Most conclusive was a comment made by the operations officer for an Army battalion operating in Gentile’s old area during the surge. Interviewed by an officer from the Army’s Center for Lessons Learned, he reported that locals who had once been insurgents told them that until the surge increased the U.S. presence in the area, they had largely ignored the occasional American patrol. Their practice, the former insurgents reported, was, “Just let them drive through, we won’t see them again for weeks.”
THE GENERAL WHO LOVED GERTRUDE BELL
But Gentile was correct in noting that American officials were indeed cutting deals with all sorts of characters they previously had shunned, and that these agreements were significantly reducing violence. In some ways, the story of the Iraq war in 2007 was the Iraqification of the American effort. Not only had Americans stopped trying to Americanize Iraq, they were themselves willing to become more Iraqified. After an American soldier got into a lethal fight with an Iraqi policeman in Ramadi in the spring of 2008, his commanders acted as if they were Iraqis. Rather than go directly to the family or tribe of the dead policeman, they followed local custom and approached a sheikh of another tribe and asked him to act as a mediator. He quizzed them about the incident and then escorted them to the family, which followed the expected routine and acted emotionally, with hundreds of related tribesman shouting “Death to America” and “The occupiers must leave.” After a series of meetings, Col. Charlton, commander of the brigade that replaced MacFarland’s, agreed to step up a reconstruction project that the tribe wanted—effectively paying blood money. This lengthy process averted “a potential disaster” in which the tribe could have turned hostile, concluded Capt. Elliott Press, an intelligence officer under Charlton.
The embrace of the tribes and their ways could have happened earlier, but was discouraged by senior U.S. officials for ideological reasons, said an Army officer who had served as a strategist in Iraq. “In ’03, the commanders were working with the tribes and they got hammered for it,” he recalled. “I was in a meeting with [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz and we said, ‘These tribes are a powerful part of the social structure.’ Wolfowitz said, ‘This disturbs me greatly. Iraq is a cosmopolitan society.’ ”
In 2007 the American effort, overall, stopped fighting Iraq’s tribal structure and instead started to cooperate with it. “Tribal society makes up the tectonic plates in Iraq on which everything rests,” concluded Brig. Gen. John Allen, the deputy commander of the Marines in Iraq that year. Acting on that insight, Allen effectively became the Marine ambassador to the sheikhs of al Anbar Province, flying frequently to Amman, Jordan, to meet with them there in private homes and at the Sheraton Hotel, whose three-tiered lobby of rich marble and divans nestled in lush vines has an almost Babylonian feel of hanging gardens.
The Marine Corps has a greater tolerance for outliers and even flat-out eccentrics than the Army does. Allen is no oddball, but he is unusual. He has three master’s degrees in international relations and related subjects, had taught political science at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, where it is more common to see diplomats, academic, and investment bankers than Marine officers. Like Petraeus, Allen also thrived in command. For example, as a company commander, he won the Left-wich Trophy, awarded in the Marines every year to one captain who has demonstrated outstanding leadership skills.
Allen’s task was to expand the accomplishment of Sean MacFarland’s brigade and its attached Marine units in Ramadi. MacFarland had run into a lot of skepticism in the Marines about what he was trying to do in Ramadi, but not from Allen. “I felt like he got it immediately,” MacFarland said. “He was finishing my sentences for me. He was Mozart to my Salieri.”
Allen was ready to take the reconciliation talks to a new, regional level. “It became clear to us that this Anbar fight was being fought over the region, in hotel lobbies and rooms around the Gulf,” Allen said. “You’d have a meeting with a sheikh in Amman or an Iraqi businessman in Dubai, a phone call would be made, and something beneficial would happen” back in Iraq, such as hundreds of tribesmen showing up at a police recruiting office.
In a June 2007 meeting in Amman, for example, he expressed a desire to see Sheikh Mishan al-Jumayli, who was living in Damascus. One of the sheikh’s sons had been killed by mistake at an American checkpoint in 2003. A second one was murdered by al Qaeda in 2005. After that, his wife died of a broken heart, the sheikh said. An Iraqi businessman at the meeting whipped out a cell phone, hit one button, and got Sheikh Mishan on the line. The next morning they met first on neutral ground in Amman and then in Allen’s room at the Sheraton. Allen asked the wary sheikh to return to Iraq, telling him that his presence in his tribal lands in al Anbar could turn the tide against al Qaeda. Mishan demurred: “It’s not time. I will return when Allah wills it.” Well, proposed Allen, if you should change your mind, I will fortify your compound and train your bodyguards. One of the lessons he had learned was that working with the tribes requires “tactical patience,” a military virtue the American armed forces tend to neglect or even disparage.
Several weeks later Allen was contacted by an intermediary in Amman. Sheikh Mishan’s third son had been killed by an IED near Fallujah, and he wanted to know if the offer was still good. The next day Allen and a team of Marines from al Anbar were on a Marine C-130 cargo plane to Amman. The sheikh, his sole surviving son, and his spiritual adviser flew back with them, with the sheikh sitting in the cockpit and emotionally looking out over the western desert of Iraq. As they landed at a Marine base, helicopters were waiting to fly the sheikh to Fallujah, where he was met by local sheikhs. “They took him home, and that began the turning of Karmah,” which had been a persistently tough town for the Marines. Each of these “turnings” would have concrete results as tribal members manned the police and brought their militias into alliance with the Americans.
