Part 11 (2/2)

”It was very clear to us from Bremer's leaders.h.i.+p that he thought it would take the Iraqis a long long time before they were going to be able to take over,” said a CPA strategist. time before they were going to be able to take over,” said a CPA strategist.

Bremer's plan had one huge flaw: It lacked essential support both in the United States and in Iraq. ”Bremer hadn't cleared the piece with his higher-ups in the Pentagon or the White House, and here he was describing a drawn-out American occupation,” columnist David Brooks reported ten months later in the New York Times. New York Times. ”Iraqis would take their time writing a const.i.tution, and would eventually have elections and take control of their country. For some Bush officials, this was the lowest period of the entire Iraq project. They knew they couldn't sustain an occupation for that long, yet they had no other realistic plan for transferring power to Iraqis.” ”Iraqis would take their time writing a const.i.tution, and would eventually have elections and take control of their country. For some Bush officials, this was the lowest period of the entire Iraq project. They knew they couldn't sustain an occupation for that long, yet they had no other realistic plan for transferring power to Iraqis.”

There was another even bigger problem looming: Ayatollah Sistani, the most important political figure in Iraq, ”declared it unacceptable to have a const.i.tution prepared by unelected actors,” recalled Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British aide to Bremer.

The same month, Robert Blackwill, a former U.S. amba.s.sador to India who also taught at Harvard, was brought in to the National Security Council to revamp Iraq policy. Blackwill was known throughout national security circles for riding roughshod over underlings and bureaucratic compet.i.tors. ”His M.O. is to spook people-'the world is falling apart,'” and then to cover himself in glory by proposing the solution, said a former senior administration official who admires Blackwill's political skills but not his character. ”And he spooked Condi, for about a month, in the fall of '03.” Rice was receptive to Blackwill's pitch. At that time, ”it was clear that things were going badly, [yet] we were getting no reporting” from CPA about its actions and their effects.

Rice had been growing profoundly frustrated with Bremer, this official said. She had been receiving so little information from him that summer that, in order to a.s.sess the real state of events at the CPA and in Iraq, she began reading the diplomatic reports that the British emba.s.sy in Was.h.i.+ngton pa.s.sed to her staff. ”Hadley and Rice were avid consumers” of the inside information coming from British diplomats in Baghdad, he said. Among other things, Blackwill convinced Rice that Bremer needed to heed Sistani, and that the long-term occupation the administrator contemplated wasn't viable. Rice in turn took those thoughts to President Bush.

In a series of meetings with Rumsfeld, and then with Rice and Bush at the White House, Bremer and the Bush administration reconsidered the mission of the CPA, and ultimately decided to abandon the idea of having the United States formally occupy Iraq for several years. The seven-step plan was dropped. On November 15, Bremer unveiled a new, swifter plan that abandoned the goal of having a const.i.tution and general elections before the U.S. government relinquished sovereignty. Instead, the United States would officially hand over power less than eight months later, at the end of June 2004.

The move was startling to almost everyone involved in the occupation. ”The decision on 15 November ... came as a complete surprise to CPA administrators,” remembered Hilary Synnott, the British diplomat who was the CPA regional coordinator for southern Iraq at the time.

It was indeed a major reversal: Instead of a long-term occupation, the U.S. government would seek to depart as soon as humanly possible. ”It was clear that Plan A wasn't going to work,” said Patrick Clawson, an Iraq hawk who long had argued for limited goals-basically, remove Saddam Hussein and leave. After more than a year of pursuing sweeping aspirations, such as transforming the politics of the Middle East, he said, ”it was the first time we pulled back dramatically from objectives. I read that as the first time we said we weren't going to achieve everything we said we wanted to do.”

After the November 15 agreement, Bremer's handling of the CPA felt much more constrained, recalled Charles Costello, who worked as a contractor on local governance issues. ”I think from November on, he was just an administrator,” he said. ”They were calling the shots in Was.h.i.+ngton.”

