Holshek said later that he came to believe that the cause of the turmoil among the troops wasn"t the quality of commanders, but rather the disconnect between what the Army was designed to do and what it actually found itself doing. "I would say that the U.S. Army, ninety percent, was not structured for success," he said later. "We"ve got a military designed to fight big wars, and it"s constantly fighting small wars." So, he said, he found himself seen by subordinates as the representative of an inst.i.tution that had failed its members: "Where are our squad automatic weapons? Where is our body armor? How long are we going to be here?"
For months, he added, he had been unable to find out how much longer his unit would serve there. "All we knew was that everyone was being extended, regardless. Nor could I get a straight answer from my chain on when we would leave Iraq-until about less than one month before we left." (Indeed, Army morale improved sharply when soldiers began to receive clearer signals on the likely duration of their tours of duty. When Army researchers returned a year later to conduct a similar survey, they found that 54 percent of the 2,064 soldiers surveyed reported poor morale. That still wasn"t good, but was an 18 percentage point improvement on the 2003 figure.) The Army wasn"t broken-yet-but it was being stressed and strained in unexpected ways. No matter what ultimately happened in Iraq, it became clear that it was going to emerge from the war there a very different inst.i.tution.
THE MARINE CORPS.
FILES A DISSENT.
WINTER 2003-4.
I.
n the winter of 2003-4 the Marine Corps was ordered to head back to Iraq to lend a hand. Its units would replace the Army in one of the toughest parts of the country: al Anbar province in the western desert, a region dominated by the hostile towns of Fallujah and Ramadi.
The Marines were determined to operate differently than the Army in the province. The Corps has long had a different outlook and culture. The smaller, infantry-oriented Corps tends to see war as a matter of the spirit; in other words, it believes less in technology and machinery and more in the human factors- blood, sweat, love, hate, and faith-as the decisive factors in combat. This embrace of the elemental nature of war runs from bottom to top: Marine boot camp indoctrinates recruits into a culture comfortable with killing the enemy, and Marine generals don"t shy away from using the word "kill" in interviews about their line of work.
Through much of late 2003 the Marine Corps had watched Army operations in Iraq with growing discomfort. With its experience in occupying Haiti and fighting banana wars in Central America, the Corps quietly thought it had a better feel for how to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign. Some officers said privately that they thought the Army had been unnecessarily heavy-handed in Iraq, firing artillery sh.e.l.ls from big bases and taking hostages when it should have been living among the people. Most of this discussion occurred far from public view, but it occasionally surfaced, as when Lt. Col. Carl E. Mundy III, who had commanded a Marine battalion in Iraq in the summer of 2003, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times New York Times later that year that scornfully contrasted the Marine success in pacifying south-central Iraq with the war the Army found itself waging farther north in the Sunni Triangle. When the Marines returned, Mundy promised, they would follow a counterinsurgency approach that "will stand in contrast to the new, get-tough strategy adopted by American forces in the Sunni Triangle." later that year that scornfully contrasted the Marine success in pacifying south-central Iraq with the war the Army found itself waging farther north in the Sunni Triangle. When the Marines returned, Mundy promised, they would follow a counterinsurgency approach that "will stand in contrast to the new, get-tough strategy adopted by American forces in the Sunni Triangle."
Unusually for a lieutenant colonel, Mundy, himself the son of a Marine commandant, was specifically critical of a general: in this case, the Army"s Gen. Odierno, and the tactics he had employed with the 4th Infantry Division around Tikrit. "We need to abandon techniques like surrounding villages with barbed wire and rounding up relatives of guerrillas," he wrote. Mundy was referring to Lt. Col. Steve Russell, a battalion commander in the 4th ID, who had encircled the village of Auja, home of many of Saddam"s relatives, with concertina wire, and made military-age males who wanted to come or go show an ident.i.ty card. "The insurgents should not be allowed to swim among the population as a whole," Russell had told reporters. "What we elected to do was make Auja a fishbowl so we could see who was swimming inside." Like the toy car controller Russell had used to detonate roadside bombs, the fencing of Auja showed that Russell was a battlefield innovator, seeking new solutions to the problems he encountered. In one of his letters home, he said he was influenced in part by French tactics in Algeria. He apparently didn"t subscribe to the judgment of historians that such tactics had won some battles for the French at the cost of losing the war.
Kicking in doors, knocking down buildings, burning orchards, and firing artillery into civilian neighborhoods was bound to be counterproductive in the long run, Mundy warned: "The continued use of such hard-nosed tactics only risks further erosion of trust." He simply was making public what more senior Marines long had been saying behind closed doors. In December, Lt. Gen. James Conway, who would be the senior Marine going back into Iraq, told the New York Times New York Times that he didn"t plan to use air strikes or artillery attacks against insurgents. "That will not be our method of operation," he said. that he didn"t plan to use air strikes or artillery attacks against insurgents. "That will not be our method of operation," he said.
The Marines thought they could use in the Sunni Triangle the tactics they had employed effectively in the south. "Our expectations were pretty high that we would be successful using our stability operations that we had trained toward,"
said Col. Toolan, commander of the 1st Marine Regiment. "We had just come out of the southern region, south of Baghdad-Hillah, Diwaniyah, Karbala, and Najaf-and we had had tremendous success. Governments were blossoming, money was being spent in reconstruction efforts. So the perception that we had was, this works, we can actually get there. We can work with the locals_________ [A] 11 of these things led us to believe that our techniques and our procedures were pretty effective, and we could use them in al Anbar."
