The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  Petraeus, an intensely competitive officer with a Ph.D. from Princeton, assembled a brilliant staff to reassess and redirect the war. Laughing, he recalls, “I didn’t get all these superstars in Iraq because people wanted to send me their best people. I got them because I said I’ve just been picked for mission impossible; the president supports it; and, with respect I’d like to get H. R. McMaster over here and I’m going to take this guy and I want that guy.”

  Petraeus brought with him to Iraq a sense that there was a plan. And he also had the full support of Bush, with whom he held a weekly private videoconference, which was unprecedented since the president was circumventing several levels in the chain of command to speak to his field commander. Watching Petraeus’s BUA, or Battlefield Update Assessment, held every morning at “Camp Victory” in Baghdad, was to see a master at work, cajoling and cheerleading his commanders across the country via video link as they reported on every variable of the Iraqi body politic from the grandest of political issues to the minutest of water projects.

  The new team and new approach got American soldiers out of their bases and into the neighborhoods and was amplified by the arrival of what would eventually become the thirty thousand soldiers of the surge. Petraeus outlined that “population-centric” strategy in a three-page letter he distributed to all of the soldiers under his command. “You can’t commute to this fight.… Living among the people is essential to securing them and defeating the insurgents … patrol on foot and engage the population. Situational awareness can only be guaranteed by interacting with people face-to-face, not separated by ballistic glass.”

  Sky says that Petraeus played another key role, which was buying time in Washington for the new strategy to work. “In showing that there was somebody in charge, somebody credible, that there was a policy. He owned the policy and he owned the implementation. Now without his strategic communications, without people’s belief in Petraeus we would never have got the time.”

  O’Sullivan says the concern at the White House during the summer of 2007 was that the political will to do what was necessary to roll back the violence in Iraq was beginning to evaporate: “Where everyone was very worried was with Congress. I think we were very nervous that we would lose the opportunity to fully execute.” A telling defection in Congress was that of Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the foreign policy eminence grise of the Republican Party. On June 25 Lugar took to the Senate floor to withdraw his support from the surge, saying, “Persisting indefinitely with the surge strategy will delay policy adjustments that have a better chance of protecting our vital interests over the long term.”

  The greatest test of whether the political will existed to continue with the ramped-up Iraq effort was the congressional hearings held on the sixth anniversary of 9/11. On September 11, 2007, Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the veteran diplomat who was U.S. ambassador to Iraq, were grilled by both the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, on which happened to sit five senators all seriously vying for the presidency—Joe Biden, Christopher Dodd, Barack Obama, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton—one of whom would become president of the United States in just over a year. Petraeus recalls that the hearing “was just charged beyond belief. I mean, you could just feel the spotlight of the world on you. It was carried live in Baghdad.”

  Petraeus and Crocker gamely tried to present a picture of progress in Iraq but the Democrats were having none of it. Clinton interjected at one point: “You have been made the de facto spokesmen for what many of us believe to be a failed policy. Despite what I view as your rather extraordinary efforts in your testimony … I think that the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief.” This is Washington-speak for “you are either wrong or lying.”

  The day before, the duo had also testified before a joint hearing of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees. Petraeus knew it was going to be a rough day when he received a heads-up that the New York Times was running a full-page ad about him, paid for by the left-wing advocacy group MoveOn.org. Under a banner headline general petraeus or general betray us? the general was accused of “Cooking the Books for the White House.” The ad copy went on to assert, “Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed.… Most importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war.” Around six o’clock on the morning of his testimony, Petraeus, an avid runner, went for a lonely run as a new day dawned gray in Washington, D.C. “Talk about feeling like an ‘Army of One.’ … Man, I’ve just been called a traitor, in a newspaper I used to read every morning,” recalls Petraeus, a native of New York state.

