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

  Even more significantly, the doubts White House staffers had held about the top American general in Iraq had reached the president. Bush usually was affable in his conversations, but in mid-November, “the president was noticeably cold,” Casey recalled. So, after three years of war, Bush and his aides would be forced into a serious review of their strategy in Iraq. Finally, they would begin to ask some of the basic questions that they had neglected to address before the invasion.

  WASHINGTON WINCES

  Back in Washington, Jack Keane, the old general who was more influential in retirement than most officers are while on active duty, was growing increasingly concerned as he watched the two Baghdad security operations sputter to a halt. “We had two bites of this apple in Baghdad, and we failed both times,” he said. “I knew that our chances to succeed in Iraq were just slipping by us.” He decided it was time to share his worries with the Bush administration.

  The White House was ready to listen to him. Gen. Casey may not have known it, but the failures of the Together Forward operations were the beginning of the end for his command in Iraq. Behind closed doors, the outlook appeared even worse. “Even in the military, there’s a concern right now that wasn’t previously,” said one worried Marine colonel. “Folks that took things at face value in the past are asking more questions.”

  Pressure was clearly building for an overhaul of American strategy in Iraq, but a major obstacle stood in the way at the top of the Pentagon. Not long before he was fired, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld insisted that the strategy of passing responsibility to the Iraqi forces was working and needed no change. “The biggest mistake would be to not pass things over to the Iraqis, create a dependency on their part, and instead of developing strength and capacity and competence,” he said at a press conference the day after Caldwell spoke in Baghdad. “It’s their country. They’re going to have to govern it, they’re going to have to provide security for it, and they’re going to have to do it sooner rather than later. And that means they’ve got to take pieces of it as we go along, even though someone may inaccurately characterize it as a strategic mistake, which it wouldn’t be at all.”

  Bush would back up Rumsfeld, saying he was flexible about tactics but wasn’t contemplating a change in strategy or goals. “Are we winning?” asked a reporter at an East Room news conference a few days later.

  “Absolutely, we’re winning,” Bush insisted. At the same time, he said, “I know many Americans are not satisfied with the situation in Iraq. I’m not satisfied either. And that is why we’re taking new steps to help secure Baghdad and constantly adjusting our tactics across the country to meet the changing threat.”

  Feaver, the White House aide, cringed at Bush’s “winning” comment. “That wasn’t the way it felt from where I sat.” He recalled that at this time, Karl Rove, the president’s political adviser, was also speaking up, telling others, “We need a new face on Iraq”—by which he apparently meant that Rumsfeld should leave.

  Support for the war was eroding rapidly among the Republican Party faithful. Back in February, John Warner, the courtly Virginia Republican who was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had expressed “a high degree of confidence” that a new government would take charge and that by the end of the year the conflict “won’t be the same.” But as October opened, Warner returned from Iraq with a far grimmer assessment: “The situation is simply drifting sideways.”

  Something had to give, said Senator Olympia Snowe, a centrist Maine Republican. “I don’t believe we can continue based on an open-ended, unconditional presence.”

  Senator Lindsey Graham, a conservative South Carolina Republican and a close friend of John McCain’s, was mulling a different strategy. “The American people are beginning to wonder if the Iraqi people can get this right,” he said. “People have begun to wonder about the basic premise, that the Iraqi people are capable of solving their problems politically. We’re at a real crossroads. The level of violence in October just shows you we don’t have enough security to ensure long-term success.”

  Others argued that the situation was even more dire than that. “Basically, the bottom has fallen out of support with the general public,” former Republican congressman Vin Weber said later that October, just before the election. “The public is on the verge of throwing up its hands over Iraq. They are right on the edge of believing that success isn’t possible.”

  A LIGHT IN RAMADI

  Near the end of Gen. Caldwell’s press conference on October 19, a few minutes after the spokesman had announced the failure of the Baghdad security plan, one reporter had inquired about some odd reports coming out of Ramadi, 60 miles to the west of Baghdad. Specifically, inquired the man from Reuters news agency, why were armed civilians marching in the streets? What was going on out there? Caldwell responded that he hadn’t heard about that and would look into it.

