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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Interestingly, the officer chosen to be Petraeus’s deputy at Central Command was John Allen, the Marine general who reached out to the sheikhs of Anbar, following in the footsteps of his beloved Gertrude Bell.

  Odierno had gone home in February to become vice chief of the army. He left Iraq with his reputation redeemed. “General Odierno has experienced an awakening,” said retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington, who in 2003 had written the intelligence report critical of Odierno. “I’ve now completely revised my impression of him.” Two months later, when Fallon’s departure created an opening, Odierno was told instead to succeed Petraeus as the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

  The advice Odierno prepared for his subordinates underscored just how much he had changed. His “key message” at an April 2008 conference, according to an internal Army document, was that “planners must understand the environment and develop plans from an environmental perspective vice an enemy situation perspective.” This was classic counterinsurgency thinking—that is, focus on the overall situation, and seek to make the enemy irrelevant to it. This was what David Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgent, had been advocating for some time, but it was almost the opposite of the approach that Odierno and most of the rest of the U.S. Army had taken in Iraq in 2003-4, when they emphasized a “kill and capture” approach.

  Emma Sky, Odierno’s political adviser, had planned to put Iraq behind her as a chapter in her life. She left in February and went hiking in New Zealand to mull her future. She was thinking about settling back in London and becoming a consultant. But a few months later, after Odierno was tapped to replace Petraeus, he called her. “What possessed you to take the job?” she asked.

  “You know that flag you make fun of?” he responded, referring to the American colors he and all other Army soldiers wear just below the right shoulder. He also told her with amazement that he had been at a birthday party in Texas for a ten-year-old, and the entertainment had been target practice with rifles. She thought that meant he was looking at his own country differently. “He wouldn’t have noticed that before,” she thought.

  He asked her to come back for a third tour in Iraq, advising him in his new position. “I will never again do anything like this without having someone like that,” he has said of Sky. “I have a lot of respect for MI [military intelligence], but you have to have someone with a different view. It is very helpful.” She agreed to return to Baghdad, joking that if she was going to serve the U.S. military so much, someone should grant her American citizenship.

  A major personnel move led by Petraeus a few months earlier also began to leak out about this time. In November he had left Iraq to come back to the Pentagon to run a promotion board to select the Army’s new brigadier generals. It was unprecedented for a commander to leave the war zone to do that, but it showed how influential he had become. Among the 40 new generals his board tapped were H. R. McMaster, Sean MacFarland, and Steve Townsend, who had commanded a highly mobile Stryker brigade that Odierno had employed as a quick reaction force in 2007. The board also was notably heavy in veterans of Special Operations, including Kenneth Tovo, who had lead a task force in Iraq; Austin Miller, a former commander of the secretive Delta Force; and Kevin Magnum, a former commander of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. One of the signs of an effective military is rewarding battlefield success, and Petraeus’s board, which was widely watched inside the military, did just that. For more than a decade, the Army had been led by post-Cold War officers—the group that did the Gulf War, the invasion of Panama, and the peacekeeping missions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Now, a new generation of generals was emerging, the leaders of the post-9/11 Army.

  “MARCH MADNESS”

  At almost the same time that Fallon was defenestrated, Prime Minister Maliki surprised the Americans with an unexpected move that would alter the relationship between the U.S. and Iraqi governments. He had been watching and learning many things from the Americans. One of those things was how to roll the dice and take risks. He was ready to gamble.

  The occupation of Basra, the biggest city in southern Iraq, had been a miserable experience for the British, the only major European government to stand with the Bush administration through five years of war in Iraq. At the outset, the British military had felt rather superior to the clumsy Americans. Not only did they have more experience in the Middle East, they also seemed to have a better feel for how to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign, reaching back to operations in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus.

