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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  As thousands of cement barriers were erected—the one separating Adhamiyah from a Shiite area was twelve feet high and three miles long—they were roundly criticized as an imitation of Israeli tactics. That was the most incendiary charge possible in the Middle East. Steve Niva, a Middle East specialist at the Evergreen State College in Washington, charged that they were “dividing neighbor from neighbor and choking off normal commerce and communications.” What they actually were doing was dividing Iraqis from people trying to kill them and choking off the normal movements of death squads. In Adhamiyah, civilian deaths declined by about two-thirds after the wall was erected in April 2007, Kilcullen said. One sign of the value of the walls was that al Qaeda in Iraq vigorously resisted them, noted Lt. Col. Dale Kuehl, commander of a battalion in northwest Baghdad. “We were engaged in a running battle with AQI as they tried to establish holes in the barriers while we tried to keep them intact,” he said.

  Taking similar measures in al Anbar Province, the Marines found that the steps to limit the mobility of insurgents produced some unexpected side benefits. “The insurgency is like a shark,” a Marine intelligence report stated, “it has to move to survive. Cut off its freedom of movement and its loses its effectiveness.” As the fighters and death squads shifted to new locations, they were forced to communicate, and signals interception enabled the U.S. military to find them, or to eavesdrop on their reports and planning sessions. Trying to escape the new constraints, some insurgents moved out of the cities and into the desert. This in turn made it easier for the Marines to locate them and then order up air strikes. “Population control measures and the subsequent movement of the insurgency into more remote areas has a secondary positive effect on our operations,” the Marine report continued. “More and more often we found ourselves engaging the enemy on terrain that maximizes kinetic effects.” Also, in the emptiness of the desert, “collateral damage”—that is, killing bystanders—became far easier to avoid.

  ONE OF THE SAD realizations brought by the new campaign was how disillusioned Iraqis had become with the Americans after five years. As Col. MacFarland had seen in Ramadi, the locals no longer had much faith in what American officers told them.

  “The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa,” an essay written by two Army captains, Michael Burganoyne and Albert Markwardt, and based on The Defense of Duffer’s Drift, the 1905 British military classic about small unit tactics in guerrilla war, vividly illustrates the education of Americans in Iraq—and shows why Iraqis were losing faith. One of the lessons that unfortunately appears more than once is about the failure of American officers to be able to fulfill the promises they make to local Iraqi leaders, or even to keep them alive against insurgent retaliation. “You Americans have been here for years now,” the mayor of a small Iraqi riverside town says in the essay to a newly arrived lieutenant. “It’s promise after promise. . . . Let us just eat so you will not have to lie to me with promises.”

  Later, after the fictional lieutenant patiently wins the confidence of the mayor, who tells him where the local insurgents are based, the American unit is ordered to move elsewhere. “I met with the mayor and let him know we were leaving. His face seemed like it lost its color and he almost looked through me.” A few days later, the lieutenant is back on his air-conditioned Forward Operating Base, watching cable news over his breakfast of Lucky Charms cereal, only to see footage of the mayor being executed. “I saw the mayor and all the locals we have developed as informants, their hands and feet tied behind their backs, on the street in front of his house, with two masked men standing behind them. Everyone who had helped us defeat the insurgents was lined up.”

  Thus, after getting into the neighborhoods, the new American units of the surge were taking over an operation that was in the red. Before they could do good they had to make up for the mistakes of their predecessors. They had to restore American credibility by delivering on their promises, and demonstrating that they wouldn’t make friends and then abandon them.

  “We were wondering if our approach was going to work,” said Lt. Jacob Carlisle. “But when we got hit, we didn’t overreact.” He had studied Petraeus’s counterinsurgency manual and constantly sought to build bridges to local residents. For example, he said, “When we went into houses around the contact, we didn’t point weapons at them and yell and swear like we used to—‘You know what the fuck just happened! Tell me! You know who did this! Tell me!’ Now we went in and asked first if they were okay. Were there bad people who did this around that were threatening them? Why didn’t you tell us there were people digging in explosives in front of your house. . . . Call us next time.”

  Carlisle, from Durand, Wisconsin, also found that years of frustrated American reconstruction programs had made Iraqis skeptical. A woman complained to him about raw sewage in the street, and he replied he would fix it. “All American make promises, but nothing ever happens,” she responded. Determined to show that times had changed, he made sure the problem was addressed. “Word gets out,” he said. “The people say, ‘This unit, they tell you something and it happens.’ ”

  Even detainees were treated differently, the young infantry officer said. “When people are released, we bring them back to the family. We don’t just dump them out the gate.” During Ramadan, he gave money to widows and children, and to the family of a man he had detained. “All this stuff makes a difference.”

  To deepen their awareness, his soldiers were assigned shifts in their neighborhoods. His platoon patrolled during the morning, and the company’s other two platoons the afternoon and evening. “We know what is normal on the streets, and see the same people in the same places every day. We know if something is out of place.” As the days passed, familiarity led to more ease in communication, and even a smidgen of trust. “Now that we were in the neighborhood every day, they believed us that we would keep them safe. More and more started calling us.”

