Battlegrounds
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Sunni Arabs feared Shia Arab and Kurdish encroachment and extrajudicial retribution. Those fears grew due to the composition of the mainly Shia and expatriate Interim Governing Council; severe “de-Baathification” that disenfranchised former military officers, government officials, and even schoolteachers; and the potential for retribution from vengeful Kurdish and Shia militias. Some feared the new government would simply divide the country’s oil reserves and richest agricultural lands between Kurds and Shia and leave a destitute Sunni population in an impoverished rump state. Many Sunni Arabs concluded that they could protect their interests only through violence; the insurgency strengthened.
Sometimes it seemed to me that those in Washington and the newly formed Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad were deliberately making the ambitious mission as hard as they could. In addition to severe de-Baathification, decisions not to recall at least a portion of the Iraqi Army, limits on the numbers of U.S. troops similar to those imposed in Afghanistan, delayed justice for the Baath party’s worst criminals, and the composition of an Interim Governing Council that Iraqis regarded as inept and corrupt fueled discontent and prevented an effective response to a growing insurgency.
As in Afghanistan, the U.S.-led Coalition was too slow to adapt to the evolution of the enemy and its strategy. For the first year of the conflict, insurgents directed violence primarily at Coalition forces, nascent security institutions, and political leaders. Initial attacks were not very effective, but the insurgents learned to employ deadly roadside bombs and car bombs. In the summer of 2003, insurgents also destroyed infrastructure to frustrate progress and foster popular discontent. Terrorism was central to the strategy; civilian-targeted attacks aimed to undermine international support for the Coalition effort, such as the August 2003 bombing of the Jordanian embassy and UN headquarters.
As in previous wars, there was insufficient civilian capacity to stabilize the country. Establishing rule of law, providing basic services, and building local governance fell into the military’s purview. Military units had not been trained for those tasks or for counterinsurgency operations; many were overcome by the unanticipated scope of responsibility. A few overreacted to the growing violence and generated more enmity through heavy-handed tactics and breaches in discipline. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal and other instances of Coalition abuses reinforced insurgent propaganda that Coalition forces were twenty-first-century “Crusaders” or “Mongols” who intended to subjugate or destroy the country. Over time, the growing Baathist resistance subsumed nationalist and tribal recruits and forged an alliance with Islamists affiliated with Al-Qaeda in Iraq. By 2004, the conflict was morphing into a sectarian civil war.
I witnessed the evolution of the conflict firsthand as I traveled across Iraq multiple times during the first year of the war. In February 2004, the Commander’s Advisory Group I led prepared a memo for General Abizaid that began with the observation that “the specter of civil war is haunting Iraq.” A month later, the leader of AQI, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, proposed “the Afghan model” for Iraq. Just as the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate arose from the Afghan Civil War, Zarqawi’s emirate would rise from the chaos in Iraq. Zarqawi would jump-start civil war with mass murder attacks on Iraq’s Shia communities, inviting retribution. He would then use retribution attacks on Sunnis to portray AQI as the protector from Shia militias and Shia-dominated security forces. Ultimately, the Islamic Republic of Iraq would become a “jihadist state” for Al-Qaeda to use as a launching pad for attacks against the “near enemies” of Israel and the Arab monarchies as well as the “far enemies” of Europe and the United States.28 To gain strength, nascent insurgencies require time and space when security forces either are not aware of them or are unable to quash them. Tragically, our strategic narcissism—which resulted in lack of preparation, an inability to consolidate military gains politically, and poor adaptation to an evolving conflict—gave the insurgency in Iraq such a respite.
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A YEAR later, in February 2005, I returned to Iraq in command of the “Brave Rifles,” the U.S. Army’s Third Armored Cavalry Regiment. I visited Abadi in Baghdad as our regiment received a new mission to conduct counterinsurgency operations and develop Iraqi Security Forces in Nineveh Province across a 22,000-square-kilometer area that included a 220-kilometer-long border with Syria. In and around the city of Tal Afar, our troopers would experience in microcosm the problems that dominated the next and most destructive phase of the war. Abadi had friends among the Shia Turkmen tribes in Nineveh. He described the situation as consistent with Zarqawi’s “Afghan Model,” explaining how Al-Qaeda took advantage of sectarian, tribal, and ethnic divisions to foment violence. The terrorists used the ensuing chaos to gain control of territory, populations, and resources. That is how the city of 250,000 people astride an ancient route that Alexander the Great used on his conquest of Persia quickly became the main training ground and support base for Zarqawi and AQI.
