The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq Read online

  What happened that day in Haditha was the disturbing but logical culmination of the shortsighted and misguided approach the U.S. military took in invading and occupying Iraq from 2003 through 2006: Protect yourself at all costs, focus on attacking the enemy, and treat the Iraqi civilians as the playing field on which the contest occurs. Kalev Sepp, a counterinsurgency expert who conducted an official study of the effectiveness of U.S. military battalion, brigade, and regimental commanders in Iraq at the time, reported that the Marines were “chasing the insurgents around the Euphrates Valley while leaving the population unguarded and exposed to insurgent terrorism and coercion.” This bankrupt approach was rooted in the dominant American military tradition that tends to view war only as battles between conventional forces of different states. The American tradition also tends to neglect the lesson, learned repeatedly in dozens of twentieth-century wars, that the way to defeat an insurgency campaign is not to attack the enemy but instead to protect and win over the people. “The more we focus on the enemy, the harder it is to actually get anything done with the population,” noted Australian counterinsurgency theorist David Kilcullen, who would play a prominent role in fixing the way the American military fought in Iraq. The aim of a counterinsurgency campaign is to destroy the enemy—but often by isolating him and making him irrelevant rather than killing him. The best insurgent is not a dead one, who might leave behind a relative seeking vengeance, but one who is ignored by the population and perhaps is contemplating changing sides, bringing with him invaluable information.

  Lt. Col. Jeff Chessani, commander of the battalion to which Kilo Company belonged, said later in a sworn statement that despite the number of civilian casualties, he didn’t see that day in Haditha as particularly unusual and saw no reason to investigate what had happened. “I thought it was very sad, very unfortunate, but at the time, I did not suspect any wrongdoing from my Marines,” he said. Nor did he act on a request for an investigation made a week later by the mayor and town council of Haditha.

  His chain of command felt the same way. “There was nothing out of the ordinary about this, including the number of civilian dead,” Col. Stephen Davis, his immediate commander, would tell investigators.

  When the division commander, Maj. Gen. Richard Huck, was briefed by Chessani on the events of the day, Huck said later, “no bells and whistles went off.”

  The buck stopped with Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, then newly arrived in Iraq as the commander of day-to-day U.S. military operations there. When he was told many weeks later that reporters were asking questions about what had happened in Haditha, he instructed his public affairs officer simply to brief them on the results of the military investigation. His mistake was to assume that there was such an inquiry. In fact, he was informed, there had been no such review of the killings. Chiarelli, who had been one of the most successful commanders in Iraq when he led the 1st Cavalry Division in Baghdad from early 2004 to early 2005, was puzzled, then shocked at the lack of interest expressed by the Marine chain of command. He had been trying to reorient the U.S. military to think more about protecting the people but here found an entire chain of command that seemingly lacked any interest in such an approach. On February 12, 2006, he asked Huck, the division commander, about the incident. Huck later recalled telling him, “I did not think there was a reason to initiate an investigation.”

  Chiarelli disagreed. He mulled the situation and two days later called Huck. “You are not going to like this, but I am going to order an investigation,” the Army general told the Marine general. He assigned Army Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell, a much-bloodied Vietnam veteran, to look into the matter. And when Bargewell’s report arrived, Chiarelli made it his top priority, clearing much of his calendar to spend most of two weeks studying the findings, the recommendations, and the appendices.

  Bargewell was appalled by what he had found. He reported that the killings had been carried out “indiscriminately.” Even more worrisome, he concluded that leaders in the Marine chain of command thought that was the right approach—despite having been told by Chiarelli that it wasn’t. “All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine,” Bargewell wrote in a report that was stamped SECRET/NOFORN and that has never been released.

  The comments made by senior Marines to investigators clearly irked Bargewell. In their view, he wrote, “Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business.” The general’s conclusions provide a kind of epitaph for the professionally ignorant and profoundly counterproductive approach that many American commanders took during the first three years of the war. Indeed, another year would pass before the U.S. military would take the first basic step in counterinsurgency and begin to implement a strategy founded on the concept that the civilian population isn’t the playing field but rather the prize, to be protected at almost all costs.

  Underscoring Bargewell’s findings, the Army Surgeon General’s office, in a survey of the mental health and ethical outlook of soldiers and Marines in Iraq conducted the following year, found that one-third of its 1,767 respondents believed torture should be allowed if it helped gather important information about insurgents, and even more said they approved of such illegal abuse if they believed it would help save the life of a comrade. Also, about two-thirds of Marines and half the Army troops surveyed said they would not report a team member for mistreating a civilian or for destroying civilian property unnecessarily. Ten percent said they personally had mistreated non-combatants. “Less than half of soldiers and Marines believed that non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect,” the report stated.

  Some Marines, especially combat veterans of earlier wars, objected to criticism of American actions at Haditha, saying that the investigators didn’t understand the nature of combat. Yet Bargewell, who served as an enlisted soldier in Vietnam, in 1971 had received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest medal, for actions in combat while a member of a long-range reconnaissance unit operating behind enemy lines. He had also been wounded several times. Nor was he alone among military professionals in his view that something had gone very wrong that day in Haditha. Marine Col. John Ewers, taking a sworn statement from Chessani, the battalion commander, exclaimed in an aside, “God damn, 15 civilians dead, 23 or 24 total Iraqis dead—with no real indication of how it was that we arrived at the enemy KIA [killed in action] number.”

