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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Yet it still is a deeply flawed institution, even with tens of thousands of American soldiers keeping an eye on it. “The Iraqi army is a predominantly Shia institution,” said Sgt. Maj. Michael Clemens. “They tend to react to things as Shia first and as soldiers second. . . . We had to remind them that they’re an apolitical organization and they couldn’t drive around in their Humvees with pictures of Moqtada al-Sadr plastered on the back and their green Shia flags. They couldn’t march in support of the Shia tribes during holidays.” (Indeed, in mid-2008, as Iraq’s political parties began to gear up for possible elections, there were reports of troops tearing down posters publicizing the registration effort in Sunni areas.) Clemens also mentioned, without offering specifics, the case of a commander’s bodyguard who also was “in a Shia death squad that runs around at night hacking the heads off Sunnis.”

  The Americans who should be heeded most on the attitudes of Iraqi commanders are those who saw them up close during tours of duty as advisers to Iraqi units. Some of their accounts should give pause to anyone who sees Iraqi forces as the key to an American exit. Those doubts should extend even to the Iraqi army, which has a far better reputation than the Iraqi national police. Maj. David Voorhies said that he was given “unsubstantiated” statements that Lt. Col. Sabah, the Iraqi commander he advised, had subordinate officers who disagreed with him killed. Voorhies didn’t seem to think it unlikely. “You’d probably get a good idea of what it’s like to work with him by watching The Sopranos or watching The Godfather trilogy. He’s very persuasive and he leads through fear.”

  Some American advisers reported that their Iraqi counterparts would candidly say they were just waiting for the Americans to depart so they could revert to their old methods of population suppression. Older officers “would sit and tell us they wanted to go back to the old way underneath Saddam and were just waiting for the U.S. to leave,” reported Maj. William Arnold, who in 2007 advised a battalion of the Iraqi 9th Division (Mechanized), a particularly significant unit because it was part of the only armored brigade in the Iraqi army and so would be key to launching a military coup d’état. “We felt that those guys would listen to us just because they were using us as a checkbook.”

  Maj. Matt Whitney, who spent 2006 advising Iraqi generals, predicted that once U.S. forces were out of the way, Iraqi commanders would relapse to the brutal ways of earlier days:

  Saddam Hussein taught them how to do that [suppress urban populations] and we’ve just reinforced that lesson for four years. Sad, huh? . . . . These guys think they’re the shit and they can do it. They’re ready to kill people—a lot of people—in order to get stability in Iraq. They just don’t have enough weapons as far as they’re concerned. . . . If you think you can leave them in charge and not wind up with a real kinetic solution that would kill a lot of people, you’re wrong.

  Another adviser, Maj. Stephen Burr, who worked with a major Iraqi military intelligence headquarters in 2006, was even more emphatic. “They’re going to be ruthless about it,” he warned. “They’re not going to be concerned about body counts, they’re not going to be concerned about media, and they’re not going to be concerned about collateral damage. If it requires leveling the city of Najaf, they will do that. That’s what they did after the Gulf War. They have no problem with that. They feel that these things are acceptable losses.”

  Gen. Odierno said in my last interview with him in November 2008 that he thinks Iraqi commanders have improved and that they no longer will automatically revert to Saddam-era viciousness. “I think two years ago that was true. I think maybe even a year and a half ago it was true. I think a year ago it was a little less true. I think today it’s less true.” He added that there clearly are still problems and cited that as one reason why the American military presence will be required for some time.

  But that hopeful assessment conflicts with the frequent statements of Iraqi commanders themselves. As one Iraqi police chief boasted to an American officer, “one week in his [police] custody was worse than twenty years in prison.”

  Maj. Chad Quayle, who advised an Iraqi battalion in south Baghdad during the surge, said that he “got consistent answers” from Iraqi officers about the political future of their country. “When you got to know them and they’d be honest with you, every single one of them thought that the whole notion of democracy and representative government in Iraq was absolutely ludicrous.”

  Or as the police chief in Fallujah had phrased his bottom line after leaving the insurgency to come over to the American side: “No democracy in Iraq. Ever.”