  The two days of contentious congressional hearings each lasted a grueling eight or nine hours. Petraeus remembers sitting outside the PBS studio in northern Virginia where he and Ryan Crocker were scheduled to give interviews following one of the hearings, saying to his colleague, “‘You know, Ryan, I am never going to do this again.’ And he said, ‘Neither am I.’ It’s a little bit like the sentiment after you run a particularly grueling marathon, not just any marathon, but one in which you sort of ran into the wall at the nineteenth-mile mark, instead of the twenty-three-or twenty-five-mile mark.”

  General Ray Odierno, Petraeus’s massively built deputy, known as “Big O,” put two brigades of the newly arrived soldiers of the surge into Baghdad’s toughest neighborhoods and three more brigades into the “belts” surrounding the capital where AQI had established bases. This operational approach emerged following the December 2006 capture by U.S. Special Forces of documents that outlined al-Qaeda’s plan to control the belts around Baghdad so as to slowly strangle the city. It was in those belts that al-Qaeda hid its car-bomb factories and rest houses for its fighters. Odierno set out to destroy those havens.

  The surge of American soldiers brought a surge of American combat deaths as their deployments into neighborhood outposts exposed them to greater risk. In May 2007, 120 American soldiers died, the deadliest month in two years. For those who worked on the surge it was agonizing. “It was awful. We had a hundred a month we were losing. Everywhere we went, a little note would come to Odierno, ‘another guy dead, another guy dead,’” remembers his political adviser, Emma Sky. Odierno recalls, “The worst was May and June; the most difficult times. I was obviously concerned, but the reason I was still fairly confident it would work is because the majority of the deaths and the casualties were coming from us breaching these defensive belts that had been put in these safe havens.”

  Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations, a critic of how the Iraq War was going, was recruited by Petraeus to be one of two outside civilians to sit on his Joint Strategic Assessment Team (JSAT) to help him work up the new campaign plan for the war. The JSAT, which was chaired by Colonel H. R. McMaster, who had restored order to Tal Afar two years earlier, recommended that the Anbar Awakening model be expanded to the rest of Iraq. Biddle described this approach as “Tony Soprano does Iraq: we had to manipulate the incentive structures of all three of the major actors—the Kurds, the Shiites, and the Sunnis. We could not simply permanently align with any one of them. There are no good guys and bad guys; there are just ethno-sectarian groups that are at war with each other in a security dilemma. Our job is to resolve the dilemma by compelling them against their will to come to compromises.”

  Odierno also enthusiastically endorsed embracing America’s former enemies. Soon after assuming his new job as deputy commander, Odierno traveled in January 2007 to Ramadi, the city where the Awakening movement had first started, to meet with its leader, Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha. Odierno says Abdul Sattar “was somebody who was convinced that, together with the U.S. forces, they could beat al-Qaeda. And he was all in.… There were thirteen different tribes out there, and at that time there were only eight who were working with us. There were still five more that we were trying to bring over, and he was helping us to do that.”
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  Odierno says that by then other Sunni tribes in other provinces were clamoring to ally with the Americans against al-Qaeda: “We started getting feedback from other Iraqis saying, ‘Why can’t we have an Awakening movement?’ … So we had a large internal discussion, how do you reach out to someone who’s been trying to kill you, and fighting against you?” Odierno issued guidance to his commanders in February and March about how to move forward to set up Awakening movements around Iraq so that the Anbar model could be extended to the rest of the country.

  Odierno recalls that this was a hard sell to some of his commanders. “Initially, people were nervous about it, and rightfully so.… Once they got out there, and they started seeing the results and how willing people were to do this, they really bought into it.” The new approach precipitated literally hundreds of local cease-fires with insurgents and tribal leaders, deals that were often sweetened by substantial cash payments. Odierno points out that the new soldiers of the surge also helped this process: “As we were able to establish ourselves in areas we’d never been able to establish ourselves in, it gave them confidence to become part of the Awakening.” Odierno explains how this process worked: “We would go set up a patrol base. When we first got there nobody would talk to us, but when they saw the walls go up, and the permanent base, they’d come out of the woodwork. They’d go, ‘OK, they’re going to stay. So they will be here to help us; they’re not just going to leave and we’ll be left here and be slaughtered by al-Qaeda.’ When they knew we were going to stay and be there for a while, they gave us help and information.”

