The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  When the chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, released the final report of the Iraq Survey Group in late 2004, there were no weapons of mass destruction to be described. Saddam had never rebuilt his programs after they were destroyed by inspections, sanctions, and bombings in the 1990s; in the madhouse logic of his late rule, he had pretended to possess the weapons in order to deter an Iranian attack, in some cases fooling his top officers, in other cases being fooled by his top scientists. The American military’s greatest concern in Iraq had been a phantom. But the report also found that guerrilla war had been the enemy’s plan all along. “Saddam believed that the Iraqi people would not stand to be occupied or conquered by the United States and would resist—leading to an insurgency,” Duelfer wrote, basing his conclusions on CIA interrogations of the top members of the regime, including the number one himself. “Saddam said he expected the war to evolve from traditional warfare to insurgency.”

  Before the war, Iraqi intelligence had trained foreign fighters in explosives and marksmanship at a camp southeast of Baghdad, in Salman Pak. (Douglas Feith’s off-the-books intelligence shop and its friends in the Iraqi National Congress had described this operation as a terrorist training center, proof of the link between Saddam and al-Qaeda; instead, it was a training camp for the guerrilla war that the Pentagon had been unable to imagine.) Between August 2002 and January 2003, Iraqi commanders had removed weapons and equipment from bases and hidden them in farms and houses all over the countryside. On the eve of the invasion, Saddam had told his top ministers and commanders to hold out for eight days—“and after that I will take over.” American intelligence officials later came to believe that Saddam and his top generals were studying Vietnamese manuals on guerrilla tactics. Knowing that he had no unconventional weapons, the Iraqi dictator was getting ready for a different kind of war, one at least as old as the Romans. The American war planners assumed that they would encounter the kind of resistance they could most easily defeat. They didn’t want to fight a guerrilla war—after Vietnam it had ceased to be an option. In planning for the wrong adversary, they failed to follow the ancient military dictum to “know your enemy.” It was another failure of imagination.

  The Iraqi insurgents thus had time to prepare, they had the advantage of surprise, and they adapted quickly as the battlefield changed. In the early weeks of the insurgency, attacks against coalition forces tended to be straight-on assaults with small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. These tactics got a lot of insurgents killed at the outset. In the Darwinian nature of such wars, the smarter fighters survived and made adjustments. The most lethal of these was the IED, a homemade bomb composed of an artillery shell or other military munitions (available at unguarded factories and ammo dumps throughout the country), buried in a hole on the roadside or hidden in trash, rubble, or roadkill, and detonated either by wire or remotely with a device such as a garage-door opener or mobile phone. By midsummer, IEDs and other forms of ambush were killing several soldiers a week, mainly in what had come to be known as the Sunni Triangle, the area of Iraq’s center, west, and north between Baghdad, Ramadi, and Mosul.

  In Washington, Donald Rumsfeld called these attacks the work of a few “dead-enders.” The phrase suggested a handful of potbellied Baathists with dyed mustaches waging a pathetic last stand on behalf of some half-remembered notion of Arab socialist glory. Later, they became FRLs (former regime loyalists), then FREs (former regime elements), and finally AIFs (anti-Iraqi forces). “Now they’re just POIs—pissed-off Iraqis,” a senior CPA official said. “But there was always this desire to say that they were people that were bad guys, either diehard Saddamists or foreigners, not that they could just be regular Iraqis. It’s not our fault they hate us—they’re going to hate us whatever we do. There wasn’t a recognition that our own tactics may be fueling the opposition.”

  Facing the American role in the growth of the insurgency beyond the initial core group first required facing the insurgency itself. But in Washington there had been no plan for a guerrilla war; a guerrilla war would change all the calculations about the military presence in Iraq; and so there was no guerrilla war. On the ground in Iraq, the consequences of this willful blindness were as real and dire as the months or even years of delay in supplies of armored vehicles and body armor reaching American forces whose “operations tempo” was increasing every week. After the Army ordered more bulletproof vests, it took almost half a year for the first shipment to reach Iraq. By December 2003, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, was writing to the Pentagon that the shortage of spare parts and other equipment was so severe that “I cannot continue to support sustained combat operations with rates this low.”

