The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq Page 5

  His tenth principle poked another stick at top U.S. commanders in Iraq. “The most fundamental rule of counterinsurgency is to be there. . . . This demands a residential approach: living in your sector, in close proximity to the population rather than raiding into the area from remote, secure bases. Movement on foot, sleeping in local villages, night patrolling—all these seem more dangerous than they are. They establish links with the locals, who see you as real people they can trust and do business with, not as aliens who descend from an armored box. Driving around in an armored convoy, day-tripping like a tourist in hell, degrades situational awareness, makes you a target, and is ultimately more dangerous.”

  Also, he counseled in rule 26, don’t obsess on fighting your foe. “Only attack the enemy when he gets in the way. Try not to be distracted or forced into a series of reactive moves by a desire to kill or capture the insurgents.”

  Petraeus read the cheeky essay and sent it rocketing around the Army via e-mail. Even before the manual appeared, it would begin to affect how some officers thought, perhaps reflecting the pent-up eagerness for change among younger soldiers. One young officer with the 1st Cavalry Division, Lt. Rory McGovern, later recalled that while he was preparing in the fall of 2006 to deploy to Iraq, he was told to read Kilcullen’s “Twenty-Eight Articles.” It changed the way he thought about intelligence operations, he said.

  A year later, Petraeus would bring Kilcullen to Baghdad as his adviser on counterinsurgency. There the Australian would explain his role with the memorable comment, “Just because you invade a country stupidly doesn’t mean you have to leave it stupidly,” a comment that Barack Obama adopted in somewhat modified form for his stump speech during the 2008 primaries.

  As the writing of the counterinsurgency manual neared completion, Petraeus began editing key portions word by word—and not just once. He made, he remembered, some “twenty or thirty edits.”

  Again, this was not the way that the Army usually worked. “I can’t think of a precedent for a commanding general to be so involved in writing doctrine,” said Keane. “It is usually driven by bright young majors.” The hands-on approach helped Petraeus move the product along quickly, and also would make it far more readable—and influential—than most Army manuals.

  Published at the end of 2006, just 11 months after the meeting at Leavenworth, the new manual had two striking aspects: It was both a devastating critique of the conduct of the Iraq war and an outline of the approach Petraeus might take there if ever given the chance. In political terms, it amounted to a party platform, the party in this case being the dissidents who thought the Army was on the path to defeat in Iraq if it didn’t change its approach.

  • Think twice before launching a raid, it recommended, and consider its consequences. “An operation that kills five insurgents is counterproductive if collateral damage leads to the recruitment of fifty more insurgents.” This was a calculation that had eluded many commanders in Iraq.

  • Don’t hole up in big bases, as the U.S. military increasingly was doing in Iraq. “If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents.”

  • Don’t let yourself be provoked, as President Bush and other U.S. officials were by the killing of four Blackwater contractors in Fallujah in March 2004. “Often insurgents carry out a terrorist act or guerrilla raid with the primary purpose of enticing counterinsurgents to overreact.”

  • Don’t abuse your prisoners, as had happened with the 2004 Abu Ghraib detainee scandal and in many other instances in the war. “Treat detainees professionally and publicize their treatment.”

  • Don’t take relatives of suspected insurgents hostage, because it is both illegal and unethical. “At no time can Soldiers and Marines detain family members or close associates to compel suspected insurgents to surrender or provide information.”

  • Don’t waste time and money attempting to build a local replica of the U.S. military. “Have local forces mirror the enemy, not U.S. forces.”

  • And don’t concentrate on big, capital-intensive reconstruction projects. “Remember, small is beautiful.”

  Even discussions that didn’t appear to be about the Iraq war carried clear messages about it. The first “vignette” in the manual—a box inserted in the text that tells an instructive story—is about Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who had been a fierce critic of the war and by 2006 was seen by the Bush administration as a political foe. Even more remote, but at the same time even more pointed, is a discussion of Napoleon’s mishandling of his campaign in Spain in 1808. “Little thought was given to the potential challenges of subduing the Spanish populace. . . . Napoleon believed the conquest of Spain would be little more than a ‘military promenade.’ . . . The French failed to analyze the Spanish people, their history, culture, motivations. . . . Napoleon’s cultural miscalculation resulted in a protracted occupation struggle that lasted nearly six years.” All these missteps, of course, were also ones the U.S. military had been committing in Iraq.

  The manual also pointed toward the very different approach Petraeus might take:

  • “Remain alert for signs of divisions within an insurgent movement.” By the time Petraeus arrived to take command in Iraq, Sunni insurgents were willing to talk to Americans about cease-fires, and he would seek ways to expand on that trend. “Encourage insurgents to change sides.” Sitting down to talk with the evil-doers, as President Bush tended to portray them, would be a radical departure for the American effort in Iraq.

  • “At the strategic level, gaining and maintaining U.S. public support for a protracted deployment is critical.” Petraeus would devote much of his time and energy in the coming years to what he called “putting more time on the clock,” especially in his 2007 and 2008 appearances before Congress, which would be the highest-profile occasions of military testimony in decades.