  There were also shifting dynamics on the ground in Iraq that would make the additional combat brigades of the surge a force multiplier rather than simply more cannon fodder for Iraq’s insurgents. Those changes included not only al-Qaeda’s weakening grip and the rise of the Awakening movements but previous sectarian cleansing that had forced more than four million Iraqis to flee their homes, and which made it harder for the death squads to find their victims. In Baghdad by the end of 2006, half the Sunni population had fled the city. Around the same time efforts to register all military-age Iraqi males using biometrics created a useful database of that population. And walls built around vulnerable neighborhoods kept insurgents out. Petraeus recalls that “we literally created gated communities all over Baghdad. And in some cases, we created gated cities like Fallujah. There was a period where we didn’t allow vehicles into Fallujah. There were massive parking lots outside the city of several hundred thousand people.”

  The better integration of human intelligence from the former insurgents on the American payroll and information from the vastly increased number of hours flown by unmanned aerial vehicles over Iraq—hours flown by UAVs in Iraq jumped from nearly 165,000 flight hours in 2006 to more than 258,000 in 2007—supplemented by signals intelligence and cell phone chain analysis, combined with the efforts of U.S. and Iraqi special forces, all integrated together, put the insurgents on the run in provinces across Iraq. Senior U.S. intelligence official David Gordon recalls, “By 2008, Special Forces were going on two rounds a night! They were going on an attack, getting new information; they were destroying the enemy … and that’s part of what happens when all of this works, is that you get this huge flow of intelligence that enables us.”

  Better bomb detection devices, such as drones equipped to spot subtle anomalies in roads indicating the presence of bombs; the increasing deployment of hulking armored vehicles with V-shaped hulls known as MRAPs, which are largely immune from roadside bombs; and an aggressive effort to map and target the networks of Iraq’s bomb makers all led to a decline in the number of deaths caused by the leading killer of U.S. soldiers—the improvised explosive device. The number of IED attacks in Iraq dropped from almost 5,000 in 2006 to around 3,000 two years later. Petraeus recalls that all of these factors were mutually reinforcing. “So you reverse a death spiral, basically. It wasn’t just a downward spiral.… And one aspect reinforces another, which makes something else possible, which reinforces another and then promotes better security which means, you just keep going up.”

  By 2008 the Sunni insurgent organizations in Iraq were largely defeated, but that was only one, albeit critically important, aspect of the problem that faced American commanders, because al-Qaeda had something of a Shia analogue, the Jaish al-Mahdi (the “Army of the Prophet”), known by its initials as JAM. Operating at the behest of the sullen young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, JAM fought pitched battles in 2004 with American forces in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf. Two years later JAM had grown to a force of some sixty thousand men, far larger than any of the Sunni insurgent groups.

  But as AQI gradually faded in importance, so too did JAM’s role as the protector of the Shia against the Sunni terrorists, and increasingly JAM began to be seen by the Shia population as just another predatory militia. The best predictor of future ethnic strife is acts of revenge for previous ethnic violence, and so as AQI and JAM declined in strength a reinforcing positive feedback loop began to take hold, and the numbers of Iraqi civilians dying in sectarian violence began a sharp decline from a high of around ninety every day in December 2006 to single digits two years later.

  The PowerPoint briefing slides so beloved of the U.S. military showed the violence in Iraq peaking in almost every category in the first months of 2007 and steadily dropping after that. That decline was true across the board, including attacks by insurgents, civilian deaths, U.S. soldiers killed, Iraq security forces killed, car-bomb attacks, and IED explosions. In December 2006, the U.S. military map of “ethno-sectarian” violence in Baghdad was colored mostly yellow, orange, and red, indicating medium to intense violence. The same map two years later was mostly colored green, indicating that the sectarian violence in Baghadad had largely subsided.