Convoys through h.e.l.l The structure of U.S. forces in Iraq may have undermined the goal of winning; its big bases required a huge support system. These forward operating bases featured many of the comforts of home, from Internet cafes to mess halls offering a surprising variety of good food. They also separated the troops from the population and so violated a key tenet of counterinsurgency campaigning. The cla.s.sic way to conduct such a campaign would have been to have only support troops, such as mechanics and logisticians, on the big facilities, with combat forces operating out of small patrol bases and other outposts located among the people.

In particular, keeping those big bases supplied with everything from gasoline to ice cream required a constant stream of convoys. Every day roughly eight hundred trucks headed north from Kuwait to supply the U.S. military effort. Hundreds more ran ancillary convoys inside the country. ”Every single thing that we provided to our soldiers had to be brought in through Kuwait,” Sanchez noted later.

Protecting the convoys was a major effort, taking up many military resources. The Polish-led multinational division operating in the south estimated that it spent about one quarter of its time and energy keeping open the two major U.S. supply lines, dubbed Route Tampa and Route Sue. Largely unseen and unnoticed by reporters and other observers of the war, these convoys were a major cause of friction with Iraqis as they traversed Iraq. ”I told Colonel Rudesheim about some abuse of civilians that occurred that day in his sector,” recalled an Army civil affairs officer. Soldiers from another unit, when convoying through his area, were shooting at pa.s.sing cars without provocation, the officer reported. Rudesheim responded, ”Oh, s.h.i.+t, those guys come into my sector and do it, and their own leaders don't stop them.”

Official reports described a lack of fire discipline in the conduct of convoys. ”The British sector ... is relatively free of anti-Coalition attacks, yet American convoys moving north from Kuwait from the British sector have fired at British contractors who drove near the American vehicles on a major highway,” noted the Center for Army Lessons Learned.

The Marine Corps, also operating in southern and central Iraq in the summer of 2003, found that some convoys also were run sloppily, especially those from support units such as mechanics and clerks. The Marines called those Army convoys manatees, after the big, slow-moving, and defenseless herbivorous sea mammals that are frequently run over by speedboats in the waterways of Florida. ”The Army drivers typically wore CD headphones, a.s.sistant drivers were most often asleep, and few wore helmets or flak jackets as the convoys made their way along routes Tampa and Sue,” reported the 1st Marine Division's official history. ”There were few crew-served weapons mounts on the vehicles, and these were often unmanned as they were uncomfortably hot in the blazing Iraqi sun.” The Marines also were critical of the fact that when the Army trucks were fired on, they simply would speed up rather than stop and attempt to kill their attackers. One nervy Marine response was to put Trojan horse trucks on the convoy routes. These bait vehicles carried around the outside of their truckbeds stacks of MRE ration boxes filled with sand. Inside the ring of boxes would wait Marines, ready to return fire or chase their attackers on foot. The tactic worked for a few days before the am-bushers moved away from the roads.

But not all the trucks were driven by U.S. military personnel, or even by American citizens. Many had at the wheel Indians or other third-country nationals with no vested interest in helping the U.S. cause. These people simply wanted to survive the year and take home their pay to capitalize a small business or build a house. In 2003, there was talk in Iraq that some of them broke the rules prohibiting them from carrying weapons, which they would shoot at any Iraqi who they felt came too close to them on the road.

Partly through Darwinian forces, U.S. military convoy operations radically improved in the fall of 2003 and the spring of 2004. Rather than drift along wearing earphones playing pop music, gunners wore two-way radio headsets and riot-style face s.h.i.+elds that were deemed capable of stopping rifle fire. And trucks were carrying double sets of radios so they could communicate with both their parent unit and the unit whose area they were traveling through.