Marine Maj. Gen. James Mattis "Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet" was one of the rules to live by that Maj. Gen. James Mattis gave his Marines. Mattis, the commander of the 1st Marine Division, began in the winter of 2003-4 to train his troops to operate differently from the Army when they returned to Iraq. Mattis is unusual in many ways, most notably in being one of the more intense intellectuals in the U.S. military. "He is one of the most urbane and polished men I have known," said retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, himself a Ph.D. in history. "He can quote Homer as well as Sun Tzu." (Once possessed of a huge personal library, Mattis gave away many thousands of books to Marine and local libraries, and in late 2005 estimated that he had reduced his load to about one thousand volumes.) When he deploys Mattis always packs the Meditations Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman who was both a Stoic philosopher and an emperor. "It allows me to distance myself from the here and now," and to discern the connection to the eternal verities of warfare, he explained. Mattis also objected to the Rumsfeld Pentagon"s emphasis on "net-centric" warfare built around the movement of data. "Computers by their nature are isolating. They build walls. The nature of war is immutable: You need trust and connection." He dismissed the net-centric emphasis as "a Marxian view-it ignores the spiritual." of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman who was both a Stoic philosopher and an emperor. "It allows me to distance myself from the here and now," and to discern the connection to the eternal verities of warfare, he explained. Mattis also objected to the Rumsfeld Pentagon"s emphasis on "net-centric" warfare built around the movement of data. "Computers by their nature are isolating. They build walls. The nature of war is immutable: You need trust and connection." He dismissed the net-centric emphasis as "a Marxian view-it ignores the spiritual."
With his troops he tended to be earthier. "The first time you blow someone away is not an insignificant event," he told two hundred Marines at one session in al Asad. "That said, there are some a.s.sholes in the world that just need to be shot. There are hunters and there are victims. By your discipline, cunning, obedience, and alertness you will decide if you are a hunter or a victim.... It"s really a h.e.l.l of a lot of fun. You"re gonna have a blast out here!" He finished in Pattonesque fashion: "I feel sorry for every son of a b.i.t.c.h that doesn"t get to serve with you."
Small, slight, and bespectacled, Mattis didn"t fit the Hollywood image of the fire-breathing Marine commander. But retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, himself a widely respected officer, commented, "I think he"s the finest combat leader we"ve produced since Korea." Mattis genuinely seemed to thrive on the noise and confusion of battle. He adopted Chaos as his radio call sign when he took the Marines into southern Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, and kept it when he led the Marine part of the invasion force for Iraq in the spring of 2003. After the invasion he sent home his tanks and artillery pieces and went to Iraqi military leaders in each area his troops were in. "I come in peace," Mattis recalled telling them. "I didn"t bring artillery. But I"m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you f.u.c.k with me, I"ll kill you all."
Just before Christmas 2003 in California, preparing to take his troops back into Iraq where they would relieve the 82nd Airborne in al Anbar province, he held a two-day meeting of his staff and commanders at Camp Pendleton to plan a different approach. Mattis"s Marines would be culturally sensitive, the group decided. They wouldn"t wear sungla.s.ses when interacting with Iraqis, so there wouldn"t be a barrier between them and the locals. They would learn a smattering of Arabic. They would even grow mustaches so they would look more like the locals. Marine intelligence a.n.a.lysts wouldn"t overreact to clerics" Friday sermons blasting the occupiers. "Religious leaders are normally going to be critical publicly of the coalition," said a summary of the meeting"s major points. "Otherwise they will be seen as weak by their followers." Also, Marine commanders were warned to brace for Fridays, when Iraqis left the mosques "fired up."
To the degree possible, Marine operations would be comprehensible to Iraqis. Col. Toolan of the 1st Marines recalled: "Transparency was the name of the game. We knew we didn"t know who to trust. So go in with the mentality that we care, and we"ll work with you." In a tactic that reached back to Marine Combined Action Platoon operations decades earlier in Vietnam, the plan called for small units of Marines to live among the people in many Sunni towns and villages to facilitate the training of the Iraqi police and civil defense forces.
Don"t get upset when a family lies to you about one of its members" committing a crime, those at the Marine meeting advised, in an admonition unusual for an inst.i.tution that places great value on truth telling: "This is not an attempt to cover up, it is an attempt to save the honor of the family. They know he did it. They just don"t want to lose face. This is fine, you know the truth, let the family keep its honor intact." In an even more extraordinary conclusion, the Marine meeting called for an almost deferential approach to searching Iraqi houses. "If you knock at the door for a "cordon and knock," try not to look directly into the house when the door opens. If searching, be careful. Do not destroy possessions and furniture," and ask the leader of the household to open rooms and cupboards. Nor should that man be dishonored before his family. "If something is found, do not throw the leader of the house to the ground in front of his family," the meeting advised. "Give him some honor. Tell them he needs to explain to his wife and children that he is coming with you."
Most controversial, at least inside the U.S. military, were the steps the Marines chose to underscore to Iraqis that they weren"t the U.S. Army. To emphasize to Iraqis that the Marines arriving in Fallujah and other centers of resistance were a new and different organization, the Marines planned to wear green camouflage uniforms and black Marine boots for their initial forty-five days of patrolling, instead of the tan desert uniform worn by Army soldiers in Iraq. "The green uniforms will be one very visible difference and symbolically represent that break between the old and the new," said one Marine officer who attended the Pendleton discussion. It was important to do so, he continued, because of the counterproductive approach some Army divisions had taken in 2003. "I"m appalled at the current heavy-handed use of air and artillery in Iraq. I don"t believe there is any viable use for artillery or JDAMs [joint direct attack munitions, precision-guided bombs weighing one thousand or two thousand pounds] in the current environment." This officer, like many Marines, had concluded that "success in a counterinsurgency environment is based on winning popular support, not on blowing up people"s houses."
That view probably represented the most basic difference in the approach the Marines aimed to take when they returned to Iraq early in 2004. "At the end of the day it all boils down to whether you are fighting the insurgents or the insurgency," said one veteran Marine officer. "The Army, writ large-I exempt the 101st-has chosen to fight the insurgents, and the Corps, the insurgency." This is, he added, "the same argument we had in Vietnam." Mattis concluded the December meeting by saying that "both the insurgency and the military force are competing for the same thing: the support of the people." At the same time, you have to kill the insurgents when you are confronted. "There is only one "retirement plan" for terrorists."
