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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Nor had Pace been much of a presence in discussions of that strategy. It was the major war on his watch, but he tended to defer to Casey and Abizaid, the two four-star officers directly involved in its prosecution. The irony of all this was that policy formulation was following the prescribed method, with the hierarchy being observed and all the correct bureaucratic players involved, but the system wasn’t really working. That is, it looked good, but it wasn’t leading to a robust discussion by top officials of the necessary strategic questions. Nor were leaders held accountable and quizzed on their failures. It was only months later, when the prescribed system was subverted and the chain of command bypassed, that a rigorous examination of American strategy in the Iraq war would get under way.

  Kaplan used his time to talk about counterinsurgency practices. “Get rid of periodic presence patrols and provide twenty-four/seven security, get out of big bases and deploy smaller units in neighborhoods,” he said. He was ambivalent about increasing the number of troops because he believed that those already in Iraq were being used incorrectly.

  Vickers, a former CIA officer, had played a key role in outfitting the Afghan mujahadeen in the 1980s in their struggle against the Soviet occupation, a role later immortalized in the book and movie Charlie Wilson’s War. Reaching back to his time then, he emphasized what strategists call the indirect approach—that is, helping a local ally fight rather than having Americans carry the combat load. Draw down your conventional forces and rely more on elite Special Operators, he said. “You’re on borrowed time with the direct approach,” said Vickers, according to people who attended the meeting.

  The conversation flowed freely, and the president enjoyed the brisk dialogue, said Feaver, the NSC aide who helped conceive and arrange the meeting. But it didn’t work as he had intended, which was to confront the president and his key advisers with the worried critiques of loyalists. Bush was riding on good news. Not only had a new government been seated, but just a few days earlier, Zarqawi had been found and killed. And as Bush was listening, he knew something his four visitors didn’t—that he would be slipping away from Camp David just minutes later to make a secret trip to Baghdad, his first since Thanksgiving 2003. (“He was almost a little bouncy,” Kagan said. “I now recognize that he was very excited about the trip he was about to pull.”) So rather than lead to a much-needed review of strategy, the three events effectively combined to reenergize the president’s commitment to the existing one, Feaver said.

  Kagan agreed with that assessment. “I think it [the meeting] had no effect. It certainly didn’t change the minds of the principals. It didn’t generate any follow-up.” Rather than a radical change in strategy, he said, “we continued to drift.”

  Returning from Baghdad, Bush gave a tempered but upbeat assessment. “I sense something different happening in Iraq,” he said in a Rose Garden press conference. “The progress will be steady toward a goal that has clearly been defined. In other words, I hope there’s not an expectation from people that, all of a sudden, there’s going to be zero violence—in other words, it’s just not going to be the case. On the other hand, I do think we’ll be able to measure progress.”

  In fact, the Camp David meeting would have a far greater long-term effect than anyone could know at the time. In the following months, three of the four worried loyalists who had trekked to the presidential retreat would become deeply involved in revamping Iraq strategy. Cohen took the position of counselor at the State Department, where he became a major strategic voice in the government, not just advising the secretary of state but also officials at the Pentagon and at the White House. Vickers, another of Cohen’s former students, became chief of overseeing Special Operations and strategy at the Pentagon. Bush, still taken with Vickers’s role in arming the Afghan rebels, pinged the Pentagon twice to hurry the clearance process for him. Kagan wouldn’t go into the government but would help redesign U.S. strategy in Iraq, both figuring out what to do and then helping sell the new approach to top White House officials.

  THE BATTLE OF BAGHDAD BEGINS

  After the Camp David meeting the situation in Iraq turned sharply worse. The period from mid-2006 to mid-2007 would prove to be the bloodiest 12 months that American troops had seen thus far in the war, with 1,105 killed. Iraqi civilian deaths are harder to determine but were clearly a multiple of that figure. In the summer and fall of 2006, Shiite militias carried out a concerted campaign that pushed Sunnis out of much of Baghdad, which until then had been a mixed city, with Sunnis predominating west of the Tigris River and Shiites to its east.

  The battle of Baghdad effectively began at sunrise on Sunday, July 9, when Shiite militiamen, some of them masked, appeared in the Sunni neighborhood of Jihad, near the Baghdad airport. They set up checkpoints on main streets and killed those passersby whose identity cards indicated they probably were Sunni. They shot up a vegetable market. They also went into homes they believed were occupied by Sunnis. All told, about 50 people were slaughtered. “This is a new step. A red line has been crossed,” said Alaa Makky, a Sunni member of parliament. “People have been killed in the streets; now they are killed inside their homes.”

  The next day, Monday, Saleh Muhammed, a resident of the Sunni neighborhood of Amiriyah in far western Baghdad, called the police emergency line to report that the leading Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army, was attacking the quarter’s Malouki mosque. He was surprised by the dispatcher’s response: “The Mahdi Army are not terrorists like you. They are people doing their duty. And how could you know that they are the Mahdi Army—is it written on their foreheads?”