When our regiment arrived in Nineveh, our troopers alongside Iraqi Army soldiers isolated AQI from sources of support in the region, interdicted the flow of foreign fighters and supplies from Syria, and eliminated support areas in the surrounding countryside. We strove to counter enemy propaganda and clarify our intentions with our deeds by pursuing the enemy relentlessly while protecting civilians. It was also important to expose the terrorists’ inhumanity, criminality, and hypocrisy. Our regiment, alongside the Iraqi Army’s Third Division and U.S. and Iraqi special operations forces, arrested the cycle of sectarian violence by moving into the city and protecting the population. Once the pall of fear over the city had been lifted, our soldiers gained access to intelligence. Locals were able to cooperate with U.S. and Iraqi forces. Terrorists could no longer hide in plain sight as our forces tracked them down in Tal Afar and the surrounding areas. In late 2005, after the enemy was defeated, mediation between Tal Afar’s communities restored trust among them. Those returning to the city had renewed confidence in reformed local government and police forces. Schools and markets reopened. Abadi and Najim al-Jibouri, who had become mayor of Tal Afar, helped forge the accommodations between the Sunni and Shia communities essential to sustaining security. The sectarian civil war centered on Tal Afar in 2004–2005 was a harbinger for what was to come across the entire country from 2006 to 2008 and the cycle of sectarian violence that would again afflict the region after 2011.
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PRE-INVASION WILLFUL ignorance about the complexity of stabilizing Iraq evolved into post-invasion denial about the growing insurgency and, later, into the refusal to acknowledge the evolution of the conflict into a sectarian civil war. Strategic narcissism produced the same depressing behaviors. Some leaders based strategies on what they preferred to do rather than what the situation demanded. The short-war mentality persisted; some generals and admirals seemed more interested in getting back to peacetime priorities than winning the war. By 2005, commanders had shifted the strategy in Iraq to one of “transition” to Iraqi forces as an end in and of itself. It was a rush to failure, as it vastly overestimated the Iraqi government’s and security forces’ ability to assume full responsibility. The drive to transition even as the security situation worsened was based in part on the rationalization that more Coalition troops were actually part of the problem rather than part of the solution; more troops would incite additional natural opposition to a Western occupying force, the thinking went. Yet, AQI would use the occupation as a recruiting tool as long as there was even one Coalition squad in Iraq; the numbers did not matter. Despite the country’s clear drift toward civil war and the example in Tal Afar of what approach was necessary to forestall that drift, strategic narcissism persisted.
In February of 2006, AQI bombed the al-Askari, or “Golden,” mosque in Samarra, one of Shiism’s holiest sites. Until that bombing, the presence of Coalition forces and Shia restraint acted as brakes on the downward slide toward civil war. Afterward, Shia militia attacks on Sunnis mounted. Death squad killings became nig
htly occurrences. Sunni militias sprouted and affiliated with Al-Qaeda. Mixed neighborhoods underwent ethnic cleansing as one group or the other moved out or was forced to leave. More than 1,300 Iraqis died in sectarian killings in March alone. By mid-summer, the death toll was over 100 per day. U.S. and government forces could not control the violence even after the killing of AQI leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June. By the end of 2006, the chaos of civil war had strengthened the influence of Iranian-sponsored Shia militias and accelerated the cycle of violence. The Iraqi government not only lacked the capacity to help pull the country back together; it had become a sectarian battleground itself and lacked the will to do what was necessary to stabilize the situation.