This generally softer, more culturally sensitive approach, combined with a hard-nosed willingness to mix it up when necessary, got good reviews from some others. "The Marines are on to something here," said a Defense Intelligence Agency a.n.a.lyst with experience in Iraq.
"I like the Marine approach, and I think it"ll succeed," said Lt. Col. David Poirier, the MP commander in Tikrit who had been appalled by some of the actions of Army soldiers, especially the 82nd Airborne, when he operated in Fallujah.
"I believe that some of the insurgency is due to families acting out against American forces for deaths occurring as a result of collateral damage."
An Army major serving on the CPA staff who had studied Iraqi tribal issues also thought it was wise to try a new approach. "I think this is a sound strategy and a good start to begin the reconciliation process," he said. His view was that the U.S. military had gotten off to an ugly start in that region on April 28, 2003, when the 82nd Airborne had fired into a crowd. "I am of the opinion that much of our trouble in the triangle is the result of the April incident in which thirteen locals were killed by U.S. forces. The tribal code demanded a rest.i.tution and reconciliation ritual, and lacking this ritual required vendetta.... I believe that the Marines may be able to break this cycle of violence with a fresh start."
But the express intention of the Marines to distinguish themselves from the Army drew angry responses from many others. Retired Army Col. Lloyd Matthews said he found this aspect of the Marine discussions distasteful. "It is hardly advisable in joint operations to denigrate the tactics of the sister service that preceded you in the trenches, and to suggest that you are going to do a lot better," he said. "If one is going to do better than his predecessor, it is wiser to wait and let his success speak for itself rather than trumpeting it in advance." He was especially unhappy with the intention to wear a different uniform. "The green cammy phase is for no other purpose than to differentiate the lovable Marines now in town from those detestable Army ruffians who just left."
Matthews, a former editor of Parameters, Parameters, the Army"s premier professional journal, was also skeptical about whether the Marine Combined Action Platoon program would be viable in the hostile atmosphere of the Sunni Triangle. "First, CAPs work only when they operate in a broadly secure environment," he said. "They can"t go up against a significant encroaching force. Second, they fragment your own force and consume manpower. Third, CAPs presuppose the availability of a reliable, loyal, ample local militia. That may become so. It is not so now." In fact, as Matthews suspected, that lack of dependable local forces was to become a major problem for the Marines in the spring of 2004. the Army"s premier professional journal, was also skeptical about whether the Marine Combined Action Platoon program would be viable in the hostile atmosphere of the Sunni Triangle. "First, CAPs work only when they operate in a broadly secure environment," he said. "They can"t go up against a significant encroaching force. Second, they fragment your own force and consume manpower. Third, CAPs presuppose the availability of a reliable, loyal, ample local militia. That may become so. It is not so now." In fact, as Matthews suspected, that lack of dependable local forces was to become a major problem for the Marines in the spring of 2004.
Others warned that the Marines were in for a rude surprise. Lt. Col. Gian Gentile, who served with the 4th Infantry Division in the area around Tikrit, commented at the same time, "Unfortunately, the Sunni Triangle is nothing like southern Iraq or the part of northern Iraq around Mosul_________ I hope the Marines"
velvet glove works, that it saves the lives of Marines and Iraqis, and leads to a stable and secure region. But I also fear that this approach, by dismissing the cultural and tactical differences in the Sunni Triangle, will ignore the hard-won gains of Army units over the past eight months."
An Army general who was experienced in Iraq privately applauded the Marines" intentions but quietly cautioned, "I don"t think it will prove as easy as it briefs.... Some of this reflects a degree of intellectual smugness that might be warranted after, say, six successful months on the ground." He would prove clairvoyant.
The meditations of Gen. Mattis To prepare his officers mentally to go back, Mattis had them read over one thousand pages of material culled from seventy-two commentaries and news articles on insurgencies, sent out in three ma.s.s e-mails during the winter of 2003-4. "Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun," he wrote to a colleague on November 20,2003.
For all the "4 "4th Generation of War" intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., i i must respectfully say, "not really": alexander the great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not must respectfully say, "not really": alexander the great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by notstudying----------------------------------- studying, vice vice just reading the men who have gone before us. just reading the men who have gone before us. we wehave been fighting on this planet for 5,000 5,000 years and we should take advantage of their experience. "winging it" and filling body bags as we sort out what works reminds us of the moral dictates and the cost of incompetence in our profession. years and we should take advantage of their experience. "winging it" and filling body bags as we sort out what works reminds us of the moral dictates and the cost of incompetence in our profession.
Each selection in Mattis"s reading list carried his explanation of what he considered noteworthy in it. Battalion commanders were required to certify in writing that their subordinates had read and understood the material. "While learning from experience is good, learning from others" experiences is even better," Mattis wrote in his introductory comment. Again and again the theme of the readings was that Iraq could be frustrating, difficult, and complex, and that leaders needed to prepare their troops for that environment. The articles called for maintaining discipline, honing skills, and having faith in each other-and warned of what can go wrong when soldiers lose hold of those fundamentals.
The first of the seventy-two selections was a magazine article t.i.tled, "The Tipping Point: How Military Occupations Go Sour," about mistakes the Israelis had committed in Lebanon. The second was a news story about the mistaken shooting by a U.S. soldier of the head of the U.S.-appointed munic.i.p.al council in Sadr City. The third was about a similar incident involving the 82nd Airborne. On an article about the Army bringing charges against Lt. Col. West, the battalion commander in the 4th ID who fired a weapon next to a detainee"s ear, Mattis wrote, "this shows a commander who has lost his moral balance or has watched too many Hollywood movies. By our every act and statement, Marine leaders must set a legal, moral and ethical model that maintains traditional Marine Corps levels of discipline."