The number of bomb attacks on logistics convoys increased steadily, with an average of about thirty a week in 2005, according to Brig. Gen. Yves Fontaine, head of the Army's 1st Corps Support Command. That was double the number a year earlier, he said. But he added that because of the increase in the armoring of vehicles, the number of casualties declined. Even so, U.S. troops operating the convoys were deeply affected by the experience. When Army researchers surveyed more than two thousand U.S. troops serving in Iraq in 2004, they found that about 19 percent of those in transportation and support units suffered from acute stress or post-traumatic stress disorder. The comparative figure for combat units was 11 percent, and for other units, just 7 percent.

Despite the improvements, trigger-happy convoys would continue to undercut U.S. efforts to win over the populace. The number of Iraqis who died in this way is unknown. Lt. Col. Todd Wood, a battalion commander in the 3rd Infantry Division, complained to a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco Chronicle about troops pa.s.sing through his area of operations on Iraq's Highway 1. ”Seems like I pick up a lot of people's pieces around here,” he said. ”These ... patrols that drive around and shoot people have been a thorn in everybody's side all year.” about troops pa.s.sing through his area of operations on Iraq's Highway 1. ”Seems like I pick up a lot of people's pieces around here,” he said. ”These ... patrols that drive around and shoot people have been a thorn in everybody's side all year.”

His senior NCO, Sgt. Maj. Samuel Coston, added, ”I hate the fact that American soldiers ride around killing civilians. All you got to say is, 'I felt threatened, the car was driving aggressively,' and you shoot. They have no remorse. They just keep on driving.”

Col. Herrington sends a warning In the fall of 2003, knowing she faced trouble, Brig. Gen. Fast, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in the country, asked one of the ”wise men” of the Army intelligence community to fly over to review her operations. The report that would result appears to have been the first major internal recognition that the U.S. effort in Iraq had run off the tracks.

Retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington was a veteran of Army counterinsurgency operations in the Vietnam War, where he was a particularly effective part of the Phoenix Program, a controversial covert effort to capture or kill Vietcong leaders in rural areas. William Colby, the CIA operative who oversaw the program and later became head of the agency, claimed that it eliminated sixty thousand Vietcong agents. That estimate had been greeted with skepticism, but after the war, observed historian Stanley Karnow, top Communist figures reported that Phoenix had done enormous damage. Madame Nguyen Thi Dinh, a Vietcong leader, told Karnow that she considered the program ”very dangerous.” She recalled that ”we never feared a division of troops, but the infiltration of a couple of guys into our ranks created tremendous difficulties for us.”

Herrington was one of the last Americans out of Saigon, lifting off the roof of the U.S. emba.s.sy at five-thirty on the morning of April 30,1975. A few years later he wrote a well-received book about the Phoenix operation, t.i.tled Silence Was a Weapon: The Vietnam War in the Villages. Silence Was a Weapon: The Vietnam War in the Villages. He went on to run intelligence operations for the Army in Panama and during the 1991 Gulf War, and later taught at the Army War College when Fast was a student there. She likely remembered that, unusual for an officer, he was an expert in interrogation, something that military intelligence officials tend to think of as ”sergeants' work.” He went on to run intelligence operations for the Army in Panama and during the 1991 Gulf War, and later taught at the Army War College when Fast was a student there. She likely remembered that, unusual for an officer, he was an expert in interrogation, something that military intelligence officials tend to think of as ”sergeants' work.”

Herrington arrived in early December and was stunned by what he found. The main prison, Abu Ghraib, was stuffed with six thousand prisoners. ”The problem of overpopulation at Abu Ghraib is serious, and must be resolved urgently,” he warned in a thirteen-page report to Fast submitted on December 12, 2003. ”The facility is a pressure cooker where it is only a matter of time before prisoners stage an uprising.” But that was the least of the problems, he concluded, because it was easily solved.

