Note from The
Raptor: This lengthy piece is the basis for the
administration's position on the "surge" - If you
are a Bush Apologist, this is a must read. If you want some
"benchmarks" this is also a must read. The Raptor
suggest that you copy this to your PC - print it out and read it
over several sittings because it is totally intense.
THE LESSON OF TAL AFAR
by GEORGE PACKER
Is it too late for the Administration to
correct its course in Iraq?
Issue of 2006-04-10
Posted 2006-04-03
Tal Afar is an ancient city of a
quarter-million inhabitants, situated on a smuggling route in the
northwestern desert of Iraq, near the Syrian border. In January,
when I visited, the streets had been muddied by cold winter rains
and gouged by the tracks of armored vehicles. Tal Afar's stone
fortifications and narrow alleys had the haggard look of a French
town in the First World War that had changed hands several times.
In some neighborhoods, markets were open and children played in
the streets; elsewhere, in areas cordoned off by Iraqi
checkpoints, shops remained shuttered, and townspeople peered
warily from front doors and gates.
Since the Iraq war began, American forces had
repeatedly driven insurgents out of Tal Afar, but the Army did not
have enough troops to maintain a sufficient military presence
there, and insurgents kept returning to terrorize the city. In
early 2004, the division that had occupied northwestern Iraq was
replaced by a brigade, with one-third the strength. A single
company-about a hundred and fifty soldiers-became responsible for
protecting Tal Afar. Insurgents soon seized the city and turned it
into a strategic stronghold.
Last fall, thousands of American and Iraqi
soldiers moved in to restore government control. This time, a
thousand Americans stayed, and they slowly established trust among
community leaders and local residents; by January, a tenuous peace
had taken hold. The operation was a notable success in the
Administration's newly proclaimed strategy of counterinsurgency,
which has been described by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as
"clear, hold, and build." Last month, in a speech in
Cleveland, President Bush hailed the achievement in Tal Afar as
evidence that Iraq is progressing toward a stable future.
"Tal Afar shows that when Iraqis can count on a basic level
of safety and security, they can live together peacefully,"
he said. "The people of Tal Afar have shown why spreading
liberty and democracy is at the heart of our strategy to defeat
the terrorists."
But the story of Tal Afar is not so simple.
The effort came after numerous failures, and very late in the
war-perhaps too late. And the operation succeeded despite an
absence of guidance from senior civilian and military leaders in
Washington. The soldiers who worked to secure Tal Afar were, in a
sense, rebels against an incoherent strategy that has brought the
American project in Iraq to the brink of defeat.
THE "I" WORD
Colonel H. R. McMaster, the commander of the
3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, is forty-three years old, a small
man, thick in the middle, with black eyebrows that are the only
signs of hair on a pale, shaved head. His features are deeply
furrowed across the brow and along the nose, as if his head had
been shaped from modeling clay; but when he grins mischief creases
his face, and it's easy to imagine him as an undaunted
ten-year-old, marching around and giving orders in his own private
war. The first time I saw him, he had a football in his hands and
was throwing hard spirals to a few other soldiers next to his
plywood headquarters, on a muddy airfield a few miles south of Tal
Afar.
McMaster and the 3rd A.C.R. had been
stationed in Tal Afar for nine months. When they arrived, in the
spring of 2005, the city was largely in the hands of hard-core
Iraqi and foreign jihadis, who, together with members of the local
Sunni population, had destabilized the city with a campaign of
intimidation, including beheadings aimed largely at Tal Afar's
Shiite minority. By October, after months of often fierce fighting
and painstaking negotiations with local leaders, McMaster's
regiment, working alongside Iraqi Army battalions, had established
bases around the city and greatly reduced the violence. When I met
McMaster, his unit was about to return home; the men were to be
replaced by a brigade of the 1st Armored Division that had no
experience in Tal Afar, and no one knew if the city would remain
secure. (Within weeks, there were reports that sectarian killings
were on the rise.)
The lessons that McMaster and his soldiers
applied in Tal Afar were learned during the first two years of an
increasingly unpopular war. "When we came to Iraq, we didn't
understand the complexity-what it meant for a society to live
under a brutal dictatorship, with ethnic and sectarian
divisions," he said, in his hoarse, energetic voice.
"When we first got here, we made a lot of mistakes. We were
like a blind man, trying to do the right thing but breaking a lot
of things." Later, he said, "You gotta come in with your
ears open. You can't come in and start talking. You have to really
listen to people."
McMaster is a West Point graduate who earned
a Silver Star for battlefield prowess during the 1991 Gulf War:
his armored cavalry troop stumbled across an Iraqi mechanized
brigade in the middle of a sandstorm and destroyed it. That war
was a textbook case of what the military calls "kinetic
operations," or major combat in relatively uncomplicated
circumstances; the field of battle was almost easier, some Gulf
War veterans say, than the live-fire exercises at the National
Training Center, in Fort Irwin, California. After the war,
McMaster earned a doctorate in history from the University of
North Carolina. His dissertation, based on research in newly
declassified archives, was published in 1997, with the title
"Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam." The
book assembled a damning case against senior military leaders for
failing to speak their minds when, in the early years of the war,
they disagreed with Pentagon policies. The Joint Chiefs of Staff,
knowing that Johnson and McNamara wanted uncritical support rather
than honest advice, and eager to protect their careers, went along
with official lies and a split-the-difference strategy of gradual
escalation that none of them thought could work. "Dereliction
of Duty" won McMaster wide praise, and its candor inspired an
ardent following among post-Vietnam officers.
In April, 2003, at the moment when General
Tommy Franks's "shock and awe" campaign against the
regime of Saddam Hussein appeared to be a clean victory, the Army
War College's Center for Strategic Leadership approved the release
of a monograph by McMaster entitled "Crack in the Foundation:
Defense Transformation and the Underlying Assumption of Dominant
Knowledge in Future War." McMaster, who describes himself as
"a bit of a Luddite," argued against the notion that new
weapons technology offered the promise of certainty and precision
in warfare. The success of the Gulf War, he wrote, had led
military thinkers to forget that war is, above all, a human
endeavor. He examined the messier operations of the
nineteen-nineties, beginning with the debacle in Somalia, and
concluded, "What is certain about the future is that even the
best efforts to predict the conditions of future war will prove
erroneous. What is important, however, is to not be so far off the
mark that visions of the future run counter to the very nature of
war and render American forces unable to adapt to unforeseen
challenges."
In the spring of 2003, McMaster joined the
staff of General John Abizaid at Central Command. Abizaid soon
took over from Franks, who got out of Iraq and the military just
as his three-week triumph over the Baathist regime showed signs of
turning into a long ordeal. Although the violence in Iraq was
rapidly intensifying, no one at the top levels of the government
or the military would admit that an insurgency was forming.
"They didn't even want to say the 'i'
word," one officer in Iraq told me. "It was the spectre
of Vietnam. They did not want to say the 'insurgency' word,
because the next word you say is 'quagmire.' The next thing you
say is 'the only war America has lost.' And the next thing you
conclude is that certain people's vision of war is wrong."
The most stubborn resistance to the idea of
an insurgency came from Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary,
who was determined to bring about a "revolution in military
affairs" at the Pentagon-the transformation of war fighting
into a combination of information technology and precision
firepower that would eliminate the need for large numbers of
ground troops and prolonged involvement in distant countries.
"It's a vision of war that totally neglects the psychological
and cultural dimensions of war," the officer said. Rumsfeld's
denial of the existence of the insurgency turned on
technicalities: insurgencies were fought against sovereign
governments, he argued, and in 2003 Iraq did not yet have one.
In October of that year, a classified
National Intelligence Estimate warned that the insurgency was
becoming broad-based among Sunni Arabs who were unhappy with the
American presence in Iraq, and that it would expand and intensify,
with a serious risk of civil war. But Rumsfeld, President Bush,
and other Administration officials continued to call the
escalating violence in Iraq the work of a small number of Baathist
"dead-enders" and foreign jihadis. For Rumsfeld, this
aversion became a permanent condition. Over Thanksgiving weekend
last year, he had a self-described "epiphany" in which
he realized that the fighters in Iraq didn't deserve the word
"insurgents." The following week, at a Pentagon press
conference, when the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Marine Corps General Peter Pace, said, rather sheepishly, "I
have to use the word 'insurgent,' because I can't think of a
better word right now," Rumsfeld cut in, " 'Enemies of
the legitimate Iraqi government'-how's that?"