  • Most important, “The cornerstone of any COIN [counterinsurgency] effort is establishing security for the civilian populace.” In 2007 this insight would become the starting point for U.S. strategy in Iraq.

  Ambassador Ryan Crocker, a veteran diplomat, would read the manual early in 2007 as he prepared to go to Iraq as Petraeus’s civilian counterpart. “If only that had been published in 2002,” he thought to himself.

  “A C-130 INTO HELL”

  While the counterinsurgency manual was coming together, Iraq was falling apart. When Iraq’s parliamentary elections were held at the end of 2005, they seemed to many to mark a major turning point. Bush administration officials, buoyed by the photographs of smiling Iraqis holding up fingers inked with the purple of the ballot booth, eagerly greeted the election as a major victory. Vice President Cheney, who 10 months earlier had declared the insurgency to be in its “last throes,” used the occasion to make his first postinvasion visit to Iraq. “I think we’ve turned the corner, if you will,” he told a group of Marines. “I think when we look back ten years hence, we’ll see that the year ’05 was in fact a watershed year here in Iraq.” Gen. Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said it looked to him as though American troop levels could begin coming down in the following months.

  In hindsight, the December 2005 elections were part of the problem, not the solution. “We needed elections in the worst kind of way in 2005—and we got them,” Maj. Gen. David Fastabend, who would become Petraeus’s chief of strategy in Iraq, wrote in a memo to his boss. Most notably, because Sunnis largely boycotted the vote, they planted Shiite-dominated governments in majority Sunni areas—and it would be those areas that would become most resistant to the Baghdad government. Also, less noticed, the elections encouraged U.S. commanders and planners to become overly optimistic. They began formulating plans for major drawdowns in 2006. Most significantly, by holding national elections without any other political structures in place, the U.S. government inadvertently herded Iraqis toward sectarian identification. In the 9 primarily Shiite provinces, the leading Shiite part
y, the United Iraqi Alliance, won 70 of 81 seats.

  The Kurds swept the 35 seats in their region, and Sunni parties won 15 of 17 seats in al Anbar and Salahuddin provinces. The election results in Baghdad, Nineveh, Diyala, and Kirkuk also resembled the sectarian makeup of each province. This may have helped light the fuse of the small civil war that exploded in Baghdad months after. As Petraeus himself would put it much later, “The elections hardened sectarian positions as Iraqis voted largely based on ethnic and sectarian group identity.”

  Neither Cheney nor anyone else knew it, but 2006 would, in fact, prove to be the crucial year for the war—but not in the way that American officials had hoped or wanted. Rather, 2006 would be the year that American policy ground to a halt, the Bush administration finally conceded that it was on a path to defeat, the American civilian and military leadership in the war was jettisoned, and a new set of commanders—Petraeus and Odierno—installed to execute a radically different strategy. “Iraq came pretty close, I think, to just unraveling in the course of that year,” Ambassador Crocker said.

  It would take agonizing months—indeed, the whole of 2006—for that process of assessment and adjustment to occur. Many observers, both Iraqi and American, think the key event was the bombing on February 22, 2006, of the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra, one of the most important Shia shrines in Iraq, and, indeed, in the world. Maj. Jeremy Lewis happened to be in Samarra, 65 miles north of Baghdad, at 6:44 that morning. He was preparing to go on patrol with some Iraqi National Police when

  ...we heard an explosion. All eyes turn toward the explosion. You see this plume of smoke going up, and the plume of smoke was right next to the mosque. I guess that was an initial charge, one of the minarets they had blown up or something like that. . . . Then all of a sudden, the mosque just explodes. You blink and shudder and hunch down. You’re thinking, “What the heck happened there?” . . . It was kind of a cloudy day, overcast. Now there’s this huge plume of smoke, a monstrous cloud, and it’s kind of yellowish and black. My gunner says, “Sir, it’s fucking gone! It’s gone!” I’m like, “No, it’s not gone, it’s not gone.” But then the wind carried the plume of smoke away and you just saw the rebar and everything from the mosque.

  Lewis and his comrades battened the hatches. “Every last one of us said this was the beginning of the civil war in Iraq,” he recounted.

  Hundreds of Iraqis would die in sectarian fighting in the following weeks, and many American commanders came to see the mosque bombing as a major turning point. But some officers and many observers argue that the incident simply was the culmination of a worsening trend that top officials weren’t grasping, in part because of their focus on developing Iraqi security forces rather than on the situation of Iraqi civilians, and also because they didn’t have troops living among the people. As James Miller, a former Pentagon war planner, put it, “The mosque bombing was just gasoline on a fire that already was burning pretty well.” Indeed, according to the U.S. military’s database of “significant acts,” violence had increased at a steady pace since March 2005 and would continue to increase at about the same pace after the mosque bombing until peaking in June 2007. In 2005 and the following year, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had fled the country. Many of them were doctors, lawyers, teachers, and journalists, the professionals who are part of the glue of a modern civil society. Because they had both money and education, they were targeted for kidnappings and murders by criminal gangs and political extremists alike. “The situation in the last six months has gotten so bad, we couldn’t continue,” Dr. Omar Kubasi told the Washington Post’s Doug Struck as the flow of refugees increased.

