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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  The second move was to begin providing services to the prison population. Basic literacy courses were offered. A civics course was made mandatory. Some 160 Muslim clerics were hired to begin teaching moderate Islam, in courses offered on a voluntary basis. Other courses were given in Arabic, English, history, science, geography, and math. “There is a danger that the insurgency is becoming a vocation,” warned a briefing prepared by Stone’s headquarters, so vocational training was begun in carpentry, textiles, and masonry. The notion was to provide a pathway back to a life in the civilian world where they would not seek to benefit from violence. Stone even proposed giving released detainees a stipend of $200 a month for six months, just to get them on their feet and keep them away from temptation, but that idea died for lack of sufficient support. Instead, he opened a brick factory inside one prison, Camp Bucca, and paid the prisoners for their work, enabling them to build small nest eggs. Typically, the flamboyant Stone had each brick stamped in Arabic, “Rebuilding the nation brick by brick.” After concluding that prisoners who saw their families were less likely to become violent, he set out to enable family visits, running regular bus trips from the cities to the camps.

  Stone also urged his subordinates to recognize their own cultural limitations. “Our own individual view of the world tends to limit our perceptions,” he wrote in an overview document, “creating risk when we make the mistake of judging a detainee’s actions in the context of our own culture rather than his own. This is one of the most significant challenges we face in detainee operations.” One of the best ways to defuse a confrontation with guards, they found, was to turn on the large-screen television and play a video of a recent soccer match. And, in another move to reduce tensions and also improve understanding, a pamphlet in Arabic was created to explain the detention process to new arrivals, with a comic book version created for those who were illiterate.

  American commanders also seemed to be getting the word. Preparing to lead a brigade of the 10th Mountain Division into Iraq, Col. David Paschal made a point during a training exercise by wearing a dishdasha—the Arab robe that most Iraqi men wear—and playing the role of “an uncooperative detainee.” He threw food and insults at his guards until he finally was tackled and handcuffed. “By participating in the training I was able to experience the level of professionalism and proficiency of my soldiers while at the same time see how they are maintaining our detainees’ safety as well as dignity,” he explained.

  Such training continued to be important, because there continued to be a hard core of such uncooperative Iraqis. Even after all of Stone’s improvements were implemented, incidents still occurred. One day many months later, six Navy personnel working as prison camp guards grew tired of having inmates’ feces hurled at them and locked the offenders in a room, then set off pepper spray and turned off the ventilation.

  But the strategic view of how to handle detainees had changed, probably irretrievably, as had the atmosphere in most parts of the camps. In April 2008, there were 178 acts of violence recorded in the prison camps, about one-tenth the figure a year earlier. At his farewell ceremony in June, Gen. Stone commented: “History has shown us that leaders often rise from the most difficult of times and circumstances, and we should not be surprised if Iraq’s future leaders are today being held in coalition force custody.” The way they were treated today might shape the country’s policies in the future, he warned.

  SURGING THE IRAQIS

  An old military aphorism holds that amateurs talk tactics, but professionals talk logistics. In fact, real military insiders often focus on larger personnel issues—raising, training, and equipping the force—because that is the key to long-term, sustainable success.

  The U.S. effort to create a new Iraqi military had never gone particularly well. Part of that grew out of the political obstacles facing Iraq: A member of the Mahdi Army, for example, might not be well equipped or trained, but he knew what he was fighting for. By contrast, a member of the Iraqi army, despite having reliable American gear, didn’t know if the government for which he fought would even exist a year later. Even under Petraeus in 2004-5, the training effort had a slow, haphazard feel to it. This was one reason he seemed to shy away from discussing that tour of duty. He maintains that he succeeded then. “It was a massive task and what we inherited was a pretty modest effort,” he said. But still that tour carries about it a whiff of something inconsistent with the rest of his stellar military career.

  Years later there was still plenty of room for improvement. In April 2007 a platoon of American soldiers was pinned down outside a mosque in western Baghdad’s Kadhimiyah neighborhood and looked around for some help from Iraqi soldiers. “Of the twenty-seven hundred Iraqi security forces that are in Kadhimiyah, no Iraqi unit would respond,” said Lt. Col. Steven Miska, deputy commander of a U.S. brigade.

  Early in 2007, Petraeus asked for Lt. Gen. James Dubik to come out and take over the program to train, equip, and advise Iraqi army and police units. Dubik is an unusual figure, lower key than Petraeus, but like him a light-infantry intellectual. He had spent about half his military career in infantry and paratroop units, and the other half studying and teaching at military schools such as West Point and Fort Leavenworth School of Advanced Military Studies, and civilian universities, including Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining the Army he had intended to become a priest and had spent a year at seminary.