A larger concern was how detainees were being treated, and not just by a handful of demoralized Army Reservists at Abu Ghraib. He was shocked by the behavior of Task Force 121, an elite interagency team of about one thousand CIA paramilitaries and black Special Operations forces devoted to finding Saddam Hussein and his top allies. Iraqis ”who had been captured by Task Force 121 showed signs of having been mistreated (beaten) by their captors,” he wrote, with some having injuries noted by medical personnel. Herrington was no innocent- the Phoenix Program killed thousands-but he was disappointed, he wrote, with the actions of the task force, and especially the sense that it was routine and acceptable to beat prisoners. One officer told him that he knew about the beatings. ”I asked the officer if he had reported this problem. He replied that, 'Everyone knows about it.' I advised the officer that this [response] was inadequate.” (The Red Cross likewise reported that high-value detainees were being brought in severely burned, apparently from being made to lie across the hoods of vehicles as they were transported, tied down like slain deer.) Herrington, by contrast, had made a point of treating his prisoners generously-feeding a hungry Vietcong captain in a restaurant, and putting up a captured North Vietnamese sergeant in his villa, and at one point, a week into the latter's captivity, handing him a loaded M-16 rifle as a sign of trust.

Broadly interpreting his mandate, Herrington went on to critique the entire U.S. military campaign. He repeatedly singled out the big sweeps that were resulting in the imprisonment of thousands of Iraqis that fall and winter. ”Conducting sweep operations in which many persons are detained who probably should not be detained, and who then wind up incarcerated for three to six months, is counterproductive to the Coalition's efforts to win the cooperation of the Iraqi citizenry,” he advised Fast.

In some instances, it appeared that U.S. commanders, in seeking to shut down the insurgency in their areas of operations, were using tactics that effectively made them recruiting sergeants for it. Herrington was especially bothered by the actions of Gen. Odierno's 4th Infantry Division, which was headquartered in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, near the northern apex of the Sunni Triangle. ”Princ.i.p.ally due to sweep operations by some line units-the 4th ID was consistently singled out as the major offender-the number of detainees” was rising steadily, he wrote. He emphasized that point five pages later: ”Some divisions are conducting operations with rigorous detention criteria, while some-the 4th ID is the negative example-are sweeping up large numbers of people and dumping them at the door of Abu Ghraib.”

He also told Fast to look into the practice of taking family members of suspects into custody. ”Recommend that you check to see if, as we were told, some detainees arrive at Abu Ghraib who were detained because the correct target of a raid was not home, so a family member was taken in his place ... who would then be released when the target turns himself in. This practice, if it is being done, has a 'hostage' feel to it.”

Army combat units were part of the problem, Herrington suggested. Looking at them reminded him of his time in Vietnam when he saw such units alienate local populations. ”They were often heavy-handed, reliant on ma.s.sive firepower, and could undo in a few hours what we had striven to accomplish with the people for months.” A radically different, far more sophisticated approach was needed, Herrington suggested. Set up an amnesty program and induce insurgent leaders to turn themselves in. There were three good ways to put an insurgent out of business: The preferable way was to foster desertion; the second best was to capture and interrogate them. ”Last resort is to target and kill them.” Yet that last thinking was at the heart of the approach that Sanchez and many of his division commanders were taking-especially in the Sunni Triangle.

Overall, Herrington concluded, the Army should change its way of thinking about what it was doing in Iraq. ”Keep the U.S. profile as low as possible going forward,” he wrote. Effectively, the veteran interrogator had turned the Sanchez critique on its head: It's not intelligence that is the problem here, it is your troops and tactics. Alter your tactics and your intelligence will improve, just as night follows day. In the following months that criticism would become the conventional wisdom among Special Forces officers, civil affairs specialists, and even some regular Army unit commanders. But at the time it was a novel, even radical, view.

Only two copies of the report were made, with Herrington keeping one and leaving the other with Fast. There is no indication that Gen. Sanchez, the most conventional of commanders, was interested in overhauling his approach in such a revolutionary way. Four months later, orders issued to his subordinate commanders still routinely called for ”killing or capturing” the insurgents.

