Part 8 (1/2)

Some CPA officials maintained that it was the military's fault that the generals had been kept in the dark. They had told Sanchez's military headquarters in Baghdad about their plans, and the word simply wasn't pa.s.sed along from there. Yet not even everyone in the CPA thought that Bremer's radical privatization was the right course. ”Employment is key issue,” Keith Mines wrote two weeks later to CPA headquarters. What his province needed was more ”Maslow” (a reference to the famed psychologist's hierarchy of human needs) and less ”Friedman” (a reference to the influential free-market economist). He argued for a reversal of CPA economic policy, which should instead be built around ”a large-scale public sector jobs program” akin to President Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era efforts.

The friction between the CPA and the military extended even to lower levels. ”As a tactical commander, I never understood his [Bremer's] role, his relations.h.i.+p with Sanchez, what the role of the State Department was versus the Defense Department,” said Col. Spain. ”None of us understood it.” That confusion was particularly difficult for Spain, who effectively was serving as the police chief of Baghdad for most of 2003, and so spanned both worlds. ”Sometimes I'd be told that CPA wants the Iraqi police to do A, and then I'd be told that CJTF-7 wants the Iraqi police to do B.”

Wolfowitz, asked several months later about the chain of command, blithely insisted that if anything, the problem was the opposite case. ”Most of the complaints on that are that there is too much unity of command, with both Bremer and Abizaid reporting to the same guy”-that is, Rumsfeld-he said in an interview.

But even at the top of the reporting pyramid there appears to have been confusion. In a meeting in the White House situation room one day, there was a lot of ”grousing” about Bremer, a senior administration official who was there recalled. As the meeting was breaking up, Rice, the national security adviser, reminded Rumsfeld that Bremer reported to him. ”He works for you, Don,” Rice said, according to this official.

”No, he doesn't,” Rumsfeld responded-incorrectly-this official recalled. ”He's been talking to the NSC, he works for the NSC.”

Bremer relates a similar anecdote in his memoir, saying that Rumsfeld told him later in 2003 that he was ”bowing out of the political process,” which apparently meant he was detaching from dealing with Iraq-a breathtaking step for the defense secretary to take after years of elbowing aside the State Department and staffers on the National Security Council.

Col. Spain vs. the Baghdad police On a hot May day in downtown Baghdad, Col. Spain met with the senior police officers of Baghdad. They had the look of hard men. Just two months earlier they had been the sworn enemies of the American officers now summoning them to meetings.

He sat at a round table with them in a meeting room at the National Police Academy as flies buzzed in and out the open windows. It was 96 degrees. Spain talked about fuel, cars, pistols, radios, and patrols-the mundane issues that make policing work and bring security to a community. The police officials, some of them longtime Baathists, every one wearing the Saddam-like facial hair of a full black moustache and a shaved chin, seemed instead to be sizing him up. They said there was good reason the police weren't on the streets: They lacked weapons and were afraid of being attacked by both Iraqis and U.S. forces. ”One of the traffic policemen was on his motorcycle this morning and was shot,” said Maj. Gen. Kais Mohammed Naief, the head of traffic police. ”This is the reason they don't feel safe.”

Another official chimed in, ”If he had a pistol, maybe they wouldn't have shot him!”

”Let's move on,” Spain said. ”I accept that there are cultural differences between the Iraqi police and the U.S. police. But I also think there are certain basic principles. One of them is that you must be out walking the streets, riding the streets.”

An Iraqi looked back at him across the table, coldly. ”But that is in normal times,” he said.

After the meeting Spain strolled along the sidewalk of a middle-cla.s.s western Baghdad neighborhood, trailed by a couple of MPs. A year later, that would be a risky act, but in May 2003, Spain was able to stop and chat with shopowners, who said they wanted more security and more electricity. ”America is so powerful, why can't it bring back the electricity?” asked Nahrawan Mahdi, a doctor at a women's clinic.

”Things are going to get better,” Spain promised a furniture storekeeper.