For another article, about the a.s.sa.s.sination of two Shiite politicians, he wrote, "Recall Beirut, my fine young men, and the absolute need for Iraqis to see the American military as impartial. We will be compa.s.sionate to all the innocent and deadly only to those who insist on violence, taking no "sides" other than to destroy the enemy. We must act as a windbreak, behind which a struggling Iraq can get its act together."
He also sent out to his officers T. E. Lawrence"s "27 Articles," a distillation of everything that eccentric but insightful British officer had learned about leading and advising Arabs in combat. Article 15 in particular would resonate: "Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good, perhaps, as you think it is." Also, Lawrence warned in Article 22, keep in mind that these people may actually know more about certain types of fighting than you do: "Unnumbered generations of tribal raids have taught them more about some parts of the business than we will ever know." Mattis"s introduction to the Lawrence piece wisely emphasized what some Marines had been neglecting: In returning to Iraq, the Marines would be operating in a Sunni area, an environment very different from the Shiite south.
Mattis hammered home the message in a series of face-to-face meetings with his troops. "The general talked to every Marine in the division at least three times, usually in battalion size," recalled Col. Clarke Lethin, Mattis"s chief of operations. "He wanted to talk them through, and image them through, the issues they would face. He wanted to talk about morality on the battlefield, how to go through an ambush one day and have your buddy blown up, and then face Iraqis the next day." The message: Iraqis aren"t your enemy, don"t let the insurgents make you think that. The people are the prize. The people are the prize.
The Marines vs. al Anbar When Mattis arrived in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Swannack, the 82nd Airborne"s commander, told him he had three pressing concerns about the Marines" contemplated approach. First, he said, you guys need artillery. "After seeing how we got mortared and rocketed in the evenings, they decided to bring it," Swannack recalled. Second, he advised them to think twice about trying to inst.i.tute the Marine Combined Action Platoon program. "I told them that the CAP program wouldn"t work, that al Anbar province wasn"t ready for it then, and maybe never, because they didn"t want us downtown." Third, he vigorously objected to the Marine plan to wear green uniforms and black boots. "I told him that was a personal affront to me, and that a relief should be seamless," Swannack said.
Mattis deferred to Swannack on the uniform issue, not wanting to cause a breach. "What I was trying to do was break the cycle of violence. He took it personally. I appreciated his candor."
Mattis also maintained that he wasn"t replicating the Vietnam-era CAP program, but adapting it-successfully, in his view-to local cultural conditions. Each battalion would have one platoon that was given a thirty-day course in Arab customs and language, and that unit in turn could help teach its company, and then the company could affect the entire battalion.
Swannack thought he had done well in Fallujah. "I think Fallujah was being managed appropriately, with surgical operations based on precise intelligence," he said.
Yet elsewhere in the U.S. military there was a growing belief that the 82nd Airborne had lost control of the city. Abizaid and Sanchez had been pressuring Swannack to do more about Fallujah, said an Army officer familiar with those exchanges.
Mattis had a plan to handle the city. "I knew Fallujah would be tough," he recalled. But he thought he could prevail through combining high-profile infrastructure projects, especially on electricity and water, with low-profile raids against specific individuals. "We were going to use the softer forms, focus on lights and water, and go in with small teams to kill the bad guys at night." But as it turned out, he would never get the chance to implement this approach. Instead, Fallujah went off the tracks almost immediately. In the view of some Marine officers, what would follow was a tragedy, beginning with a mistake and followed by death and retribution. Mattis"s plan for Fallujah would become for the Corps"s commanders a great lost opportunity, yet another of the many roads not taken.
Marine commanders found that their broader plan for the pacification of Anbar province would be undercut by the chronic lack of troops. Col. Toolan, commander of the 1st Marines, recalled that he had four basic missions: control major supply routes (MSR), develop Iraqi security forces (ISF), eliminate insurgent sanctuaries, and create jobs. "The challenge was, when we controlled the MSR and developed the ISF, there was no one left to eliminate sanctuaries or create jobs. So it was like whack-a-mole." And so, within weeks of arriving, the Marine Corps, which had wanted to go back to show how to work better with the people, would wind up instead involved in some of the most savage fighting U.S. troops had experienced in decades.
THE SURPRISE.
SPRING 2004.
B.
y the late winter of 2003-4, it was clear that the U.S. effort, both in pacification and reconstruction, was faltering. But it wouldn"t be until spring that it would become clear just how troubled it was. The key change in the disposition of forces was a major rotation that withdrew the units that had been there a year and replaced them with a new set of divisions. Notably, this rotation cut the U.S. troop presence in the north, replacing the 101st Airborne, which along with its attached units had fielded twenty thousand troops, with a patched-together outfit called Task Force Olympia that had less than half that number, and also far less mobility than the helicopter-rich 101st.
One reason such a reduction was still thought possible was that midwinter had gone by quietly, perhaps lulling commanders, especially those who thought that the capture of Saddam Hussein in mid-December would quell the enthusiasm of the insurgents. And February 2004 brought the lowest death toll so far of any month during the U.S. military presence in Iraq, just twenty-and a relatively peaceful fraction of the number in every subsequent month of that year. It was also the low point in terms of total U.S. troop presence in the country in 2003-5, dipping briefly to about 110,000. For the next twenty-two months the number of U.S. troops would creep upward, until finally, by the end of 2005, it hit 159,000, the highest level since the occupation began.
The troop rotation itself may also have contributed to the misplaced sense of calm, as many experienced U.S. units began disengaging, doing less patrolling and more packing up. So in retrospect, this period of quiet wasn"t necessarily as rea.s.suring as it was interpreted to be at the time. The insurgency was quiet in order to lay the groundwork for a spring offensive, a security expert who worked in the Green Zone said later. "I think enemy forces were planning, solidifying their support base, getting ready to hit us in the spring. I was talking to Iraqis, and they were saying things were going to get bad. We got intelligence that they were going to hit the Spanish and Italians, drive them out. That was the model: Isolate the U.S., then drive us out and embarra.s.s us."