  If these forebodings are borne out, then unlike in the Saddam era, the United States will bear some of the blame for creating a brutal Iraq run by younger, tougher versions of that dictator, who by the time of the invasion was an aging, almost toothless tiger. What’s more, American forces probably would still be in the country, advising and supporting this new Iraqi military and police, but with fewer troops and so less ability to know what is happening on the ground. Capt. Justin Gorkowski, who advised an Iraqi brigade in 2006-7, told the story of a Turkmen Shia police chief who used his pull with an Iraqi general to call an air strike on a Sunni village, as part of his ethnic cleansing work. As it happened, Gorkoswki said, the American gunships, seeing no hostile actions or threats in the village, declined to fire into it. In future such situations, American forces, thinner on the ground and so lacking awareness, might not be able to be so discerning.

  HOW DOES THIS END?

  So to address the perceptive question David Petraeus posed many years ago during the invasion: How does this end?

  Petraeus himself wasn’t keen to take on the question. Asked if the gloomy formula once proposed for Vietnam of “eight divisions for eight years” applies in Iraq, he said that it clearly wasn’t going to take that many troops. As for duration, he said, “I don’t know how long, you can only see so far.” But such operations, he said, seeking refuge in vagueness, take “a long time.”

  I posed the question to several other American commanders and officers in Iraq. Probably the best answer came from Charlie Miller, the member of the Petraeus think tank who did the first draft of policy development and presidential reporting for the general. “I don’t think it does end,” he replied one day in 2008. “We are going to be in this centrally located Arab state for a long time. There will be some U.S. presence, and some relationship with the Iraqis, for decades.” In many ways, this was the best case scenario for Petraeus and those around him, because they saw the alternative as a chaos that could eventually drag the United States into another Middle Eastern war sooner or later. “We’re thinking in terms of Reconstruction after the Civil War,” Miller added. That may be a historically insightful way to think about the duration of the American presence in Iraq, but it probably is not a good sign politically, given that Reconstruction was a failure, giving rise to the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization that for the next century violently intimidated American blacks and any whites who might seek to help them exercise their civil rights. Nor have Americans signed up for a century-long mission in Iraq.

  The American public is unlikely to put up with such a long-term effort, which in turn raises the danger that, as Dodge, the British analyst put it, “America will have bequeathed a highly unstable state to the Middle East and a great deal of suffering to the Iraqi people, for nothing.”

  No matter how the U.S. war in Iraq ends, it appears that today we may be only halfway through it. That is, the quiet consensus emerging among many people who have served in Iraq is that we likely will have American soldiers engaged in combat in Iraq until at least 2015—which would put us now at about the midpoint of the conflict. “The story of the new Iraq is going to be a very, very long time in unfolding,” Ambassador Crocker said one day in 2008.

  The heart of the Iraq matter still lies before us, Crocker maintained in both my interviews with him in Baghdad in 2008, and he likely is correct. “What the world ultimately thinks about us and what we think
about ourselves,” he said, “I think is going to be determined much more by what happens from now on than what’s happened up to now.”

  In other words, the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened.

  AFTERWORD

  THE UNRAVELING

  “We are going to bring this war to an end,”President Obama,barely a month in office, said in February 2009. Despite what he and many other Americans seemed to think, the war in Iraq wasn’t over as that year came to a close. Bombings and deaths declined but hardly stopped, with smaller blasts routinely killing Americans and Iraqis in Mosul, Tall Afar, Ramadi, Fallujah, and Kirkuk, in addition to some spectacular explosions in central Baghdad. In late 2009, there were still 117,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, close to the average American commitment under the Bush administration from 2003 to 2006. The president plans to halve that number during the first six months of 2010, but my sense is that that remains more an aspiration than a certainty.