  T. X. Hammes, a Marine colonel who devoted his career to studying guerrilla war, told me, “I am willing to bet the captain you were with understood he was in an insurgency very early. Our leadership was absolutely unable to make that leap. Bad news was very, very slow to filter up.” When President Bush stood on the deck of the carrier Abraham Lincoln on May 1 in front of an enormous banner proclaiming “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” and declared the end of major combat in Iraq, Hammes said to himself, “‘Oh, shit.’ It struck me that, my God, we don’t have any understanding at all of how bad this can be.”

  Hammes, a stocky, square-headed, blunt-spoken man, entered the Marine Corps a month after the fall of Saigon, and he spent the next three decades trying to figure out how an agricultural society of twenty million people had defeated the United States. It was not a question senior military leadership cared to explore. After Vietnam, “There was a pretty visceral reaction that we would not do this again. We stopped thinking about insurgency years ago. So even when we figured out Iraq was an insurgency, we didn’t know what to do about it.” Though the Marine Corps, as Hammes reminded me, had always been a “small-wars outfit” with a tradition of intellectual independence, he spent his career as something of an outlier. During a fellowship year, he studied the classic texts and cases of insurgency over the objections of his instructors, who told him, “You’re crazy, we don’t do insurgency,” and urged him to study something relevant, like conventional war in Europe. Then he pursued practical knowledge in the dirty little conflicts of the late Cold War—Honduras, Angola, Somalia, Afghanistan. He picked the brains of U.S.-backed guerrilla fighters, assuming that sooner or later people like them would become America’s main enemies. “I was sitting there thinking: If I’m a bad guy and I’ve got to fight the United States, that whole conventional thing doesn’t look that good. If you want to study your profession, go to the other guy’s side and look back.” After Hammes set down his years of thinking about insurgency in a book, publishers told his agent, “Interesting book, well-written, but a subject nobody’s interested in because it’s not going to happen.” The Sling and the Stone was finally accepted for publication in the spring of 2003, just as “it” started to happen.

  The Iraqi insurgency soon took on the characteristics that Hammes had written about. It was a fragmented network, which made it inefficient in some ways but also difficult to defeat because there was no central node of command; it could survive great damage. Its members learned by experience, watching their own coverage on al-Jazeera; they also coordinated their efforts through the media. They used the population, mainly by intimidation, but also by luring the Americans into violent overreactions that swung support their way. They chose soft targets. They lacked a unifying ideology—Hammes identified at least five groups in Iraq with different goals—and yet the solution to this kind of war must be political. Iraqi institutions of governance and security would have to become capable of winning the population’s allegiance. Meanwhile, the United States would have to make a long-term commitment to what was bound to be a protracted struggle. The ultimate arbiter would be the Iraqi and American publics.

  None of this was good news at the technology-minded Pentagon. Franks’s successor as chief of Central Command, General John Abizaid, an Arab American with a
better grasp of the strategic dangers in Iraq than his predecessor, acknowledged on July 16, 2003, that American forces were faced with “a classical guerrilla-type campaign.” He was directly contradicting his boss Donald Rumsfeld, who had said a couple of weeks earlier, “I guess the reason I don’t use the phrase ‘guerrilla war’ is because there isn’t one.” The soldiers on the ground in Iraq were far ahead of the senior leadership in Washington in recognizing the seriousness of the enemy they now faced. But even the sharpest of them had no ready-made model for understanding the Iraqi insurgency. The battalion commander I met in Kirkuk, Lieutenant Colonel Dom Caraccilo, said that the American role as liberators, occupiers, and counterinsurgents in Iraq had no parallel in our military history. “It’s hard to make a relevant comparison to anywhere. It’s very unique.” Postwar Germany and Japan, Vietnam, French Algeria—none was an exact template. “What we’re seeing here is a different face. This isn’t guerrilla warfare, it’s not some Maoist thing. I personally don’t think there’s an organizational structure like the Algerian FLN. It’s a hodgepodge. They didn’t have a plan—there’s no plan right now.”