  JAM compounded its problems when in late August 2007 it started fighting another Shia militia, the Badr Corps, around the shrine of the holy city of Karbala, in southern Iraq, during pilgrimage season, clashes that killed scores. It was as if two mafia families had waged pitched gun battles in the vicinity of the Vatican in the middle of Easter, and it horrified most Shia. As a result Moqtada al-Sadr ordered JAM to stand down in a six-month truce that he later renewed.

  In the spring of 2008, JAM overreached yet again when it unleashed barrages of mortar and rocket attacks on the hitherto largely safe Green Zone in Baghdad, attacks that had landed close to the prime minister’s own house. By the last week of March, Maliki decided to launch an assault on the city of Basra, the key to the southern province that is the source of some 70 percent of Iraq’s oil wealth, which had been largely taken over by JAM.

  Maliki’s attack plan reflected his mounting frustration about the Shia gangs running rampant in Basra. He barely gave American commanders any warning about what he was doing. Petraeus recalls that this was a make-or-break moment for Maliki: “We saw it as a game-changer if he didn’t win. I remember the president saying, ‘This is a decisive moment,’ and I was telling Ryan [Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq], ‘Boy, I hope it’s decisive in the way I think he means,’ because it was such a rapid, such a sudden, frankly, arguably impulsive decision.”

  Senior U.S. intelligence official David Gordon recalls, “There were all of these questions being raised about Maliki, and President Bush said, ‘You know, we don’t have the luxury of choosing who our partners are.’ And I give President Bush … really, very high grades for his personal management of the relationship with Maliki.” National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley was in the Oval Office as Bush heard the news about Maliki’s impulsive move into Basra and recalls the president saying, “If he succeeds on this, it will transform him as a leader. He will become the leader of this country, and he will become a nonsectarian leader of his country. That’s what I’ve been looking for ever since we toppled Saddam Hussein. So, not only are we gonna support Maliki in this, but the Pentagon and the military better get some people down there and help get control of this operation, and make it a success.�
�� American advisers and air support soon arrived in Basra and the Shia militias were decimated.

  Maliki followed up the Basra operation with a similar American-supported drive by the Iraqi military into the vast Shia slums of Sadr City in Baghdad, from which many of the rocket and mortar attacks into the Green Zone were being launched. Maliki’s operations against JAM, however, were not just simple acts of single-minded patriotism, since they had the side benefit for the prime minister of neutralizing a major competing power center in the world of Shia politics.

  The Basra and Sadr City operations sent an important signal to the Sunni population that the Shia-dominated government would act against Shiite militias. It is hard to imagine a more anti-Shia and anti-Iranian group than the Sunni sheikhs of the Anbar Awakening, but after the Basra operation a group of four of them all took turns to say variations of “We are pleased with Maliki. The rest of the government other than the prime minister is Shia.” Before the Basra operation, their praise for Maliki, who had spent decades living in Iran and came to power because of his onetime alliance with Sadr, would have been inconceivable.

  And the operations in Sadr City and other parts of the country underlined the importance of another “surge,” the significance of which was largely missed in the United States: the Iraqi security services were now quite substantial and somewhat effective. By 2009 there were some six hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers and policemen, four times more than was then the case in Afghanistan, which is a much larger country with a larger population and is harder to control because of its mountainous topography.

  For years the Iraqi police had been seen by Sunnis, with ample justification, as just another ethnic-cleansing Shia militia. But in 2008 the new head of the police force, Major General Hussein al-Awadi, fired eighteen of the more sectarian of his twenty-seven battalion commanders and the force became much better balanced ethnically. Similarly, the Iraqi army was increasingly able to operate as a genuinely national force. For instance, the 1st Brigade of the 1st Division had no problem operating in the 2008 Basra operation despite the fact that it was a mixed force of 60 percent Sunni and 40 percent Shia.