It was during this period that Rayburn coined the term “My-raq,” to describe the tendency of U.S. civilian and military officials to describe the situation in “I-raq” as they would like it to be. It was a funny play on words, but strategic narcissism is dangerous and costly in wartime. The transition strategy continued to brief well on PowerPoint; bulletization of the situation in My-raq masked the reality that the strategy was failing. Metrics measured the successful execution of a flawed strategy. Ultimately, the Iraq strategy was wrested from the Department of Defense as the disconnect between Pentagon briefings and the actual situation in Iraq was undeniable. By the fall of 2006, several reassessment efforts were under way in Washington.
I was part of one of those assessments, one that became known as the “council of colonels.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Peter Pace assembled a team of us to help the Joint Chiefs prepare recommendations to the broader White House assessment run by Deputy National Security Advisor J. D. Crouch. General Pace, a gentleman of great integrity, was unable to shake his and the JCS’s tendency to base recommendations on their preferences rather than what the situation in Iraq demanded. Our deliberations revealed that the JCS and the secretary of defense suffered from cognitive dissonance in not grasping that the transition strategy was utterly inconsistent with the deteriorating situation in Iraq.
On Veterans Day weekend, my colleagues asked me to write the memo for the chairman’s recommendation to the National Security Council staff. I tried to expose for the chairman and others the disconnect between the nature of the problem in Iraq and the recommendation to continue with the same strategy. The memo made what had previously been implicit assumptions explicit.29 They included:
Iraqi security forces possessed not only the strength but also the legitimacy with the Iraqi people to defeat the insurgency and provide sustainable security.
The Iraqi government was capable of providing basic services on a nonsectarian basis and convincing Sunni Arab and Turkmen populations that they could protect their interests through a political process rather than through violence.
I concluded the memo with the observation that the principal advantage of the recommended strategy was that it did not require any additional U.S. troops or resources. When General Pace’s executive officer, Mike Rogers, who would later become commander of Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, came into the Pentagon to read the draft, the always calm navy captain was exasperated with me. He wanted me to redraft the memo, but I argued that there was not anything in the memo that was untrue or did not reflect the chiefs’ discussions. I asked him to forward it to the chairman as drafted. I would take full responsibility and, of course, make any edits or changes that General Pace directed. General Pace, an officer committed to giving his best military advice, forwarded the memo to the White House as it was drafted.
Meanwhile, Vice President Dick Cheney was developing his own reassessment to provide an alternative perspective to the government process. The American Enterprise Institute, a think tank, conducted a war game and planning session under the direction of Drs. Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, good friends of mine, fellow historians, and particularly astute critics of Iraq War strategy. I would not participate with the Kagans’ project, but what our regiment learned from the experience in Tal Afar informed their effort. Two recently retired officers, our cavalry regiment’s deputy commander, Col. Joel Armstrong, and plans officer, Maj. Dan Dwyer, structured a war game and developed a “surge” option to adapt the Iraq strategy to the evolving nature of the war. Soon after I drafted the memo for General Pace, Vice President Cheney invited me to his home. In response to his questions, I described how our strategy in Iraq had been, from the very beginning, disconnected from the character of the conflict there. During a second meeting, I brought with me a handwritten list of the “Top Ten Reasons We Do Not Deserve to Win the War in Iraq,” to highlight the effect of strategic narcissism on the war.
As I got home to London for Christmas, where I was working at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, President George W. Bush directed a dramatic shift in the strategy for the war in Iraq. I returned to Iraq less than two months later. Along with Ambassador David Pearce and a talented interdisciplinary and multinational team, we helped draft the strategy for the new commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and the new U.S. ambassador, Ryan Crocker. Prior to the invasion in 2003, Pearce, an exceptionally talented and experienced diplomat, had produced a largely ignored study of Iraq that predicted many of the difficulties we would encounter after Saddam’s removal. Pearce knew a civil war when he saw one. Before joining the State Department, he had been the chief Middle East correspondent for United Press International during the Lebanese Civil War. Pearce and I agreed that we needed a political strategy to address the causes of the violence and ensure that all activities, programs, and operations in Iraq, as well as diplomatic efforts in the region and beyond, were directed at addressing those causes.
