No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy

by Jim Proser

  Mattis wrote, “[T]his shows a commander who has lost his moral balance or has watched too many Hollywood movies. By our every act and statement, Marine leaders must set a legal, moral and ethical model that maintains traditional Marine Corps levels of discipline.”15

  But privately to a friend, Mattis had a personal concern about his Marines’ mental readiness in spite of all he had done to prepare them. Ricks quotes this email:

  Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun. For all the “Fourth Generation of War” intellectuals running around saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new etc., I must respectfully say, “Not really.” Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying—studying, not just reading—the men who have gone before us. We have been fighting on the planet for 5,000 years and we should take advantage of their experience. “Winging it” and filling body bags as we sort out what works reminds us of the moral dictates and the cost of incompetence in our profession.16

  Perhaps with the example of Lieutenant Colonel West on his mind, Mattis again stresses moral discipline regarding the enemy and the innocent:

  Recall Beirut, my fine young men, and the absolute need for Iraqis to see the American military as impartial. We will be compassionate to all the innocent and deadly only to those who insist on violence, taking no “sides” other than to destroy the enemy. We must act as a windbreak, behind which a struggling Iraq can get its act together.17

  On professional humility and respect for the capabilities of the enemy, Mattis sends, very likely from his personal library, T. E. Lawrence’s 27 Articles, in which Lawrence of Arabia warns his fellow Englishmen about fighting an Arab war: “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.” Lawrence goes on, “Unnumbered generations of tribal raids have taught them more about some parts of the business than we will ever know.”18

  Mattis reviews and emphasizes the importance of the reading material in numerous follow-up meetings. His commander’s intent is loud and clear: the coming fight will be confusing, difficult, and bloody, and their first command is “Be ready at all times to win the ten-second gunfight.”19 The second is to avoid harming Iraqi civilians. In Mattis’s words, “If someone needs shooting, shoot him. If someone does not need shooting, protect him.”20 The third and final is to to win hearts and minds by respecting and helping the Iraqis.

  The First Division prepares for the coming bloodshed comforted with a deeper understanding. This comfort is tempered by the alarming fact that, on Mattis’s orders, they are leaving behind the watchful Marine artillery that shielded and saved them so often during OIF 1.

  In contrast to the success of Mattis’s Marines in the southern provinces, four separate US Army units operating in the Sunni Triangle, ending with the Eighty-Second Airborne, tried and failed to win the hearts and minds of the suddenly powerless Sunni tribes. The Army failed mainly because US envoy Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), was in the process of destroying all remnants of Saddam’s army, along with his Ba’ath political party. Part of this process was to cut off all payments, in spite of the billions of dinars sitting in the captured Iraqi treasury, to any Ba’ath party member or Iraqi Army officer of the rank of colonel or above. More than any other action, this inflamed the once privileged army commanders and intelligence officers and guaranteed their violent insurgency.

  Ba’athists were then purged from the Iraqi parliament, and the remaining Shia leaders showed no sympathy for the plight of their recent tormentors. Into this political vacuum stepped former enemy Iran, al-Qaeda leaders like Zarkawi, and local clerics like Muqtada al-Sadr, who wanted to add the now furious Sunnis to their own ranks. Saddam’s disbanded army gathered by platoons and companies and whole battalions, complete with weapons, ammunition, and Iranian support, in northern cities like Ramadi and Fallujah. The Army’s Eighty-Second Airborne didn’t stand a chance of mollifying them.

  As insurgent attacks increased, the Eighty-Second responded with overwhelming firepower, killing local civilians in the exchanges. Suddenly America was in a blood feud with an entrenched, well-equipped, well-led urban enemy that was being protected by local civilians. Once liberators, the Americans were now seen as occupiers, exactly what Mattis had warned against and successfully avoided in the south.

  Saddam and Osama were now both in hiding, but by the capricious gods of war had the Americans exactly where they wanted them. It would be bloody house-to-house and hand-to-hand combat. It would be a havoc of medieval savagery, including beheadings, dismemberments, and impalings. It would kill thousands, including women, children, Iraqis, and Americans indiscriminately. It would generate horrible headlines and many body bags returning to America. It would not be quick.

