by Greg Jaffe
Other Iraqis weren’t as helpful. Casey and Khalilzad pleaded with Jaafari, who was fighting to keep the prime minister’s job, to issue a curfew and appeal publicly for calm. Jaafari hesitated. He saw the bombing as an act of treachery by the Sunni Baathists, and he knew that any Shiite politician calling for restraint risked appearing weak. He finally agreed to make the public statement but refused to impose a curfew for forty-eight hours.
Two days after the bombing, a worried Casey typed out a hasty e-mail to Chiarelli and his other commanders: “Troops, polit situation took a turn for the worse yesterday,” he began, warning them not to share what followed: “Situation is as volatile as I have seen it.” The curfew was in place, but Sunni sheikhs and politicians had been slow to condemn the attack and Shiite patience was “waning quickly.” Iraqis had passed along intelligence that thirty car bombs were heading to Baghdad. Casey wanted his men to look for signs that militia groups were stockpiling weapons or preparing for sectarian war. He didn’t know when the sectarian tension would subside, but he concluded, “It won’t be soon.”
After the mosque bombing, violence steadily increased. The war was changing. Shiite gunmen, many of them members of Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia, known as Jaish al-Mahdi, went block by block in mixed neighborhoods forcing Sunnis from their homes and in some cases killing those who resisted. Sunnis fought back with massive car bombs in crowded markets. Between late February and early May, 3,034 bodies were found in Baghdad. In late February Casey received an intelligence report noting that most of the bodies in Baghdad were concentrated in Sadr’s strongholds. Unless the violence could be contained, the report warned, there would be “intense sectarian strife across several provinces—likely resulting in civil war.” In the margins of the report, Casey drew a star and jotted two words to himself: “Must act.”
Sometimes he sat in his office or his quarters at night and methodically composed lists of ideas and questions to ensure he wasn’t missing something: “What’s going on?” he wrote one day after noticing that attacks by Al Qaeda were growing larger and more deadly. “Are Sunnis with military experience moving to AQ?”
“May need an offensive,” he wrote in another list. At the same time, he mulled ways of halting the fighting. “Negotiated settlement,” he jotted, wondering if there was a way to bring the warring factions into what would amount to peace talks. He wanted to change the atmosphere. Maybe, he mused, they should “level Abu Ghraib,” the Saddam-era prison that, after the 2004 prisoner abuse scandal, had become a symbol to Iraqis of the hated occupation.
Outside Samarra
February 2006
Chiarelli didn’t need a list of new ideas. Even after the Samarra mosque bombing, he was certain he knew what needed to be done. The problem was getting others in the military to embrace his ideas. A few days after the attack, he flew to the U.S. base on the outskirts of Samarra and was ushered into a dimly lit command post. He’d come to hear what the battalion responsible for the city planned to do to bring it back under control and win over the people. Even before the mosque bombing, Samarra had been a difficult place. The United States had mounted large assaults to clear the city of insurgents three times before. Each time the enemy had returned.
As he sat on a folding chair listening, Chiarelli became annoyed. The battalion had plenty of plans for killing or capturing insurgents. Troops, operating from a small patrol base in the center of the city, went out on daily patrols and raids of insurgent safe houses. They were working on finishing a ten-foot-high sand berm around the city so that they could prevent insurgents from going in and out. But he hadn’t heard any mention of plans to revive the economy, build up the local government, or bring jobs to its residents.
After listening for more than an hour, Chiarelli said he’d heard enough. “This is unacceptable. You are going to go around conducting operation after operation, but you don’t give these people some reason to hope their life is going to get better,” he said. Then Chiarelli stood up and stormed out. It wasn’t often that a three-star general dismissed a battalion’s entire plan. More confusing to the officers in the room, Chiarelli’s thoughts on what was needed in Samarra were completely at odds with what their brigade commander, Colonel Michael Steele, had told them.