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I HAD last seen parliamentarian Haider al-Abadi in Tal Afar in early 2006. As we in the Joint Strategic Assessment Team, or J-SAT, started our work in March 2007, I borrowed Petraeus’s plane and took Abadi back to Tal Afar. Rayburn, by now my trusty sidekick on these projects, joined us. The city was flourishing. Despite Al-Qaeda’s best efforts to restart the cycle of sectarian violence, the peace held. Residents in Tal Afar did not want the horror to return. Mayor Jibouri was a superb leader and mediator who kept communications open between the communities and insisted on professional police forces. A small U.S. force, less than one battalion, remained to continue advising and assisting Iraqi security forces. Iraqi soldiers and policemen had good relations with each other and with the population. We walked through neighborhoods that had, two years earlier, been battlegrounds. But this time, we wore no helmets and no body armor. Marketplaces were thriving. Schools were full of happy children. Mothers watched their children play together in the city’s parks and playgrounds. The people greeted us and thanked us. Tal Afar, once wracked by horrible violence, now seemed a sanctuary from the death and destruction across mixed sectarian areas of Baghdad and the Tigris and Euphrates River Valleys.
Tal Afar was a model for what was needed across Iraq: political accommodation between communities. To foster this accommodation, the United States needed more than reinforcements—it needed a fundamental change in strategy. That strategy would aim to extend a Sunni tribal “awakening” against AQI, defeat that terrorist organization, and nurture local cease-fires. Isolating not only AQI but also Shia militias from popular support required convincing communities that they could protect their families and their interests through a political process rather than through violence.
But it is difficult for political processes to take hold when factions are shooting at one another. The military headquarters in Iraq, III Corps, under Gen. Raymond Odierno, was already directing its forces to physically break the cycle of violence, establish security, and help broker local cease-fires as a first step toward “bottom-up” reconciliation efforts. Special operations forces under Lt. Gen. Stanley McCrystal were focusing on irreconcilable factions within AQI and Shia Islamist militias. The idea was that reconcilable factions, witnessing the fate of those targeted, would be incentivized to join the political
process. The utter brutality of AQI helped. Rather than patrons and protectors, Zarqawi and those who flocked to Iraq to fight with him were beginning to be seen by the Sunni population as a foreign pathogen that needed to be excised.30 All programs, from development assistance to development of security forces, were aimed at reducing malign sectarian and foreign (i.e., Iranian) influence. It worked. In the year following the complete deployment of surge forces, violence in Iraq fell to the lowest levels since 2004.31
Abadi, Rayburn, and I returned to Tal Afar again in early 2008. Abadi believed that the surge had pulled Iraq away from the precipice of utter mayhem. As we walked through a peaceful Tal Afar, we recognized that the success of the surge was fragile and reversible. What was needed to ensure that Iraq remained stable and was not aligned with Iran was long-term military, diplomatic, and economic engagement. Unfortunately, this was not to be.
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AT A crucial moment in 2009–2010, the new administration would drive U.S. policy based on a new version of strategic narcissism, one based in pessimism and resignation to any outcome in Iraq as long as the United States disengaged. Candidate Barack Obama campaigned on a sixteen-month time line for withdrawal from the country. When the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, endorsed that time line and Obama won the election, the momentum behind complete disengagement proved irresistible. Whereas the Bush administration’s overconfidence led to underappreciation for the risks and costs of intervention, the Obama administration’s pessimism led to underappreciation for the risks and costs of extrication. Whereas the Bush administration’s strategy betrayed the conceit that U.S. decisions in war would produce the desired outcome, the Obama administration saw U.S. presence in Iraq as the principal cause of problems. Both approaches lacked strategic empathy because they failed to consider the agency that others, especially enemies and adversaries, had on the future course of events. In December 2011, President Obama declared, “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government.”32 Like the announcement of the withdrawal of U.S. forces in Afghanistan even as additional troops deployed there in 2009, the Obama administration equated American withdrawal to the equivalent of the end of the war. Vice President Biden called President Obama from Baghdad to say “thank you for giving me the chance to end this goddamn war.”33 Key officials in the Obama administration saw American disengagement from not only Iraq, but also the Middle East, as an unmitigated good.