  But as one crusty defense expert, Anthony Cordesman, put it, “By late 2007, the British position in Basra had eroded to the point of hiding in the airport.” Daniel Marston, an American who taught counterinsurgency at Sandhurst, the British military academy, noted that it had been a humiliating experience for British officers, especially as they watched Petraeus and Odierno regain the initiative in Baghdad. “I’m not going to go into details, but the frustration . . . when I’ve been with commanders, to see how bad they were doing things, and that the Americans turned it around, was incredible,” Marston said. “There was a lot of upset, and honor was a problem in the army.” (Underscoring that unhappiness, British military commentary, so vocal at the beginning of the war in grading the American performance, fell almost silent in 2007.) Islamic extremists and thugs were running Basra, siphoning off oil revenue and inventing new ways to impose their religious rules, not just banning the sale of alcohol but also shutting down a plastic surgeon’s practice on the reasoning that he was altering what God had made.

  On the evening of Friday, March 21, 2008, as the sixth year of the war began, and just before the U.S. military death toll hit 4,000, Petraeus was being briefed on a very deliberate plan to take Basra. Developed by Iraqi Lt. Gen. Mohan al-Furaiji, the Iraqi commander there, it would take months to carry out and called for the United States to provide money, machine guns, tanks, and concrete barriers. It probably would begin in September or maybe October. It certainly was seen as something that would happen in the distant future and last for months.

  But Maliki had a different idea. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser to the prime minister, interrupted the briefing with an urgent message: The prime minister wanted to see Petraeus the next morning at eleven, he said. “It’s about doing Basra,” Rubaie explained.

  “Mosul, you mean,” responded Maj. Gen. Barbero, Petraeus’s chief strategist, thinking the aide had intended to refer to the largest city in the north. American intelligence had reported that some Iraqi brigades were being moved by Maliki, but the word was that they were heading north.

  “No,” Rubaie said, “He means Basra. He is tired of the lawlessness there.”

  So began a major turning point in the war, and even more in the course of relations between the Iraqi government and the U.S. occupation force.

  The next morning Maliki told Petraeus, “I’m going to go in there forcefully, now. We’ve got to clean these people out.” He had been briefed that criminals and militias were running and looting the city, killing anyone who stood in their way and raping many women they encountered. He presented the general his plan, frequently employing the term “lines of operations,” which he had heard incessantly in briefings by American officers. “He laid out, there is going to be a tribal engagement line of operations, a political engagement line of operations, an economic/humanitarian assistance line and a security line of course,” Petraeus said. “And he talked about how he was going to go down personally with a number of the ministers—Interior, Defense, Justice—the commander of the National Police, commander of the Iraqi ground forces, and a number of others, and they were going to work these different lines of operations.”

  His question for Petraeus: “Will you support me?”

  In Petraeus’s mind, there was no question about that. Of course he would.

  The general had worked, he recalled later, “very hard to build what I think now is a relationship of mutual trust, respect, and confidence, informed by an awar
eness of the demands of our different positions and the context in which we perform our different responsibilities.” He sometimes had spoken bluntly to Maliki, but, he thought, never disrespectfully. “Occasionally guys think I just went in there and had it out with him a couple of times—you don’t do that with a prime minister of a sovereign country.” Nor would it fit Petraeus’s style. Even when his relationship with Fallon was on the rocks, for example, it always remained correct.

  Maliki’s decision to move precipitously was especially a shock because Petraeus and his staff had just gone through interminable briefings on Mohan’s cautious plan for Basra. Also, the Americans had understood that consideration of retaking Basra would commence only after Mosul was quiet. “I was planning to defeat al Qaeda in the north, hold the center, and not pick a fight in the south,” recalled Lt. Gen. Lloyd Austin, who had replaced Odierno as the corps commander, in charge of day-to-day operations in Iraq.

  Instead, Maliki said, the operation would begin on Monday, March 24—that is, two days later. “He thought it would be quick and easy,” said Sadi Othman, who attended the Saturday meeting. “That’s what his commanders told him.” Petraeus was a bit uneasy, but didn’t try to talk him out of it. Instead he gave him advice about how to operate, how to set conditions for the assault.