  As Mattis would tell new Marines coming into Fallujah to prepare them emotionally, “Fallujah’s the most morally bruising place in Iraq. It’s going to rock you when an IED goes off and there’s blood and shit all over you. Hold the line. Show the people respect. We’re here to win.”21

  January 2004—Sunni Triangle, Iraq

  Major General Mattis and aides conduct a recon of Anbar Province, examining the enemy, terrain, and recent after-action reports. Mattis orders First Division headquarters to remain in Ramadi, where the Eighty-Second Airborne is headquartered in a captured palace on the banks of the Euphrates, halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. Ramadi is the political capital of Anbar Province, with strategic access to the Euphrates River valley. The new headquarters is called Camp Blue Diamond, after the First Division’s insignia.

  The former palace, located on a spit of land cooled by the breezes off the winding Euphrates, was a favorite retreat of Saddam’s government ministers. It is in the better part of Ramadi, among the expensive riverfront homes of many of Saddam’s former senior intelligence officers. In other words, it is surrounded on three sides by nests of very sophisticated spies. Some neighboring houses and many street corners, shops, and markets along Route 10, a main east-west boulevard leading to and from the front gate of Mattis’s headquarters, are often listening posts, feeding information to the insurgent network.

  Within the Camp Blue Diamond compound itself, the Kellogg, Brown, and Root company employs dozens of Indians, Pakistanis, Turks, and Bangladeshis to provide meals, clean laundry, distribute newspapers and magazines, and dispose of trash. The workers, hired through Jordanian and Turkish subcontractors, are everywhere. They see who comes into the base, they see when patrols go out and how long they stay out. They may hear snatches of unguarded conversation in the chow line. They see deference paid to a certain slight, bespectacled, and energetic general with two stars embroidered on his flak vest, who sometimes appears in the American newspapers. They likely provide discarded newspapers to the surrounding spy houses where Saddam’s officers read that the new American commander’s name is Jim Mattis.

  Major General Charles Swannack, the Eighty-Second Airborne’s commander, welcomes Mattis. He tells him he has three problems with Mattis’s approach.22 First, he says the Marines are going to need their artillery. Swannack will comment later, “After seeing how we got mortared and rocketed in the evenings, they decided to bring it.” Second, he advises Mattis against the US Marines’ Combined Action Program (CAP) for law enforcement and infrastructure rebuilding, which Mattis had applied successfully to win hearts and minds in southern Iraq. “I told them that the CAP program wouldn’t work,” Swannack will say, “that Anbar Province wasn’t ready for it then, and maybe never, because they didn’t want us downtown.” Third and most pointedly, he disparages Mattis’s plan for Marines to distinguish themselves from the Army troops, with their sand-colored desert camouflage, by issuing green jungle camouflage and black boots to the
Marines. Swannack let Mattis have it: “I told him that was a personal affront to me, and that a relief should be seamless.” Mattis agrees with Swannack about the artillery and the uniforms, saying, “What I was trying to do was break the cycle of violence. He took it personally. I appreciated his candor.”23

  But Mattis doesn’t budge on his version of CAP. Each Marine battalion will have one platoon that is briefed in depth on Arab customs and language. That platoon will teach its parent company, and then all the companies will inform the battalion at all levels.24

  Swannack feels the Eighty-Second Airborne is doing a good job in Ramadi and the restive nearby city of Fallujah: “I think Fallujah was being managed appropriately, with surgical operations based on precise intelligence.”25 But up the chain of command the assessment, especially concerning Fallujah, is not good. General John Abizaid, commander of all US forces at Central Command, is pressuring Swannack to do more about Fallujah. Mattis has heard the scuttlebutt but had high confidence in his own plan for the city: “I knew Fallujah would be tough. We were going to use the softer forms, focus on lights and water, and go in with small teams to kill the bad guys at night.”26