The refusal of Washington's leaders to
acknowledge the true character of the war in Iraq had serious
consequences on the battlefield: in the first eighteen months, the
United States government failed to organize a strategic response
to the insurgency. Captain Jesse Sellars, a troop commander in the
3rd A.C.R., who fought in some of the most violent parts of
western Iraq in 2003 and 2004, told me about a general who visited
his unit and announced, "This is not an insurgency."
Sellars recalled thinking, "Well, if you could tell us what
it is, that'd be awesome." In the absence of guidance, the
3rd A.C.R. adopted a heavy-handed approach, conducting frequent
raids that were often based on bad information. The regiment was
constantly moved around, so that officers were never able to form
relationships with local people or learn from mistakes.
Eventually, the regiment became responsible for vast tracts of
Anbar province, with hundreds of miles bordering Saudi Arabia,
Jordan, and Syria; it had far too few men to secure any area.
A proper strategy would have demanded the coordinated
use of all the tools of American power in Iraq: political,
economic, and military. "Militarily, you've got to call it an
insurgency," McMaster said, "because we have a
counterinsurgency doctrine and theory that you want to
access." The classic doctrine, which was developed by the
British in Malaya in the nineteen-forties and fifties, says that
counterinsurgency warfare is twenty per cent military and eighty
per cent political. The focus of operations is on the civilian
population: isolating residents from insurgents, providing
security, building a police force, and allowing political and
economic development to take place so that the government commands
the allegiance of its citizens. A counterinsurgency strategy
involves both offensive and defensive operations, but there is an
emphasis on using the minimum amount of force necessary. For all
these reasons, such a strategy is extremely hard to carry out,
especially for the American military, which focuses on combat
operations. Counterinsurgency cuts deeply against the Army's
institutional instincts. The doctrine fell out of use after
Vietnam, and the Army's most recent field manual on the subject is
two decades old.
The Pentagon's strategy in 2003 and 2004 was
to combat the insurgency simply by eliminating insurgents-an
approach called "kill-capture." Kalev Sepp, a retired
Special Forces officer, who now teaches at the Naval Postgraduate
School, in Monterey, California, said of the method, "It's
all about hunting people. I think it comes directly from the
Secretary of Defense-'I want heads on a plate.' You'll get some
people that way, but the failure of that approach is evident: they
get Hussein, they get his sons, they continue every week to kill
more, capture more, they've got facilities full of thousands of
detainees, yet there's more insurgents than there were when they
started." In "Dereliction of Duty," McMaster wrote
that a strategy of attrition "was, in essence, the absence of
a strategy."
During the first year of the war, Lieutenant
General Ricardo Sanchez was the commander of military operations
in Iraq. He never executed a campaign plan-as if, like Rumsfeld,
he assumed that America was about to leave. As a result, there was
no governing logic to the Army's myriad operations. T. X. Hammes,
a retired Marine colonel who served in Baghdad in early 2004,
said, "Each division was operating so differently, right next
to the other-absolutely hard-ass here, and hearts-and-minds
here." In the first year of the war, in Falluja and Ramadi,
Major General Charles Swannack, of the 82nd Airborne Division,
emphasized killing and capturing the enemy, and the war grew worse
in those places; in northern Iraq, Major General David Petraeus,
of the 101st Airborne Division, focused on winning over the
civilian population by encouraging economic reconstruction and
local government, and had considerable success. "Why is the
82nd hard-ass and the 101st so different?" Hammes asked.
"Because Swannack sees it differently than Petraeus. But
that's Sanchez's job. That's why you have a corps commander."
Lieutenant General Sanchez, who never received his fourth star,
remains the only senior military official to have suffered
professionally for the failures of the Iraq war. (He is now
stationed in Germany.)
From his post in Central Command, McMaster
pushed for a more imaginative and coherent response to an
insurgency that he believed was made up of highly decentralized
groups with different agendas making short-term alliances of
convenience. By August, 2004, Falluja had fallen under insurgent
control, Mosul had begun to collapse, and Najaf had become the
scene of a ferocious battle. On August 5th, General George Casey,
Sanchez's successor, signed the Operation Iraqi Freedom campaign
plan. The document, which was largely written on Sanchez's watch,
remains classified, but Kalev Sepp described it to me in general
terms. (In early 2004, McMaster had recruited him to be an adviser
on Iraq.) Sepp said, "It was a product that seemed to be
toning itself down. It was written as if there were knowledge of
this bad thing, an insurgency, that was coming up underfoot, and
you had to deal with it, but you had to be careful about being too
direct in calling it an insurgency and dealing with it that way,
because then you would be admitting that it had always been there
but you had ignored it up to that point. It did not talk about
what you had to do to defeat an insurgency. It was not a
counterinsurgency plan."
In the fall of 2004, Sepp went to work under
Casey in the strategy division of Multi-National Force Iraq,
MNF-I. In Baghdad, a small group of officers, led by an Army
colonel named Bill Hix, worked with Sepp and two analysts from the
RAND Corporation to turn the campaign plan into a classic
counterinsurgency strategy that focused, above all, on the
training of Iraqi security forces, with American advisers embedded
in Iraqi units and partnerships between the two armies.
By November, 2004, MNF-I had outlined a
strategy, and the military command in Baghdad finally had a plan
for fighting the insurgency. Much time had been lost, and putting
the plan into effect in numerous units was a formidable task.
Counterinsurgency, by its nature, is highly dependent on local
knowledge and conditions. Changes had to be made at the level of
the platoon, the company, and the battalion; the campaign plan
helped officers catch up with what some local commanders had
already learned to do.
By then, Colonel McMaster had arrived in Fort
Carson, Colorado, and he had assumed command of the 3rd A.C.R. He
had just a few months to get the regiment ready for its second
deployment to Iraq. The unit ended up in Tal Afar-a place that was
being called the next Falluja.
In Colorado, McMaster and his officers, most
of them veterans of the war's first year, improvised a new way to
train for Iraq. Instead of preparing for tank battles, the
regiment bought dozens of Arab dishdashas, which the Americans
call "man dresses," and acted out a variety of realistic
scenarios, with soldiers and Arab-Americans playing the role of
Iraqis. "We need training that puts soldiers in situations
where they need to make extremely tough choices," Captain
Sellars, the troop commander, said. "What are they going to
see at the traffic control point? They're possibly going to have a
walk-up suicide bomber-O.K., let's train that. They're going to
have an irate drunk guy that is of no real threat-let's train
that. They're going to have a pregnant lady that needs to get
through the checkpoint faster-O.K., let's train that."
Pictures of Shiite saints and politicians were hung on the walls
of a house, and soldiers were asked to draw conclusions about the
occupants. Soldiers searching the house were given the information
they wanted only after they had sat down with the occupants three
or four times, accepted tea, and asked the right questions.
Soldiers filmed the scenarios and, afterward, analyzed body
language and conversational tone. McMaster ordered his soldiers
never to swear in front of Iraqis or call them "hajjis"
in a derogatory way (this war's version of "gook"). Some
were selected to take three-week courses in Arabic language and
culture; hundreds of copies of "The Modern History of
Iraq," by Phebe Marr, were shipped to Fort Carson; and
McMaster drew up a counterinsurgency reading list that included
classic works such as T. E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of
Wisdom," together with "Learning to Eat Soup with a
Knife," a recent study by Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, a
veteran of the Iraq war.
Sellars told me, "I don't know how many
times I've thought, and then heard others say, 'Wish I'd known
that the first time.' " The rehearsals in Colorado, he said,
amounted to a recognition that "this war is for the people of
Iraq." Sellars, who grew up in a family of lumber millers in
rural Arkansas, described it as a kind of training in empathy.
"Given these circumstances, what would be my reaction?"
he asked. "If I was in a situation where my neighbor had
gotten his head cut off, how would I react? If it was my kid that
had gotten killed by mortars, how would I react?"
By the time two squadrons of the 3rd A.C.R.
reached the outskirts of Tal Afar, in the spring of 2005, the city
was being terrorized by takfirin-Sunni extremists who believe that
Muslims who don't subscribe to their brand of Islam, especially
Shiites, are infidels and should be killed. The city was central
to the strategy of the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi;
Tal Afar had become a transit point for foreign fighters arriving
from Syria, and a base of operations in northern Iraq. Zarqawi
exploited tribal and sectarian divisions among the city's poor and
semiliterate population, which consists mostly of Turkomans,
rather than Arabs, three-quarters of them Sunni and one-quarter
Shiite. The mayor was a pro-insurgent Sunni. The police chief,
appointed by the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari,
was a Shiite. His all-Shiite force was holed up in an area of high
ground in the middle of the city known as the Castle, which is
surrounded by sixteenth-century Ottoman ramparts. Unable to
control the city, the Shiite police sent out commandos (McMaster
described them as a "death squad") to kidnap and kill
Sunnis. Outside the Castle, radical young Sunnis left headless
corpses of Shiites in the streets as a warning to anyone who
contemplated cooperating with the Americans or the Iraqi
government. Shiites living in mixed neighborhoods fled. "The
Shia and Sunni communities fell in on themselves," McMaster
said. "They became armed camps in direct military competition
with one another."