  The mosque bombing “wasn’t a trigger, it was an indicator,” concluded Col. Christopher Holshek, a civil affairs veteran of Iraq. “All that did was expose some of the weaknesses in our approach.”

  The real effect of the bombing, added Jeffrey White, a former analyst of Middle Eastern affairs, was that it compelled U.S. commanders to deal with reality. After that day, it would become harder for them to argue that there were enough troops, because they had been given the additional mission of containing Shiite militias, on top of the existing tasks of countering the Sunni insurgency and training Iraqi security forces.

  One Army officer who recalled buying into the optimism of late 2005 and early 2006, when he was a commander in Iraq, reluctantly agreed. In retrospect, he said, the situation had been far worse than he and his peers had understood it to be. It was the Samarra bombing that led him to believe that Iraq was indeed caught in a civil war: “What Samarra came to mean for me was a defining point in time, almost like a teaching point, where the real face of the Iraq war became clear.”

  Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency theorist, was at Petraeus’s conference at Fort Leavenworth when the Samarra bomb exploded. He immediately left for Baghdad, catching an Air Force cargo plane for the last leg. As he landed two days later, he said, “I felt like I was riding a C-130 into Hell. I mean, everything was burning.”

  OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND

  One of the questions raised by the bloodshed of 2006 was whether it was a revealing preview of what would happen if the U.S. military withdrew altogether. Gen. John Abizaid, at the time the chief of the U.S. Central Command, had argued for years that the U.S. military presence was an irritant to the Iraqi population. Yet as U.S. forces had pulled back from Baghdad in 2005, as part of a consolidation effort, violence actually had increased. There were 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, but they were becoming increasingly irrelevant as fighting swirled around the tall walls of their bases. To a surprising degree, they were offstage and ill informed. U.S. military intelligence gathering tended to focus on two sorts of events: anything that affected American troops and the killing of Iraqis. Other actions affecting Iraqi civilians—kidnappings, rape, robberies, acts of extortion, and other forms of intimidation—didn’t appear to be on the U.S. military’s radar. As one soldier in the 4th Infantry Division dismissively put it, all that was “background noise.”

  As 2006 opened, there were almost no U.S. troops present on the streets of Baghdad, which U.S. commanders were trying to turn over to Iraqi forces. “We have become reactive,” warned Capt. Zachary Martin. “With our fortified bases and our few secured major supply routes linking them, we have immobilized ourselves and cut ourselves off from the battlefield—the populace of Iraq.” Many commanders, he charged, seemed more concerned with “force protection” than with winning.

  American officials believed they were turning security over to Iraqi forces. But those Iraqi troops and police weren’t able to control the streets, which meant that the American commanders really were abdicating responsibility and letting the streets become a battleground for sectarian groups. The Americans wouldn’t enforce order and the Iraqis couldn’t—even if they wanted to. As one Army major put it early in 2006, the capital resembled the pure Hobbesian state where all are at war against all others and any security is self-provided. Iraq appeared to be slipping steadily toward chaos. On one day, 22 civilians would die in a car bombing in Baghdad. On another, 17 policemen would be slain. By the third anniversary of the war, on March 19, it was clear that Iraq—or at least greater Baghdad, home to about a quarter of the nation’s population—was on the edge of a civil war.

  Enemy attacks were growing in both number and sophistication. In March, 17 policemen and security guards were killed in a dawn raid on a police station in Muqdadiyah that also released 33 prisoners. The attackers, numbering about 100, also set fire to a courthouse, destroyed 12 police cars, and held off an outnumbered U.S.-led counterattack. A month later, the enemy double-bombed an American outpost in the same province. The attack began with a truck exploding against a wall, clearing an opening for a second truck to barrel into the base and detonate against a security wall, which, improperly placed, fell over onto a building, killing 9 American troops inside.

  In some U.S. Army units, commanders seemed simply to be keeping their heads down and plodding forward. “I
t is like we are on a combat patrol and what we see are all the indicators of an ambush—and yet we continue forward as if we had not been trained to detect, avoid, or take preemptive measures,” said one Army colonel in Iraq who was versed in counterinsurgency theory.

  Despite Gen. Casey’s efforts with his new Counterinsurgency Academy, abuses by American soldiers, while less common than in 2003-4, still occurred. Even Petraeus’s old division, the 101st Airborne, which had posted a nearly spotless record while under his command in northern Iraq in 2003-4, ran into ugly trouble in 2006. In March, two of the division’s soldiers raped and murdered a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl and killed her parents and sister to cover their crimes. In May, other 101st soldiers killed three detainees they had captured and handcuffed. Ultimately, four of them would be charged. One of their comrades, Pfc. Bradley Mason, would later testify that they had threatened to kill him if he reported their action.