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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  One day I was traveling from Camp Victory, near the airport, to downtown when my driver and I came to a National Police checkpoint manned by perhaps eight men. We, and our bodyguards in a chase car, waited about half an hour, and then were waved through. Fifty yards later we came to an Iraqi army checkpoint, manned by another eight men. The two checkpoints apparently were stationed closely so the police and army could keep an eye on each other. After another half-hour wait, we were through. About 200 yards later, we arrived at a bridge over the Tigris, only to find one side of it closed for repairs, pushing all the cars to the other side. There, where a police officer really could have helped, there was no one directing traffic, nor were there even lanes demarked for the two opposing directions. The river crossing felt like a civilian demolition derby, with Iraqis driving head on at each other at high speeds, flashing their lights as warnings to swerve out of the way. That was how Iraq worked in 2007.

  “It’s ironic that the Iraqis, who we built up into such a threat, now seem so entirely helpless,” observed Lt. Col. Miller.

  As Iraqi’s rainy, surprisingly chilly winter set in, Petraeus was pondering whether the war might change. “It’s going to continue to morph,” he said. “We think we are going to be quick enough to adjust.”

  It was a time of assessment. What had we gained with tactical success? Where has the new strategy taken us? How much further do we need to go? Who are our friends, and who the foes, in reaching our goals? Was the Baghdad government part of the problem or part of the solution? Asking these questions led to reexaminations not only of the strategy but of the major players it was intended to affect: the Iraqi government, the former Sunni insurgents, and the Shiite militias. The new American strategy also had the unintended side effect of casting a new light on the tens of thousands of mercenaries—also known as “private security contractors”—that the Americans had brought to Iraq.

  REVISITING A STRATEGIC ASSUMPTION

  “The surge is doing what it was designed to do,” President Bush asserted in the spring of 2008. But it hadn’t done what he had hoped it would—that is, lead to political reconciliation. As Defense Secretary Gates had phrased it, “The purpose of the surge was to create enough space that the process of reconciliation could go forward in Iraq.”

  On the ground in Iraq it was clear that anything resembling genuine reconciliation wasn’t occurring, and probably wouldn’t anytime soon. “We had a faulty logic, February ’07, that the surge protects the people, then government will reconcile,” Col. Bill Rapp said one day later that year. “We still haven’t seen that knitting together at the top.”

  Col. Mike Bell, Rapp’s successor as consigliere to Petraeus, found pretty much the same situation obtained in mid-2008. It took him back to Petraeus’s persistent need for more time. “I think what we haven’t thought through as a government is how much time you need from improved security to a political change,” Bell said.

  Despite a reputation for stubbornness, President Bush had become quite flexible as he searched for a way out of the labyrinth of Iraq. In a speech at the National War College he offered a fallback assumption. Political movement at the local level ultimately would lead to change at the national level, he argued. The goal of this new approach, he said, was “to help Iraqis make progress toward reconciliation,” which in turn would lead to freedom, human rights, democracy, and so on.

  But here again, there had been little evidence of that happening. As Maj. James Powell, one of Odierno’s planners, was preparing to leave Baghdad early in 2008, he said that bottom-up moves “buy us time.” But, he added, “As I’ve heard one Iraqi say, it takes two hands to clap. At some point it has to be met by movement at the top.”

  Rapp at first was an advocate of the localized alternative. But by the winter of 2007-8, he also had given up on that idea. “In retrospect, it was a dumbass thing to say.” There was something happening at the local level, he said, but “it wasn’t reconciliation, it was bottom-up accommodation, or calmness. They weren’t reconciling with anything.”

  Some top Iraqi leaders dismissed the entire notion the Americans were peddling. “I don’t think there is something called reconciliation,” said Barham Salih, the deputy prime minister. “To me, it is a very inaccurate term. This is a struggle about power.” Maliki, meanwhile, began to argue almost the opposite, that the necessary reconciliation already had occurred, so there was no need to talk about it anymore.