McMaster's point man in the effort to
stabilize the city was Lieutenant Colonel Chris Hickey, a squadron
commander. Hickey, a good-looking man who has soft brown eyes and
an aquiline nose, almost never raises his voice and seems as
ordinary and steady as McMaster is intellectually restless and
gregarious. He's the father of two girls, and it's easy to picture
him at a parent-teacher conference. His soldiers spoke of him with
reverence; a major in the squadron described Hickey as "the
sort of quiet man who feels things very deeply," and Jesse
Sellars spoke of his "tactical patience." Last summer,
while American and Iraqi soldiers moved block by block into the
city, encountering heavy resistance that often took the form of
three-hour firefights, Hickey began to study the local power
structure. For several months, he spent forty or fifty hours a
week with sheikhs from Tal Afar's dozens of tribes: first the
Shiite sheikhs, to convince them that the Americans could be
counted on to secure their neighborhoods; and then the Sunni
sheikhs, many of whom were passive or active supporters of the
insurgency.
"The Shia freaked out," Hickey told
me inside his cramped headquarters, in a derelict cluster of
cement buildings behind the crenellated ramparts of the Castle.
" 'Don't we give you information? So why are you meeting with
the Sunnis?' 'Because I'm trying to be balanced. I'm trying to
stabilize your city. If I just talk to you, I'm not going to
stabilize your city.' We tried to switch the argument from Sunni
versus Shia, which was what the terrorists were trying to make the
argument, to Iraqi versus takfirin."
Hickey's first attempts to persuade Sunnis to
join the Tal Afar police force yielded only three recruits, but he
did not give up. In painstakingly slow and inconclusive
encounters, each one centering on the same sectarian grievances
and fears, Hickey tried to establish common interests between the
Sunnis and the Shiites. He also attempted to drive a wedge between
nationalist-minded Sunnis and extremists, a distinction that, in
the war's first year or two, American soldiers were rarely able to
make; they were simply fighting "bad guys." At the
highest levels of the Administration, the notion of acknowledging
the enemy's grievances was dismissed as defeatist. But in Tal Afar
I heard expressions of soldierly respect for what some Americans
called the Iraqi resistance. "In a city that's seventy-five
per cent Sunni, if you approach it from a point of view of
bringing in or killing everyone who's had anything to do with the
insurgency you're bound to fail," Major Michael Simmering
said. "Imagine how many people in this town have picked up a
rifle and taken a shot at coalition forces. Do we really want to
try to arrest them all?" Lieutenant Brian Tinklepaugh
explained, "You can't sever your ties with anyone-even your
enemy. People with ties to the insurgents have us over for
tea."
Hickey, during his conversations with
sheikhs, was educating himself in the social intricacies of Tal
Afar's neighborhoods, so that his men would know how a raid on a
particular house would be perceived by the rest of the street.
("Effects-based operations," a term of art in
counterinsurgency, rolled off the tongue of every young officer I
met in Tal Afar.) He was also showing his soldiers what kind of
war he wanted them to fight. It required unlearning Army precepts,
under fire. "The tedium of counterinsurgency ops, the small,
very incremental gains-our military culture doesn't lend itself to
that kind of war," Jack McLaughlin, a major on Hickey's
staff, told me. "There are no glorious maneuvers like at the
National Training Center, where you destroy the Krasnovian hordes.
It's just a slow grind, and you have to have patience."
At the same time, the 3rd A.C.R. engaged in
frequent combat; ultimately, the regiment lost twenty-one soldiers
in northwestern Iraq, and one platoon suffered a casualty rate of
forty per cent. Last September, Colonel McMaster staged a push
into Surai, the oldest, densest part of the city, which had become
the base of insurgent operations; there were days of heavy
fighting, with support from Apache helicopters shooting Hellfire
missiles. Most of the civilians in the area, who had been warned
of the coming attack, fled ahead of the action (unknown numbers of
insurgents escaped with them), and though many buildings were
demolished, the damage to the city wasn't close to the destruction
of Falluja in November, 2004. "There are two ways to do
counterinsurgency," Major McLaughlin said. "You can come
in, cordon off a city, and level it, à la Falluja. Or you can
come in, get to know the city, the culture, establish
relationships with the people, and then you can go in and
eliminate individuals instead of whole city blocks."
After McMaster's offensive, Hickey and a
squadron of a thousand men set up living quarters next to Iraqi
Army soldiers, in primitive patrol bases without hot water,
reliable heat, or regular cooked meals. One afternoon, I walked
with Hickey a hundred yards from his headquarters-past soldiers on
guard duty warming themselves over a barrel fire-to the mayor's
office, in the Castle. The new mayor, Najim Abdullah al-Jabouri,
is a secular Sunni Arab and a former brigadier general from
Baghdad, who speaks no Turkmen, Tal Afar's main language. The city
was so polarized that the provincial authorities had turned to an
outsider to replace the corrupt former mayor and win a measure of
confidence from all sides. Najim, a chain-smoker, wore a dark suit
and a purple shirt without a tie; his face was drawn and he had
dark pouches under his eyes. On his wall hung a photograph of him
with McMaster. The Mayor had written a letter to Bush, Rumsfeld,
and Congress asking them to extend the 3rd A.C.R.'s deployment in
Tal Afar for another year.
"If a doctor makes an operation and the
operation succeeds, it's not a good thing to put the patient under
the care of another doctor," the Mayor told me. "This
doctor knows the wound, he knows the patient." He added,
"Hickey knows my children by name."
I asked what would happen if, as before, the
Americans withdrew from Tal Afar.
"What? No American forces?" The
Mayor could hardly comprehend my question. "It will take only
one month and the terrorists will take over. At a minimum, we need
three years for the Iraqi Army to be strong enough to take control
of the country-at least three years. You can't measure the Army
only by weapons. It's building people, too."
The Mayor had once been tempted to join the
insurgency. He lost his military career in 2003, when L. Paul
Bremer III, the administrator of the Coalition Provisional
Authority-the American occupation government-dissolved the old
Iraqi Army. "Bremer gave the order that whole families
die," he said. "I decided that if my children died I
would pick up my gun in revenge." But the dynamic in Tal
Afar, where the U.S. Army seemed to be cleaning up after its own
mistakes, had improved his opinion of the Americans. "I began
to work with the Americans here and saw a new picture. I thought
before that all Americans, like Bremer and the people we saw on
TV, were killers and turned guns on Iraqis. But when I worked with
them and saw them more, I realized they were different. Before, we
were just sitting and watching Al Jazeera and believing it. Now I
see it's a lying network."
The intensity of the Mayor's attachment to
the Americans was understandable. They were in the same position,
outsiders trying to hold the city together and persuade its tribes
and sects to find a common national identity. I once saw Hickey
ask a group of police trainees at a new station whether they were
Sunni or Shiite, and when they started to answer he said,
"No-Iraqi!" Hickey had seen the Mayor demonstrate the
lesson to an elementary-school classroom.
Down the hall from the Mayor's office was a
small conference room dominated by a thirty-foot table. Along each
side, behind clouds of cigarette smoke, Tal Afar's notables sat
grimly in tribal dress and business clothes: Sunnis on one side,
Shiites on the other. It was only the second time the two groups
had met in the Castle. The Mayor had told me that cold drinks were
among his main negotiation tools, and everyone was sipping a Pepsi
or a Sprite. The Mayor took his place at the head of the table. On
the wall behind him hung a giant Iraqi flag.
The meeting soon deteriorated. There were
complaints about the slow pace of rebuilding, the uneven
distribution of contracts, the lack of government funds, and the
inability of Shiite families who had fled Tal Afar to return to
the mixed neighborhoods. "The rebuilding is something
horrible," the Mayor said, in agreement. "But it
contains a wonderful thing: it's not accepted by both sectors. So
that's proof they can be united."
Shiite sheikhs accused the Sunnis of
tolerating the presence of terrorists, and Sunni sheikhs accused
the Shia of making unwarranted generalizations about them.
"This is our second meeting, and we're saying the same
things," a Shiite sheikh complained. "What is the
point?"
"Sitting here is the point," the
Mayor, relentlessly cheerful, said; I was beginning to understand
his look of exhaustion. "It's wonderful that you are at least
sitting together. We're supposed to have a meeting of the
reconstruction committee, but the important thing is we should
reconstruct ourselves-then everything will be easier."
