by Jim Mattis
At the same time, we Marines were working with the remnants of the Iraqi Army, excluding only those openly hostile to us or with innocent Iraqi blood on their hands. Over coffee, I hosted former Iraqi generals and elicited their views about reestablishing their army alongside us.
One sweltering afternoon, I dropped in to see Lieutenant Colonel Pat Malay, my battalion commander in the city of Diwaniyah. He had commandeered a soccer field and nailed together a string of plywood booths, staffed by Iraqi women counting out stacks of dinars. Outside the booths, thousands of dismissed soldiers were lined up, waiting to be paid their stipend to return to their unit’s barracks. The payment was the idea of my Army civil affairs officer. I concurred. They had no money and no job prospects, and I certainly did not want them taking up arms against us. Pat escorted me along the line.
“Take your pick, sir,” Pat said. “Military police, engineers, infantry, even a commando company—you name it and I can have it ready to deploy in three days. Every soldier here wants to be put back to work.”
It was not to be. Without consulting our military commanders in the field, Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Army and banned most members of the Baath Party from government positions. Under Saddam, technocrats had kept their jobs by belonging to the party. We could have weeded out the oppressors and die-hard Baathists without slicing off the sinews of governance, public services, and security. Demobilizing the Iraqi Army instead of depoliticizing it set the most capable group of men in the country on an adversarial course against us.
As an example of the disarray, we were methodically building the process for local elections when, against our advice, CPA told me to press for immediate elections. Swallowing our misgivings, we publicly engaged with tribal and local leaders to urge rapid elections, and then CPA suddenly reversed course, leaving us with egg on our face as we had to explain why we were now delaying elections we had been extolling.
In accord with CENTCOM planning, the U.S. Army was remaining, but we Marines were leaving Iraq, our positions taken over by Polish, Spanish, and Ukrainian units.
At the end of that long, hot summer, I took my division home. We had deposed Saddam and bought time for a new order to take shape. The British strategist B. H. Liddell Hart wrote that the object of war is to produce a “better state of peace.” I left having no confidence that we had done that.
BY THE FALL OF 2003, my 1st Marine Division was back in Camp Pendleton, and ships were at sea returning our equipment to California ports. I thought we were finished with Iraq and that we Marines would return to our traditional role of being a naval force in readiness. I focused on refurbishing our hard-used equipment and kicking training schedules into high gear. I was focused on North Korea. I always choose the toughest threat to train against.
Meanwhile in Iraq, mob protests were erupting, initially in the Sunni areas. Our soldiers were being engaged by hit-and-run attacks. From Baghdad to Basra, violence was also growing in Shiite areas.
Two months later, in November, as I was dressing for the Marine Corps Birthday Ball, a televised Pentagon briefing announced that the Marines were going back to Iraq. Shortly after, we received an official warning order: prepare to relieve the 82nd Airborne Division in Anbar Province, the heart of what was called the “Sunni Triangle.”
I immediately called John Kelly and said, “Get over there and find out what we’re getting into.”
I had to read the newspapers to understand the end state desired by President Bush. It was called the “Freedom Agenda.”
“America will take the side of brave men and women who advocate these values around the world,” the President said, “including the Islamic world, because we have a greater objective than eliminating threats and containing resentment. We seek a just and peaceful world beyond the war on terror.”
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Now we were going back, and again I had no specific policy guidance. I knew that we would have to provide security for the population, because in these “wars among the people,” the Iraqi people, not the nation’s capital, were the prize. That meant we would also be training Iraqi forces to take over security.
I was also certain that, within days of our taking over, sheiks, elders, and an assortment of local characters would expect my Marines’ take on civil matters. I wanted to know whether CPA had an economic blueprint for fostering recovery. Would we restart state-run industries or try to jump-start free enterprise? Would we focus on large-scale projects or microloans? Were elections in the offing, or should we support the traditional tribal sheiks?
In the U.S. military, we ride for the brand. If a civilian leader tells me to fight rustlers, that’s what I do. If he tells me to round up wild horses, I do that. And if he tells me my job is to help a new settler plow his cornfield, I’ll get off my horse, cinch my holster around my saddle horn, and get behind the plow. But again, in this case guidance was not forthcoming. My requests for clarity up the chain of command went largely unanswered.
John Kelly returned from his reconnaissance to Anbar. More than a million Sunnis lived there, split among a dozen major and more minor tribes. Most lived in a string of cities and farming communities running two hundred miles northwest from Baghdad along the Euphrates, all the way to the Syrian border. John explained that there was a difference of opinion about what was happening in Anbar.
“Corps headquarters in Baghdad,” Kelly said, “claims we’re fighting robbers and a few disgruntled former soldiers. The 82nd showed me coordinated patterns of attacks, especially in Fallujah.”
This struck me as odd, given that General John Abizaid, our new CENTCOM commander, had said months earlier that we faced a “classical guerrilla-type campaign.” Apparently the fedayeen, of little consequence the year before, had grown in capability.