Steele, a barrel-chested former offensive lineman on the University of Georgia national championship football team, was sitting just a few chairs from Chiarelli. He’d led the 1993 rescue mission in Somalia made famous in the book and film Black Hawk Down. The experience on the chaotic streets of Mogadishu had driven home to him the importance of aggressively pursuing the enemy. Before his men left Fort Campbell in Kentucky he’d gathered them in an auditorium to tell them what he expected of them. “Anytime you fight—anytime you fight—you always kill the other son of a bitch,” he said, pacing back and forth like Patton. “You are the hunter, the predator—you are looking for the prey.” He had undisguised contempt for anyone, including Chiarelli, who suggested that the Army should be trying to create jobs or convince insurgents to lay down their weapons. “This is real, and the guy who is going to win is the guy who gets violent the fastest,” he told his troops, some of whom began using “kill boards” to track how many Iraqis they had shot during the deployment.
Steele repeated none of this as Chiarelli was sitting across from him that day in Samarra. He was, after all, only a colonel, and Chiarelli was a three-star general. A few weeks later Chiarelli returned to Samarra for another visit, which was even more disturbing. This time his aide called Steele and told him that Chiarelli was bringing along Major General Adnan Thavit, who had led the police commandos and was a native of the city. Thavit knew all of the sheikhs in Samarra, and Chiarelli thought that he might be able to provide Steele with some insights. First Steele tried to bar the Iraqi officer from coming, arguing that he planned to discuss classified information. Chiarelli was astonished. “Thavit is on our side,” he thought. “Don’t they understand?” At Chiarelli’s insistence he grudgingly let the Iraqi into the briefing. Later Steele refused to give Thavit a seat in the convoy of Humvees that was ferrying Chiarelli’s entourage back to the helicopter pad. Major Steve Gventer, Chiarelli’s aide, pointed out that the sixty-four-year-old Thavit would have to walk. “I don’t fucking care,” Steele yelled. Gventer hustled away and found Chiarelli, who ordered Steele to surrender his seat.
Steele’s disdain for Iraqis, though extreme, was not atypical. Three years of occupation duty had left the Army tired and indifferent. Worried about suicide attacks and car bombs, convoys now routinely fired off warning shots at cars that strayed too close. The gulf between occupier and occupied had never been wider. Chiarelli was bothered by the incident with Steele’s brigade but kept going back to Samarra, determined to win over at least some of his subordinates.
In Baghdad, the parliament fought over who would be the next prime minister. Months passed. Violence continued to climb. The government that was supposed to unite the country was paralyzed. Chiarelli’s optimism that Iraq had turned a corner began to fade as the months without a new prime minister went on. He began looking for ways to show average Iraqis that life would improve. In April, Chiarelli’s helicopter lifted off in an eddy of hot wind and turned west. Leaving the sprawl of Baghdad, it soon was speeding low over palm groves and green wheat fields, part of the country’s farm belt, which is startlingly lush to anyone who thinks of Iraq as purely a desert country. The pungent smell of manure wafted up from the ground. Over the whap-whap-whap of the rotors, Chiarelli told the Iraqi general flying with him that he was arranging for aerial pesticide spraying of the date palm groves below. Saddam Hussein’s government had done the job every year, but the groves had gone unsprayed since the American military had arrived, and the once-lucrative crop was a mess. A smaller harvest meant fewer jobs for Sunnis in western Anbar Province, fueling the insurgency in what had become one of the most violent and chaotic spots on the earth. “We’re going to do it!” Chiarelli said of the spraying. “I’m following it ever
y day.” He planned to give credit for the idea to the still-to-be-decided prime minister in the hope that it would further bolster his support in the Sunni heartland. The general nodded but said nothing, seemingly puzzled by the American general’s interest in dates.
Chiarelli landed at al Asad Air Base, a vast American installation in the middle of the desert. There, they were met by Colonel W. Blake Crowe, the regimental commander in far western Anbar Province. With his high and tight haircut and buff biceps, Crowe was the picture of a squared-away Marine. The Marines were under Chiarelli’s command, and Crowe, the son of a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was keen to make a good impression. But he was also a Marine, and they tended to look upon the Army as a plodding outfit without the Corps’s warrior ethos.