  The Iraqi insurgency had no Mao, no Ho, no clear and popular political agenda. The killing of Uday and Qusay and the capture of Saddam had no strategic effect on it. There was little attempt to court the press (few Western journalists got anywhere close to the insurgents except by unpleasant accident or kidnapping, and even with arranged contacts they were sometimes lucky to return to their laptops). In Hammes’s experience of the small wars of the eighties and nineties, modern insurgencies were likely to be composed of dispersed cells, criminal gangs, ethnic militias, and regional warlords, sometimes cooperating, sometimes not, all festering in a weak state with corrupt local officials. The absence of a manifesto and a charismatic leader didn’t make them any less durable. What the Iraqi insurgency lacked in coherence it made up for in weapons, cash, and trained personnel.

  The key military tool in counterinsurgency is intelligence. Because of the planning failures and the slow recovery, this was exactly what the United States lacked in Iraq. There were nowhere near enough Arabic interpreters for each battalion—the Pentagon contractor hired to provide them, Titan Corporation, was reviled all over Iraq for its sluggishness—and soldiers often went out on patrol with no way of knowing what was being said to them, let alone what was not being said. In September 2003, a staff officer in a battalion in Baghdad wrote me:

  Security is not really something you can do anything about unless you have an intelligence network set up, or some sort of security force is at the right place at the right time to catch the right criminal or terrorist … There aren’t enough security forces, whether coalition or native, to do the job now. As it stands, a native-intelligence apparatus is non-existent. Our information comes from open-source intelligence, which means people walking up to the front gate and saying they have information and our intelligence officer debriefing him, or Iraqis who we deal with through the NACs offering up some information, which isn’t always useful. Also, sometimes the locals use us to carry out grudges against their neighbors. One translator who worked for us got our guys to raid a house he said had RPGs and contained individuals carrying out attacks on coalition forces. Nothing was in the house and the guy sleeping with his family inside told us immediately who it was that had sent us; he owed the translator money and the translator said he would sic the Americans on him. Turns out he was telling the truth. We fired and arrested our translator instead.

  The military kept claiming that its intelligence was getting better, tips were pouring in faster than intelligence officers could handle them. And yet the number of daily attacks kept rising and growing more sophisticated. In November, the bloodiest month since the invasion, the Pentagon estimated that the insurgency included five thousand fighters. This struck most people who had spent time in Iraq as improbably low. The United States still seemed reluctant to give this new, hidden enemy its due, as if, Hammes said, “This insurgency thing is an aberration, so we can get on with” the high-tech revolution in military affairs. He added, “There seemed to be kind of a feeling of ‘So what if it’s a guerrilla war?’ It really shocks people when you say that superpowers are zero and five against insurgents.”

  Arguably, the only modern success has been the British victory over communist guerrillas in Malaya in the 1950s, which took ten years. More than a year into the Iraq War, Hammes wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about Sir Harold Briggs, the retired British general who devised the political-military plan that led to the defeat of the communists in Malaya. After it appeared, Hammes got a call from Douglas Feith’s office: Would he write it up as a memo to the undersecretary by the following Monday? “Seems they’d never heard of Briggs,” Hammes said. He duly wrote the memo and sent it to the Pentagon. By then Feith was traveling; time went by, and Hammes never heard back. “Maybe it was the ten-year number that soured them,” he said. “But if they haven’t heard of Briggs, we’re in trouble.”

  Kalev Sepp, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who taught at the Navy’s Center on Terrorism and Irregular Warfare, went to Iraq twice in 2004. In the late eighties, as a Special Forces major, he had served as an adviser to a Salvadoran army brigade in what was a qualified, if brutal, success in counterinsurgency, and then he analyzed the Central American wars in his dissertation at Harvard, where he met Drew Erdmann. Sepp, like Hammes, was one of the independent thinkers on the margins of the military who had watched senior leadership fail to understand America’s strategic situation in the wars that followed September 11. (In Iraq, as in Vietnam, one continually found more insight among midlevel civilians and military than at the top—because the political pressure at that altitude was low enough for clear thinking to take place, and because their intellectual candor made professional advancement less likely.) Sepp was first recruited to study military intelligence in Iraq by General Abizaid, and he arrived at the palace in Baghdad in January 2004. He soon discovered that the officers working in the CPA felt a barely concealed or nakedly obscene contempt for most of their younger, inexperienced civilian counterparts rotating in and out on ninety-day tours. He also found that Lieutenant General Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq, and his staff had grown defensive to the point of paranoia toward anyone coming from outside. By then, things were going badly enough that any offer of help was seen as an attempt to place blame. There was plenty to go around—almost everyone realized that Sanchez was in way over his head—but relief of command at such a high level would have been an admission of failure, so Sanchez’s job was secure (he would only be punished after Iraq, when he failed to get his fourth star).