  On Easter Sunday, the day before the hasty offensive was to commence, powerful rockets began to rain down on the Green Zone. From that day through mid-May, more than 1,000 rockets would be fired at the Zone, mainly from the Sadr City area, making a mockery of the truce Sadr supposedly was following. By the U.S. military’s count, the attacks killed or wounded 269 people. Looking back, some officials came to believe that word had leaked inside the Iraqi government of Maliki’s intent to crack down on his erstwhile allies in the Sadrist movement. Others, such as Maj. Rayburn, a regional strategist for Petraeus, argued that such a barrage takes many days to prepare and coordinate, with stockpiling and planning, and that both Maliki’s decision and the rocket attacks from Sadr’s turf simply reflected the growing tension between the two. Rayburn’s analysis was that the Sadrists were moving to oust Maliki, not really caring who replaced him, so long as they were able to show themselves to be the kingmakers who could remove a sitting prime minister. If they succeeded, he said, “They would have looked like they have veto power, like Hezbollah in Lebanon.”

  It was an unsettling moment. “I called it ‘March madness,’” Barbero said a few months later in his Green Zone office, which faces east, toward the Sadr City rocket launching sites. “Basra was going on. We had rockets coming in here. The worst case was that all of southern Iraq would go up in flames with the Mahdi Army.” The U.S. military had seen what that might look like back in 2004, when as the first battle of Fallujah got under way, Sadr’s followers began attacking U.S. and allied forces in central and southern Iraq. For several weeks the American fought a two-front war, and grew seriously concerned that the Shiite militias would cut their major supply line that stretched across the south to Kuwait. For a short period, Baghdad was entirely isolated, with every road leading into it deemed too dangerous for travel.

  Assaulting Basra piled gamble upon gamble. Maliki was betting that his security forces could do it. Other political parties calculated, after some hesitation, that they should back Maliki. It was clear that the Iranians were active in Basra, which is not only the biggest city in the south but the key to Iraq’s only seaport, and so the lucrative home of much of its export trade. The Americans crossed their fingers, hoped for the best, and prepared to bail out Maliki if necessary.

  The attack didn’t begin well. Iraqi troops moved surprisingly quickly, but upon arrival simply were thrown into the city, often without supplies and with the barest of orders, such as, Go take that area. Some commanders were handed bags of cash and told to buy food after they settled into the city, Petraeus said. “It was difficult to understand for a wee while whether it was a work of genius or folly,” said Lt. Gen. John Cooper, a British deputy to Petraeus who was on his second Iraq tour. “For the first few days, we were badly concerned about it—to that extent, had the prime minister bitten off more than he could chew?”

  Or, as Col. Bell put it, American-style, “It was a huge mess.”

  There were very few Americans in Basra, and almost none with the Iraqi units, so the American headquarters in Baghdad was almost blind. What it did hear didn’t sound good. Some 883 soldiers in the Iraqi army’s 52nd Brigade, which numbered only about 2,500, refused to fight, along with about 500 members of the Basra police. Sadr’s Mahdi Army launched counterattacks in Baghdad and in towns across southern Iraq, but not a full-scale assault that would mean the truce was entirely dead. “There were some very tenuous moments during the first forty-eight to seventy-two hours,” recalled Lt. Col. Nielsen. She began to worry that it ultimately would be a tactical victory but a strategic setback—that is, so expensive a win that it would undercut Maliki and make the United States look inept as well.

  The early conclusion was that Maliki had gambled and lost. “It was ill advised and ill timed,” said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish politician. “I think Maliki had a setback and America had a setback because Iran and Moqtada al-Sadr were victorious.”