  “I was horrified by it,” said retired Gen. Jack Keane, who had been the number two officer in the Army during the invasion of Iraq and also was a veteran of two tours in Vietnam. “I sensed that something had really gone wrong—that amount of civilians killed by direct fire? I know from my experience that to kill that number of civilians directly, you had to be in the room, pointing at them. I sensed it was a breakdown in the chain of command.” His worries would intensify so much that they would propel him into a central role in the remaking of the war in the following years.

  LOST AND ADRIFT

  In 2005 the United States came close to losing the war in Iraq. Even now, the story of how the U.S. military reformation and counterattack came together is barely known. As the Washington Post’s military correspondent, I followed events as they occurred, day by day, but it was only when setting out to research and write this book that I delved deeper and found there was a hidden tale to this phase of the war. It begins with Keane, who in the following year would grow so deeply concerned by the direction of the Iraq war that he would set out to redesign its strategy, an unprecedented move for a retired officer. Despite having left active duty several years earlier, he worked behind the scenes with two former subordinates whom he trusted and admired, David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno, who partly through his efforts would become the two top U.S. commanders in Iraq.

  It would take nearly 12 more months, until late in 2006, for senior officials in the Bush administration and the U.S. military to recognize that the U.S. effort was heading fo
r defeat. Then, almost at the last minute, and over the objections of nearly all relevant leaders of the U.S. military establishment, a few insiders, led by Keane, managed to persuade President Bush to adopt a new, more effective strategy built around protecting the Iraq people.

  The effect of that new approach, implemented in 2007 under Petraeus, the fourth U.S. commander in the war in Iraq, would be to reduce violence in Iraq and so revive American prospects in the war. That change likely will prolong it for at least another three years, and probably much longer. It is now quite possible that U.S. troops will still be involved in combat in Iraq in 2011, which would make the war there America’s longest overseas war, if the major U.S. combat involvement in Vietnam is deemed to have lasted from 1965 to 1973.

  Yet it is unclear in 2009 if he did much more than lengthen the war. In revising the U.S. approach to the Iraq war, Petraeus found tactical success—that is, improved security—but not the clear political breakthrough that would have meant unambiguous strategic success. At the end of the surge, the fundamental political problems facing Iraq were the same ones as when it began. At the end of 2008, two years into the revamped war, there was no prospect of the fighting ending anytime soon. But it was almost certain that whenever it did end, it wouldn’t be with the victory that the Bush administration continued to describe, of an Iraq that was both a stable democracy and an ally of the United States. Nor was that really the goal anymore, though no one had said so publicly. Under Petraeus, the American goal of transforming Iraq had quietly been scaled down. But even his less ambitious target of sustainable security would remain elusive, with no certainty of reaching it anytime soon.

  The 12 months after Haditha, from late 2005 to late 2006, were a period of agonizingly slow reassessment of the U.S. military’s approach in Iraq. After that, it would take many more months for a new strategy to be implemented. During that period, no one except the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense seemed to be happy with the direction of the war. Even war supporters were uneasy. Senator John McCain, the most prominent war hawk in the Congress, said, “There’s an undeniable sense that things are slipping—more violence on the ground, declining domestic support for the war, growing incantations among Americans that there is no end in sight.”

  On the ground in Iraq there often was an emptiness in the U.S. military effort, a feel of going through the motions, of doing the same things over and over again without really expecting them to be effective, perhaps reflecting a fear that there really was no way out. “It sucks,” said Spec. Tim Ivey. “Honestly, it feels like we’re driving around waiting to get blown up.”

  In late 2006, Maj. Lee Williams arrived at FOB [forward operating base] Falcon on the southern edge of Baghdad to take over advising a brigade of the Iraqi National Police. He found his predecessors had all but given up. When he landed, the base was being mortared. Plus, the Iraqi unit being advised was hardly inspiring—it was, he said, “corrupt, . . . tied to being involved in extra-judicial killings, . . . definitely been known to have been connected with some of the insurgent groups with emplacing IEDs.” Some of the privates on the police force were members of the extremist Shiite militias and had so intimidated their commanders that they “would even slap their faces,” Williams said. Even so, he was surprised at the demoralization of the team he was relieving. Before leaving for Iraq, he explained, “We had no communication with the team we replaced. They sent one e-mail. They were just tired and they said they were busy. But when we actually got on the ground, they were only going out maybe once or twice a week. When we got there, you could tell that they were burned out.”

  Some in the military suspected that commanders were just trying to get through their tours in Iraq without making waves, so they could get on with their lives and careers. “The truth is that many commands in Iraq are no longer focused on winning and instead are focused on CYA”—that is, covering your ass—charged Capt. Zachary Martin, a Marine infantry officer. He continued:

  Part of this loss of focus is a lack of clear guidance on exactly what winning means and how we are to achieve it. From the highest levels, there is nothing to relate our efforts to the vague goals of “democracy in Iraq” and “the defeat of terrorism.” . . . [C]ommanders in Iraq cannot win, although they can certainly lose. An aggressive commander who, in the absence of unifying guidance and in spite of inadequate cultural preparation, assesses the situation, formulates a campaign plan, and takes calculated risks in implementing it will most likely have little concrete evidence of success to show when he rotates six months later.