  There were three steps of cooperation, said Lt. Col. Stephen Michael, commander of a battalion of the 25th Infantry Division, also posted on the south side of Baghdad. “First people weren’t working with us, then they would work with us covertly, and now most work with us openly.”

  It took time—sometimes two or three months—before the Americans and the Iraqis began to grow accustomed to each other. “When we first came over and started planting ourselves in, you wouldn’t see too many people because they didn’t know if we’d be here, they didn’t know to trust us, and basically the extremists were still intimidating and the people were reconning us,” said Col. Wayne Grigsby of the 3rd Infantry Division, commander of the third of the surge brigades, which deployed to the tough area to the southeast of Baghdad. But after about two months, in late spring, people began talking to the American soldiers. Iraqis would begin telling them things, he said, like “Hey, that guy over there has never been in this town before. He drove in with two big trucks,” their cargoes covered with tarps. “I don’t think it’s right, and we don’t want him in here if he’s going to bring trouble. Can you go take care of that problem?”

  Down in south Baghdad, Lt. Col. Crider found the same effect. “The days of large cordon-and-sweep operations and hoping to find something . . . were over,” he said. Instead, he sent his soldiers into Iraqi homes to learn who lived in the neighborhood to converse, drink tea, take photographs and census data, and learn about local concerns. “The American soldiers was no longer a mysterious authority figure speeding by in a HMMWV behind two-inch glass who occasionally rifled through their home. . . . After repeated encounters, our soldiers began to learn who was related, which families did not get along, who provided useful insight, and many other intimate details.” They found that in their neighborhood lived an international basketball referee who had worked on the side for Iraqi intelligence. They met a famous Iraqi comedian, as well as a cardiologist fluent in English and eager to help. As they began to know and see more, attacks on them and on Iraqi civilians began to taper off. “AQI could no longer threaten individuals wit
h violence after we left, because we never did,” he observed. Also, locals began to report the emplacement of roadside bombs, which forced insurgents to switch to grenades and automatic weapons, which were riskier to use.

  After a detainee was released—legitimately—into the neighborhood, Crider was pleased to receive 11 tips from local citizens about his presence. U.S. soldiers were sent to visit him and talk to him “about how things had changed. . . . He never caused any problems.”

  In keeping with the new, more neutral stance of the U.S. military as the arbiter of events, rather than an ally of one side, Crider also reined in the National Police, which at times was indistinguishable from a Shiite militia. “Denying the National Police the ability to unilaterally operate in the neighborhoods greatly increased our credibility,” he said. Commanders also learned to keep a wary eye on those allies, especially as they tried to capitalize on U.S. operations for their own ends. “Once we cleared AQI from an area, Shia extremists would try to follow and claim it as their own, essentially replacing a cleared area with a new threat,” stated an after-action review conducted by Odierno’s headquarters.

  The fight was growing more complex. One day in May, Kilcullen noted that, in Baghdad’s Hurriyah neighborhood, there were four factions of Jaysh al-Mahdi, Sadr’s extremist Shiite militia, fighting each other—Noble JAM, Golden JAM, “criminal JAM,” and “ordinary JAM.” U.S. officials sent a message to “JAM Central” in Najaf. “We want these guys out of there.” In response, he said, the JAM headquarters in Najaf sent a hit team to Baghdad to sort out the problem. “Because we treated them as the authority, they cleaned it up.” There also was murky unconfirmed talk that a deal was reached under which the U.S. military would aid Golden JAM in attacking other parts of the militia deemed to have gone rogue. Petraeus stated flatly that no such agreement existed and suggested that it grew out of rumors collected from Iraqis by U.S. intelligence or deals made by local American commanders.

  The trends in Shiite southern Iraq also were worrisome. “The British have basically been defeated in the south,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official in Baghdad. They were abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where an official visitor from London had described them as “surrounded like cowboys and Indians” by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. embassy office and Britain’s remaining 5,500 troops were barricaded behind building-high sandbags, was being hit by rockets or mortars an average of 150 times a month. Was Basra this year a foretaste of Baghdad the next?

  ON JULY 4, 2007, Lt. James Freeze, leader of a 2nd Infantry Division reconnaissance platoon based north of Baghdad, celebrated Independence Day by having a glass of sparkling cider and a cigar with his old friend Austin Wilson, another lieutenant and West Pointer who had been the best man at his wedding. They discussed what one word would best characterize the Iraq they knew. They settled on “hopeless.”

  By coincidence, Fred Kagan, in many ways the guiding spirit behind the surge, was in the tough south Baghdad neighborhood of Doura a few weeks earlier, visiting one of his former West Point cadets who was now a company commander. “It was a complete combat zone,” he said. “There was no one in the streets. It was a ghost town.” The American brigade commander declined to take him out on patrol because of the danger.

  Generals tend to be optimistic by nature, said Gen. Fastabend, Petraeus’s strategic adviser. “The pessimists quit as captains,” he cracked.