Ushering Chiarelli into the regimental command post in a crumbling one-story masonry building, Crowe and a half dozen of his officers launched into a detailed briefing about enemy activity in the area and the difficulty of performing the kinds of civic tasks that Chiarelli wanted. Only a few days earlier, Crowe said, a suicide car bombing just outside their front gate had killed two policemen. The only workers willing to help clear a large ammunition dump, among other Chiarelli-type projects, had to come all the way from Baghdad. But the hiring of these outside workers had angered the local sheikhs, causing still more problems and attacks. Crowe’s implication was clear: the tactics preferred by Chiarelli might work in Baghdad, but in violence-ridden Anbar the Marines would have to handle things their own way, and that meant, first and foremost, killing insurgents. He didn’t have enough troops to cover the vast territory he was responsible for and carry out the kinds of assistance projects Chiarelli wanted.
Chiarelli heard Crowe out. “If you’re saying you’ve got to get an area secure before you do any reconstruction, you’ll never get any reconstruction done,” he said. Crowe, realizing that his presentation had gotten him nowhere (except perhaps in trouble with a general), said he was trying his best. He described how his Marines had recently tracked a suspected insurgent leader to an isolated house. A year ago, he said, they probably would have called in an air strike to kill him. Mindful of Chiarelli’s directives on limiting destruction, they raided the house and captured the man alive. “You probably got more intelligence and avoided killing civilians,” said Chiarelli, beaming. “That’s what I’m trying to make everyone understand.” The Marine evidently was off the hook.
On May 20, the new government finally formed with an obscure Shiite politician named Nouri al-Maliki as the prime minister. It was hardly the moment of reconciliation and unity that Casey and Chiarelli had hoped it would be. A few minutes into the proceedings, the main Sunni coalition stormed out. Its members were angry that the government was being formed without a decision on who would run the Interior and Defense ministries, the only two ministries left unfilled. “I call for a withdrawal!” Abdul Nasir al-Janabi, a conservative Sunni Muslim, had bellowed on his way out the door. As the national anthem, “My Homeland,” played over and over, Ambassador Khalilzad worked furiously to persuade Janabi and his fellow Sunnis to return. Casey watched apprehensively from the sidelines dressed in his formal Army greens. It was the first time he’d worn the uniform in Iraq, and it reflected his fervent hope that the seating of the new government, which included more Sunnis than the previous administration, was going to be a major turning point in the war. “I wanted to show that this was a new setup, a new order for Iraq,” he recalled.
Casey met with Maliki almost daily for the first few weeks. His assessment was mixed. The new prime minister seemed sharper than Jaafari, but he had two big handicaps. “One, he absolutely believes the Baathists are coming back to power. He’s scared to death of them,” Casey recalled telling Bush and Rumsfeld. His other weakness was that he came from the secretive Dawa Party and was surrounded by stridently anti-Sunni advisors.
Casey hoped for teams of advisors from the State Department and other agencies to help the new Maliki government, the third since Casey took over in 2004. That spring, Bush had assembled his cabinet and ordered them to find people willing to go to Iraq. Secretary of State Rice was put in charge of making sure they delivered. Six days after the Maliki government formed, Rice announced that she’d found forty-eight people who were willing to help.
“Excuse me, ma’am. Did you say forty-eight?” asked Casey, who was participating in the White House meeting by video from Al Faw Palace.
“Yes,” she said.
“That’s a paltry number,” he replied curtly.
Rice told him that he was out of line. But Casey wasn’t going to apologize. Colonel Hix, who had done a major strategy assessment for Casey months earlier, had estimated that it would take as many as 10,000 people to mount a reconstruction effort similar in scope to the one in Vietnam. Casey never expected 10,000 advisors. But he certainly had hoped for more than four dozen. The military could build up police and army units. But it desperately needed assistance developing the other parts of the government. He felt let down. Casey couldn’t help wondering whether his strategy depended too much on people who couldn’t deliver.