  At the palace, Sepp met an Army Special Forces colonel who sat two desks away from the door to Bremer’s inner office. Sepp engaged the colonel in conversation, trying to get a sense of the CPA’s strategic thinking, and at one point he used the word “insurgency.” The colonel held up his hand. “There is no insurgency here,” he said. “There’s a high level of domestic violence.” At V Corps headquarters out in Saddam’s old lakeside hunting lodge by the airport, Sepp found an atmosphere that suggested the routine business of staff work back in Heidelberg rather than any reckoning with a worsening war. The party line in Baghdad reflected the unimaginative approach that Sepp had seen coming from the Rumsfeld Pentagon. It was “kill-capture”: Success was measured in the number of insurgents and of top-level Baathists from the deck of playing cards who were eliminated. No one seemed able to explain why, with all the dead or detained, the number of insurgents kept increasing. The strategy was all wrong, Sepp realized. Instead of an emphasis on threats, it should have been on effects, the desired end-state, which would have put the center of action in the lives of Iraqis. “The most important thing is security—the security of the people,” Sepp said. “The problem was, we seized on the idea that our security was the most important thing. This is where there’s some sacrifice involved. The people have to be secured first.”

  This was the meanin
g of hearts and minds (a phrase, Sepp reminded me, first used by John Adams about the American Revolution): the establishment of a government to which Iraqis would be willing to risk giving their allegiance. The insurgents understood better than the Americans that the battle was for the loyalty of the population. They began slaughtering police recruits in part to show Iraqis that the new institutions couldn’t protect them. But the Americans, having dissolved the old Iraqi security forces, didn’t adapt quickly, didn’t seriously train and equip the new police, didn’t ensure the safety of Iraqis who came forward with intelligence. The early training efforts were focused on the formation of a conventional Iraqi army—the lowest priority, with a hundred and sixty thousand foreign troops already in Iraq. The trainers weren’t the experts from Special Forces, who were originally created to train foreign armies, but who were being used in Iraq to kick down doors. The Pentagon didn’t want the job of training Iraqi soldiers, and instead it was done by the CPA using a private contractor. Walter Slocombe, Bremer’s adviser on security, told me, “If we had been able to say at the beginning that training up the Iraqi army is a military mission, that would probably have been a good thing. The military didn’t want to do it.” A private corporation called Vinnell, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman, was hired on a $48 million contract. “They were supposed to train twenty-two battalions,” Sepp said. “They trained six—half of the soldiers deserted, and the remainder were judged untrained.” An officer on Abizaid’s staff came to inspect Vinnell’s work. “He was furious, he was furious, at how bad the training was and how bad the equipment was that Vinnell was giving the Iraqi soldiers.” The military took over the job from its inept contractor, but precious time had been lost, and with it the confidence of the Iraqi public.

  The Bush administration, seeing an exit strategy, wanted to claim high numbers of trained forces in a hurry and went for bargain-basement soldiers and police. Sepp said, “It was a failure of military leadership to look at political leadership and say, ‘I appreciate that there’s a presidential election coming up, but this is how it has to be done.’” The Pentagon and the occupation authority kept issuing utterly misleading figures on manpower and training. Even in 2003, Rumsfeld and Bremer threw around numbers in the range of 150,000, but in June 2004, the small print of a CPA report on the new police force revealed that fewer than six thousand out of almost ninety thousand had received serious academy training lasting more than two or three weeks. As a result, during the April uprising the undermanned, underequipped police abandoned their stations all over the south, and the new soldiers trained by battalions like Prior’s collapsed; national guardsmen refused to board helicopters that would ferry them to join the fight with Americans against fellow Iraqis.