Not that the job was done. “Al Qaeda counterattacked right away,” Allen remembered. “They put about ten members of his family in a house and dynamited it.” Then one of the sheikh’s subordinate leaders was shot by a sniper, and Allen stayed with him through his surgery. Then his brother’s house was mortared, wounding several family members.
The attacks diminished but never really ended. In June 2008, a suicide bomber hit a meeting in Karmah and killed 13 other sheikhs, the town’s mayor, and the commander of a Marine battalion and also the CO of one of his rifle companies.
Another problem was the relatively low stature of the main American ally among the tribal leaders, Sittar albu-Risha. Farther up the Euphrates River Valley, Allen recalled, “They’d talk about Sittar the criminal, the smuggler, the second-tier sheikh of a third-tier tribe. At this point many of the sheikhs from the older, larger tribes were unwilling to subordinate their prestige or tribal equities to Sittar, even though he’d apparently been able create a strong relationship with the U.S. Army brigade in Ramadi.” Also, Sittar was pushing for greater political representation, arguing that he and his followers had liberated Ramadi, the provincial capital and so should receive half the seats on the provincial council. He didn’t get that, but he got a voice. And by August 2007, when Sittar sponsored a meeting at his compound, nearly all the sheikhs in the province showed up, “voluntarily,” said Allen. When President Bush visited al Anbar Province the following month, Sittar was seated next to the president, at the recommendation of the governor. Always smooth-tongued, Sittar told Bush that as soon as the fighting was done in Iraq, “We’re ready to go to Afghanistan to help you.”
Only 10 days later, just after Petraeus testified to Congress and just before the first anniversary of the crucial meeting in Ramadi, Sittar was blown up in his backyard by a buried bomb.
Allen is an unusual Marine. “I probably would have been an archaeologist had I not wound up where I am,” he said. He was particularly influenced by the writings of Gertrude Bell, the British expert on the Middle East who was a colleague of T
. E. Lawrence’s and spoke far better Arabic than him but lacked his skill at self-promotion. She worked extensively in Iraq advising the British government, especially on tribal affairs. An heiress, the author of many books, translator of Arabic and Persian poetry, and a mountain climber, she also founded what became the Baghdad Archaeological Museum before committing suicide in Baghdad in July 1926, likely because she knew she was suffering from cancer. “She had the life I perhaps would have liked to have had,” Gen. Allen said. He read her books, letters, and diaries, especially after he found some of them posted on a British university website. He studied her writings on the Iraqi tribes. “When the tribes are at their best they live in a condition of splendid equilibrium,” he said, quoting from her diaries. Lifting a book from his desk, he read aloud her comment about the British campaign in Iraq during World War I: “ ‘Before the smoke of conflict has lifted, within the hearing of the guns, the work of reconstruction has been initiated.’ ”
Bell had a gimlet eye for the politics of Iraq. In commenting on the rebellion against the British occupation after World War I, she wrote, “The tribes witnessed the withdrawal of British administration and were convinced that their efforts would, as they had been assured, drive the British out of Mesopotamia. This conviction spurred on those who had already risen and won over the half-hearted, who could not risk being left on the losing side.”
Allen saw Iraq through the lens provided by Bell. “If you are not a member of a tribe in Anbar, you have no status,” he said. “You’re probably a dead man.” He was fascinated to see former al Qaeda fighters petition for reentry into their old tribes. In the fall of 2007, Allen recalled, Sheikh Khamis of the Albu Issa tribe issued an edict: “You have to put your name on a public statement that you will fight al Qaeda. And then you must have the blood of al Qaeda on your hands.”
Tribal justice was far from unsophisticated, Allen advised other Marines. “It’s about mediation, conflict resolution,” he would say. “Remember, there’s a thousand years in this operating system.” As al Qaeda’s leaders fled the province, leaving behind their foot soldiers, he began to see many more such statements, he said. An entire IED cell came in one day and simply surrendered out of the blue. “They were simply exhausted by the relentless pursuit of Coalition and Iraqi security forces and had lost hope in their cause.”
A BALANCED STRATEGY
Petraeus hadn’t said so publicly, but he had brought the means and ends of U.S. strategy more into balance. Not only had he and Odierno increased the resources devoted to the war, primarily with the addition of 30,000 troops, his new, more realpoliitik approach had reduced the size of the opposition, even if that mean negotiating with people who had killed American troops. Finally, after years of driving its enemies together, the U.S. effort was splitting them apart, thus obeying Andrew Krepinevich’s law of the conservation of enemies: Never make more than you need to have at any one time.