Spain oversaw a big brigade-all told, including staff and support units, some 7,100 soldiers, as big as many German divisions in World War II. But he would say much later, after a tough year in Iraq, that he never really had the troops he needed. He ultimately received about twenty companies of MPs-but by then his mission required about fifty. He shrugged. ”You can just sit around and wring your hands, or you can do the best you can with what you got.” Over the next year Teddy Spain's MPs would be attacked 395 times and lose a total of 13 soldiers.

Abizaid calls it a war In July, Gen. Abizaid took over Central Command from Franks and instantly injected a note of realism, telling members of Congress and reporters alike that America was going to be dealing with Iraq for a long time.

As he took over, Abizaid was the Great Arab American Hope of the Army, widely seen as one of its smartest commanders, and also able to bring an in-depth knowledge of the Mideast. In their 1973 yearbook his West Point cla.s.smates described the Lebanese American cadet, who was raised in rural California, as ”an Arabian Vince Lombardi______ He just couldn't accept second place.” Later in the 1970s he studied in Jordan, and when the university was shut down by a student strike, he trained with Jordanian Special Forces. He also earned a master's degree in Middle Eastern studies at Harvard.

He also was known as a good troop leader. As a Ranger company commander during the 1983 invasion of Grenada, he needed to attack a Cuban-manned bunker, so he ordered one of his sergeants to drive a bulldozer toward it, and then had his men advance behind its cover. That improvised moment was memorialized in the climax of Clint Eastwood's 1986 movie Heartbreak Ridge Heartbreak Ridge-although Eastwood changed it to a Marine action because the Corps was more cooperative in helping him film. In Provide Comfort in 1991, Abizaid maneuvered his battalion aggressively yet deftly in northern Iraq.

As a general Abizaid quickly earned a reputation as a bright thinker and a competent, low-key manager. At the Pentagon in the early 2000s, he was one of the few in the military who seemed to be able to handle Rumsfeld. As director of Joint Staff, a key inside slot, he was one of two senior officers who led the way in easing the tense relations.h.i.+p between Rumsfeld's office and the uniformed military. The question after he took over Central Command was whether he would live up to the high expectations people had of him.

Abizaid faced some formidable tasks: Fight a war in Iraq; prosecute an offensive against terror in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and the rest of the region; and also help bridge the gap between the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz civilian leaders.h.i.+p of the Pentagon and the estranged Army.

At the Pentagon in July, he used his first press conference as chief of Central Command to make a major course correction. Yes, he announced, we are indeed in a war in Iraq. ”What is the situation in Iraq?” Abizaid said, addressing reporters at the Pentagon after meeting with Rumsfeld. Opponents of the U.S. presence, he said, speaking with precision, ”are conducting what I would describe as a cla.s.sical guerrilla-type campaign against us.” He then went on to use the word the Bush administration had been dancing around for weeks: ”It's war, however you describe it.” This went a long way toward clearing up the strategic confusion about what the U.S. military was doing in Iraq, and how it was doing it.

Asked to explain why he was calling it a war after weeks of hesitancy by Bush administration officials to do so, Abizaid said bluntly, ”Well, I think that, you know, all of us have to be very clear in what we're seeing.” In that seemingly offhand comment, Abizaid was making an essential point about strategy and military operations. Abizaid knew that it matters very much whether the nation thinks it is at war, especially to the soldiers on the ground and their commanders. ”The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish ... the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature,” Clausewitz famously wrote. ”This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.”

Strategy, correctly formulated, shapes tactics. But tactics uninformed by strategy, or misinformed by an incorrect strategy, are like a car without a steering wheel: It may get somewhere, but probably not where its driver wants it to go. ”In Iraq, we fought the war we wanted to fight, not the war that was,” said Bruce Hoffman, a Rand Corp. terrorism expert who consulted with the CPA. ”We belatedly recognized it as a large insurgency, after dismissing it as 'dead-enders.'” This lapse gave the enemy breathing s.p.a.ce in which to organize and look for vulnerabilities in the U.S. military.