A Sunni sheikh demanded, "If you want to
make things better, why do you ask people applying to be police
whether they are Sunni or Shiite? Asking will only consolidate the
problems."
"We want to create a balance between
Shiite and Sunni," the Mayor answered. "If the Sunnis
come, believe me, after a while we won't ask this question."
After listening to the complaints of the
Sunnis, a Shiite sheikh lost his temper and stood up to face the
other side of the table: "The people who are fighting-where
do they come from? They don't pop up from the ground. Some of you
know who they are." The sheikh's father had been ambushed and
killed on the way to a reconciliation meeting with a Sunni tribe.
"Only Shia have these problems," he said.
That night, I visited the jail at a police
station between Hickey's headquarters and the Mayor's office.
Forty-seven prisoners were squeezed into a cell so tight that they
had to take turns sleeping; four or five others were crammed into
the latrine. When a guard slid aside a plywood sheet covering the
cell's barred door, the prisoners, dazed and wide-eyed, protested
their innocence and asked for blankets. One boy said that he was
twelve years old. A fat, middle-aged man who claimed to be a
teacher from Mosul told me in fluent English that he'd been
arrested because a roadside bomb had happened to go off near a
taxi in which he was riding. He hadn't seen a judge in a month,
and hadn't seen a lawyer at all.
Next door to the cell, in an unlit room whose
roof had partially caved in, offering a view of the starry desert
sky, several policemen were trying to stay warm around a petrol
burner. With one exception, they were Shiites. Police work was the
only job they could find, they said; Sunnis had taken their old
jobs. The chief, whose name was Ibrahim Hussein, said, "My
wife and children can't leave the house." A slight young cop
named Hassan said that seventy members of his tribe had been
killed by terrorists, including a cousin whose corpse turned up
one day with the head severed.
The policemen offered me the only chair in
their squalid little room. One of their colleagues was sleeping
under a blanket on the cement floor. It was bitterly cold. They
said that they wanted the Americans to leave Tal Afar and create a
perimeter around the city to keep terrorists out; inside the city,
they said, the Americans were preventing the police from
eliminating the terrorists, releasing most prisoners after just a
few days. The men had been trained for two months in Jordan, and I
asked whether they had been instructed in human rights. They said
that they had studied the subject for a week.
"What about the rights of the guy who
gets kidnapped and beheaded?" Hussein said. Hassan added,
"If the Americans weren't here, we could get more out of our
interrogations."
"You mean torture?"
"Only the terrorists."
"How do you know that they're
terrorists?"
"Someone identifies them to me. We have
evidence. The innocent ones, we let go."
"How many terrorists and sympathizers
are there in Tal Afar?"
Hassan considered it for a moment. "A
hundred and fifty thousand." This was approximately the
number of Sunnis in the city.
When I got up to leave, the policemen begged
me to ask Colonel Hickey for blankets and heaters.
The Tal Afar police were better informed
about local realities than either the Americans or the Iraqi Army,
but they were ill-trained, quick to shoot, likelier to represent
parochial interests, and reluctant to take risks. "There are
some police that would go after the Sunnis," Chris Hickey
said. "So, yes, we are a constraint on them. Their head's not
there yet." A soldier in the squadron, who was departing on a
mission with Iraqi policemen to distribute food packages in a
mixed area, went further: "These guys are worthless."
The American patrol bases around the city
stand next to Iraqi Army battalion headquarters; this allows for
daily conversations among counterparts in the two armies and
frequent sharing of information. The Americans are not just
training an Iraqi Army; they are trying to build an institution of
national unity before there is a nation.
Hickey and other Americans spoke highly of
Lieutenant Colonel Majid Abdul-Latif Hatem, an Iraqi battalion
deputy commander. One evening, Colonel Majid invited me into his
spartan quarters on the grounds of Tal Afar's granary, across a
marshy field from the American patrol base. A Shiite from
Nasiriya, in the south, he had a comically large handlebar
mustache and mirthless eyes under droopy eyelids. In the corner of
the room was a cot with a military blanket; on the wall was a map
of his battalion's area of operations. As he began to talk, an
orderly prepared tea in a blackened brass pot.
Colonel Majid, who had been in Tal Afar for a
month, had an unsentimental view of the city's problems. "If
we evacuated Tal Afar of Shiites or of Sunnis, it would be a calm,
lovely city. The main issue in Iraq now is the sectarian one: one
group wants to destroy the other group. The people need a long,
long time, so that they can learn democracy, because they were
raised on a sectarian basis. Second, to get rid of the problems we
should divide Iraq into three parts: Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd. If
there is one Iraq on the map, but inside the people are divided,
what's the point of being one? The people are tired of war and
instability-they just want to live in peace, even by dividing. The
time of Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad is past. There are no more
miracles."
Colonel Majid took out a piece of white paper
and carefully drew the outline of Iraq, then carved it into
sectors. "This area is Shiite," he said. "This area
is Sunni: Mosul, Tikrit, Samarra, Anbar. Take oil from
here"-he pointed to Basra and Kirkuk-"and give some of
it to here. The Sunnis will have to accept. If the oil was in
their area, they would ask for division."
I asked if the American and Iraqi armies
could prevent a civil war.
"At any moment, there will be war
between the two sects," he said. "I want to tell you the
truth." He repeated the word in English. "Right now, you
are observing the men of the Iraqi Army, and seeing what's on the
outside. But I know the interior of them. My men are not coming
here for nationalist beliefs, for one Iraq. They are here because
they need work. So don't be surprised if they stand and watch
killing between the people here."
We drank tea and talked, and, as the night
wore on, Colonel Majid disappeared into the darkness; I could see
only his mustache, his eyes, and the orange glow of the petrol
burner. I asked if Iraq could be divided without huge population
transfers and terrible bloodshed.
"How much do the Americans spend on
their army every month here? Six billion dollars. One billion of
this can build houses or apartment complexes in the south, for the
Shia here up north. You have to offer many things if you're going
to move people: transportation, houses, jobs. It's a very
complicated situation, and I'm not George Washington to arrange
everything for you.
"God says: no one can change the people
if they don't change themselves. America is the biggest power in
the world, but it cannot get control over the explosions here and
the insurgency. It cannot change the way people think." He
added, "Saddam Hussein brought all of us to the point where
we all hate Iraq."
I asked if Iraqi minds could change over
time.
"Maybe," Colonel Majid said.
"But it will take years."
In Tal Afar, I began to imagine the Americans
as sutures closing a deep wound. If they were removed too quickly,
the wound would open again, and there would be heavy bleeding; at
the same time, their presence was causing an infection in the
surrounding flesh. This was a dilemma that required careful
timing. It was also possible that the wound was too deep ever to
be repaired. This would be less a dilemma than a defeat.
The Americans' achievement in Tal Afar showed
that, in the war's third year, individuals and units within the
Army could learn and adapt on their own. On my last night in the
city, Colonel McMaster sat in his makeshift office and said,
"It is so damn complex. If you ever think you have the
solution to this, you're wrong, and you're dangerous. You have to
keep listening and thinking and being critical and self-critical.
Remember General Nivelle, in the First World War, at Verdun? He
said he had the solution, and then destroyed the French Army until
it mutinied."
During the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment's
final weeks in Iraq, morale was remarkably high. Some soldiers
expressed, almost under their breath, a reluctance to leave. Many
of them had established strong bonds with Iraqis and didn't want
to abandon the work they had done together. They brought gifts for
the Iraqis' children when they returned from leave. The Iraqi Army
units in Tal Afar had been watching McMaster's men carefully, and
were showing signs of competence, taking the lead in small
operations, learning to win the trust of local civilians, and
often proving more adept than the Americans at securing good
intelligence. They still faced enormous logistical problems-they
lacked armored vehicles and a reliable system of paying salaries,
and their Ministry of Defense was so weak and corrupt that Iraqi
soldiers still depended on the American military's supply system
to eat and to stay warm. As for the Iraqi police, they resembled
less a neutral security force than a faction in the city's
conflicts. Nonetheless, the American soldiers in Tal Afar felt
that they had achieved something. At the headquarters of Hickey's
squadron, in the Castle, young officers who, in the war's second
year, had concluded that the cause was lost now talked about a
fragile success.
"If we're not stupid, and we don't quit,
we can win this thing," Major McLaughlin said. "History
teaches you that war, at its heart, is a human endeavor. And if
you ignore the human side-yours, the enemy's, and the
civilians'-you set yourself up for failure. It's not about
weapons. It's about people."