  In an echo of Petraeus’s “Mesopotamian Stampede,” Dubik called his training effort “Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch.” That is, he explained, “We all feel we’re the part of the movie where the spotlight isn’t. The posse is going after the rustlers, rescuing the stagecoach, and running the bad guys out of town.” Meanwhile, Dubik was trying to create a more effective Iraqi security force. In some ways, this was a key counterinsurgency move, because it is axiomatic that it is indigenous forces that finally put down insurgencies, not foreign militaries. Dubik wasn’t particularly taking a page out of the new counterinsurgency manual, but he was consistent with the new strategy in another, larger way: He increased the risk taking in his part of the effort.

  First, he deemphasized the transition to Iraqi control. “It’s the indirect approach,” Dubik said. “It’s right out of Aristotle: If you want a happy life, don’t aim for happiness, aim for virtue.” In other words, create an effective Iraqi force, and the transition will follow naturally, without being forced. In Maoist terms, Iraqi forces would not be given power, they would take it.

  Second, rather than downplay the infiltration of Iraqi forces by Shiite militias, especially in the National Police, Dubik confronted it, purging its ranks. This wasn’t just a matter of personalities and personal connections, but also of the politics of the country. As Stephen Biddle, who advised Petraeus on the issue, put it, “The problem is, in a country at war, the same pressures will exist against the next commander. The guys in the black baklavas will visit him at midnight.” So the issue was not how to go after individual commanders but how to reduce sectarian influence—again, an instance of the indirect approach. The key, Biddle said, was to initiate a “virtuous cycle” where militias were weakened, so their pressures were less, so Iraqi commanders acted in less sectarian ways, and so the Iraqi population’s opinion of Iraqi forces improved, making those forces stronger.

  But there also plainly were some commanders who had to go. “We have gradually cleaned them up,” Petraeus later said. In the National Police, he said, “They replaced the overall commander, both division commanders, all of the brigade commanders, and about seventy to eighty percent of the battalion commanders—and in some cases did it twice.” In the course of those removals, Dubik noted, some 15 internal affairs investigators at the Ministry of Interior, which oversees the police, were killed, and another 14 were wounded.

  Third, and probably most important, Dubik accelerated the growth of Iraqi forces, knowing that they might not be as effective at the outset. His goal was “sufficie
nt quantity of sufficiently capable.” He halved the time dedicated to basic training. This was essentially a step away from the professional U.S. military approach of the last 20 years and toward the World War II approach of churning out troops and letting quality show itself and rise up. Under Dubik, the size of the Iraqi security forces increased from 400,000 in June 2007 to 560,000 a year later—actually becoming larger than the active-duty United States Army.

  FINISHED BUSINESS

  There was also one more American commander who had to go. In June, just as the surge was about to take full effect, Defense Secretary Gates effectively fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Pace, who was the last member of the old Rumsfeld team still in place, having been vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs starting in October 2001 and then chairman since October 2005. Gates blamed the removal on Congress, saying he decided not to renominate Pace for the customary second term because “the focus of his confirmation process would have been on the past, rather than the future, and further, there was the very real prospect that the process would be quite contentious.” That may be so, but Gates was also effective at ridding himself of unneeded trouble. Pace became the first chairman in more than 40 years to serve such a short term. With him went the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Edmund Giambiastiani, who had been seen as even closer to Rumsfeld than Pace.

  7.

  SIGNS OF LIFE IN BAGHDAD

  (Summer 2007)

  Like a summer thunderstorm tapering off, American losses began to drop sharply in July. From a distance it all still looked like a solid wall of thunder and lightning, but those underneath it began to see patches of blue. In some neighborhoods, the streets were growing more crowded. More shops were open. Parents were allowing their children to play outside. The biggest change was the general absence of the clatter of gunfire and the roar of bomb blasts, which a year earlier had been common in Baghdad. There were five major reasons for this change. First, and most obvious, was the new force posture of putting troops out among the people and giving them the mission of protecting those people. Eventually there were some 75 outposts established across the city, and their presence was beginning to produce benefits. Much of the city was beginning to feel safer.

  Second was that by the time they got there, the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad had been largely completed, with some neighborhoods that once were heavily Sunni becoming overwhelming Shia. Shiite militias patrolled their streets and sometimes rented out the houses from which Sunnis had been driven. “Now that the Sunnis are all gone, murders have dropped off,” said Capt. Jay Wink, the intelligence officer for a 1st Infantry Division battalion that was operating in one newly Shiite neighborhood in southwest Baghdad. “One way to put it is they ran out of people to kill.”

  Third, and later in the year, came the declaration of a cease-fire with the Americans by Moqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric.

  There was also a less noticed fourth reason: For the first time since the invasion, U.S. forces were all pursuing the same goal in the same way. Putting out an official document is one thing; getting commanders and their troops to actually implement it is another. For example, when Gen. Kinnard surveyed his peers who had served in Vietnam for The War Managers, one senior general, asked about how a newly issued campaign plan had affected his operations, responded, “I never read them, it would only confuse me.”

  Odierno’s great accomplishment may have been making sure that all his forces were dancing to the same tune and at the same time. Rather than permit each of his subordinate units—divisions or brigades—to carry out their own operations independently, he coordinated and even synchronized them, especially after the last surge brigade arrived as summer began, so that insurgents and terrorists couldn’t just shift to quieter areas where there was less pressure. “In July, Odierno had all his forces, and he was able to put down the hammer, keep the squeeze on, everywhere,” said Keane. “He just kept hammering and hammering and hammering.”