After Abizaid spoke, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita, standing at his side in the Pentagon briefing room, jumped in to attempt to undercut the crucial point the general had just made. ”The discussion about what type of conflict this is, is-like so many other discussions we're having within the context of Iraq-is almost beside the point,” the spokesman told the reporters. The issue to remember, he insisted, was that the fighters wanted to restore Saddam Hussein's regime. ”So it's worth remembering that as we kind of have this almost kind of, you know, academic discussion, is it this or is it that.” Di Rita appeared to be brus.h.i.+ng aside the considered opinion of one of the Army's top generals, the senior commander for Iraq and the rest of the Mideast-who knew more about the area and about war than Di Rita did.

It was a moment that captured in a nutsh.e.l.l the weakness at the core of the Bush administration's national security team: Strategy was seen as something vague and intellectual, at best a secondary issue, when in fact it was the core of the task they faced. It was the same sort of limited thinking that had led the Bush team first to focus in 2002 and early 2003 almost exclusively on its plan of attack for Iraq, rather than on the more difficult but crucial consolidation of that victory, and that also led it to make wildly unrealistic a.s.sumptions about postin-vasion Iraq, and then to fail to develop operational plans as a fallback if its a.s.sumptions proved incorrect.

By failing to adequately consider strategic questions, Rumsfeld, Franks, and other top leaders arguably crippled the beginning of the U.S. mission to transform Iraq. An ”overly simplistic conception of the war led to a cascading undercutting of the war effort: too few troops, too little coordination with civilian and governmental/non-governmental agencies (U.S. State Department, as one example) and too little allotted time to achieve success,” concluded Maj. Isaiah Wilson.

A lieutenant killed by confusion A confused strategy can be every bit as lethal as a bullet. If a soldier fighting in Iraq is told that he isn't at war, that he is just conducting a peacekeeping operation, then his every thought and action will be different-his mind-set as he goes out the front gate, as he conducts a patrol, as he apprehends an Iraqi. On the evening of July 30, Army Lt. Leif Nott, a member of Alpha Troop of the 1st Squadron of the 10th Cavalry Regiment in the 4th Infantry Division, was killed in the eastern town of Balad Ruz at least in part by a lack of understanding of the situation in Iraq.

The action began ominously. Sgt. Brian Beem, in one patrol, saw an animal moving toward him out of the darkness. ”The dog got louder and started coming forward, so I shot it,” he told an Army investigator. ”It was hurt and running in circles. I could not leave it like that so I shot it again. The dog died. We kept moving.”

The patrol heard a mortar sh.e.l.l impact, then small-arms fire. Beem saw some people, apparently armed, walking toward his patrol. ”I was concerned that they were suicide bombers,” he wrote. ”Why did they line up like they were and walk toward a U.S. building?” He fired a warning shot and yelled at the people to get down. It occurred to him only in retrospect that they couldn't hear his shout over the jet-engine-like roar of the engines of two nearby Bradley fighting vehicles.

In fact, he was shouting at another group of four American soldiers, led by Nott, bringing three Iraqis into an Army outpost for questioning. But Beem's patrol didn't know that. In a posture that seemed more like a cop's than a soldier's, ”Nott was walking down the middle of Balad Ruz's main street with the Iraqi prisoners,” the Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Jefferson Morley later wrote in detailing the incident. Adding to the confusion, Sgt. Mickey Anderson, a member of Nott's group, was carrying a AK-47, making him look like an Iraqi attacker to the soldiers in the Bradleys. Jefferson Morley later wrote in detailing the incident. Adding to the confusion, Sgt. Mickey Anderson, a member of Nott's group, was carrying a AK-47, making him look like an Iraqi attacker to the soldiers in the Bradleys.

”n.o.body indicated any friendly personnel were on the ground,” Lt. Chris Amaguer told the Army investigator. ”There were shadows and silhouettes with an AK-47 identified.”

”The senior scout told me to 'get those dismounts,'” Sgt. Christopher Creech stated, using Army jargon for a dismounted soldier, or infantryman. ”There was not a question that these dismounts were enemy.”