  But the vagaries of war dash Mattis’s plan almost immediately. Fallujah spins out of control soon after the First Division arrives, and quickly descends into tragedy. Lieutenant General James Conway, Mattis’s superior officer and commander of all Marine forces in Iraq, says today about the situation they inherited back then, “The first week we were in Ramadi we had four Marines and one corpsman dead.”27

  Pacification of Anbar and the northern provinces also suffers from the Washington, DC, mythology that the Marines can always be counted on to adapt, overcome, and get the job done with less, particularly with the lucky and gifted Jim Mattis running things on the ground. But with the northern provinces covering an area about the size of North Carolina and with a few of its major cities already in flames, limited support from the withdrawing US Army, and wavering support from Bremer’s CPA in Baghdad, the First Division is simply stretched too thin.

  Mattis saw the problem the previous April, even as Rumsfeld and the Pentagon officials continued to insist that there were enough troops. He noted in an internal message, “The lack of Army dismounts [regular infantry] is creating a void in personal contact and public perception of our civil-military ops.”28

  Colonel John Toolan, a key commander on the march up to Baghdad and now in charge of Regimental Combat Team 1 in Fallujah, recalls the four basic missions for field commanders in Anbar: control major supply routes (MSRs), develop Iraqi security forces (ISF), destroy insurgent sanctuaries, and create jobs. He described the Marines’ problem this way: “The challenge was, when we controlled the MSR and developed the ISF, there was no one left to eliminate sanctuaries or create jobs. So it was like whack-a-mole.”29

  Instead of quietly pacifying the people, the Marines quickly end up engaging in some of the most savage fighting America has ever known. Mattis’s lucky streak appears to be running out.

  0920 Hours—12 February 2004—Ramadi

  As the transition from Eighty-Second Airborne to the First Marine Division is under way, the outgoing Swannack and his boss, Lieutenant General John Abizaid of Central Command, ride through Ramadi in convoy to meet with Sunni leaders for top-level discussions. They are under the highest level of protection from Iraqi security forces, as well as US armored units in the convoy.

  The streets are crowded with vehicles and pedestrians. The convoy slows to a crawl along Route 10 as beggars in dark dishdashas and checkered kaffiyeh scarves line the roadsides, hands outstretched for a coin or bottle of water. Children jostle for position yelling at the convoy for candy and the highly prized Oreo cookies. They are all smiles and thumbs-up, but behind them on the sidewalks, loitering in the shadows of the open-air clothing and vegetable stalls, are a thousand eyes of the insurgency. Cell phones text the location of the convoy down the route to young men on motorbikes, who join the flow of traffic ahead of the American generals. On rooftops above the convoy, Iraqi security melts away and is replaced by faces hidden behind wrapped kaffiyehs. RPGs come up to their shoulders, sighted in on the center of the roadway. As the convoy rolls slowly into the kill zone, fire pours down on it from all directions.

  The convoy returns fire, and the generals’ armored vehicles plow headlong between the vehicles ahead of them, pushing small cars, bicycles, and motorbikes aside or rolling over them, crushing innocent motorists beneath their wheels. Motorbikes zoom up, flanking the convoy, spray it with fire from AK-47s, and then disappear down narrow alleys where the American vehicles can’t follow. Prepositioned artillery shells camouflaged in piles of trash along the route explode on signal from nearby cell phones. The generals are slammed against the sides of their rocking vehicles as the ambush zeroes in on them. Fire erupts from RPGs, slamming into unlucky civilian vehicles. Shrapnel sprays across the sidewalks into the crowds of children and shoppers.

  The battered convoy races out of the kill zone, with two of America’s top military commanders bruised but alive. The scheduled discussions with Sunni leaders and Iraqi security commanders is an unhappy and brief encounter, and a source of deep shame for the Iraqis. They have failed spectacularly in their duty to protect the Americans. Talk of further cooperation is curt and inconclusive. The generals return to Camp Blue Diamond by a different route.