  Unity of effort radically increases the effectiveness of military operations. The new counterinsurgency manual was officially issued only in December 2006, but within months it was being implemented on the streets of Baghdad. That was a sharp contrast to the first years of the war, when every unit pursued its own fight, often in very different ways, said Col. James Rainey, who had been a major in Iraq during the 2003 invasion, then commanded a battalion of the 1st Cavalry Division in Iraq in 2004-5, and then returned in 2008 as the G-3, or director of operations, for the 4th Infantry Division. “The biggest difference is, we have doctrine now,” he said, “Everyone’s doing it now, protecting the population.” That was also a much more concrete mission than “stop the insurgency,” an order that only raised a series of additional definitional questions, such as what the insurgency was and what tactics were appropriate in countering it.

  Listening to Rainey, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Hammond, the division commander, added, “Petraeus’s view of counterinsurgency changed the way we all look at it.” That was an overstatement, as Petraeus was not alone in developing the new manual on counterinsurgency. Yet Hammond’s basic point was correct: It is rare for a single person to have as dramatic effect as Petraeus did on how a large institution operates, and especially in how the U.S. Army wages war.

  Illustrating how the new view permeated the force, Craig Coppock, who led an infantry platoon in Iraq in 2006-7, compiled a “Counterinsurgency Cliff Notes” for his peers. In this seven-page essay, lessons from the Vietnam War, from the French campaign in Algeria in the 1950s, and, most of all, from earlier in the Iraq war are woven together. The innovations of past years that had been considered only by dissidents now were becoming common sense. Once Army commanders had thought shows of force were the way to impress the locals and so prevail. Now Coppock admonished, “Use minimum force. Basically, try not to break stuff or kill anyone you don’t have to.” While top American officials had let the lynching of four U.S. contractors provoke them into ordering an attack on Fallujah in the spring of 2004, the young officer warned, “Avoid emotional responses to an operational event. . . . Knee-jerk reactions waste energy, effort, and are in most cases counterproductive to COIN strategy.” And while the Army had spent years improving the anti-bomb properties of Humvees, Coppock instructed soldiers instead to get out of their rolling cocoons: “You should be out on foot in your AO [area of operations] every time you roll out of the wire.” (Coppock also spoke with the tone of hard-won wisdom: “Never leave your AO the same way you went in.”)

  A SEPARATE PEACE

  The fifth—and by far the most controversial—reason for the decline in violence was the turning of parts of the Sunni insurgency. This may have been the biggest gamble Petraeus took as the commander of the war in Iraq. He was going behind the back of the Baghdad government to put its enemies on the American payroll. Strikingly, he didn’t seem to think he needed to get clearance from the American government, either. When asked about how he had gotten the president to agree to the program, he indicated that he hadn’t asked Bush about it. “I don’t think it was something that we needed to ask permission for. We had the authority to conduct what are called security contracts, and that was how we saw these.” But, he added, “to be truthful we didn’t see it growing to 103,000”—its peak in 2008, and a huge addition to the firepower the U.S. military could bring to bear in and around Baghdad. At its height, the monthly payroll was $30 million, which sounds like a lot but amounts to a few hours of what the war costs the American taxpayer twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year.

  Some experts, such as retired Gen. Abizaid and Stephen Biddle, a sometime adviser to Petraeus, argue that the change in the loyalties of Sunni fighters was the single most important cause of the improvement in security in 2007. It had begun before the surge, in the fall of ’06, with the deals Col. MacFarland was cutting in al Anbar Province.

  “It reached critical mass in Ramadi, and set off a chain reaction up the Euphrates River Valley,” Petraeus said. The turning a
ccelerated during the winter and spring of 2007. The membership rolls of these new neighborhood militias exploded later in the year, going from a few thousand to more than 60,000 by the winter, and then to 103,000, the majority of them Sunni and many of them former insurgents. They were not supporters of the Baghdad government, but they were allies of the American effort—at least, most of the time.

  In simple manpower terms, this was a huge bonus to the Americans. As Gen. Keane put it, tens of thousands of fighters who had been trying to kill Americans now “were not shooting at you. That helps a lot when you only have thirty thousand of your own additional troops to address the problem.”

  It was effectively a second marriage for both sides, which had become estranged from their original partners. The Americans weren’t quite divorced from their allies in the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, which wasn’t interested in a program of centrally driven reconciliation, but there was a new distance between the two. The Sunnis had split from al Qaeda in Iraq, rejecting its program of violent religious extremism. “The possibility of forming a de facto alliance with the tribes emerged only once the Sunnis had themselves become disenchanted with AQI, and once the United States had also grown equally disillusioned with the prospects of achieving a ‘top down’ process of reconciliation through the auspices of the al-Maliki government,” commented Australian political scientist Andrew Phillips.