  A wave of Sunni retaliation followed. Two car bombs exploded in Sadr City, the city’s biggest Shiite neighborhood, home to about 2 million people, killing or wounding nearly 30. On Wednesday, gunmen kidnapped a group of people, apparently Shiites, at a bus station in Muqdadiyah, and murdered 22 of them. The following Sunday, a café filled with Shiites was blown up north of Baghdad, killing 26. On Monday morning, death squads assaulted the marketplace in the mostly Shiite southern Baghdad suburb of Mahmudiyah. They fired heavy machine guns, burned cars, threw grenades, and entered a café to shoot 7 elderly men in the head. At least 40 people were killed. On Tuesday, a minibus loaded with explosives blew up near a Shiite mosque in Kufa, killing 53 day laborers and wounding at least 130 more. Hundreds more Iraqis were dying in smaller incidents. Police in the tough southern Baghdad neighborhood of Doura said 425 people were killed in that area alone during the week after the Jihad marketplace massacre. Altogether, more than 3,000 Iraqis were slain during July, the United Nations estimated. It was the deadliest month in three years.

  Army Capt. Don Makay, who fought in southwest Baghdad, recalled that during his tour, every Sunni mosque in his area was attacked, in one case, he thought, with the involvement of the local commander of the National Police. From July through October, the number of murdered bodies dumped near Sunni districts “rose considerably,” wrote another Army captain, Michael Comstock, in his study of the ethnic-cleansing operation. Other Iraqis were luckier, receiving “night letters” that contained a bullet and an order to vacate their homes within a day or two.

  The core of the Iraqi state was rotten. The Iraqi army was heavily Shiite, and even worse, the National Police were thoroughly infiltrated by Shiite militias. These forces didn’t have to carry out the cleansing themselves. All they had to do was go into a Sunni neighborhood and demand in the name of pacification that all heavy weapons be relinquished. After that was accomplished, they could tip off the Shiite militias, who might arrive that night or the next morning, ready to take on the newly defenseless population. As one foreign diplomat in Baghdad summarized the legitimate complaint of Sunnis, “You come and denude us of weapons, and the next day the militias visit.”

  Nor did the gunmen need to kill everyone—just enough to intimidate the rest. This is how Capt. Eric Haas summarized the tactics of Jaysh al-Mahdi, Moqtada al-Sadr’s radical Shiite militia: “JAM/Shia militia group kidnaps a Sunni
male from a mixed-sect market; takes Sunni male to the edge of Sunni-dominated neighborhood; takes Sunni male from the vehicle shot in the back of a head with a pistol; Shia militia drives off.”

  Crueler tactics, such as using power tools to drill holes in the kneecaps or heads of victims, also became common. “People are killed here every day, and you don’t hear about it,” Capt. Lee Showman told the Washington Post’s Josh Partlow. “People are kidnapped here every day, and you don’t hear about it.” As the ethnic-cleansing campaign intensified, the number of Iraqis seeking refuge in neighboring nations spiraled, with an estimated 2 million leaving the country. An equal number were classified as internally displaced, with much of that movement occurring in 2006.

  But the militias’ work was hardly done once the Sunnis had been driven out. The next step was to turn the neighborhood into a paying concern. First the vacated houses would be rented to Shias. Then kidnapping and extortion rings would raise money from shop owners and other holders of wealth. Shiite party banners would festoon the altered area. Local police would be intimidated, co-opted, or replaced with Shiite militia members who would cooperate. The explicit support and assistance of all civilians in the area was demanded. “Leave, join or die” was the summary offered by Army Capt. Josh Francis. At this point the area might become less violent, but that wasn’t necessarily a positive sign. Instead, it might just mean that the job was done and that the newly quiet neighborhood then could be used as a base from which to begin launching attacks on adjacent Sunni areas.

  Sgt. Victor Alarcon watched as his battalion in the 1st Infantry Division lost 20 troops in an unsuccessful effort in 2006 to prevent the destruction of what had been a bustling middle-class Sunni neighborhood. “I don’t think this place is worth another soldier’s life,” he said near the end of his tour.

  Maj. Mark Gilmore gave this dismal summary of his time in one Baghdad neighborhood: “When we got there, it was mixed Sunni and Shia. When we left, it was Shia. . . . When we left, it wasn’t even worth counting the Sunnis because there weren’t that many left.”

  THE FIGHTING in Iraq wasn’t just sectarian. Two other major players in the tragedy of Iraq were also escalating their activities at this time: al Qaeda in Iraq, and Iran.

  In August, Col. Peter Devlin, the senior Marine intelligence officer in Iraq, filed a secret report concluding that the U.S. military had lost al Anbar, in western Iraq, and that al Qaeda was now the dominant factor in the province. “The social and political situation has deteriorated to a point that MNF [MultiNational Forces] and ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al Anbar. . . . Underlying this decline in stability is the near complete collapse of social order in al Anbar.” What’s more, al Qaeda in Iraq, which was mainly made up of nihilistic Iraqi religious extremists but also included some foreign fighters, who frequently were used in car bombings, had elbowed aside other centers of power in the province and made itself Anbar’s “dominant organization of influence.” (Devlin’s assessment is reprinted in full as the first document in the appendix.)