  The lack of political movement raised the unhappy question of just what it was that U.S. forces were fighting for. In the Army’s survey of the mental health and morale of soldiers in Iraq, one sergeant commented, “They are at the watering trough but choose not to drink. . . . I don’t think we’re doing anything at all—they’re not changing.” It is not too much to say that American troops were dying to give Iraqi politicians the chance to find a way forward—but that it wasn’t clear if Iraqi politicians wanted that chance.

  So what were the Americans waiting for? “This is the dilemma we’re in right now,” said a senior U.S. military intelligence officer with long experience in the Middle East. “We’ve bought some time, but for what? We’re still waiting for someone to pull the rabbit out of the hat. But so far there is no indication that anything is going to stave off the breakup of the country. So right now we are in a kind of twilight zone of neither peace nor victory. But I think we are drifting toward a breakup.”

  To some, that meant it was time to pull the plug. “To date the Iraqi political process has not demonstrated the capacity to deal successfully with any of these issues,” said Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who was growing increasingly influential on defense issues. “And if they’re not dealt with, then you’ve got a failing state that is not helping itself.”

  But to others, the failure of Iraqi politics raised the question of whether the next step was to revise the American mission—and in some ways return to the grandiose vision that the Bush administration held when it sent American forces into Iraq, that of making it a democratic beacon that would change the politics of the Middle East. “We’ve built a state, and now we have to build a nation,” Col. Allen Batschelet, chief of staff of the 4th Infantry Division, said early in 2008. “At the tactical level, we’ve been buying time for that to happen.”

  TIME FOR MALIKI TO GO?

  The impasse led to a new and grimmer understanding of the limitations of the people at the top of the Iraq government. There was a growing feeling that perhaps they just weren’t capable of doing what the Americans thought they needed to do. “We thought that once they weren’t being shot at, they could start being statesmanlike,” Col. Rapp said. “It turns out we have a bunch of guys who survived the Saddam years by being secretive and exclusive, instead of being open and inclusive.”

  Some of those around Petraeus were coming to see the intransigence of the Maliki government as the key threat in Iraq, rather than terrorists, insurgents, or militias. “I think the reason that we’re in the twilight zone is the Maliki government is very dysfunctional, and unwilling to reach out to his enemies,” Mansoor said. “He has a conspiratorial mind-set, and is fearful of a coup.”

  The Americans were especially antagonized by what they saw as Maliki’s footdragging on bringing in the former insurgents who had turned onto the Iraqi government payroll. An Army officer in Baghdad reported that after his unit sent in applications for local Sunnis to join the police, they were returned because they had been filled out with a nonprescribed color of ink. “The longer the Iraqi government stalls, . . . the greater the danger that tens of thousands of tough, armed Iraqis will stray,” said Wayne White, a retired State Department specialist on the Middle East.

  There was an undercurrent of distrust in dealing with Iraqi officials. Top officials not only didn’t do the right thing, they didn’t seem to want to do it. “The ministers, they don’t get it,” said Campbell, the assistant commander of the 1st Cavalry Division. “They don’t know what the hell is going on on the ground.” B
y contrast, he said, the Sunnis, waiting to be given a place at the table by the Baghdad government, had in his view shown great patience. “You don’t want the Sunnis that are working with you to go back to the dark side.”

  After years of insurgent attacks and criminal kidnappings, anyone in the Iraqi government who was still alive was viewed with some suspicion. Had he cut unsavory deals, or worse, did he have a foot in both camps? One battalion commander in Baghdad, talking about a neighborhood official, called him “a good guy,” but then wondered aloud about how he alone on the local political council had survived: “Why is he the original member who wasn’t touched?”

  Americans worried that the Baghdad government would fritter away the opportunity won for it by their bloody counteroffensive of the spring and summer of 2007. “The tipping point that I’ve been looking for as an intel officer, we are there,” said a senior U.S. military intelligence officer. “We are at the critical juncture. The GOI [government of Iraq] and ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] are at the point where they can make or break it.” He was especially worried that if the top Iraqi officials didn’t make more of an effort to reach out to the Sunnis that the country would slide back into civil war. “If the Sunni insurgents are disenfranchised by the GOI, guess what? It’s game on—they’re back to attacking again.”