Seasoned insurgents vs. newcomer troops U.S. forces learned but then went home, while the enemy learned and, if he survived, fought better the next time. In 2003, one ill-conceived drive-by shooting was conducted from a horse-pulled cart, remembered Col. Spain. The Iraqi police who had come under attack simply shot the trotting horse and then finished off the stranded attackers. "The insurgents grew more proficient" with the pa.s.sage of time, noted Ahmed Hashim, a professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College, who as a reservist would later serve with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. "American forces had killed most of the incompetent ones; the tactics, techniques, and procedures of the surviving insurgents became more lethal as a result of experience."
This change became apparent early in 2004, when the insurgents began to contend with fresh U.S. troops. Some disruption had been expected from the troop rotation, but commanders thought they could ensure that knowledge would be pa.s.sed on. Yet the change seems to have given the insurgency a major opening. "We didn"t expect the level of violence that we ran into," Sgt. 1st Cla.s.s Erick Macher, who operated in Bayji and Tikrit, recalled much later. "You"re coming in for OIF II [the second rotation of Operation Iraqi Freedom]; they captured Saddam Hussein before we got there. We thought that would change things."
The new troops had two strikes against them. In a culture where social life turns not on official positions but on personal relationships, they were blank slates. And with a fast and constantly moving insurgency, where the enemy was quickly adapting, as well as operating on his own turf, anything that can be dis- tilled into written knowledge is already likely to be a bit too old, a bit stale. The cutting edge of operations against an insurgency is the gut instinct that tells a squad leader that a street scene that appears safe really isn"t, or the backlog of experience that allows a battalion commander to discern a new twist in what a sheikh is telling him. Much of that was lost when new troops rotated in. They were enthusiastic and hardworking but alien in the situation, while the other side had just gone through months of hard fighting.
Nor had many commanders really grasped the nature of the war in which they were engaged. "I don"t think we came in with leaders fully prepared to fight counterinsurgency," Lt. Col. Jim Chevallier, commander of the 1st Squadron of the 4th Cavalry Regiment in the 1st Infantry Division, told Army Army magazine much later, after his 2004-5 tour of duty was concluded. "I don"t think we understood what the enemy"s basic scheme of maneuver was." So, he said, "until you understand counterinsurgency, it"s difficult to tell what success is. If I had to do it all over again, I"d train my leaders more on counterinsurgency operations." magazine much later, after his 2004-5 tour of duty was concluded. "I don"t think we understood what the enemy"s basic scheme of maneuver was." So, he said, "until you understand counterinsurgency, it"s difficult to tell what success is. If I had to do it all over again, I"d train my leaders more on counterinsurgency operations."
Also, overoptimistic planners and commanders, encouraged by the midwinter lull, thought the U.S. military posture could be altered and that the new troops could take a more distant stance from the fledgling Iraqi security forces. Unlike the unit of Capt. Kipling, the MP officer, the MPs who replaced her brigade were told not to operate from the police stations. "It had taken us months to develop a rapport, and we were in the stations," sometimes as much as nine hours a day, she said later. "I didn"t see how they could develop a rapport, not being in the stations."
As Kipling and more than one hundred thousand other troops departed, there was a worrisome falloff in the quality of the intelligence gathered. "The actionable intelligence improved in the late summer, early fall, into the winter," Gen. Sanchez said in a legal statement. "And then in the spring, it went into a significant, very noticeable decrease." He blamed the decline squarely on the big troop rotation. "We changed out every single unit in that country, so you had the natural dip in situational awareness."
Oddly, the Army recognized the problem but persistently failed to respond adequately, said one Army officer, after watching two more major rotations. "During every RIP/TOA [relief in place/transfer of authority] all the intelligence gets flushed down the drain," this officer said. "It"s like, "If our unit didn"t develop the intelligence, we don"t trust it.""
An Army War College study later arrived at a similar conclusion. "Rotating nearly the entire force at once degraded capability, [and that] may have contributed to loss of control over several cities in the Sunni Triangle," wrote the Iraq Stabilization Study Team, a group at the college"s Strategic Studies Inst.i.tute that has produced some of the military establishment"s most insightful work on the Iraq war. This wasn"t just a theoretical problem about the loss of abstract data, but rather an urgent issue that involved the deaths of U.S. troops and Iraqi allies.
On top of that, the radical reduction in U.S. troops in Mosul and elsewhere in the north began to have a corrosive effect on Iraqi security forces. The replacement units were less engaged with local security forces than the 101st had been, according to people who observed its operations. Police officials who had been visited daily were now seen only weekly or monthly. "When you only have contact with him once a week, once every two weeks," a police chief begins to feel isolated and more likely to cut a deal with the insurgents, noted the lOlst"s Col. Joe Anderson. The cutback in the U.S. presence in the north was even more severe in smaller towns there: As the troop contingent in Tall Afar was reduced from three thousand to about five hundred, friction between Sunnis and Shiites there increased.
But the inaccurate U.S. a.s.sessment of the situation wasn"t attributable solely to the rotation. The 82nd Airborne had been operating in al Anbar province for over six months when its commander incorrectly declared the insurgency all but dead there. The enemy was "in disarray," Swannack told reporters on March 10, just weeks before the province erupted. "When we first got here, I felt very, very strongly about fighting the insurgency, and there was a very sophisticated insurgency here." Since then, he said, the Army had successfully deprived it of its leadership, financing, and support structure. "And so that"s why I"m discounting a very serious insurgency ongoing here right now, because of those factors." In fact, Iraq was on the verge of some of the worst fighting it would see during the entire U.S. occupation.
The failure to train Iraqis But the CPA and the U.S. military were too busy fighting each other to notice the gathering storm. There was general agreement on both the civilian and military sides that their leaders in Iraq, Bremer and Sanchez, were profoundly unhappy with each other. "It was very clear that they hated each other," recalled a senior administration official who visited them in March. "They lived in the same palace and didn"t talk to each other."