"If we are smart enough to see this
through, we can win it," Major Simmering said. "If we're
not careful, we could destroy everything we've done in the last
six months in a matter of minutes by doing something stupid-taking
an action that could alienate the Sunni population. It takes
months to make somebody like you; it can take just a minute to
make them hate you." All the soldiers worried about what one
general in Iraq called a "rush to failure." As Simmering
put it, "There's a lot of political pressure back home to
turn this over to the Iraqis."
From Tal Afar, I flew by helicopter to an
airfield a few miles north of Tikrit, called Forward Operating
Base Speicher. The headquarters of the 101st Airborne Division,
Speicher is an "enduring FOB"-one of a handful of
gigantic bases around Iraq to which American forces are being
pulled back, as smaller bases are handed over to the Iraqi Army.
Speicher has an area of twenty-four square miles and the
appearance of a small, flat, modular Midwestern city; there is a
bus system, a cavernous dining hall that serves four flavors of
Baskin-Robbins ice cream, a couple of gyms, and several movie
theatres. At least nine thousand soldiers live there, and many of
them seemed to leave the base rarely or not at all: they talked
about "going out," as if the psychological barrier
between them and Iraq had become daunting. After three months on
the base, an Army lawyer working on the Iraqi justice system still
hadn't visited the Tikrit courts. A civil-affairs major who had
been in Iraq since May needed to consult a handbook when I asked
him the names of the local tribes. A reporter for the military
newspaper Stars & Stripes had heard a bewildered sergeant near
Tikrit ask his captain, "What's our mission here?" The
captain replied sardonically, "We're here to guard the
ice-cream trucks going north so that someone else can guard them
there."
Much of the activity at an enduring FOB
simply involves self-supply. These vast military oases raise the
spectre of American permanence in Iraq, but, to me, they more
acutely suggested American irrelevance. Soldiers have even coined
a derogatory term for those who never get off the base:
"fobbits." I spent two days at Speicher without seeing
an Iraqi.
After Tal Afar, it was dismaying how little
soldiers at Speicher knew about the lives of Iraqis. When I drove
with the civil-affairs major into Tikrit, we stopped along the way
at an elementary school, just outside the base. The major wanted
to see if the teachers had pursued his request to have the
children become pen pals with kids at an elementary school in his
home town, in California. It sounded like a fine idea, but two
nervous female teachers who received us in their office gave a
number of reasons that the children hadn't yet written letters.
The major pressed them for a few minutes, and then he was ready to
let the project go. As soon as he left the room, the women showed
me a thick stack of pictures that their students had drawn for the
children in California, along with a letter from the teachers
asking for school supplies and "lotion for dry skin."
The letter concluded, "Good luck U.S.A. Army." But the
women were too frightened to give the bundle to the major; a
relationship with an elementary school in America could make them
targets of local insurgents. All this was lost on the major. The
teachers said that they rarely saw American soldiers anymore.
Speicher provides a more representative
picture of the American military's future in Iraq than Tal Afar.
The trend is away from counterinsurgency and toward what, in
Washington, is known as an "exit strategy." Commanders
are under tremendous pressure to keep casualties low, and combat
deaths have been declining for several months, as patrols are
reduced and the Americans rely more and more on air power. (During
the past five months, the number of air strikes increased fifty
per cent over the same period a year ago.) More than half the
country is scheduled to be turned over to Iraqi Army control this
year. This is the crux of the military strategy for withdrawal,
and it is happening at a surprisingly fast pace. President Bush
has always insisted that the turnover and "draw down"
will be "conditions-based"-governed by the situation in
Iraq and by the advice of commanders, not by a timetable set in
Washington. But everywhere I went in Iraq, officers and soldiers
spoke as if they were already preparing to leave. A sergeant in
Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, said, "We'll be here for ten
years in some form, but boots-on-the-ground-wise? We're really
almost done." He said that the U.S. Army doesn't allow itself
to fail, and when I suggested that Iraq hardly looked like a
victory the sergeant replied, "So you adjust the standard of
success. For me, it's getting all the Joes home. It's not that I
don't give a damn about what's going on here. But that's how it
is."
A field-grade officer in the 101st Airborne
said, "The algorithm of success is to get a good-enough
solution." There were, he said, three categories of
assessment for every aspect of the mission: optimal, acceptable,
and unacceptable. He made it clear that optimal wasn't in the
running. "We're handing a shit sandwich over to someone
else," the officer said. "We have to turn this over, let
them do it their way. We're like a frigging organ transplant
that's rejected. We have to get the Iraqi Army to where they can
hold their own in a frigging fire-fight with insurgents, and get
the hell out." The Iraqi national-security adviser, Mowaffak
al-Rubaie, who chairs a high-level committee in Baghdad on
American withdrawal, gave the same forecast that was mentioned by
a planner on General Abizaid's staff, at Central Command: fewer
than a hundred thousand foreign troops in Iraq by the end of this
year, and half that number by the middle of 2007.
In other words, "conditions-based"
withdrawal is a flexible term. The conditions will be evaluated by
commanders who know what results are expected back in Washington.
I suggested to Senator Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican, who
has been a critic of the Administration's war policy, that this
sounded like a variation on the famous advice that Senator George
Aiken, of Vermont, gave President Johnson about Vietnam, in 1966:
declare victory and go home. "In a twenty-first-century
version, yes, probably," Hagel said. "It won't be quite
that stark." The Administration, he said, is "finding
ways in its own mind for back-door exits out of Iraq." He
added, "We have an election coming up in November. The fact
is, we're going to be pulling troops out, and I suspect it'll be
kind of quiet. We're going to wake up some morning, probably in
the summer, and all of a sudden we'll be forty thousand troops
down, and people will say, 'Gee, I didn't know.' "
A senior military officer defended Generals
Abizaid and Casey, and said that they would not simply bow to
pressure from Washington. "I don't think commanders are so
ambitious that they're willing to sell their men and their
endeavor up the river so they can tell their bosses what they want
to hear." But he admitted that there was considerable
pressure for withdrawal, saying, "A blind man on a dark night
can see people want the recommendation to be draw down." The
pressure is partly driven by the strain on the military, and
partly by the fear that thousands of junior officers and senior
sergeants, who face future deployments, may quit if the war
extends many more years. Divorce rates among Army officers have
doubled since the war began. The Army is so short-staffed that it
has promoted ninety-seven per cent of its captains. "If
you're not a convicted felon, you're being promoted to
major," a Pentagon official said.
As Americans pull back to the isolated
mega-bases, further reducing the daily death toll, Iraq will
likely become a lighter burden for Republicans in Congress and for
the Administration. A number of American officials, both civilian
and military, along with Sunni politicians in Tal Afar and Tikrit,
told me that this scenario was not only inevitable but healthy.
Contact between Americans and Iraqis had led to mistakes, deaths,
and mutual exhaustion.
But a good-enough counterinsurgency is really
none at all. There is no substitute for the investment of time,
effort, and risk that was so evident in Tal Afar. The retreat to
the enduring Fobs seems like an acknowledgment that
counterinsurgency is just too hard. "If you really want to
reduce your casualties, go back to Fort Riley," Kalev Sepp,
the Naval Postgraduate School professor, said. "It's absurd
to think that you can protect the population from armed insurgents
without putting your men's lives at risk." The policy of
gathering troops at enormous bases, he added, "is old Army
thinking-centralization of resources, of people, of control.
Counterinsurgency requires decentralization."
Some military leaders are feverishly trying
to institutionalize the hard-won knowledge from cities like Tal
Afar, in time to make a difference in this war. At the training
base in Taji, just north of Baghdad, there is now a
counterinsurgency academy where incoming officers attend classes
taught by those they've come to relieve. (Jesse Sellars told me
that his main lesson to his successors was to educate themselves
and their soldiers about the Iraqis.) Sepp sat in on a class led
by General Casey, after which a newly arrived brigade commander
said, "This is the first time I've been told my primary
mission is to train Iraqi forces." Until then, he had thought
that his mission was to kick down doors and haul people in. Many
commanders in Iraq still think so.
In the first year of the war, Major General
David Petraeus achieved a temporary success when, as a divisional
commander in northern Iraq, he applied the basic ideas of
counterinsurgency. He is now a lieutenant general and commander of
the Combined Arms Center, at Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas. Petraeus
is overseeing a group of active-duty and former officers in the
writing of a new joint Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency field
manual. "It is, as with many things in life, much easier to
explain than to do," he told me. "But it is very
important to get that basic understanding right again, and the
power of a field manual is its ability to communicate relatively
straightforward concepts. The basic concepts and principles are
not rocket science or brain surgery, but they can be very hard to
apply." Counterinsurgency begins, he said, when military
leaders "set the right tone."