A machine gun on one of the Bradleys opened up on the approaching group. Several other soldiers followed suit with their rifles, as did a .50-caliber gunner aboard a tank. ”Then I heard 'Oh G.o.d' from a person on the ground,” Beem wrote. ”In English. 'Oh my G.o.d.' English again, and this time I knew the voice. It was Sergeant Anderson. He's been my best friend for four and half years. I walked over to see him lying there with wounds on his legs and his left ankle was wrong.” Nott was dead, shot in the chest.

The official conclusion of Maj. David Chase, the investigating officer, was that the fratricidal death of Capt. Nott was ”primarily the result of inadequate situational awareness.”

Arguably, Nott was a victim of strategic confusion in miniature. He had acted as if he were operating in near peacetime conditions, dealing with a few dead-enders-just as the secretary of defense had said. Also, if senior officials had understood that U.S. forces were indeed at war, they might have acted with more alacrity to provide soldiers such as Nott with body armor. ”There was also a significant shortage of Individual Body Armored Systems (IBAS) available to the Troop,” Maj. Chase wrote in his report. In fact, at the time, he wrote, there were just 9 sets of body armor to go around for 134 soldiers in Alpha Troop. ”This deficiency was corrected shortly after the incident.”

”This is not Vietnam!”

When Gary Anderson, the retired Marine colonel, went to see Wolfowitz about his op-ed piece in the Post Post warning that the United States might be facing a guerrilla war in Iraq, he found the deputy secretary more worried than his public comments indicated. ”The way things are going, it looks like your diagnosis of the situation is correct,” Wolfowitz said to him, he recalled later. ”Having identified the problem, what do you recommend we do about it?” warning that the United States might be facing a guerrilla war in Iraq, he found the deputy secretary more worried than his public comments indicated. ”The way things are going, it looks like your diagnosis of the situation is correct,” Wolfowitz said to him, he recalled later. ”Having identified the problem, what do you recommend we do about it?”

”We're in the early stages of an insurgency,” Anderson replied. ”We have to nip it in the bud.” The danger, he said, was that Baathists not soon countered would begin to intimidate the Iraqi population. The problem was the sort of force needed to confront them, he said. U.S. troops aren't trained to wage counterin-surgency campaigns, while the Iraqi army wasn't going to be positioned to do it, and the task was well beyond the capabilities of the Iraqi police, he said. ”So,” Anderson said, ”you need a native constabulary force, something like what the U.S. did in the Philippines and Haiti” in campaigns in those countries early in the twentieth century.

Wolfowitz liked the idea. ”I think he tried to sell it to General Franks, but Franks didn't seem to think it was needed,” Anderson recalled. A few weeks later, Wolfowitz asked Anderson if he would go out to Baghdad and pitch the idea to Bremer.

Anderson's employer, a defense consultant, wasn't wildly enthusiastic, but permitted him to become an unpaid adviser in Iraq. Anderson's own worry was that if he were killed there his family wouldn't get an insurance payment. ”If you get yourself greased, your family is in bad shape,” he warned himself.

The meeting with Bremer, in early July, didn't go well. ”Bremer's a talker, not a listener,” Anderson soon noticed. A flurry of questions from the career diplomat threw Anderson off his train of thought. It became clear that Bremer hadn't thought much about the issue of having a counterinsurgency militia, or that he thought this interloper from Was.h.i.+ngton had much to offer. ”It was obvious that Bremer saw me as a creature of Wolfowitz,” Anderson recalled. ”Bremer and Wolfowitz didn't have the greatest relations.h.i.+p, even then.”

”Mr. Amba.s.sador, here are some programs that worked in Vietnam,” Anderson said, trying to redirect the conversation. He had in mind the popular forces that had been used successfully as village militias in South Vietnam.

It was the wrong word to put in front of Bremer. ”Vietnam?” Bremer exploded. ”Vietnam! ”Vietnam! I don't want to talk about Vietnam. This is not Vietnam. This is Iraq!” I don't want to talk about Vietnam. This is not Vietnam. This is Iraq!”

”That was pretty much the end of the meeting,” Anderson recalled He came away thinking that the top U.S. officials in Iraq really didn't fathom the nature of the conflict they faced. ”I don't think he-or Sanchez- ever fully grasped the danger of it.” The U.S. occupation stood at the edge of a precipice its leaders didn't see.