“I’ve checked all our intel sources,” added Joe Dunford, who was now my division chief of staff. “The Sunnis were the top dogs. Now we’ve put the majority Shiites on top. The Sunni Salafists are preaching jihad across the province. About 150 terrorists a month are coming in from Syria.”
“So you two believe,” I said, “that we face an insurgency fueled by religion and supported by Sunnis who were thrown out of power by our invasion?”
“It’s already happened,” Kelly said. “The 82nd knows it’s facing a guerrilla war. Some in Baghdad refuse to admit it.”
John Kelly had also hit on the key to turning things around. He said we needed to persuade the Sunni tribes to accept the new reality and to organize a counterweight to compete politically with the majority Shiites. In a Middle East torn apart by sectarian strife, our intelligence community made abundantly clear that score settling would be the order of the day. Nevertheless, John believed that the Sunni tribes could be turned to our side. We set to work figuring out how to do that.
The central question was how to kill or capture the insurgents while persuading the population to turn against the insurgent cause. If we needed “new ideas” to help us construct our plan, old books were full of them. I reminded my men that Alexander the Great would not be perplexed by the enemy we faced. In 330 B.C., he first conquered the country, then instituted fair laws and orderly practices. It wasn’t a bad model to consider.
The result of John Kelly’s recon was a plan designed to persuade the tribes to provide recruits my Marines would train. We would patrol together and vest the locals with the responsibility and capability of protecting themselves from our common enemy.
My intent was to erode support for the Sunni extremist enemy while building an indigenous force to replace us. We would remain steadfast longer than the enemy could sustain their mayhem.
Sitting alone in my Camp Pendleton office and reflecting on two decades of deployments to a region with no democratic traditions, I knew the transition to a Shiite-dominated “democracy” would not be peaceful. I had to make clear to my Marines the dilemma we faced: We had to dia
l down the overall cycle of violence while dominating it at the point of enemy contact. We had to be both restrained and deadly.
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On the march to Baghdad, my refrain had been “speed and chivalry.” Now I had to persuade those same Marines to slow down, work with the locals, and think. Engage your brain before your trigger finger. As I had done before, I composed a one-page letter to describe my intent to all hands.
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A senior leader in any organization must recognize when his environment has changed. I adapted my touchstones accordingly. In my letter, I stressed that the fight would be long and we could not slack off as the months dragged on. I turned to the past to make my central point. In 300 B.C., Hippocrates, the father of medicine, wrote the oath taken by all doctors: “First, do no harm.” That fit our approach: We would perform our profession with discipline, rigor, and care. Finally, I stressed our heritage: Marines do not fail.
When I visited with each of my battalions, I stressed the same principles over and over. Behave with the same politeness you show at home. Remove your sunglasses when talking, and ask permission to enter a house; don’t kick the door down. If a man shoots at you on a crowded street, don’t fire back. Hunt him down another day and kill him.
I rapidly established “pre-deployment training” at an abandoned Air Force base near Camp Pendleton. It included rudimentary Arabic language training, a revised reading list on counterinsurgency operations, Vietnam Marine vets from the Combined Action Platoons on their techniques, and Los Angeles Police Department officers sharing community and barrio policing techniques.
Knowing that this would be a hard fight, I also sent a letter to the families (see Appendix D), assuring them that together we could overcome any challenge, sharing our courage and steadfastness. I next prepared and distributed my commander’s intent, as follows.
COMMANDER’S INTENT: My aim is to make common cause with the Iraqis, providing security until Iraqi forces are fully manned, trained, and equipped to assume the mission in order to restore civil administration.
Exploiting the 82d ABN’s successes and creating a model of stability in our zone for all Iraq, we will act swiftly to diminish frustrations and conditions that cause any Iraqis to support anti-coalition efforts. Rewarding those Iraqi areas that turn against former regime elements, we use their example to turn the population against the enemy. Concurrently we will defeat noncompliant elements through interdiction, elimination of sanctuary, and building trust with Iraqis to gain actionable intelligence. These two lines of operations—diminishing the causes for anti-coalition efforts and destroying non-compliant forces—will facilitate transition to political, administrative, and social conditions for a free Iraq in our zone. Wrapping all our actions in a blanket of information operations, we will do no harm to innocent Iraqis, using focused and discriminate force by sturdy Marines who will remain unfazed by enemy actions.
Through presence, persistence, and patience, our end state is a functioning Iraqi civil administration with Iraqi security forces replacing USMC security elements.
ANBAR
I knew from the British experience in Malaysia and our experience in Vietnam that we needed one soldier per twenty inhabitants to succeed in a counterinsurgency. In Anbar, our ratio would be closer to one per forty civilians.
As the CIA and military intelligence officers briefed me, it became obvious that the densely packed cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, thirty miles apart, represented the most violent area in all of Iraq. I set up my division headquarters on the outskirts of Ramadi, the provincial capital. The MEF headquarters was located adjacent to Fallujah, the most hostile city in the country.