  In July, Col. Timothy Reese, an Army officer based in Baghdad, wrote a memorandum that amounted to a pretty good summary of the state of the politics of Iraq:

  The ineffectiveness and corruption of GOI [government of Iraq] Ministries is the stuff of legend. The anti-corruption drive is little more than a campaign tool for Maliki. The GOI is failing to take rational steps to improve its electrical infrastructure and to improve their oil exploration, production and exports. There is no progress towards resolving the Kirkuk situation. Sunni Reconciliation is at best at a standstill and probably going backwards. Sons of Iraq (SOI) or Sahwa transition to ISF [Iraqi security forces] and GOI civil service is not happening, and SOI monthly paydays continue to fall further behind. The Kurdish situation continues to fester. Political violence and intimidation is rampant in the civilian community as well as military and legal institutions. The Vice President received a rather cool reception this past weekend and was publicly told that the internal affairs of Iraq are none of the U.S.’s business.

  Caring about the internal affairs of Iraq certainly has become less an American preoccupation, by any measure. To a surprising degree, since the departure of Gen. David Petraeus in September 2008 and his replacement by Gen. Raymond Odierno, the Mesopotamian conflict became a war hiding in plain sight. It was increasingly difficult to track what was happening, because the international media was less engaged, having trimmed its Baghdad presence for two major reasons—first, events there were deemed less newsworthy, and second, because the journalism business was in collapse, under financial pressure even before the Great Recession of 2008 began. A third and lesser reason for the lack of coverage was that even though security had improved somewhat, reporters didn’t feel able to move about freely. The violence in Iraq, oddly enough, as a running story had migrated from the front pages to the local sections of newspapers, where it was covered as something that occasionally killed soldiers from a given area.

  The result was that large parts of the country seemed to go off the radar screen. It was hard to know what was happening just west of Baghdad in al Anbar Province. There were numerous bombings and attacks on police there, but who was doing them and why was hard to know. In the south, Basra had always been a bit of a mystery during the war but in 2009 became even more veiled. This especially struck me because I suspect that the government of Iran covets Basra more than it does Baghdad. Influence in the capital may be prestigious, but it also promises to be a continual headache as Iraqi factions shift and split. Basra, the biggest city in the south, sitting atop the Persian Gulf, is a more straightforward proposition: Control it and one has a hold over much of Iraq’s foreign revenue. And because that money derives from the export of oil, one may also be able to regulate the size of the outward flow of that commodity, which would help Iran’s position in the world oil markets.

  The U.S. military presence didn’t shrink as much as the media’s, but its operational presence was sharply curtailed. With the pullback from smaller outposts into big bases, the U.S. Army’s feel for the situation seemed to grow less sure. I noticed this not only in official statements but also in e-mails I got from soldiers in the field. One infantry officer wrote to me that during his time in Baghdad in 2009, he was struck by the comment that Ambassador Ryan Crocker made at the end of the hardcover edition of this book, that the events for which the Iraq war would be remembered have not yet happened. “This is quite true,” the officer told me, “and the troubling fact is that these events are going on right now and we don’t even know what to do about them.” In addition, there seemed to be new friction between the U.S. military headquarters and the U.S. embassy, with the soldiers wanting to intervene as they had in the past, but the diplomats arguing that it was time to take American hands off and let Iraq find its own course.

  WHITHER SECURITY

  So what course is Iraq on? It is possible to be overly pessimistic about Iraq. I made that error in the early spring of 2009, because I thought that the deals that General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker had cut with Iraqi politicians and insurgents during the surge era were beginning to unravel quickly. My worries peaked in March, when fighting broke out in the streets of Baghdad between “former Sunni insurgents” and Iraqi government forces. During the surge, the Sunni fighters had entered into a cease-fire, not a surrender, keeping their weapons and organizations and even in some cases their areas of operation. After the surge, as the Americans tried to turn over security functions to Iraqi forces, some of these people went back into violent opposition. American units were dispatched to support the Iraqi forces fighting these erstwhile enemies turned allies turned enemies again. This is how the Washington Post described one of those springtime confrontations:

  As Apache helicopter gunships cruised above Baghdad’s Fadhil neighborhood, former Sunni insurgents fought from rooftops and street corners against American and Iraqi forces, according to witnesses, the Iraqi military and police. At least 15 people were wounded in the gunfights, which lasted several hours. By nightfall, the street fighters had taken five Iraqi soldiers hostage.