HOW TO CREATE AN INSURGENCY (II).

SUMMER AND FALL 2003.

British Lt. Gen. Aylmer Haldane concluded his memoir of his suppression of the Iraqi uprising of 1920 by noting somberly that the fight had been a near-run thing. ”From the beginning of July until well into October,... we lived on the edge of a precipice where the least slip might have led to a catastrophe,” the commander of the British counterinsurgency campaign wrote in The Insurrection in Mesopotamia, 1920. The Insurrection in Mesopotamia, 1920. By luck, pluck, and courage-and the timely arrival of reinforcements-he said, the British force avoided sliding over the cliff into a long and agonizing guerrilla war. By luck, pluck, and courage-and the timely arrival of reinforcements-he said, the British force avoided sliding over the cliff into a long and agonizing guerrilla war.

In the spring of 2003, U.S. commanders had fought the war they wanted to fight-lightning fast, relatively bloodless, and generally predictable. But in the summer and fall of 2003, from the beginning of July into October, they slipped over the precipice Haldane had avoided and fell into the war their Iraqi enemies sought. The vulnerabilities that had plagued Haldane returned to haunt this new occupation force-most notably, insufficient troops and supply lines that were dangerously long and exposed to attack. Haldane also had faced insurgents who appeared to be led by former Iraqi officers, and he too had watched his Iraqi police officers desert as fighting intensified. In a comment that foreshadows the haphazard nature of the U.S. occupation authority, the British in 1920, Haldane wrote, were hampered by having a ”scratch and somewhat incongruous team” of administrators, with the majority possessing ”little exact knowledge of the people they were called upon to govern.”

But unlike Haldane, the United States wasn't able to put down the insurgency quickly. In the summer of 2003, the enemy brought it on, as President Bush had taunted them to do, and the U.S. military found itself enmeshed in a guerrilla war for the first time since the Vietnam War. In early summer it was still safe for an American to jog along the east bank of the Tigris in the morning, to lunch on chicken cordon bleu at a nice restaurant in western Baghdad's heavily Baathist Mansur district, and even to walk out at night to visit nearby friends. By late fall of 2003 such actions would still be possible but a bit foolhardy. Two years after that they would be absolutely suicidal, an invitation to being kidnapped or shot on the spot.

Arming, financing, and recruiting the insurgents It isn't clear that a large and persistent insurgency was inevitable. There is some evidence that Saddam Hussein's government knew it couldn't prevail conventionally, and some captured doc.u.ments indicate that it may have intended some sort of subversion campaign against occupation. The distribution of arms caches, the revolutionary roots of the Baathist Party, and the movement of money and people to Syria either before or during the war all argue for some advance planning for an insurgency. ”I believe Saddam Hussein always intended to fight an insurgency should Iraq fall,” Maj. Gen. Swannack, Jr., said in November 2003. ”That's why you see so many of these arms caches out there in significant numbers all over the country.” But the U.S. approach, both in occupation policy and military tactics, helped spur the insurgency and made it broader than it might have been.

Every insurgency faces three basic challenges as it begins: arming, financing, and recruiting. A peculiarity of the war in Iraq is that the Iraqi insurgency appears to have had little difficulty in any of these areas, in part because of U.S. policy blunders. The missteps made in 2003 appear to be a major reason that the anti-U.S. forces burgeoned despite their narrow appeal, both geographically and ideologically.

In the first area, arms, the unusual situation in Iraq favored the enemy. It was a land awash in weaponry and explosives, both in small collections distributed by Saddam Hussein's government before the U.S. invasion, and in huge dumps, some of them the size of small cities. In this area, policy decisions made at the Pentagon aided the nascent insurgency, because U.S. forces lacked the manpower to monitor the big dumps, let alone unearth the far-flung caches. Had the Iraqi military not been disbanded, it might have been used to cordon off those large caches. There certainly would have been some leakage, but less than occurred with no guards whatsoever in most places.