  It was a good question, because Ramadi had been one of Iraq’s most dangerous cities for years. This time, to the astonishment of anyone focused on Baghdad, the armed men were not members of al Qaeda in Iraq but allies of the Americans, albeit tentative ones. Ramadi, the capital of turbulent al Anbar Province, had begun to provide a counterexample to Baghdad. That turnaround, led by Col. Sean MacFarland, would take place even as the senior Marine intelligence officer in the country pronounced the province lost. Ramadi in 2006 would become the link between the first successful large-scale U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, in Tall Afar in 2005, and the “surge” counteroffensive in Baghdad in 2007.

  By chance, MacFarland’s unit first had been assigned to replace the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tall Afar, in the far northwest of Iraq, and had spent several months there before moving south to Ramadi. What MacFarland and his subordinates had seen there was very different from how the U.S. military had operated in Iraq for several years. The new approach made sense to him. Under Col. H. R. McMaster, an innovative officer unafraid to chart a different course, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment had slowly and patiently approached Tall Afar, a medieval feeling town of about 250,000. After the U.S. military reduced its presence in northern Iraq in 2004, Islamic extremists had begun to seep in from Syria and make contact with local allies. By mid-2005 they had intimidated the locals with terror tactics and made the town a base from which to send suicide bombers and other attackers 40 miles easy to Mosul, the most important city in northern Iraq. “Give the enemy credit,” said Maj. Chris Kennedy. “As soon as we started pulling back, the enemy identified that as a weak point.”

  McMaster, who is both a rugby player and a Ph.D. in history, began by telling his soldiers to treat Iraqis with dignity and respect. “Every time you treat an Iraqi disrespectfully, you are working for the enemy,” he instructed them—neatly summarizing counterinsurgency theory in a way that any nineteen-year-old infantryman could grasp. In a marked contrast to the attitude found in some other units, his standing orders required his soldiers to “Treat detainees professionally; do not tolerate abusive behavior.” He met with sheikhs and clerics who had ties to the insurgency and apologized for past American mistakes: “When the Americans first came to Iraq, we were in a dark room, stumbling around, breaking china. But now Iraqi leaders are turning on the lights.” And, he added, the time for honorable resistance had ended.

  Then, after months of preparatory moves in the desert around the city, cutting off lines of retreat and safe havens, McMaster attacked Tall Afar. Rather than just stage patrols from his big base outside the city, he moved his people into it, establishing 29 outposts in its neighborhoods. In sum, it was a model of a counterinsurgency campaign, the first large-scale one conducted in the war. It was an example the U.S. military needed badly. In far northwest Iraq, a Marine battalion commanded by Lt. Col. Dale Alford carried out a similar campaign, establishing outposts in the area of al Qaim and cutting deals with local sheikhs. However, these examples weren’t imitated by other commanders, probably because they were at odds with the strategy set by Gen. Casey and his bo
ss at Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid. Working on the theory that the U.S. military presence was an irritant to Iraqi society, the generals were trying to oversee a transition to Iraqi forces and so wanted an ever-shrinking American “footprint.” By contrast, McMaster injected thousands of U.S. troops into the middle of a city, implicitly saying that they were not the problem but part of the solution, that American troops weren’t the sand irritating Iraqi society, but could be the glue that held it together.

  McMaster’s organization also began to grasp the significance of Iraqi tribal power. One of MacFarland’s officers, Capt. Travis Patriquin, a bright, bushy-haired, Special Forces veteran who spoke Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese, was particularly intrigued by this. Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, his counterpart in the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, told him about an officer’s encounter with a sheikh of the Shammar tribe. “Sheikh, why do you smuggle sheep and benzine in from Syria?” the officer asked.

  The sheikh had responded, “Why did you put the Syrian border in the middle of my sheep? We were here first.”

  Yingling told Patriquin about the Shammar tribe’s view of the world. “He understood it very well, and got a good laugh out of the story,” he recalled.