Many in the military also saw Sanchez as a failure. "We always wondered why there wasn"t relief"-that is, why Sanchez wasn"t simply replaced-remembered an intelligence expert who worked on Sanchez"s staff that winter.
In the spring of 2004, Gen. Kellogg finished up his effort to sh.o.r.e up the administration of the CPA. When he got back from Iraq, he went to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and recommended that Sanchez be removed. "I said to General Myers, you need to get Rick Sanchez out of there, because he"s tired," Kellogg said in an interview. "At our morning meeting, Sanchez"s body language was telling. He was sitting with his arms crossed, every morning.... My point to him was, I believe, Rick Sanchez was tired and that there was an uneven working relationship with Bremer."
An active-duty officer said, with an edge of disgust in his voice, "In Vietnam we left Westy in. In Iraq we left Sanchez in." Neither Gen. William Westmoreland nor Sanchez understood the war he was fighting, this officer said.
Nor was the White House nearly as enthusiastic about Bremer as it had been a year earlier. "By early "04, the president was quite aware of Bremer"s flaws," said a former administration official. "But he couldn"t let him go in an election year. He knows that Bremer is a control freak, that he won"t release information, that he wouldn"t listen to anyone"s suggestions or direction." Most important, the star-crossed American effort wasn"t producing results. It was during this period, the official noted, that Condi Rice began calling Bremer nearly every day in an effort to get Iraq policy on track.
Gary Anderson, on his two a.s.sessment trips for Wolfowitz, in July 2003 and January 2004, noticed the frustrating lack of progress. "In the summer of "03 I was impressed with how hard they were working. I had no way to gauge how successful they were being," he said later. "It wasn"t until January, when I returned, that it struck me how little effect they were having outside the Green Zone, and that was a result of my interaction with the troops in the field."
Hallenbeck, the retired Army colonel working on Iraqi media infrastructure for the CPA, had the same experience a month later. After spending much of 2003 in Iraq, he went back to the United States and then returned in February 2004. The occupation felt different to him-no longer flailing but failing, and moving toward being moribund. In Baghdad, he said, "I had the feeling driving around downtown that there was no longer any sense that we were part of their solution. We clearly weren"t getting it. They didn"t want Americans to go away. They just wanted us to stop trying to run things, because we couldn"t."
"Over time Iraqis became disappointed," said David Dunford, a retired foreign service officer who helped set up the new Iraqi ministry of foreign affairs. "Each Iraqi owed it to himself and his family to decide whether it made more sense to cooperate with us or to cooperate with somebody else, the insurgents.
Unfortunately, because of our incompetence, more and more Iraqis have made the decision that their interests don"t lie with us."
"n.o.body was waving"
Iraqis never had been particularly welcoming of the U.S. presence. But in the spring of 2004, some Americans were noticing a subtle shift in the reception they received. "The real way that you could tell the frustration was growing was when you drove around the city [and saw] how people would respond to the Humvees," recalled Lt. A. Heather Coyne, an Arabic-speaking Army reservist who-unusually-joined the Army Reserve while working on terrorism issues in the White House"s budget office. She served in the Army in Iraq for over a year, from the beginning of the occupation until the end of the CPA in June 2004: "After a while they would wave a little tentatively. After that, they would watch the Humvees with suspicion or concern, but they still waved back when I waved to them. Right toward the end, n.o.body was waving."
The numbers in the CPA"s own polls bore out Coyne"s sense of decline. Late in 2003 the U.S. effort still had the benefit of the doubt of the broad Iraqi middle- the group that U.S. commanders would come to call "the fence-sitters." But the support dwindled steadily as the occupation wore on without producing either the security or the services it promised. In November 2003, according to a survey conducted for the CPA, nearly half of Iraqis polled-some 47 percent-expressed confidence in the CPA. By March 2004, it was down to just 14 percent.
"There was no security" for Iraqis under the occupation, and that antagonized them, said Hallenbeck. "People would read about every U.S. troop who dies. But we never heard about all the kidnappings, robbings, rapes of Iraqis. The average housewife was just terrified, and we didn"t get that." There has been much subsequent hand-wringing about the CPA"s lack of strategic communication with the Iraqi people, Hallenbeck said. But, he countered, the CPA communicated some points all too well, if unconsciously. The Green Zone had security, it had services, it had the things that Iraqis wanted. "A lot of people had no electricity but could look across the river and see the CPA all lit up at night. And that was the way we really communicated." In the fall and winter of 2003-4 he witnessed Iraqis beginning to turn against the occupation. "I remember watching that turn-Iraqis were saying, "Not only do I not like these guys, they can"t do anything for me, and they step on my dignity.""
"Bremer and his most trusted CPA advisers simply did not grasp the depth of Iraqi disaffection, suspicion, and frustration, even among many of our partners and philosophical allies within the Iraqi political cla.s.s," remembered Larry Diamond, an expert on democratization processes at Stanford University"s Hoover Inst.i.tution who, at the invitation of his old Stanford colleague Condoleezza Rice, went to work at the CPA in the winter of 2003-4.
The U.S. military fared no better in terms of winning hearts and minds: In November, only 11 percent of respondents had said they would feel safer if the U.S. forces left Iraq immediately. By January 2004, that figure had more than doubled, to 28 percent. By April 2004, it would be 55 percent. As the pollsters put it, in a.n.a.lyzing what they termed this "substantial deterioration of image," Iraqis had come to see the U.S. military as part of the problem, a "liability whose presence makes things more dangerous."
"We were like the Wizard of Oz," said Col. Alan King, who served in Iraq from March 2003 to July 2004, a tour longer than that of most soldiers. "They expected magic from us, in terms of living standards. They really thought we could do it- they"d seen it happen in Kuwait," with the swift rebuilding there after the 1991 war.
By early 2004, "we begin to smell like losers" in Iraq, said a.n.a.lyst Patrick Claw-son, "because we can"t deliver on personal security for Iraqis. There were robberies, kidnappings, carjackings. At that point, the military bra.s.s and the CPA were still pretty clueless."