After the meeting Rumsfeld shot him a message thanking him for his patience with Rice. The defense secretary had been one of his staunchest supporters since he arrived, and Casey appreciated his strong vote of confidence. But he often felt that the defense secretary didn’t understand the war, or at the very least was losing patience. A few days earlier Rumsfeld had asked for a study that explained why so many soldiers were still being killed and wounded. Casey worked on the briefing with a few close aides, ordering them not to tell his field generals why he needed the casualty data. “For me to go down to my division commanders and ask, ‘Are you doing everything you can so your guys don’t get killed?’ It’s insulting,” he recalled.
The results were predictable. Most of the soldiers and Marines were dying on patrols. Rumsfeld’s request, though, sent a clear message: he wanted Casey to cut the fatality rate, and he didn’t want American soldiers intervening in the worsening sectarian fighting.
In mid-June Casey returned to Washington to update Bush and Rumsfeld on his plans for the rest of the year. By the fall, he said, he was on track to reduce the U.S. force to about 110,000 soldiers from the 134,000 then in the country. Before he made any further cuts he wanted to clear it with Maliki, but he thought it was doable. Despite the mosque bombing and the growing sectarian violence, Casey still believed that the new government could unite the country.
In Baghdad Chiarelli was slowly coming to the opposite conclusion. In the few weeks since Maliki’s government had taken office the sectarian violence had grown far worse. Major General J. D. Thurman came to Chiarelli in late June with a chart of the capital covered with red dots showing all the bodies found the previous day. Thurman was in charge of U.S. troops in Baghdad and reported directly to Chiarelli, who oversaw daily military operations throughout the entire country. Thurman’s chart was a cause for serious alarm. There were more than a hundred dots, most concentrated in west Baghdad’s mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods, where Shiite death squads and rogue police units were pushing out the Sunnis.
“We’ve got to get in to see Maliki and explain what’s going on in the city,” Chiarelli said. As a start, he hoped to lock down Sadr City, which had become a staging ground for the death squads.
A few hours later he and a senior British general from Casey’s staff laid the chart in front of the stoic prime minister. “This is not all the bodies. These are just the bodies we’re finding,” Chiarelli said. The Iraqi army and police had probably picked up dozens more. Most of the victims had been bound and blindfolded before they were shot in the head, he explained.
Maliki studied it intently for several minutes but didn’t seem overly alarmed. “It was much worse under Saddam,” he told the stunned generals, referring to the intimidation and murder inflicted against his people—the Shiites—by the old regime. When it came to Sadr City, he would not budge: any operations in the Shiit
e slum had to be cleared through his office.
Chiarelli’s doubts about Maliki grew more acute over the course of the summer. It was late one night when one of his staff officers stopped Chiarelli in the hallways at Al Faw Palace. There was highly classified information that he needed to share as soon as possible. “It’s bad,” the officer advised. The next day, Chiarelli sat in a windowless secure room on the palace’s second floor reading transcripts of translated conversations involving Maliki. (The United States has never publicly acknowledged listening in on the conversations of senior officials.) There were late-night telephone calls from the prime minster to one of his aides, a woman named Bassima al-Jaidri, who had served as a civilian in Saddam’s military. As they conversed, she urged Maliki to remove certain Sunni commanders in the army and replace them with Shiite officers. It was clear that Maliki was under tremendous pressure from Shiite political parties to fashion the army into a sectarian force. Chiarelli got updates every day on highly classified intelligence, but rarely was the information so revealing. When Casey read the transcripts the following day in his office, he, too, looked astounded.
It was standard practice for Casey or his staff to update the prime minister before a sensitive military operation. A few weeks later another classified intelligence report showed the cell phone and text messaging traffic from Maliki’s office after he and his aides received briefings about a pending raid. Minutes after the update, people in Maliki’s office were making calls to pass on key details—the intended target, where the U.S. forces were headed, which bridges and roads would be blocked. It wasn’t clear who was responsible for the leaks or exactly whom they were telling, but it certainly looked as if they were tipping off potential targets. The report stung Chiarelli. He’d made it a personal policy to treat Iraqis as full partners, and here was strong proof that his assumptions about them were flawed.