  Americans quietly debated whether to look for an alternative to Maliki. “As I arrived, Maliki had kind of a questionable future,” recalled Col. Bell, who got to Baghdad in February 2008. “It wasn’t clear that he had the political support or the personal leadership to remain there [in office] very long.”

  Arguing against Maliki was his track record. There were concerns that he might prove to be a leader who needed to have a war, who thrived on its divisiveness and feared peace for two reasons. First, any fair election would diminish his power, because greater Sunni participation in the vote would cut the Shiite hold on government. Also, an absence of violence would push to the fore the divisive questions to which he had no answers: How to divide oil revenue among the peoples of Iraq? How to decide the future of the disputed city of Kirkuk, claimed by the Kurds as their capital, but sitting on top of much of Iraq’s oil? And who really led Iraq’s Shiites, still learning how to exercise the power of the majority?

  Maliki’s advocates responded that it wasn’t clear that anyone else could do better. As Kilcullen had observed, we shouldn’t blame the Iraqi officer who cuts deals with insurgents to keep his family alive, we should fix a system that can’t protect his family and so forces him into such arrangements. Maliki may be in the same position on a national scale. Also, there was fear that pushing out Maliki could return the country to the situation in early 2006, when it took five months to form a government, during which Baghdad drifted into a municipal civil war.

  THE SUNNI SIDE OF THE STREET

  Many American officials considered the turning of the Sunni insurgency to be more significant than either the surge or the new tactics associated with the surge. But no one knew how long the loyalty of these new allies could be retained, especially if they believed they weren’t getting a fair deal from the Baghdad government. In 2008 there were 103,000 of these armed men—a ceiling the Iraqi government had asked the U.S. military to stop at—and there were plans to absorb only 20,000 of them into the police and army. It wasn’t clear ultimately what would happen to the rest, especially if the Sunni community continued to feel estranged from the Baghdad government.

  But the central government in Baghdad had never warmed to them, seeing them as little more than warlords for hire. “They are like mercenaries,” one aide to Maliki told the Associated Press. “Today they are paid by the Americans. Tomorrow they can be paid by al Qaeda.” Other Iraqi officials scorned the groups as “American militias.”

  The American view was rather different. “Clearly the coalition and the government of Iraq and I think the Iraqi people realize that these are very brave, courageous people that stood up in a time of need of their country,” said Brig. Gen. David Perkins.

  Maj. Gen. John Kelly, commander of the Marines in western Iraq, reported that more than two-thirds of the Sons of Iraq, most of them turned Sunni insurgents, in his area wanted to join the Iraqi army or police. How would the thousands left hanging react? “Despite the repeated assurances of the Maliki government, there is no evidence to date that the governing coalition has resolved its sectarian concerns” about the groups, “or begun to formulate a comprehensive plan for integration of their members,” noted Michael Hanna, an expert on Iraq law and politics.

  In the short term, such a reliance on local militias didn’t appear to be such a bad bet. But what would happen to them in the long run? As Col. Jon Lehr, commander of one of the surge brigades, prepared to leave Iraq, he explained the role that the Sons of Iraq had played in improving security in Diyala Province, north of Baghdad. “From Baqubah, emanating out from Baqubah, we have conducted a strategy of clear, hold, and tactical build in a series of concentric rings,” he said. “And clearing is one thing, but holding the ground is another. And that’s where the CLC/Sons of Iraq part of the strategy is very important. You can clear an area, but if you can’t hold it, it’s all for naught.” In other words, Lehr appeared to have succeeded by turning over control of cleared areas to a force that may or may not respond to orders from Baghdad. That raised the question of whether basic problems of security weren’t being solved as much as deferred. If so, when push came to shove, there almost certainly would be far less U.S. combat power available to back up Baghdad than was available during the surge of 2007-8.