One day that spring, Col. Lloyd Sammons, a Special Forces reservist who had been working at the CPA, just packed it in and went home, taking advantage of a backlog of leave he had acc.u.mulated. "When I left, I didn"t tell anybody. I was there one day, one day I wasn"t, and that was it. I cleaned out my desk drawer." He had had enough of the CPA, which he considered misguided and ineffective. "You can sort of smell when you"re losing," he said. "You can sort of figure it out. It was Pollyanna all day long. I mean, they were living in La-la Land, acting like they were doing great things, but I couldn"t see it." He was especially disgusted with Bremer. "When Bremer would walk in every once in a while-he had to pa.s.s my desk on the way to the John-I"d just look at him like he was a piece of s.h.i.t, and that"s how I felt about him."
The failure to train Iraqis In February 2004, Keith Mines also left Iraq to return to his life in the State Department. In a summary of his seven months as the CPA representative in al Anbar province, Mines used his background both as a diplomat and a Special Forces officer to puzzle through some of the problems in the American effort.
"The economy is gradually improving," he wrote. Eventually, oil production and U.S. government spending would reduce unemployment and raise living standards. But he was worried by the other two thrusts of the U.S. occupation: creating a new political process and putting together a new security structure. "The Iraqis know they are looking over the edge of a cliff and into the abyss. This one is still ours to lose."
The problems began at the top of the U.S. operation in Iraq, he had decided. "Most lacking is simple leadership," he wrote to his family. "There is no subst.i.tute in this business for experience, or for surrounding oneself with those with experience. Bremer for some reason was not able to do so."
He especially was worried by the sluggish pace of outfitting and training Iraqi police and soldiers, which lay at the core of the U.S. strategy. "The development of the security forces ... is a failure that is difficult to comprehend. Ten months into the operation there is not a single properly trained and equipped Iraqi security officer in the entire al Anbar province. There are over 10,000 police and civil defense officers on the rolls, but none have received anything more than ad hoc training and rudimentary equipment."
The training program had been handled in a way that, like so many other early policy decisions in Iraq, ignored the lessons of history. Special Forces units specialize as much as anything else in training foreign militaries. This isn"t just a matter of military knowledge, or even primarily of it. Rather, at its core it requires cultural understanding, the skill of being able to operate at the interface of the U.S. military and a foreign culture, and to somehow produce foreign soldiers in cohesive units that are not only militarily trained but willing to obey commands.
Having reversed course on so many other of Jay Garner"s initiatives, Bremer and his subordinates decided to stay with one: to have the Iraqi security forces trained not by Special Forces experts, but rather by defense contractors and some regular soldiers, including some from the National Guard and the Army Reserves. "The feeling was manpower-why waste precious Special Forces manpower when you can get pretty much the same thing with Vinnell and MPRI?" said Col. Gregory Gardner, who was a senior adviser on Ministry of Defense issues, referring to two companies that ran training programs. Rumsfeld agreed with that view, he added. In a meeting at the Pentagon in June, "the Sec Def told us, "These precious Special Forces guys have been busy in Afghanistan and Iraq and didn"t need to be wasting their time training Iraqis-they should be out on the cutting edge, not sitting on an Iraqi base somewhere."" It was a decision that would come back to haunt Bremer and the U.S. effort nearly a year later, when it became clear that Iraqi forces lacked leaders, either Iraqi or American, whom they were willing to follow into battle.
By early December 2003 it was clear that training of the new Iraqi army was going badly. More than half the recruits in the first battalion to be trained deserted while on leave. When officers from the headquarters set up to oversee the training of Iraqis observed National Guard soldiers instructing Iraqis, they judged them "almost wholly substandard, as a function of the limited training and experience of the National Guard soldiers themselves," said Kalev Sepp, a retired Special Forces officer with much advisory experience and a frequent consultant in Iraq, in congressional testimony. He also testified that on Christmas Eve 2003, the U.S. trainers of one Iraqi unit so distrusted their students that they carried loaded pistols at a graduation ceremony in case of a mutiny.
At the CPA, officials began to write off the entire program. "It took us about six months to see that these processes weren"t really working," said Gardner. "The first battalion of the Iraqi army was s.h.i.t, and we knew it. It started in July, and by August and September we kept hearing them complaining about their pay, and going on leave and not coming back."
Looking back, Marine Col. T. X. Hammes, who was involved in training the Iraqi army, called it "a bad plan, poorly executed, and underfunded." The numbers being released by the Bush administration, he wrote in his diary that winter, were a "fantasy."
Lt. Fox"s year The spring of 2004 brought a steady increase in the average number of daily bomb, mortar, and grenade attacks on U.S. troops, from about twenty-five a day during January to about twice that by June. "It"s been a long year," Lt. Jay Fox, a young platoon leader from Warner Robins, Georgia, said one day in northern Baghdad. His dominant memory of the time was an incident on March 2 when he watched Baghdadis celebrate the bombing death of one of his soldiers, Spec. Michael Woodliff, a young Floridian. It happened on the Ca.n.a.l Road, just south of Sadr City. "The Humvee was burning, and the soldier was still in it. We couldn"t tell if he was alive. And I looked over, across the ca.n.a.l, and people were dancing and singing-people we"d tried to help." Lt. Fox was most proud, he said, of his soldiers" reactions. There were fighters hiding inside the crowd, trying to provoke the Americans into firing on the people, just as had happened almost a year earlier in Fallujah. Undisciplined troops might have succ.u.mbed to the temptation.
But Fox recalled that his platoon "didn"t open up on them, even when somebody fired an RPG at them."
The first battle of FallujahThen Fallujah blew.
It was a bad time. Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who oversaw the training of Iraqi forces at that time, recalled, "This thing evolved in front of us. And each day it got incrementally worse, until it exploded" in late March.