In February, I attended a two-day workshop at
Fort Leavenworth, where the authors of the draft heard suggestions
from an assembly of critics. Petraeus had invited not just
military and civilian officials but academics, journalists, and
human-rights activists, and the workshop was co-sponsored by the
Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, at Harvard's Kennedy
School-in keeping with the draft manual's claim that
counterinsurgency is twenty per cent military and eighty per cent
political. Also in attendance was Brigadier Nigel Aylwin Foster, a
British general who had just published an article in Military
Review, out of Fort Leavenworth, which delivered an attack on the
American military's cultural ineptitude in fighting the Iraqi
insurgency. Aylwin-Foster, who had served under Petraeus in 2004,
when Petraeus led the training mission in Baghdad, told me,
"It seemed to be an enigma, the U.S. military as an entity.
They're polite, courteous, generous, humble, in a sense. But you
see some of the things going on-if I could sum it up, I never saw
such a good bunch of people inadvertently piss off so many
people." When Aylwin-Foster's article appeared, in December,
General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, ordered it to
be sent to every general in the Army; I saw it on a number of
desks in Iraq.
The question hanging unasked over the
workshop at Fort Leavenworth was whether it was already too late
to change the military's approach in Iraq. When Kalev Sepp
discussed the field manual with students in his class on
insurgency at the Naval Postgraduate School, a Special Forces
captain said, "If this manual isn't written soon, you'll have
it ready just in time to give one to each soldier leaving
Iraq."
CIVIL WAR?
Just as the Americans have begun to learn how
to fight a counterinsurgency war, they find themselves in the
middle of a growing civil conflict, and what succeeds in the
former may backfire in the latter. Training Iraqi security forces
and turning responsibility over to them makes sense if the
Americans are trying to buttress an embattled government against
insurgents; but, as sectarian violence rises, with the police and
the Army dominated by one group, the Americans could also be
arming one side of an approaching civil war.
On February 22nd, the Shiite shrine in
Samarra was bombed, almost certainly by elements of Al Qaeda; its
golden dome was destroyed. The sectarian violence that followed
was widely interpreted as the first definitive sign that Iraq was
coming apart, but Baghdad and the mixed towns around it had
already shown clear symptoms of civil war. In the capital, Shiite
families were being driven out of Sunni neighborhoods by a
campaign of threats and assassinations. Young Sunni men were being
rounded up by Shiite militiamen, some of whom wore police
uniforms; they disappeared into secret prisons or turned up on the
street, bound and shot to death.
Dora, a middle-class neighborhood of Sunnis,
Shiites, and Christians in southern Baghdad, has become the
epicenter of the low-grade civil war. A businessman from Dora told
me that it began with the killing of barbers: Sunni extremists
believed that shaving a man's beard was against Islam, and they
extended the ban to Western-style haircuts. "After the
barbers, they went on to the real-estate agents," the
businessman said. A fatwa was issued, declaring that in the time
of the Prophet there was no buying or selling of property. Then an
ice vender was shot dead on the street because ice wasn't sold in
the seventh century.
The next targets were grocery-shop owners,
exchange-shop owners, clothing-shop owners. "At first, they
were giving reasons, but then things developed, and they started
killing for no reason," the businessman said. Every day in
the heart of Dora, around the Assyrian Market, a list of intended
victims-mostly merchants, and always Shiites-circulates by word of
mouth. Within a few days, people on the list who don't take
precautions are shot to death in broad daylight. Police at the
local stations don't get involved, and American soldiers rarely
enter the district, though the businessman said that he goes to
sleep at night to the sound of gunfire, helicopters overhead, and
bombs dropping, as if he were on the front line of a battle.
"Dora is out of the government's control," the
businessman said, and Shiites who can afford to escape are
leaving.
A senior Iraqi official who has access to
classified intelligence said that the campaign of violence is part
of a strategic effort by Sunni insurgents to "shape the
battlefield": to clear the district of potential enemies and
use it as a staging area for attacks in Baghdad. Dora has an oil
refinery and a power plant, and it lies along the route from the
Sunni-dominated tribal areas south of Baghdad to the heart of the
city. The killings in Dora, the official said, are part of a trend
away from attacks on American and Iraqi military units, which
expose insurgents to great risk, toward killings of local
officials and ordinary citizens, intended to undermine the
public's confidence that the government can protect it. In
January, he said, there were seven hundred of these murders, the
highest number of the war up until that month. "So 2006,
maybe, will be the year of assassinations and infrastructure
attacks," the official said.
The killings have created an atmosphere of
sectarian hysteria that residents of Baghdad have never known
before. Fear and hatred of one's neighbor are expressed in extreme
language. I met a Shiite butcher, Muhammad Kareem Jassim, who owns
a small shop on a busy thoroughfare, the doorway obstructed by the
hanging carcasses of skinned lambs. His brother was also a
butcher, with a shop in Dora. One morning in January, the brother
was cutting meat for two women customers when a man walked into
the shop, asked the women to excuse him, came up to the counter,
and said, "Good morning." The brother looked up, said,
"Good morning," and was shot in the face and killed. His
grown son rushed into the room, shouting, "Daddy,
Daddy!" and he, too, was shot dead. A second brother, also a
butcher, came running from an adjacent shop with a carving knife
in his hand; he was also killed.
When I sat down, ten days later, to talk with
Jassim, a stout, bearded man in his fifties, he was
hyperventilating with rage. "Dirty fuckers, sons of
bitches-they have no faith, no religious leaders, since the time
of Omar and Abu Bakr until now," he said of Sunnis, going
straight back to the seventh century. "The only reason for
this is that we are Shia." He expressed great bitterness that
Sunni religious and political leaders rarely condemn the killings
of Shiites, and he despaired of being protected by American or
Iraqi security forces. The butcher's shoulders heaved, and he
said, "If our religious leaders gave a fatwa, there would be
no more Sunnis in Iraq anymore! Because everybody now has a broken
heart. I wish I could catch them with my hands and slaughter them.
I could do it-I'm a butcher."
In the past year, Shiites have begun to
engage in deadly retaliatory strikes against Sunnis. Many ordinary
Shiites have lost patience with the calls for restraint from
religious leaders like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. And Shiite
party militias have taken up kidnapping and assassination,
creating widespread fear among Sunnis for the first time.
The Iraqi Islamic Party is the country's
largest Sunni party. Its headquarters, in western Baghdad, has a
human-rights office with pictures on the walls of Sunni corpses
bearing marks of torture allegedly inflicted by Shiites. While I
was in the office, an elderly couple arrived in a state of panic.
A week before, at six in the morning, fifteen commandos had broken
into their house and taken their grown son from his bed. Since
then, the parents had been unable to get any information about
him. The woman described the commandos as members of the Badr
Corps, the largest Shiite militia in Iraq, which was formed during
the Iran-Iraq War by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. One of its
leaders, Bayan Jabr, is now the Minister of the Interior; Sunnis
accuse him of allowing Shiite militiamen to infiltrate Iraqi
police forces. Sunnis routinely call Shiite politicians like Jabr
"Iranians." The mother cried, "In all my life, I
never saw something like this. They are coming from Iran, the
Persian people-Iran, which is trying to get the nuclear bomb to
destroy the world."
A Party official, Omar Hechel al-Jabouri,
told the old couple that he would contact the Interior Ministry
about the case, in order to prevent their son from being tortured
or killed. Every day, he said, a hundred people come to his office
with complaints, so many that he has taken to sleeping on a cot in
a corner of the room. "Our brothers, the Shia, are very smart
in crying about their suffering," he said. "We others
are not as smart." (An American Embassy official told me that
in Iraq each side has perfected its own "victimology.")
American troops have been struggling to purge
Shiite militiamen from the Iraqi police and recruit Sunnis, with
the goal of making it a non-sectarian force. Major General Joe
Peterson, who is leading the police-training effort, said that the
goal was to have two hundred thousand police trained and equipped
by the end of the year. (As of mid-March, a hundred and thirty
thousand had been trained.) "We captured a Shiite death squad
last week," he said. "There are guys going out in the
middle of the night." The squad, which was out to avenge the
death of a member's relative, included twenty-two employees of the
Interior Ministry. "We have some very bad groups out there
who are bent on insuring that the government fails," he said.
An American intelligence official said that
he considers the increasingly aggressive Shiite militias a bigger
long-term threat to Iraq than the Sunni insurgency. These groups
raise the prospect not just of a Sunni-Shiite civil war but also
of an intra-Shiite fight, between the Badr Corps-widely perceived
as a front for Iran-and the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the
radical Iraqi populist. When I asked Colonel McMaster what
Americans could do if a full-scale Iraqi civil war breaks out, he
said, "Not a whole hell of a lot."