Yet over a year later, after the Abu Ghraib scandal shook the Army, a cascade of reports and investigations vindicated Herrington's views. It is worth quoting at length the conclusions of one investigator, Maj. Gen. George Fay, because in retrospect they read like an obituary for the strategy and tactics employed by the U.S. military in Iraq to respond to the insurgency in 2003.

”There was a general consensus,” Fay wrote, from interviews with, among others, Sanchez and then Brig. Gen. Barbara Fast, that as the pace of operations picked up in late November-early December 2003, it became a common practice for maneuver elements to round up large quant.i.ties of Iraqi personnel in the general vicinity of a specified target as a cordon and capture technique. Some operations were conducted at night resulting in some detainees being delivered to collection points only wearing night clothes or under clothes. Sgt. Jose Garcia, a.s.signed to the Abu Ghraib Detainee a.s.sessment Board, estimated that 85%-90% of the detainees were of no intelligence value based upon board interviews and debriefings of detainees. The Deputy C2x, CJTF-7, CIVILIAN-12 [that is, the number-two military intelligence official and a U.S. official operating in Iraq whose name wasn't being released] confirmed these numbers.

The effect of those numbers of innocents was unintentionally to provide cover to the insurgents also detained, Fay concluded.

Large quant.i.ties of detainees with little or no intelligence value swelled Abu Ghraib's population and led to a variety of overcrowding difficulties. Already scarce interrogator and a.n.a.lyst resources were pulled from interrogation operations to identify and screen increasing numbers of personnel whose capture doc.u.mentation was incomplete or missing. Complicated and unresponsive release procedures ensured that these detainees stayed at Abu Ghraib-even though most had no value.

The U.S. military response to the rise of the insurgency was fundamentally misguided. An effort to squeeze out more intelligence, involving thousands of American troops and profoundly disrupting the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis, swamped the intelligence system. The American offensive was undone by a combination of overwhelmed soldiers and indiscriminate generals-especially the 4th ID's Odierno, who sent too many detainees south, and his immediate superior, Sanchez, who should have seen this and stopped it.

The capture of Saddam Hussein Yet what Gen. Odierno and the 4th ID are remembered for is something very different-in fact, for what may be the high point of the U.S. occupation.

”We got him!” Bremer exclaimed to reporters on December 14. After thirty-eight weeks of searching, Operation Red Dawn, involving six hundred conventional and Special Operations troops, had caught Saddam Hussein hiding in a hole on a farmstead near the village of Dawr, 10 miles southeast of Tikrit and not far from his birthplace of Auja. An informant had said that an important person was there, amid the palm groves and orange orchards. One soldier noticed a prayer rug over a dirt spot that looked swept recently. The rug was removed, and a Styrofoam lid was found underneath it. After it was lifted-carefully, in case it was b.o.o.by-trapped-it revealed a square-cut hole resembling a mineshaft.

Under standard procedures, said Col. James Hickey, the smart, sad-eyed commander of the operation, soldiers would have dropped a grenade or fired into the ”spider hole.” But before they could, two hands appeared in surrender. Saddam was taken into custody by a combination of Special Operations troops and members of the 4th Infantry Division.

At last, some commanders thought, the corner had been turned. Not only had Saddam been caught, he hadn't even put up a fight-a circ.u.mstance that appeared to undercut the heroic image he had tried to construct. Bremer presented the moment to Iraqis as a potential turning point in the life of their nation. ”This is a great day in your history,” he said. ”With the arrest of Saddam Hussein, there is a new opportunity for members of the former regime, whether military or civilian, to end their bitter opposition. Let them come forward now in a spirit of reconciliation and hope, lay down their arms, and join you, their fellow citizens, in the task of building the new Iraq.”

Some U.S. commanders, caught up in the euphoria of the moment, said at the time that they believed it the beginning of the end of the insurgency. ”The Wicked Witch is dead,” rejoiced Lt. Col. Henry Arnold, a battalion commander in the 101st Airborne, based near the Syrian border. ”The capture of Saddam Hussein will have a tremendous negative impact on the Baathist insurgency, and it is all good news for us and the future of Iraq.” He predicted that most of the former regime elements, or FRE, active in the insurgency now would be demoralized. ”I believe that the majority of the FRE will melt away and begin to reintegrate into normal society.”