The outburst of attacks caught the U.S. military off guard, in part because of persistent friction between Army headquarters and Marines operating near Fallujah and in the rest of western Iraq. One Marine officer remembered walking into the Army"s big operations center at Camp Victory that spring and being appalled. He surveyed the ascending rows of desks, as in a modern movie theater, each with multiple laptops, each with an unenc.u.mbered view of several screens displaying troop locations or showing live video from Predator drone aircraft surveilling convoy routes. It was all enough to give a staff officer the illusion that he knew what was going on out there. It was the opposite of the Marine Corps practice of having a small headquarters as close to the front as possible. "Oh, my G.o.d," this officer thought to himself, "this is a bunch of people writing e-mails home." Some in the Army, by contrast, resented the Marine Corps"s att.i.tude that it had a better handle on how to deal with an insurgency and was returning to Iraq to show the Army how to operate in Anbar province.
On Wednesday, March 24, the Army"s 82nd Airborne turned over responsibility for Fallujah to the Marine Corps. Under the 82nd, Fallujah had been relatively quiet, in part because the 82nd had trod lightly in the city, not conducting intrusive patrols. "John Abizaid had said to me in November 2003 that we didn"t want Fallujah to become a flashpoint," recalled Gen. Swannack. Under the Marines, he pointedly noted, "it did."
The Marine view is different. "Fallujah looked looked good," said Toolan, who commanded the 1st Marines, based just outside the city. "It had a mayor, a police chief, all the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. But it had termites. You always tread lightly, talking about the guys before you. But they [the 82nd Airborne] weren"t out enough to do the termite inspections." He also was shocked during the turnover of command when the Army convoy he was in just pushed through an ambush outside the mayor"s office rather than launch a determined counterattack. "If my guys did that, I"d have their a.s.s." good," said Toolan, who commanded the 1st Marines, based just outside the city. "It had a mayor, a police chief, all the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. But it had termites. You always tread lightly, talking about the guys before you. But they [the 82nd Airborne] weren"t out enough to do the termite inspections." He also was shocked during the turnover of command when the Army convoy he was in just pushed through an ambush outside the mayor"s office rather than launch a determined counterattack. "If my guys did that, I"d have their a.s.s."
By Friday, just three days into Marine control, the city erupted. A group from Task Force 626, a successor to earlier elite organizations dedicated to killing or capturing high-level officials from the old regime, was. .h.i.t by a bomb. Marine patrols into the city then engaged in a thirty-six-hour-long series of firefights that left at least fifteen Iraqis dead. The Marines were looking to engage both the people and the enemy-the first with friendship, the second with guns. "You want the f.u.c.kers to have a safe haven?" asked Lethin, the 1st Marine Division"s operations officer. "Or do you want to stir them up and get them out in the open?"
But the Marine plan for Fallujah was thrown off track, irretrievably, by what happened next. Marine patrols into Fallujah were familiarizing themselves with the city, and in the process purposely stirring up the situation. Inside the city, insurgents were preparing to respond-warning shops to close, and setting up roadblocks and ambushes with parked cars. One week into this new, more volatile situation, two SUVs carrying security contractors from a company called Black-water bypa.s.sed a Marine checkpoint and drove into the hornet"s nest, not understanding that the American approach to the city had changed and that it was in turmoil over the recent shootings.
Just why the contractors were heading into the unsettled city is unclear. Some say it was just a mistake. "CJTF-7 had very poor movement controls," said Lethin. "That route was closed, but they went in. Because they went in there, we had to change our campaign plan." There was some talk that the Blackwater men were on CIA business, but insiders dismiss that, saying that they were checking out the route that contractor Kellogg Brown & Root"s logistics convoy would take the next day, and had been lured into Fallujah by members of Iraqi security forces. "Very vanilla," or routine, said Dave Scholl, a former Special Forces soldier who speaks Arabic, was friendly with some of the Blackwater people, and was working for another security contractor in Iraq at the time.
There is little question about what happened next: The Blackwater vehicles ran into a well-prepared ambush that had been set up the day before. There had been a leak out of the Green Zone about their movements, said a senior U.S. intelligence official with direct access to that information. That morning nearby shops were warned to close, and roadblocks were set up to prevent the contractors from escaping, according to a Marine briefing that summarized the events of this period. Cans of gas were stashed and standing ready in a nearby alley. The four American contractors were attacked near the center of town, hit by fire from AK-47s and RPGs. They were dragged from their car, beaten, and dismembered. Two of their torsos were dragged westward and hung from the girders of a bridge over the Euphrates on the edge of the town, then taken down and tossed on a pile of tires to burn while crowds cheered and crowed.
At the Marine headquarters outside Fallujah, senior commanders learned about the Blackwater situation from CNN. Mattis saw the attack as a ploy designed to provoke a ma.s.sive retaliation. He devised a methodical plan to respond to the atrocity. "If the Marines took it step by step, the ringleaders would be arrested or killed over the course of the next month," Frances "Bing" West, the author and former Pentagon official who was embedded with Marine commanders, wrote in No True Glory, No True Glory, his lively history of Marine operations in al Anbar in 2004. his lively history of Marine operations in al Anbar in 2004.
But the televised atrocity in Fallujah provoked a powerful response down the chain of command, starting from Washington, where the images of Muslim mobs burning Americans evoked memories of October 1993 in Mogadishu, Somalia. The civilian leadership of the U.S. government didn"t want to wait for a careful, quiet counterattack. Robert Blackwill, who had been brought into the NSC staff to advise on Iraq policy, began pushing for a swift and tough retaliatory raid, according to officials who worked with him. That would knock the Marines off the course they"d planned, and top military commanders in Iraq, including Lt. Gen. Sanchez, advised against it, said several people involved in the exchanges. Bremer was somewhere in the middle, said a former Bush administration official. "Bremer asked for time to try to deal with the situation," he said. But the word came back from the White House: If there was no political movement, the president wanted action within a few days.