  On Thursday, March 27, Gen. Austin, Odierno’s successor as the commander of day-to-day operations in Iraq, flew south to take a look. “The smell of fear [in Iraqi officials there] was palpable,” said a senior Army intelligence officer who accompanied him. That night Austin ordered one of his deputies, Marine Maj. Gen. George Flynn, to go to Basra to help the Iraqi army, especially with planning and coordinating support, such as supplies, aerial reconnaissance, and air strikes. Flynn flew down the following morning and soon was joined by a group of planners. As he arrived, he recalled, “the situation on the ground was tense and uncertain.” The British were at the airport, outside of town. Maliki was downtown in a government complex that was being shelled steadily by mortars. The chief of his personal security force was killed at about this time by mortar shrapnel. Soldiers inside the compound, including Americans, hesitated even to go outside to another office because of the incessant fire, which made it difficult to communicate inside the headquarters.

  The first step, Flynn decided, was to get armed Predator drones in the air to begin finding and destroying the mortar emplacements and killing the mortar teams, to get the shelling off the back of headquarters so they could begin to operate normally. The second was to get U.S. liaison troops embedded with Iraqi units, so they could report back and call on U.S. resources to help out.

  By the fourth day, the hastiness of the operation began to impede Iraqi units, as nearly every unit in the fight ran low on fuel, food, water, ammunition, and money, recalled Marine Sgt. Alexander Lemons, who was deployed to Basra. The Iraqi troops to whom he was attached fed themselves by dropping hand grenades into a canal and collecting and cooking the fish that floated to the surface.

  On March 30, the sixth day of the battle, Sadr ordered his followers to stand down, apparently after receiving reassurances from Maliki that the attacks on his loyalists would cease. Many of his fighters did lay down their arms. But the statement he issued was hardly conciliatory, calling the Americans and their Iraqi allies the “armies of darkness.” Word seeped out that the cease-fire had been brokered by the Iranian government, which apparently was alarmed to see the Shiite-led Baghdad government crack down on the Shiite militias that dominated Basra. “JAM [Jayash al-Mahdi, Sadr’s Mahdi Army] wasn’t really broken so much as they were chased underground,” Lemons concluded. But they were clearly on the wrong foot: Sadr’s organization began to threaten to hold a “million-man march” to protest the offensive, a tactical retreat for an outfit that a few days earlier had been willing to fight Maliki and the Americans for control of a major city. A few days later, Sadr took another step back from confrontation and cancelled the march—only to issue a blustery statement later in the month threatening “open war until liberation.”

  The militias in Basr
a that had continued to fight began to show signs of weakness. A series of raids by Iraqi special operations troops killed or captured about two dozen of their commanders, as well as some top criminal gang leaders. Other militia captains began to flee the city, leaving behind a headless force. Then the air strikes began to kick in, shutting down most of the remaining mortar sites. Supplies began to flow into the city. Sadi Othman received anguished telephone calls from his Sadrist contacts, saying, he said, “This is crazy, we need to talk to Maliki, this is unnecessary bloodshed.” But, he said, the prime minister wasn’t in the mood to negotiate. Still in Basra, Maliki received calls from some erstwhile political opponents saying, “We are with you.”

  “As those factors accumulated you could sense the shift,” Petraeus said. “The targeted operations started to really bear fruit, the Iraqi SOF [Special Operations Forces] really got some traction. You also have the negotiations ongoing, Iran realizing that they don’t want to bring the government down, so they are starting to pull on the reins. And frankly the leaders of these organizations typically do not stay and fight, and so they were starting to exfiltrate to Iran and so you have them, the Iranians and presumably Sadr, realizing that their forces are getting beaten up pretty badly, realizing that the people are frustrated with them.”

  By mid-April, the crisis had passed. “We were beginning to feel pretty good,” said Flynn, the Marine general, who was still in Basra, coordinating American support. In a symbolic move, an Iraqi army battalion occupied the building that had housed Sadr’s headquarters in the city. Maliki felt so vindicated that he fired Gen. Mohan, who had developed the more deliberate plan that would have taken months. On April 19, Iraqi forces went into the “flats” on Basra’s southern side that were considered to be the Sadr City of the south, deemed hostile and nearly impregnable. They were unopposed. The battle was over, and Maliki had won it, more or less.