Fort Leavenworth has a Center for Army
Lessons Learned. There is no equivalent at the White House or the
Office of the Secretary of Defense. Last November, the Pentagon
issued D.O.D. Directive 3000.05, which declared that
"stability operations," or peacekeeping and security
maintenance-which Rumsfeld had denigrated in the run-up to the
invasion of Iraq, questioning why the Pentagon had such a
division-were now "a core U.S. military mission that the
Department of Defense shall be prepared to conduct and
support." The directive went on, "They shall be given
priority comparable to combat operations." In the obscure
world of "stability ops," D.O.D. 3000.05 was a historic,
if belated, document. Careful readers noticed that it was signed
not by Rumsfeld but by his deputy Gordon England. In February,
Rumsfeld released his Quadrennial Defense Review, a
congressionally mandated report setting out long-term military
policy. Its language seemed unassailable, focusing on the need for
greater capability in civil affairs, military policing, cultural
and language expertise, and counterinsurgency, all as part of what
the document called "the long war" against global
terrorism. But in its budget choices, which reveal the real
priorities of the Defense Secretary, the Iraq war had hardly
registered. Instead of cutting back on hugely expensive weapons
programs in order to build more troop divisions-Iraq has made it
painfully obvious that a larger army is necessary for fighting
counterinsurgency wars-the review favored the fighter jets and
carriers that are the lifeblood of military contractors and
members of Congress.
It's an open secret in Washington that
Rumsfeld wants to extricate himself from Iraq. But President
Bush's rhetoric-most recently, in a series of speeches given to
shore up faltering public support-remains resolute. For three
years, the Administration has split the difference between these
two poles, committing itself halfheartedly to Iraq. (Through every
turn in the war, the number of troops in Iraq has remained
remarkably stable-between a hundred and fifteen thousand and a
hundred and sixty thousand.) In 2006, maintaining the status quo
no longer seems viable. The midterm elections and the President's
flagging popularity will force Bush to make a choice: either he
will devote the rest of his Presidency to staying in Iraq or he
will begin a withdrawal.
In "Dereliction of Duty,"
McMaster's book on Vietnam, he described how Lyndon Johnson's top
generals allowed the President to mire American troops in Vietnam
with no possible strategy and no public candor. He wrote, "As
American involvement in Vietnam deepened, the gap between the true
nature of that commitment and the President's depiction of it to
the American people, the Congress, and members of his own
Administration widened. Lyndon Johnson, with the assistance of
Robert S. McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had set the
stage for America's disaster in Vietnam." In Tal Afar, I told
McMaster that there were more than a few echoes of the Iraq war in
his book. He laughed and said, "I can't even touch
that."
A President who projects a consistently
unrealistic message of success to the public; a Defense Secretary
who consolidates power in his office and intimidates or ignores
the uniformed military; senior generals-Tommy Franks, John
Abizaid, Ricardo Sanchez, Richard Myers, and now Peter Pace,
Myers's successor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs-who appear
before congressional committees and at news conferences and
solemnly confirm that they have enough troops to win: the
parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, in terms of the moral
abdication of leaders, are not hard to see. In one sense, though,
the two wars are inversely analogous: in Vietnam, Johnson claimed
to be staying out while he was getting in; in Iraq, something like
the opposite is happening.
It isn't easy to know how much unwelcome
information reaches the President. On December 16th, the day after
elections for a constitutional government in Iraq, a group of
senators and representatives met with the President and his top
national-security advisers in the Roosevelt Room at the White
House, while General Casey and Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S.
Ambassador to Iraq, joined in from Baghdad on a large video
screen. According to Senator Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat,
who had flown back from Iraq that morning, Vice-President Cheney
was characteristically sanguine about the war, saying, "It's
been a great election, Mr. President-we're well on our way."
The President talked at length about the need to continue fighting
terrorism. When it was Biden's turn to speak, he said, "With
all due respect, Mr. President, if every single Al Qaeda-related
terrorist were killed tomorrow, done, gone, you'd still have a war
on your hands in Iraq." On the video screen, Khalilzad and
Casey nodded. When the discussion turned to the need for a
political solution, with non-sectarian heads of the Defense and
Interior Ministries, Rumsfeld began nodding vigorously-as if to
say, Biden thought, "Hey, this is Condi's problem. This ain't
my problem."
Condoleezza Rice now finds herself trying to
win the kinds of fights with Rumsfeld that Colin Powell lost long
ago. As Secretary of State, she has begun to repair alliances that
Powell was helpless to keep the Administration from shredding. By
most accounts, Stephen Hadley, her replacement as national security
adviser, is a weak figure in the White House, and Cheney's
influence has waned in the second term, allowing Rice to
consolidate foreign-policy decision-making in her department, as
Powell never could. But Rumsfeld remains a formidable bureaucratic
force. Recently, Rice and Rumsfeld have battled over the question
of how to protect Iraq's infrastructure. Insurgents have become so
adept at hitting pipelines, power stations, and refineries that
fuel and electricity shortages have become nationwide crises;
meanwhile, some Iraqi Army units and tribes that are being paid to
guard these facilities are collaborating in the destruction. At
the State Department, these attacks have become a full-time
preoccupation. One official there described the strategy of Sunni
insurgents this way: "The one thing we can do is strangle
Baghdad, the crown jewel of Iraq. You don't have a country without
dealing with us. You may have the oil in the north, Kurds-but how
are you going to get it out?" For several months, Rice has
tried to force a decision on whether to commit American troops to
protecting key sites. Rumsfeld has resisted, and-as with so many
issues in Iraq-the White House has made no decision.
The Defense Secretary has even objected to
soldiers providing security for the small reconstruction teams
that Khalilzad wants to establish in provincial capitals.
(Rumsfeld insists that private contractors be used instead.) Final
word on the mission has been held up at the White House for
months. An Administration official said that the delay showed how
badly reality can be "disconnected from the President's
rhetoric of Iraq as the most important thing on the planet."
The official went on, "Certain people at the Pentagon want to
get out of Iraq at all costs." He added, "These
provincial reconstruction teams should be resolved in an
afternoon. But Rumsfeld doesn't want to do it, and nobody wants to
confront him."
As a State Department official was preparing
to leave for Baghdad recently, a colleague told him, "When
you get there, the big sucking sound you'll hear is D.O.D. moon walking
out of Iraq as fast as it can go. Your job is to figure out how we
can fill the gap." But the State Department has nothing like
the resources-money, equipment, personnel-of Defense. It is having
trouble persuading enough foreign-service officers to risk their
lives by filling the vacant slots at the Embassy in Baghdad or on
ministerial-assistance teams, even though raises are being
offered; for a brief period, the State Department considered
re-activating, for the first time since Vietnam, a policy of
forced assignments. In 1970, at the height of the pacification
program in Vietnam, the U.S. reconstruction teams included seventy-six
hundred civilians and military officials; in a country the size of
Iraq, that would mean eleven thousand people, but barely a
thousand positions are planned for the provincial teams in Iraq.
The Administration asked an increasingly skeptical Congress for
just $1.6 billion in reconstruction funds for the coming year,
which means that, though the output of electricity, water, oil,
and other utilities still falls well short of prewar levels, the
major reconstruction effort in Iraq is now over.
In February, I met Secretary Rice in her
office at the State Department. On one wall was an old recruiting
poster, in which the pointing figure of Uncle Sam is saying,
"We're at War. Are You Doing All You Can?" I asked Rice
whether she would alert the President if she saw a rush to
disengage from Iraq. "If I thought there was a draw down that
was going to endanger our ability to deliver a foundation for
stability that outlasts whatever presence we had-absolutely, I
would," she said. She quickly added that this isn't
happening, and that the President won't allow it to happen:
"Even though there is violence, there is a process that is
moving, I think rather inexorably, actually, toward an outcome
that will one day bring a stable Iraq."
Rice admitted that the American public is
"uneasy" about Iraq. Speaking in her precise, academic
manner, she analyzed one or two of the Administration's mistakes.
But she kept falling back on the strategy of hope. I asked in
several ways about the danger of civil war; her answer was that
Iraq won't have one, because Iraqis don't want one. And when she
turned to the larger questions about the President's legacy in the
Middle East, Rice sounded almost mystically optimistic: "I
think all the trends are in the right direction. I can see a path
where this turns out as we would want to see it turn out."
She narrowed her eyes. "I can see that path clearly."