”I think this puts a nail in the coffin of hopes that the Baath Party could ever regain control of Iraq,” an Army general said. ”There is no longer any central figure around whom such a movement could coalesce.”

Indeed, in the next few weeks the U.S. military obtained the best information it had seen in months. ”The peak was in the December timeframe after we took down Saddam and captured him,” Gen. Sanchez said in a legal statement given later. On Christmas Eve, Fadhil Mohammed Ahmed, who was believed to be commanding former members of the regime in launching attacks in Baghdad, turned himself in. (He actually had to go to four U.S. checkpoints before finding a soldier willing to take him into custody, said an Army officer.) January and February 2004 were good times for U.S. military intelligence, recalled one senior officer. ”We were rolling up the Baathists,” he said. ”We had them on their heels in Diyala and al Anbar”-the provinces flanking Baghdad on the east and west. At one point some five hundred insurgent fighters pet.i.tioned for amnesty, he said, and ringleaders were putting out feelers for surrender.

This might have been the moment for a political opening to the Sunnis, capitalizing on the stunning capture by reaching out to wavering enemies, said an Army intelligence officer who was based in Anbar at the time. ”I think we missed an incredible opportunity to bring the Sunnis into the fold during that December-January time frame,” he said. ”A lot of infrastructure spending and a push to reach out to religious and tribal leaders could potentially have changed the course of the war.”

But neither the CPA nor the Bush administration was inclined to offer reprieves, recalled the first officer. ”That was the great missed opportunity,” he said with palpable regret.

At the time Sanchez was hearing rea.s.suring reports from subordinate commanders. The number of attacks appeared to be dwindling. The 4th ID's Maj. Gen. Odierno contended that the back of the insurgency was broken. ”The former regime elements we have been combating have been brought to their knees,” he told reporters. ”Capturing Saddam was a major operational and psychological defeat for the enemy.” He described the insurgency as ”a fractured, sporadic threat, with the leaders.h.i.+p destabilized, finances interdicted, and no hope of the Baathists' return to power.” There were just a ”handful of cells” left fighting in his area, the northern and eastern parts of the Sunni Triangle, he said. In terms of reconstruction, he added, ”we see constant improvement. And so it is getting better.... [W]e are making significant progress.” He even offered a time line: ”I believe within six months you're going to see some normalcy. I really believe that.”

In al Anbar province, the 82nd Airborne's Swannack was almost as optimistic. ”We have turned the corner, and now we can accelerate down the straightaway,” he told reporters on January 6.

But even at the time of the capture, there were indications that the ultimate payoff wouldn't be as good as commanders hoped. ”That was a very unpopular event in al Anbar province,” recalled Keith Mines. ”They didn't like to see the whole thing of checking his teeth on TV. They thought he should be handled with dignity.” He emphasized this in his weekly update to Bremer, recording that he was seeing ”outrage at how Iraq's former leader has been publicly humiliated.”

Nor did the display of Saddam play well in other parts of the Arab world. ”No Arab and no Muslim will ever forget these images. They touched something very, very deep,” a Moroccan journalist named Khalid Jamai told Reuters, the news service. ”It was disgraceful to publish those pictures. It goes against human dignity, to present him like a gorilla that has come out of the forest, with someone checking his head for lice.”

Ultimately, the capture of Saddam would prove to be the prelude to a new, more determined phase of the war. It is possible that removing Saddam from the equation made it easier for some of the Iraqis who hated Saddam but also disliked the Americans to support the insurgency. ”We are not fighting for Saddam,” Ahmed Ja.s.sim, a religious student in Fallujah, said around this time. ”We are fighting for our country, for our honor, for Islam. We are not doing this for Saddam.”

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