  The time scale of counterinsurgency is simply too long. On the other hand, a commander who takes no risks and thus keeps his casualties low can be reasonably assured of a Bronze Star with a combat “V,” an article in the [Marine Corps] Gazette relating how well his battalion performed under his firm and dynamic leadership and, with combat command ticket punched, a decent shot at promotion.

  It was a morale breaker, observed another officer, to take a city on your second tour that you thought had you had secured on your first.

  In another sign of a strained force, there was a spate of legal and disciplinary issues with soldiers. These were not the usual cases of privates’ abusing drugs, but of career soldiers getting into a variety of trouble. “I’d never seen it at this level before,” recalled Maj. David Mendelson, a military lawyer on the staff of the top operational headquarters in Iraq in 2006. “We did over fifteen reliefs for cause and they were for senior enlisted soldiers and even battalion commanders, very senior officers. . . . We saw company commanders and battalion commanders doing the wrong things.”

  Gen. Keane, visiting the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, was shocked. “They had given up,” he told people. “There was a sense of hopelessness and futility.”

  Underlying all this was a sense of drift in the war. “There was a period after that when we just didn’t have an answer,” recalled Tom Donnelly, a defense expert at the American Enterprise Institute who was another longtime hawk. “We knew we couldn’t kill our way out of it, but we didn’t want to take on the mission of protecting the people, so there was a kind of drift, and by default an emphasis on training Iraqis and transitioning to them.”

  Back in mid-2004, Gen. George Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, had inherited a mess from his predecessor, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who had been overmatched by the deterioration of Iraq and poorly supported by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the military establishment. Casey made major changes, developing a formal campaign plan and focusing on the need to protect the people as the way to isolate the enemy from the people. Casey was a thoughtful man. He had been tapped immediately after the 9/11 attacks to take over as director of strategic planning for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position he filled so well that on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, he was promoted to be overall director of the Joint Staff, an important behind-the-scenes job at the Pentagon. Officers who do that job well tend to look over the horizon, pushing the staff below them to anticipate questions that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs might have to face in the coming months. After that Casey had become the Army’s vice chief of staff, a position that tends to run the general officer corps. He was as “Army” as an officer can be, his father having been a general who was the highest-ranking American casualty of the Vietnam War. The one thing Casey lacked was combat experience. Over the previous two decades, the Army had fought in Panama, the Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, but he had not been involved in any of these.

  Even so, Casey’s background made him far better equipped than Sanchez to know where the levers of power were in the Army and how to pull them. That helped him when he grew frustrated by the inappropriate training he saw being given to units arriving in Iraq. At one brigade, recalled Sepp, his counterinsurgency adviser, “The officers said they had been trained for ‘kick in the door, two in the chest.’” To remediate such maleducation, in 2005 Casey had decided to establish a “coun
terinsurgency academy” at the big U.S. base at Taji, just north of Baghdad, and make attendance at its one-week immersion course a prerequisite for command under him. “Because the Army won’t change itself, I’m going to change the Army here in Iraq,” he told subordinates. The classes emphasized that the right answer is probably the counterintuitive one, rather than something that the Army taught officers in their 10 or 20 years of service. The school’s textbook, a huge binder, offered the example of a mission that busts into a house and captures someone who mortared a U.S. base. “On the surface, a raid that captures a known insurgent or terrorist may seem like a sure victory for the coalition,” it observed in red block letters. But, it continued: “The potential second- and third-order effects, however, can turn it into a long-term defeat if our actions humiliate the family, needlessly destroy property, or alienate the local population from our goals.” As the Marine chain of command’s reaction to Haditha demonstrated in the following months, along with similar incidents of less magnitude in the Army, many officers still didn’t see those negative effects—or, if they did, they didn’t seem to care.

  So, concluded Francis “Bing” West, a defense expert who studied both Marine and Army operations in Iraq under Casey, counterinsurgency in 2005 and 2006 remained more a slogan than a strategy. “By and large, the battalions continued to do what they knew best: conduct sweeps and mounted patrols during the day and targeted raids at night,” he wrote. Casey also undermined his own efforts, because his basic approach remained at odds with counterinsurgency theory: He was pulling his troops farther away from the population, closing dozens of bases in 2005 as he consolidated his force on big, isolated bases that the military termed “Super FOBs.” That move was arguably simply a retreat in place. Casey may have been under the sway of the view popular in the military that the American public is “casualty intolerant” and that additional U.S. losses would undermine whatever political support remained for the war. He may not have been aware that a small group of political scientists had sharply questioned that view in recent years, gathering evidence that the American public actually hates losing soldiers in a losing cause but will accept higher casualties if it believes it is winning. And one of those political scientists was Peter Feaver, then a member of the staff of the National Security Council, who had been brought into the White House to work on Iraq policy.