  But five months into the new strategy, even some of the optimists were feeling gloomy. The Army’s new counterinsurgency strategy required soldiers to be among the people, where they would form new relationships—but it also exposed them to hellacious new levels of violence. “We had some extreme challenges, in May, June, July,” recalled Brig. Gen. Anderson, Odierno’s chief of staff. “We were hedging our bets that the surge would work.” When Iraqi forces were sent into a cleared area to help out, he said, the chances were “fifty-fifty” they were up to the job.

  “It kept getting worse,” Rapp recalled. “May had very high casualties. I thought, ‘Holy cow, what is going on here?”’ There was good reason to fret: The possibility was growing that the situation was about to get much worse, with the Americans played out and all the ingredients of a massive civil war coming together—there was oil to fight over, plenty of weapons available, and plenty of Iraqis as well as people in neighboring states who possessed the experience and skills to intensify the fighting.

  It wasn’t just Baghdad, either. In May, Gen. Odierno and Emma Sky helicoptered to Baqubah, about 35 miles northwest of the capital, a city both knew from their previous tours. “I knew it wasn’t right,” Odierno said. “It had a black cloud.” As the surge had pushed some fighters out of the capital, they had moved into Baqubah and other parts of Diyala Province.

  “We were gobsmacked,” added Sky, using British slang for being stunned into speechlessness.

  It was tough having to face the soldiers bearing the brunt of the new strategy. “There was a brief moment of What have we got ourselves into?” recalled Command Sgt. Maj. Hill, the veteran infantryman who had been selected by Petraeus to become the senior enlisted soldier in Iraq. Looking at the casualty reports every night that spring, he said, “would just suck the energy out of you.” His days began to seem like a soul-lashing round of visiting the wounded and then attending memorial services for the dead. He learned to say a prayer under his breath before walking into the military hospitals: “God, give me strength to deal with what I’m about to see.” He kept his calendar open every day from 5 to 6 P.M., on the assumption that at least one service for a dead soldier would be held.

  As the casualties continued to mount, Odierno said later, “I was a little nervous.” Col. J. T. Thomson, the career artilleryman who was Odierno’s executive officer, would later recall those dark days as the hardest part of his tour. “May—I mean, the whole month of May,” he said much later. “The wondering—is it going to get any better?”

  According to unreleased statistics in the U.S. military database, there were 6,037 “significant acts” of violence in Iraq during May 2007, the highest recorded total since November 2004. “This is a period in which it gets harder before it gets easier,” Petraeus said one day in May as he sipped iced tea in his office, a giant map of the city of Baghdad behind him. He was expecting a long, hard summer of violence, followed by a trek to Capitol Hill to tell Congress how much progress he was making. He was pushing all the American chips on the table, going “all-in,” he said, with the surge. Whatever happened, he was going to ride this thing through to the end. “There’s no combat forces left, at least, I’m aware of,” he said. That is, the United States military simply didn’t have replacement troops available for those he was fielding. “You can’t ask for a brigade that isn’t there.”

  Petraeus later would describe this period as “excruciating.” He said he believed that the new approach would work, but “what started to develop as the question in my mind was, when will it start to show demonstrable effects?”

  United States’ combat deaths climbed inexorably: 70 in February, 71 in March, 96 in April, and 120 in May, which became the deadliest month for U.S. troops in two years. The additional casualties had been expected as the price to be paid in the short term for moving from big, safe bases to smaller outposts among the population. But they came even as a series of horrific killings of Iraqi civilians occurred. In February, a ton of explosives detonated in a market in a predominantly Shiite area of Baghdad, killing at least 125 and wounding 300 more. It was the single deadliest terrorist bombing ever in the capital. “They were carrying bodies like sheep,” said one Iraqi witness, Abu Lubna.

  The insurgents also were introducing worrisome new tactics. In February and March, they forayed into chemical warfare, detonating three trucks carrying toxic chlorine gas in Baghdad, Fallujah, and Ramadi, killing 11 people and sickening hundreds. Col. MacFarland may have found the tipping point in Ramadi the previous year, but the
re was plenty of fighting left in the city, as his successor unit, the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, led by Col. John Charlton, found in a series of battles in February and March 2007, and then again in June, when a U.S. patrol stumbled across an al Qaeda counterattack as it was forming, resulting in an all-night firefight that was called “the battle of Donkey Island.” It left two Americans dead and more than 30 insurgents, and blunted what likely was a new al Qaeda offensive.

  Another horrific new approach appeared in Baghdad. The driver of a car bomb managed to get through a U.S. military checkpoint and into a marketplace because he had two children in the backseat of the vehicle. Troops had been taught that cars with children were no threat. Three Iraqis were killed in the subsequent blast.

  Enemy tactics were also more sophisticated, with false IEDs being strewn along with real ones, the better to slow down American troops and set them up for ambushes. “These guys are real smart,” said 1st Lt. Anthony Von Plinsky. “The Iraqi insurgent as a whole has adapted well to our tactics.” By this point in the war, soldiers were fond of saying, all the stupid insurgents were dead. The Americans had come and gone on tours of duty, but many of their enemies had fought nonstop for several years, and those who had survived were fit and adaptive.