involved.
Iraqi police interviewed later by reporters said they had tried desperately to get the Americans to stop. Thousands of rounds of ammunition, many of them heavy caliber, were fired, according to Stars & Stripes, Stars & Stripes, the U.S. military newspaper. "They shot at us for about an hour," Sgt. a.s.sem Mohammed, one of the police officers, said later, while recovering from a gunshot wound at Fallujah General Hospital. "They kept firing, and we kept shouting at them, "We are police! We are police!"" In the course of the three-way firefight-which involved U.S., Iraqi, and Jordanian police, who were all ostensibly allies-a good part of the nascent Fallujah police force was killed. the U.S. military newspaper. "They shot at us for about an hour," Sgt. a.s.sem Mohammed, one of the police officers, said later, while recovering from a gunshot wound at Fallujah General Hospital. "They kept firing, and we kept shouting at them, "We are police! We are police!"" In the course of the three-way firefight-which involved U.S., Iraqi, and Jordanian police, who were all ostensibly allies-a good part of the nascent Fallujah police force was killed.
"It was the deadliest friendly-fire incident in the six-month-old occupation, and it left tremendous bitterness on both sides," wrote Bing West, the defense a.n.a.lyst who spent months observing U.S. operations in Anbar province.
In the weeks after that, Kipling, the MP officer, recalled, the Iraqi police frequently were wary of U.S. troops. "More than once the Iraqi police would say something along the lines of "You and your soldiers are okay, but those others are dangerous,"" she said.
In the wake of the incident, Keith Mines tried to get the attention of his superiors. He had arrived in the province in midsummer, somewhat concerned about the direction of the occupation, but still believing that it could be put right. The diplomat, a former Special Forces officer, knew that in counterinsurgencies, the solutions tended not to be military. "Police, [electric] power and political process," he wrote to his family in August. "That is what will fix this place, and if we give them those three we can get the heck out of here." But that wasn"t the path the occupation would take. By September Mines began to turn pessimistic. "The president has received some profoundly bad advice on this, and unfortunately the same people who gave him bad advice to begin with are the ones trying to help dig him out," he wrote in a depressed letter to a State Department colleague. "Things are as bad as the press reports and quite frankly I don"t see how with our current strategy it is going to work."
In the Iraqi view, the incident outside Fallujah was just the latest U.S. military blow to Iraqi dignity, Mines noted in a subsequent memo to the CPA and the staff of the 82nd Airborne. "Al Anbar"s sheikhs are expressing increasing resentment over what they perceive as lack of respect for them by the coalition," he wrote on September 18. "Between detentions, arbitrary and often destructive house searches, and the recent killing of coalition-sanctioned police officers by coalition forces, the Anbar sheikhs say they are tired of not receiving the respect that their traditional position should convey."
A hardening of views Back in the United States the split in the views of the situation in Iraq also was deepening. In the fall of 2003, Anthony Zinni began speaking out again, bitterly denouncing Rumsfeld, criticizing the Iraq occupation, and saying it lacked a coherent strategy, a serious plan, and sufficient resources. "There is no strategy or mechanism for putting the pieces together," he told a gathering of the U.S. Naval Inst.i.tute and the Marine Corps a.s.sociation in Crystal City, Virginia, within walking distance of the Pentagon. "We"re in danger of failing." The situation was worse than the newspapers had been portraying it, he told his audience. He mocked the premature celebration of victory against a weak Iraqi military: "Ohio State beat Slippery Rock sixty-two to nothing. No s.h.i.t." Yet now, he said, the jihadis were flocking to Iraq from around the Mideast. "We need to seal the borders"-a view that the Pentagon would come to endorse more than a year later.
The U.S. military was unbeatable at fighting but not much good at the larger task, Zinni said. "We are great at the tactical problems-the killing and the breaking. We are lousy at the strategic part." Nor should the Pentagon be overseeing the occupation. "Why the h.e.l.l would the Department of Defense be the organization in our government that deals with the reconstruction of Iraq?" he asked. "Doesn"t make sense."
Underscoring how much his views had changed since he had endorsed the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2000, Zinni implied that the Bush administration was damaging the U.S. military in the way that Bush and Cheney, during the 2000 election campaign, had charged the Clinton administration with doing. "We can"t go on breaking our military and doing things like we"re doing now," he said. "It kills me when I hear of the casualties and the sacrifice that"s being made," especially because the casualties are being suffered because "some policy wonk back here had a brain fart of an idea of a strategy."