  A few months later MacFarland was ordered to move his unit, the 1st brigade of the Army’s 1st Armored Division, to Ramadi. A soft-spoken officer from an Irish Catholic neighborhood in Albany, New York, MacFarland knew that every brigade assigned to that violent provincial capital had lost about 100 soldiers during its tour of duty, even as the city steadily declined into chaos. “I’ll be goddamned if I lose one hundred soldiers here and have nothing to show for it,” the brown-haired cavalryman, a 1981 graduate of West Point, vowed to himself.

  His orders were to “fix Ramadi but don’t do a Fallujah”—a reference to the intense battles for that city just to the southeast in 2004. “But I really wasn’t sure how I was going to ‘fix Ramadi.’ ”

  All the conventional responses had been tried and none had worked, so three years into the war, MacFarland was willing to take a gamble on something different. Anbar Province had at first been all but ignored in the planning for the 2003 invasion, then treated as an “economy of force” operation, and then saw two bruising battles for control of Fallujah in 2004. In a low point just before MacFarland’s brigade arrived, a protest broke out at a graduation ceremony for 978 Iraqi soldiers, most of them Sunnis, at nearby Camp Habbaniyah. Provoked by word that they would be ordered to deploy outside their home province of al Anbar, some soldiers began tearing off their uniforms before the astonished eyes of the Iraqi and American officials in attendance for the event, which they had hailed in speeches as a major step in the formation of the Iraqi army. At the time, U.S. military spokesmen attempted to minimize the significance of the event. “It was actually a very small number of graduates,” claimed one, Army Lt. Col. Michael Negard. But Carter Malkasian, a counterinsurgency adviser to the Marine Corps in Anbar, later disclosed that a full two-thirds of the soldiers refused to deploy, and more than that ultimately deserted.

  On top of that, the Iraqi battalion that MacFarland was counting on for help had mutinied upon being informed that it would be deployed to Ramadi. Of several hundred men in the Iraqi unit, only about 140 showed up, he recalled—and most of them refused to leave the base to go on patrol. “We basically just sent them home,” he said.

  MacFarland’s audaciously different approach to Ramadi ultimately would become an out-of-town tryout for the surge that came eight months later in Baghdad, not so much in troop numbers, but—far more important—in the strategy of moving into the population and the tactics of how to do that successfully. The two major differences are that Ramadi is overwhelmingly Sunni, and so didn’t have sectarian fighting, and also is a fraction of the size of the capital.

  In 2005 al Qaeda in Iraq had mounted a ferocious campaign against about 12 tribal leaders who competed with the terrorist group for the loyalty of al Anbar’s population by forming the Anbar People’s Council. “This was the first broadly based opposition to al Qaeda,” recalled Marine Brig. Gen. John Allen. “Al Qaeda recognized the threat and attacked almost immediately,” conducting a focused and efficient assassination campaign. In one month, half the sheikhs in the council were dead, with the remainder fleeing the country. The Americans really hadn’t come to the aid of the sheikhs, who had multiple ties to the Sunni insurgency.

  “There was a large safe haven there. . . . Al Qaeda was calling the shots,” MacFarland said. “Zarqawi was known to go out there, for instance. I mean, this was where al Qaeda went when they got pushed out of Fallujah.” In retrospect, he estimated that he faced perhaps 5,000 fighters in the city.

  When MacFarland’s unit arrived in Ramadi, it was hit by bombs, grenades, mortars, and rifle fire an average of 25 times a day. It was replacing a unit from the Pennsylvania National Guard that had retreated from parts of the city. “My predecessor was just trading artillery fire with the rocket and mortar fire,” he remembered. “Al Qaeda had the run of the town. . . . The enemy basically controlled the center part of the city.” Every night, insurgents were planting an average of eight roadside bombs in and around the town. The National Guardsmen had stopped patrolling in areas where they had been hit hard, he said, leaving parts of the city map that, he joked, were labeled, HERE BE MONSTERS.