  6 March 2004—Fallujah

  The First Marine Division is nearly up to strength as troops and equipment pour into Camp Blue Diamond. Mattis, as commander on the ground in Anbar Province, and General Conway, commander of Marine forces in Iraq, coordinate to apply Mattis’s successful strategy in the south to the northern provinces. Mattis will handle the interface of Marines with local Iraqis; Conway will run interference with Washington and Baghdad to get the Marines what they need, including a free hand to operate differently than the Army.

  General Conway recalls one of the first pacification missions for a CAP unit in Iraq: “Somewhere down south, the date palms needed to be sprayed. The bugs would eat the dates and the region would lose the whole crop. We didn’t know what kind of spray or whatever they needed like equipment, but we got on the phone and we got those trees sprayed.”30

  As expected, in spite of the Marines’ good works, the war rages on. On the outskirts of Fallujah, insurgents set a fuel tanker ablaze and create a staged multicar accident to divert Iraqi police away from the center of the city. As police arrive at the blazing tanker, they are immediately surrounded with a snarl of screaming, honking motorists. In the city, insurgents launch a massive attack against three police stations, the mayor’s office, and a civil defense base. At least seventeen police officers are killed, and as many as eighty-seven imprisoned insurgents are sprung out of jail cells.

  In spite of the fact that the Eighty-Second Airborne has largely withdrawn and no longer regularly patrols the streets of Fallujah, not even retaliating for the earlier attack on Swannack and Abizaid, Swannack decides that the police murders demand a response. He retaliates by conducting lightning raids of homes, businesses, and schools, which damage property and sometimes lead to shootouts with the locals. The Eighty-Second also blows up city property that they think might be used to hide IEDs, such as curbs and road barriers. The Army’s retaliation provokes angry demonstrations in the city, during which the Eighty-Second claims that shots are fired at them. They return fire into the crowd, and seventeen local Fallujans are killed. It is now a full-blown blood vendetta between besieged Fallujans seeking retribution and the American occupiers.

  1100 Hours—20 March 2004—Camp Blue Diamond, Ramadi

  Exactly one year to the day after Mattis and the First Division crossed the berms from Kuwait and successfully marched on Baghdad, Lieutenant General Swannack transfers authority over Anbar Province to the I Marine Expeditionary Force, commanded by Lieutenant General Conway and Major General Mattis.31 In what might be a critical oversight in the transfer of authority, unlike the Shia in the south, Sad
dam’s loyal Sunnis in Anbar and the north were never actually defeated during Mattis’s spring blitzkrieg. Many in Anbar have not yet begun to fight. Lighting the fuse of this powder keg is accomplished by Paul Bremer’s de-Ba’athification program that has impoverished and insulted seventy thousand proud Fallujah men. These seventy thousand now nurse their grudges against the Americans and plot revenge. Conway and Mattis are not really inheriting a pacification mission; more accurately, they are continuing the march from Kuwait but against a different and highly motivated enemy.

  Making matters on the ground even worse, the insurgents have access to what is estimated to be more than a million metric tons of ordnance and weapons in ten thousand bunkers spread across Iraq—mortar shells, RPGs, rifle ammunition, and high explosives. US commanders rolling through Iraq in the spring invasion avoided detonating the bunkers for fear they contained poison gas or radioactive stockpiles, Saddam’s infamous WMDs, that might be blown into the air, killing US soldiers and Iraqi civilians. So the bunkers have remained fully stocked and available to the insurgents.

  But that isn’t all. In his paper U.S. Marine Corps Operations in Iraq, 2003–2006, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Ken W. Estes describes an Anbar Province crisscrossed by “terrorist infiltration routes, termed ‘rat lines,’ extending from Syria to Ramadi and Fallujah,” where “age-old smuggling routes, tribal cross-border associations and active Syrian support provided the insurgencies with a steady supply of money and sanctuaries . . . radical elements could infiltrate through a system of safe houses, counterfeit document providers, training areas, and routes.”32