Invoking the most emotional of comparisons for U.S. military officers of his generation, he ended by warning that Iraq was beginning to feel to him like the Vietnam War. "My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice," said Zinni. "We swore never again would we allow that to happen. I ask you, Is it happening again?" There were hundreds of Marine and Navy officers present, and many of those present rose to give his denunciation of their civilian leaders a standing ovation.
From the perspective of top U.S. officials, things were going far better that Zinni suggested. At about the same time that he was speaking in Washington, Rumsfeld flew out to Iraq, where his tour turned into a concentrated attack on the media"s coverage of events there. At the end of a long day, Rumsfeld, Bremer, and Sanchez met with reporters at Camp Victory, one of Saddam"s palaces near the Baghdad airport.
Rumsfeld: There"s so much reporting about Baghdad and so little about what"s taking place in the rest of the country.... I feel that the progress in four or five months is breathtaking. There"s so much reporting about Baghdad and so little about what"s taking place in the rest of the country.... I feel that the progress in four or five months is breathtaking.Br erne r: Mr. Secretary, I would just add a little more on the point you made about the good news. Every day in this country there are dozens of success stories. Mr. Secretary, I would just add a little more on the point you made about the good news. Every day in this country there are dozens of success stories.
Schools were being built, he said, hospitals reopened, and local governments stood up.
Bremer: Democracy is on the march in this country. Democracy is on the march in this country.Rumsfeld: And if you think about it, it happened in four or five months. Four or five months. Not four or five years. Four or five months. If one looks back at Germany, at j.a.pan, at Bosnia or Kosovo, and measures the progress that"s taken place in this country in four or five months, it dwarfs any other experience that I"m aware of. And if you think about it, it happened in four or five months. Four or five months. Not four or five years. Four or five months. If one looks back at Germany, at j.a.pan, at Bosnia or Kosovo, and measures the progress that"s taken place in this country in four or five months, it dwarfs any other experience that I"m aware of.
At this point, Sanchez got with the spirit of the session.
Sanchez: Mr. Secretary, ladies and gentlemen. It is very disturbing for me when I sit here every day and watch the news back home that focuses on the bad things that are occurring in Iraq, and I see my soldiers that have suffered either wounds or have gotten killed, and we"re not paying the right credit to their sacrifices. Mr. Secretary, ladies and gentlemen. It is very disturbing for me when I sit here every day and watch the news back home that focuses on the bad things that are occurring in Iraq, and I see my soldiers that have suffered either wounds or have gotten killed, and we"re not paying the right credit to their sacrifices.
So, the general admonished the group of reporters, We need to capture the great news out there and make sure that America knows what her sons and daughters are doing and what the rest of the international community is doing here in Iraq.
A few days later, Wolfowitz struck a similar theme in a round of congressional testimony in support of an $87 billion budget supplement for spending on Iraq. He seemed to be saying that talking a good game was essential. "You know, confidence is part of winning," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "We need to project confidence. And we have every reason to project confidence, because we"ve done a fantastic job. We"ve liberated a country from a horrible dictator. We are cleaning up the remnants of that regime. We have the people with us."
Gen. Sanchez vs. Col. Spain When Col. Teddy Spain thinks back on his year in Iraq, the one day that stands out, painfully, is October 17,2003. What he dwells on isn"t so much the nasty firefight with Iraqi militiamen-he was actually more than 60 miles away when that broke out the day before-but the confrontation afterward with Gen. Sanchez that helped him decide that he would leave the Army at the end of his tour.
The killings occurred in Karbala, one of the two cities in Iraq holy to Shiite Muslims. Lt. Col. Kim Orlando, commander of the 716th Military Police Battalion from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, was attached to the multinational division operating in southern Iraq and led by Poland; it had been put in that area because it was presumed to be quiet. Col. Spain, the military police commander in Baghdad, had worried that the battalion, which normally would come under his command, should be reporting to him. But he was told by Sanchez"s staff that he didn"t have tactical or operational control of the unit.
Recalling "that d.i.c.ked-up frago," or fragmentary order, he said later, "I said, "Bottom line, can I tell them what to do?" They said, "No." I said, "Okay, got it, they don"t belong to me."" So he turned his attention to the units he actually still did command.