With the new approach, it was possible to make better distinctions. “The insurgency had three levels,” Capt. Keirsey, the Baker Company commander in southern Baghdad, said he realized. “Top was the true AQI hard-core leaders. Next were those who were truly trying to protect their neighborhoods. Others were simply the criminals and such that try to exploit the situation for their own benefit or make a living.” The second group could be enticed simply by allowing them to maintain checkpoints and patrols if they cooperated and coordinated with U.S. and Iraqi forces. They and the third group could be bought off for surprisingly little—usually $10 a day, plus some reconstruction contracts for the sheikhs who brought them in. That was a small price to pay to keep alive American soldiers.
Keirsey gave the Iraqi security volunteers tough love. The volunteer group in his area was at first called “Heroes of Mulhalla Organization,” but the acronym HOMO made them decide to change it. Each member was vetted with a local member of the community. The Americans kept track of each endorsement. If the volunteer went bad, the endorser could be fined or even jailed. Those accepted were then issued a numbered badge. Every day an assignment sheet indicated by badge number which volunteers were on duty, and if a patrol found that the volunteer wasn’t there, they would report him so his pay could be docked. “We were extremely harsh on discipline,” Keirsey said. “Late for work, lose twenty percent of your pay for the month. Shirt not tucked in, lose twenty percent of your pay.”
In turn, he found the volunteers far more effective than the Iraqi police or army. After he asked for a list of the area’s poorest families, they developed one with 55 names, plus phone numbers and addresses. His patrols checked it out and found “the information was one hundred percent accurate.” Just to be careful, the company also developed “target packets” in case any of the volunteer leaders turned against them again. “Fortunately, that was never an issue,” Lt. Gross, the platoon leader, said.
With the passage of time they were able to build trust. “We picked up a lot of credibility in one incident,” Keirsey recalled. Local Iraqi volunteers came under attack without American troops nearby. After they called Keirsey’s unit on a cell phone, desperate for help, he was able to get U.S. attack helicopters to fly to their defense. Later that day, the Iraqi militiamen wanted to come visit him to express their gratitude but were detained at a checkpoint. “We got them out.”
One nagging question is whether Petraeus and Odierno had tried only to harmonize policy and strategy—or actually had overstepped their bounds by setting policy. There is evidence that they did overstep to a degree, but in a forgivable way, because there was a strategy vacuum at the White House. As part of this, they quietly downsized American goals in Iraq, lowering their sights to trying to achieve sustainable security, but not necessarily aiming for an Iraq that is democratic, respects human rights, and is an ally of the United States. Thus they brought means and ends more into balance—despite Bush’s continuing presidential rhetoric about victory and liberty. The two big American bases just west of downtown Baghdad were called Camp Victory and Camp Liberty. But if they were labeled truthfully, they would have been renamed Camp Accommodation and Camp Stability, as those were the new goals of the American effort.
The danger of making policy on the fly and not vetting it through scrutiny and debate is that it may win short-term advances without recognizing long-term costs. As Long, the counterinsurgency expert at the RAND Corporation put it, “The tribal strategy is a means to achieve one strategic end, fighting al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, but it is antithetical to another, the creation of a stable, unified, and democratic Iraq.”
It was no coincidence, added Marc Lynch, a Middle Eastern expert at George Washington University, that after the United States began cutting deals with local militias, both the Sunni and Shiite communities began “fragmenting at a remarkable rate.” There was still a scramble for power in the future Iraq; the Americans had just made sure there would be some Sunni entries in the race.
BAGHDAD SATURDAY NIGHTS
One reason Petraeus was able to bring Bush along into these hazy areas of half deals with enemies and threats to friends was that he is skilled at managing upward, especially at the strategic level. Part of the job, as Petraeus saw it, was to “make sure your bosses understand the mission.” For him, much of that educational task came during his weekly video-teleconferences with President Bush.
Preparation for those sessions began with Lt. Col. Charlie Miller, who had known Petraeus for well over a decade, having been a second lieutenant in Petraeus’s battalion in the early 1990s. Indeed, Miller had been across the street at a different firing range when a sergeant told him the battalion commander had just been shot. Miller didn’t believe it at first, thinking that the NCO was pulling a green lieutenant’s leg.
Now, 16 years later, the two were in Baghdad. Every Saturday night Miller would sit down and write one of the world’s most exclusive memos, about what he thought the president needed to know and understand about this week of the war. Miller—smart, boyish, and sincere—would take notes al
l week, as would his boss, Col. Rapp, the head of Petraeus’s internal think tank, who traveled around Iraq with the general. Miller also would review the week’s operations. In particular, he would look for a theme, something that pulled together the events and data of the week.
At around 7:30 on Saturday evenings, Miller would walk across the bridge from the palace at Camp Victory, over the shallow artificial lake, to the path winding to the mess hall, where he would get a take-out meal. He would bring it back to his desk in a cubbyhole just outside the office Petraeus kept there. Then he would begin writing, sipping big cups of coffee as he did. His first paragraph summarized the security situation. His second was about politics and economics. By midnight he would have about 2,500 words on his computer screen.
On Sunday morning he would send it to Col. Rapp, who would edit it. “We try to use it to push Petraeus, see if we can get some edge into it,” Rapp said. On Sunday night, Petraeus and his writing aide, Liz McNally, would go over it. “He handwrites all over it,” Rapp said.
The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq Page 30