  The city wasn’t even on life support. “There was no mayor, there was no city council, and there were no communications like we had in Tall Afar,” he said. “Basically, all services had stopped.”

  Sheikhs were telling reporters that they no longer felt safe being around Americans. “Today, there is no tribal sheikh or a citizen who dares to go to the city hall or the U.S. base, because Zarqawi issued a statement ordering his men to kill anyone seen leaving the base or city hall,” said the head of one tribe, Bashir Abdul Qadir al-Kubaisat. The U.S. military assessed that of the 21 tribes in the area, only 6 would cooperate with it.

  Desperation may be one of the stepmothers of invention. “There was really no place to go but up,” MacFarland recalled. “I was willing to try whatever made sense.” Other units were moving away from the cities, concentrating their forces on big bases. He decided to go in the opposite direction. His commanders, who were Marines, were skeptical, having seen dialogues with tribal leaders start up and then peter out before, but they let him take a flyer. “I had the backing of my bosses, but not a lot of guidance. I felt like if it failed, it would be my failure.”

  Sterling Jensen, who was working as an interpreter for MacFarland’s brigade and had become deeply involved in tribal issues, recalled the Marines’ being even more negative. “They’d say, you guys don’t know what you’re doing. You’re way too arrogant. You’re going to get yourselves killed.” The Marines had tried several times to reach out to tribes, only to see al Qaeda assassinate sheikhs who turned. Senior Marines also thought that MacFarland was dealing with third-rate sheikhs who didn’t hold real power. What MacFarland wasn’t seeing was that some Marine generals had noticed that there was a quiet, almost secret war under way in Anbar between some tribes and al Qaeda. The Marines were reaching out to some of the harder hit sheikhs, offering them help.

  On the upside, MacFarland’s superiors were willing to give him what he needed—a Marine infantry battalion, snipers from two Navy SEAL platoons (dubbed “Task Force Bruiser”), and even four 40-foot-long armored Marine riverine boats to cut off the enemy crossing points on the Euphrates River and stealthily insert patrols. “They were fast, they were quiet, they were heavily armed, and they could carry a squad and put them ashore,” he said. “They could kind of run up on the beach, dump them off, back off, and then provide fire support.”

  Interestingly, among the Marines deployed to Ramadi was Cpl. Jimmy Webb, son of James Webb, the novelist (Fields of Fire) and former Navy secretary who in 2006 was running a long-shot campaign to become a U.S. senator from Virginia. While home on leave, the corporal asked his father why his opponent, Senator George Allen, made
cowboy boots the symbol of his campaign “when Virginia doesn’t have any cowboys.” Webb was intrigued. His son also pointed out that he and his father both had worn combat boots in wartime. He gave his father his own boots, which he had worn in the streets of Ramadi. Webb would wear them throughout his campaign.

  MacFarland and his staff began by thinking about the “metrics” they should use. If the goal was to protect the population, as they had seen in Tall Afar, then that is what should be tracked somehow. They also knew they would have to confront the skepticism of local leaders, who had seen Americans come and go for more than three years, making promises that often weren’t met or were forgotten by successor units. MacFarland began to spread the word that the Americans weren’t leaving anytime soon.

  Knowing that Americans had put in office a generation of leaders, and then seemed unable to keep alive those police chiefs, mayors, and governors, MacFarland made protection of local leaders a top priority. He stationed tanks at key intersections near their houses and put drone aircraft circling over their homes to keep an eye out for attacks. He also asked sheikhs for advice on where to place new police stations and outposts, calculating that they would put them near their homes.

  He named the Arabic-speaking Capt. Patriquin as his liaison to the sheikhs. Together they tried to sort out who was a real sheikh, with big wasta, or influence, and who was a lightweight. They also realized that years of fighting had created an opening: Not only had some sheikhs been killed, many others had moved to Jordan—and so a new generation of tribal leaders was emerging. “It was like going into Don Corleone’s house—you can tell who has wasta,” especially by following who moderated the discussion, he observed. The first sheikh with whom he began to work closely was Abu Ali Jassim, whose tribe was based out in the desert.