When General John Abizaid arrived to talk with the sheiks, insurgents attacked the meeting place and tried to kill him.
In Fallujah, a month before we took charge from the 82nd Airborne, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) stormed the city jail, killing twenty-three policemen. The murders went unavenged, leeching power from the sheiks. AQI’s most notorious leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a cunning thug with a lust for killing, was hiding in the city. Zarqawi directed suicide bombers against Westerners, Shiites, and those Sunnis he deemed apostate. Even the Al Qaeda leadership, hiding in Pakistan, told him to restrain his wanton killing.
Abdullah al-Janabi, the highest-ranking mullah in Fallujah and a sly, excitable zealot, was Zarqawi’s patron. Following his example, hundreds of clerics were preaching anti-American sentiment with increasing venom. Among the sheiks and city elders, it was hard to distinguish the ones who were keeping their mouths shut to stay alive from those who were the true jihadists.
By the time my small leadership team and I arrived in late January 2004 to start coordination for my inbound troops arriving in February, attacks inside Fallujah were becoming more and more common. The on-scene U.S. Army battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Brian Drinkwine, speaking from six months’ experience, warned that my Marines would “be bloodied.” I could sense that the window of opportunity to avoid a full-blown fight was closing rapidly. The highways and ratlines from Syria were wide open for foreign fighters. We had very few reliable local Iraqi forces, and we were still developing informant networks. The terrorists were coming together for attacks and then falling back into safe houses in the city. Very few civilians would dare inform against them, and even if someone wanted to inform, they didn’t know which Iraqi officials could be trusted not to betray them, and we Americans hadn’t proved that we would stick around.
In late March 2004, the transfer of U.S. military authority for Fallujah passed from a battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division to one of my Marine battalions. During the low-key ceremony at City Hall, insurgents snuck up and let loose a fusillade of rocket-propelled grenades and mortar shells in an attempt to kill their own town council members.
Less than a week after my division had taken charge of Anbar, I was on the highway approaching Saqlawiyah, a small village near Fallujah. The local sheiks had semi-agreed to expel a gang of insurgents in return for electric power. If we sealed the deal, I’d provide the generators. I heard over the radio that John Kelly and his team had been in a scrape several miles away and were returning to base with the wounded. The op center also reported that two hundred miles to the northwest, on the Syrian border, a Marine company was heavily engaged. At the same time, Army Colonel Buck Connor, commanding an Army/Marine brigade in the Ramadi zone, came up on the radio, asking me to drop by to talk about a big fight he had on his hands. Already, these were the normal reports coming in from across fifty thousand square miles of battle space.
One item relayed to me was that four civilian contractors had driven into Fallujah without checking in with the Marines. This was a frequent frustration for me, because they didn’t understand the danger. Joe Dunford called me.
“CNN is showing the burnt bodies of the contractors hanging from a bridge,” he said. “The whole world is seeing this.”
When I walked into our operations center about an hour later, I saw pictures of a gleeful mob dancing below the blackened bodies dangling on the bridge. Knowing this enemy, I was not surprised by the barbarity, and I was already thinking about how to get the bodies back and kill those responsible. Among the competing tribes in the city, we had contacts who would help us.
John Kelly and Joe Dunford joined me in my office to assess the situation. The lynching had been seen on television sets across Iraq. If we charged in, many innocent people would die, uniting the city behind the killers.
“The best we can hope for in Fallujah,” Joe said, “is not to lose ground with the people. Not to have an emotional jihad uprising because of something we do, or let Fallujah fester as an insurgent base.”
I didn’t want to provoke an already aroused population further. If we rolled in with tanks, excited teenagers would hurl rocks and bottles of gasolin
e with flaming wicks. One errant round from a tank gun could have tragic consequences. It didn’t take us more than fifteen minutes to decide on a low-key, three-step approach.
First, we would avoid sparking further outbursts. Working with certain sheiks, after the mob dispersed, John Toolan would arrange to bring out the bodies. Second, we had to hold to a steady course. Across Anbar, our commanders would continue their patrols to provide security. Third, we would deliver justice by the discriminate use of force. We would learn the identities and locations of the ringleaders, using pictures of the murderers who had posed among the bodies and overhead photos of their homes. We would respond with raids at times of our choosing. I would employ, to quote Napoleon, “an iron fist in a velvet glove.”
The defilement of the human body affronts our sense of dignity. Homer, in describing how Achilles had dragged Hector’s body behind his chariot during the Trojan War, condemned Achilles, regardless of his warrior fame. Civilization progresses, Homer taught us, only when the strongest nations and armies respect the dignity of the weakest. In Fallujah, our military strength would be guided by moral power, just as it has been since George Washington first commanded our Continental Army. By killing those who had violated our common humanity while maintaining our moral compass, I intended to demonstrate that there is no better friend and no worse enemy than a United States Marine.