  Despite such incidents, security didn’t deteriorate as quickly as I thought it would, and instead the confrontations between the Sons of Iraq and Iraqi forces tailed off. Then, in late June, when American troops closed outposts in the cities and moved back to big bases, there was a spate of bombings and other violence, with a series of blasts against Christian churches. But again the violence seemed to decline somewhat. Sunni and Shiite militias didn’t start re-emerging, as many Iraqis feared—and as I did, having seen Iraq in 2006—when there was a small civil war in and around Baghdad.

  Yet much worry remains just under the surface, especially among Iraqis in sensitive positions. As the Americans pulled back, people who had allied with them at the local level expressed alarm. “I never expected we’d come to this point,” Hassan Shama, the head of a “district council” in Baghdad’s Sadr City, told a reporter. “The U.S. Army and the U.S. Embassy have abandoned us. After six years of very hard work, we’re worthless. They call us agents, spies for the Americans.” Such fear is noteworthy especially because it is expressed while the American military still maintains a large presence in the country. The apprehension is likely to grow in 2010 if the Obama administration is able to draw down as planned, with more than ten thousand troops leaving every month from spring through late summer.

  The best answers of the future of the security situation have been offered in two forward-looking analyses, one by an American, the other by an Iraqi. The first, by Adam Silverman, who in 2008 served as a political adviser to a brigade of the 1st Armored Division on the outskirts of Baghdad, found several indicators that the central government was not taking the steps necessary to bind it to the people. Shiite sheikhs as well as Sunni ones perceived the central government as a subsidiary of the Iranian government. “Even by Shia . . . the members of it are viewed as either Iranian agents or Iranians,” he wrote.

  Also, Silverman wrote, the central government wasn’t providing services, and
so was disconnected from the tribes. “The lack of tethering . . . of governmental structures to the most powerful socio-cultural dynamic in Iraq, the tribal system, is worrying.” This lack threatened to undo the political gains of the surge era, he warned. “The concern is that unless the population layer, which is tribally oriented, is fully activated and brought into the mix, the hard work, grounded in the COIN [counterinsurgency] reality of empowering the lowest levels . . . will fail.” Silverman also concluded that the two groups enjoying broad indigenous support were the former insurgents known as the Sons of Iraq and the Sadrists. These groups—one Sunni, the other Shiite—are bitter foes. Their commonalities are their inclination to use violence and their anti-Americanism. This certainly wasn’t where the U.S. government had placed its bets.

  The second discussion was by Najim Abed al-Jabouri, the former mayor of Tall Afar, the northwestern Iraqi town that saw the first major successful sustained counterinsurgency campaign in the war. In a different place than Silverman and with a very different perspective, he came to a remarkably similar set of conclusions. In contrast to American views of the Iraqi security forces, or ISF, he wrote, “Iraqi assessments suggest that without separating the ISF from the incumbent ethno-sectarian parties, the ISF will be a tool for creating instability in the country. Iraqis realize that the reasons and justifications for a civil war are still at play in Iraq.” In other words, the Iraqi military and police were not a force for stability any more than the politicians were.

  A major reason that the army and police were likely to fracture the country, al-Jabouri continued, was that political meddling had created a divisive situation within those forces. “The majority of [Iraqi army] divisions are under the patronage of a political party,” he asserted. Unusually, he then listed the political affiliations of various units: the 8th Iraqi Army division in Kut and Diwaniya was heavily influenced by the Dawa party, the 4th Division in Salahudeen was under the sway of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the 7th Division was responsive to the Iraqi Awakening Party, and the 5th division in Diyala heeded the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. It was as if the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne cleared its movements with Nancy Pelosi, the 101st Airborne vetted its orders with John McCain, and the 4th Infantry Division was hard-over libertarian or dominated by Texas separatists. Similarly, al-Jabouri added, many of the forces of the Ministry of Interior actually operated beyond the control of that ministry and instead reported to political parties. Officers who blow the whistle on the influence wielded by political parties over Iraqi army units risk losing their personal security guards as well as their jobs, he noted.