  Likewise, in Tarmiyah, the rough little town where a U.S. outpost had been besieged for four hours in February 2007, the U.S. military finally cut a deal with the local Sunni sheikh and made his son the chief of the local contingent of the Sons of Iraq. But the Americans and the Iraqis seemed to have different notions of the long-term purpose of this force. The father, Sheikh Sa’d Jassim, had been accused of providing funds for al Qaeda operations in the area, but the U.S. military now chose to interpret that as simply a case of blackmail in which the victim shouldn’t be blamed. The son, Sheikh Imad, oversaw a force of 500 armed men, each paid $300 a month. “He does not seem to regard the U.S.-paid Sons of Iraq as a short-term transition, but as a long-term means to protect Sunni areas against Shiite persecution,” reporter Nathan Webster wrote in the blog “The Long War Journal.”

  U.S. troops tended to praise these local allies, but some were indeed genuine thugs, despite American assurances to the contrary. The British newspaper the Guardian published a hair-raising profile of Haji Abu Abed, the former insurgent who a few months earlier had arrived at an alliance of convenience with the U.S. military in Baghdad’s Amiriyah neighborhood. The Americans dubbed his group “the Baghdad Patriots,” but it preferred to be known as “the Amiriyah Knights.” The Guardian portrayed him screaming at Iraqi bystanders while waving a pistol and shouting, “Oh people of Iraq, I had come to you with two swords, one is for mercy, which I have left back in the desert, and this one”—the gun—“is the sword of oppression, which I kept in my hand.” His men piled into cars and drove around his territory, waving weapons out the windows. On a raid looking for an alleged cache of sniper rifles, he told a boy he would cut off his head “and put it on your chest if you don’t tell us where the guns are by tomorrow.” He then tried to put his shotgun in the boy’s mouth, the newspaper said.

  Nine months later, Abu Abed had fled to Amman, Jordan, after being ousted by a subordinate. His former U.S. military adviser still supported him. “Many times he had the opportunity to do the wrong thing and never did,” former Army Capt. Eric Cosper told the Los Angeles Times. “I have absolute faith in him.”

  Spec. Horton, the Stryker brigade soldier who had qualms about working with former insurgents in Baqubah, later wrote that under American tutelage, “they’ve grown into a much more organized, lethal force. They use this organization to steal cars and intimidate the local population, or anyone else they accuse
of being linked to Al Qaeda. The Gestapo of the 21st century, sanctioned by the United States Army.”

  Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the forces just south of Baghdad, said early in 2008 that he understood how tenuous the situation was. “I mean, a good portion of our concerned citizens were probably insurgents yesterday, and they could be insurgents tomorrow, and what we’re doing right now is working hard to keep them on the right side of the fence.”

  The Iraqi government was less interested in that approach, and in the summer of 2008, began to talk about setting a deadline sometime in the winter for the groups to unilaterally disarm—or suffer the consequences.

  THE ONCE AND FUTURE SADR

  “There’s something going on above us,” an Army intelligence officer said one day in 2007. He knew there were some sort of contacts between U.S. officials and representatives of Moqtada al-Sadr, but he didn’t know the details.

  This was a form of reconciliation by the United States government, which was reaching out to an anti-American leader whose followers had killed American troops in two rounds of fighting in 2004, and who continued to be a threat. U.S. policy toward Sadr resembled that of President Johnson toward FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, of whom he said he would rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside it pissing in. “Sadr isn’t going to go away,” said a senior U.S. military intelligence officer. “So how do you deal with him in a way that facilitates the continued growth of the GoI?”—that is, the government of Iraq.

  “We are now meeting with them, for the first time,” Odierno said in January 2008. Of Sadr, he said, “He’s clearly moving more toward a humanitarian approach, and less of a militia.” In public comments, American commanders began to refer to Sadr as “the honorable.” Petraeus took it a step further a month later, calling him “al-Sayyid Moqtada al-Sadr,” using the honorific for descendants of the prophet Muhammad.