  To the north of Baghdad, al Qaeda in Iraq, sometimes referred to by the U.S. military as “AQIZ,” launched a swift and viciously effective campaign. “Using a small, localized cell of hardcore believers, AQIZ successfully coerced and intimidated the local populace over time through a four phased plan: clandestine organization, psychological preparation of the people, expansion of control, and consolidation of power,” Army Capt. James Few wrote in a study of the terrorist takeover of the town of Zaganiyah.

  A mukthar, or town elder, sought an audience with al Qaeda leaders in the town of Nukisa to complain about the behavior of the organization’s recruits. He was beaten in public, the humiliation intended to demonstrate that there was a new sheriff in town. In November 2006, while American forces were focused on the deterioration of security in Baghdad, al Qaeda members in the town made their move, launching a complex attack on the local Iraqi police station, with a car bomb followed by an assault by fighters. “Over the next two weeks, ISF stopped patrolling the area, and CF [coalition forces] designated Zaganiyah as ‘No-Go’ terrain,” Few wrote. The al Qaeda cell then consolidated its hold, destroying the home of an Iraqi working as an interpreter for the Americans and beheading a captured Iraqi soldier and a local Shiite. They also dug fighting positions around the town and deeply buried more than 160 bombs, establishing a defensive belt.

  Meanwhile, Iran, capitalizing on the cover provided by violence and counting on the Americans to be distracted, quietly launched its own offensive in Iraq. Devastating “explosively formed projectiles,” the most lethal type of roadside bomb, began appearing in great numbers in late 2006. These high-tech bombs operate by melting a disk of metal into a spray of high-velocity drops that cut through armored vehicles, frequently killing three or four soldiers in one blast. U.S. intelligence officials said all the devices were imported from Iran. During 2007 they would become the greatest threat to U.S. troops, inflicting 73 percent of all American casualties.

  Asked what he would do differently in 2006 if he could, Abizaid, the top American commander for the Middle East, said, “We didn’t react quickly enough to Shia and Sunni violence,” or, he said, to the misdeeds of the Iraqi police.

  “FORWARD” INTO FAILURE

  Finally, in the summer of 2006, the U.S. military and its Iraqi allies launched a major counteroffensive aimed at improving security in the capital. Dubbed “Together Forward,” the operation involved some 42,500 Iraqi police and army personnel backed up by 7,200 U.S. troops. The Iraqi forces were instructed to erect new checkpoints, enforce extended dusk-to-dawn curfews and new restrictions on carrying weapons, and step up the frequency of their foot patrols. Posters were distributed showing an Iraqi soldier in tan battle fatigues holding the hand of a smiling Iraqi boy. But the Americans were operating more and more from big bases, removing themselves from the population and from the civil war being waged beyond the tall cement walls of their isolated bastions. They also continued to judge their actions all too often by input, such as the number of patrols conducted, rather than by output, such as the reduction in violence.

  The offensive never really got off the ground. “They were dead in the water by midsummer,” said Krepinevich, the counterinsurgency expert.

  For Brett McGurk, a staffer on the National Security Council who was in Baghdad that summer, the failure was a turning point in his view of the approach the U.S. military was taking. “Gaziliyah was probably the best example of a clearly failing strategy,” he recalled. “We go in, MNF-I reports its metrics (buildings cleared, violence reduced), we leave, and violence in Gaziliyah hits all-time highs.” His conclusion was that “it was clearly a failed recipe—the question was whether we could do anything about it.”

  Fred Kagan, the defense analyst who had been at Camp David as the summer began, later said the offensive was doomed from the start, because it relied excessively on Iraqi police forces, which he said were part of the problem, not the solution. “They were not and could not be effective bulwarks on their own against sectarian violence of which they were a part,” he wrote.

  American commanders would, in fact, blame Iraqi units for the failure. “The loyalty of the Iraqi security forces, particularly the police, was the overriding issue that kept this from being a success,” Gen. Casey said in an interview. A secondary flaw, he said was the slowness with which the Iraqi government moved to conduct follow-on economic aid projects. “It was never clear whether it was incompetence or sectarian bias.”

  Chiarelli, the number two U.S. commander in Iraq, added,“ I was under the impression that we would get two additional Iraqi brigades, and they didn’t show up.” In addition, Abizaid said, the American liaison connection to Iraqi forces needed to be strengthened.

  Some in Iraq said that Chiarelli and Casey should have known that the Americans couldn’t rely on Iraqi forces to carry a large part of the burden. “They ordered these Kurdish units to come dow
n,” recalled Maj. Matt Whitney, who at the time was an adviser to the Iraqi Ground Forces Command, a top headquarters. “One of them mutinied. They look for troops in the south and they wouldn’t come either. They looked for two more units from the north and they didn’t come.” He wasn’t surprised by this, because many Iraqi units thought they were supposed to defend the area where they were based. They had neither the training nor the equipment to pack up and move around the country. “General Casey was frustrated because he couldn’t get Iraqi units to deploy, although we never built that army to deploy. Somehow he was surprised by this.”