At the Embassy in Baghdad, Khalilzad gave me
the impression that he worries about the focus and staying power
of the Administration, as if his own sense of urgency had to be
constantly signaled to Washington. As the military draws down, he
said, he isn't certain that the American effort will be redoubled
in other crucial areas, such as education, or on the provincial
teams. He was blunt about his fears for 2006. The U.S. will stay
engaged in Iraq on one condition, he said. "The condition is
whether we, the people who have responsibility here and in
Washington, project to the American people that we know what we're
doing: that we have reasonable goals, that we have good means to
achieve those goals, and that we're making progress. I think the
American people lose confidence when they think either the war is
not important or we don't know what the hell we're doing. So it
behooves us, those of us who believe that we know what we're
doing, to communicate to the American people that there is a
strategy that can produce results, and to communicate it
effectively, without hyping." He added, "Happy talk is
not the way to gain the confidence of the people."
The American strategy is for Khalilzad to
push the Iraqi factions toward a government of national unity, so
that political compromise will drain away support for the
violence, while the Iraqi security forces become capable national
institutions. Considering that just a year ago Sunni Arabs stood
completely outside the political game, and the Iraqi Army was only
a few months into a serious training program, the strategy has
been at least partly successful; the high Sunni turnout in the
December elections was a tribute to Iraqis' political maturity and
Khalilzad skills as a broker. But if a government forms and the
violence-whether sectarian, insurgent, criminal, or some
indistinguishable mixture of them all-continues at this
extraordinary level, or even intensifies, the U.S. will have
played its last card. Then there will be no more milestones to
celebrate, only the incremental effort of fighting an insurgency
and rebuilding a failed state, without the prospect of a dramatic
turn that could restore the support of the American public. People
with experience in insurgencies talk about five, eight, ten years.
Recently, Senator Biden noticed a change in
the tone of Administration officials. After the Samarra mosque
bombing, Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser, called him
to say that perhaps Iraqi leaders had "looked over the
precipice" of civil war and would now pull back. What Biden
heard in Hadley's voice was not the unshakable conviction normally
expressed by White House officials. It was something closer to
"wistfulness," he said-a prayer more than a belief.
In recent remarks, the President and
Administration officials, such as Cheney and Rumsfeld, have made
it clear that, in the case of an American defeat, they will have a
Plan B ready: they will blame the press for reporting bad news.
They will blame the opposition for losing the war. In mid-March,
on "Face the Nation," Cheney, who has offered
consistently rosy forecasts on Iraq, was asked whether his
statements had deepened public skepticism about the war. "I
think it has less to do with the statements we've made, which I
think were basically accurate and reflect reality, than it does
with the fact that there's a constant sort of perception, if you
will, that's created because what's newsworthy is the car bomb in
Baghdad."
In Congress, there has been remarkably little
public pressure on the Administration from Republicans or
Democrats to take drastic action, at least until the formation of
the Iraqi government is complete. Among Republicans, though, the
anxiety over Iraq is barely concealed-midterm elections are now
seven months away-and has been expressed partly through criticism
of the Administration on other national-security issues, such as
wiretapping and the Dubai port controversy.
"Most Republicans know that they're
connected to Bush and his fortunes and his poll numbers,"
Chuck Hagel said. "Iraq has been consistently the No. 1 issue
in the polls." Since the call for withdrawal, several months
ago, by Representative John Martha, the Pennsylvania Democrat,
members of his party seem to be content to watch in silence as the
Administration destroys its domestic standing over Iraq. Three
years into the war, there is still no coherent political
opposition.
"There's an old saying in politics: when
your opponent's in trouble, just get out of the way," Senator
Barrack Bema, the Illinois Democrat, told me. "In political
terms, I don't think that Democrats are obligated to solve Iraq
for the Administration." He added, "I think that, for
the good of the country, we've got to be constructive in figuring
out what's going to be best. I've taken political hits from
certain quarters in the Democratic Party for even trying to figure
this out. I feel that obligation. I'll confess to you, though, I
haven't come up with any novel, unique answer so far."
After the Samarra bombing, when the prospect
of civil war was added to an intractable insurgency, many
Democrats and Republicans concluded that Iraq was lost.
Conservatives like George F. Will and William F. Buckley, who, for
philosophical reasons, never held out much hope for Iraq, have
given up on the reconstruction. But most politicians remain
paralyzed between staying and leaving, unable to decide which is
the lesser evil. The deaths of more Americans and the spending of
billions more dollars offer no promise of success beyond the
prevention of wider chaos and, perhaps, a slow consolidation of
the Iraqi state. Yet an American withdrawal would leave behind
killings on a larger scale than anything yet seen; Iraqis from
every background expressed this fear. Baghdad and other mixed
cities would be divided up into barricaded sectors, and a civil
war in the center of the country might spread into a regional war.
The Shiite south would fall deeper under Iranian control,
Kurdistan would try to break away, and the Sunni areas would go
the way of Tal Afar at its worst. This is where comparisons to
Vietnam do not apply: in Southeast Asia, the domino theory turned
out to be false, but Iraq in the hands of militias and terrorists,
manipulated by neighboring states, would threaten the Middle East
and the U.S. for many years. The truth is that no one in
Washington knows what to do.
A former Administration official said,
"All of us-not just the Administration but Congress and the
American people-own the problem of Iraq. But I'm afraid we're
going to cut. We're unwilling to make the sacrifice and spend the
political capital." He summed up the three years of the Iraq
war as three successive kinds of failure: "There was an
intellectual failure at the start. There was an implementation
failure after that. And now there's a failure of political
will."
Beyond the White House, various analysts have
offered alternative strategies, all of them based on the notion
that 2006 is the year in which Iraq's long-term future, for better
or worse, will be decided. Barry Posen, a political scientist at MILT.,
has offered a more radical proposal than any officials have dared
to entertain. In a recent article in Boston Review, Posen
concluded that a unified, democratic Iraq is highly unlikely and
that American interests require a strategic withdrawal over the
next eighteen months. Posen is known as a foreign-policy realist;
when I met him at his office at MILT., he said, "I've been
depicted as a villain. I just want the American polity to consider
all sides of the equation before undertaking armed
philanthropy." Posen has decided that America can afford to
leave behind a civil war in Iraq-one that we will
"manage" on our way out, so that its result will be, in
his words, "a hurting stalemate." If one side seems
about to win, the U.S. can tip the board in the other direction.
"We managed a civil war in Bosnia from the outside,"
Posen said. "Whether we knew it or not, we were generating a
hurting stalemate." In the end, after much violence, Iraq's
factions will conclude that no one can win, and then they will
come to their own arrangement.
Posen's version of withdrawal is realpolitik
with a vengeance, offering the cold comfort of hardheaded
calculations rather than grand illusions; but it's difficult to
imagine how America, without troops in Iraq, could control events
on the ground any better than it can now. When I asked Posen about
the moral obligation to Iraqis, who will surely be massacred in
large numbers without American forces around, he replied, "No
one talks about the terrible things that can happen if we stay the
course. The insurgents are trying for a Beirut Marine barracks
bombing." He added that he doesn't imagine his ideas will be
heard in Washington. "These people are stubborn. A rational
person would think that they've learned something about the limits
of American power. They've learned nothing."
Kenneth Pollack, who served on the National
Security Council under President Clinton-and whose book "The
Threatening Storm" made an influential case for the war in
2002-recently led a small group at the Brookings Institution in
writing a detailed report on a new strategy for Iraq. It calls for
the Administration to shift the focus from the pursuit of
insurgents in the Sunni heartland and, instead, to concentrate
overstretched American and Iraqi forces in cities where the
reconstruction effort is still somewhat popular-providing security
while allowing economic development to flourish. This strategy,
known in counterinsurgency doctrine as the "ink spot"
approach (because zones of security gradually spread out from
population centers), has also been proposed by the military expert
Andrew Krepinevich. It was put into practice in Tal Afar.
Pollack's proposal demands that, in spite of intense political
pressures at home, there be no troop withdrawals anytime soon,
since the total number of American and Iraqi forces is now only
half of what experts say is required to secure the country. It
also counts on a level of international help that the Bush
Administration has never shown the ability, or the desire, to
muster. In a sense, the report asks the country to offer the same
commitment and imagination, to take the same risks and make the
same sacrifices, as the soldiers in Tal Afar.
"PARADISE"
On a quiet street in eastern Baghdad, behind
a garden with lawn chairs arranged in rows, there is a small,
unremarkable two-story building. A sign in front, which says
"Al Janna Center," is barely visible from the street,
for reasons of safety. Al Janna means "Paradise," and
Dr. Baher Butti, who directs Al Janna, had been warned by
anonymous fundamentalists that paradise cannot be found on earth.
Dr. Butti is a psychiatrist and a secular
Christian in his mid-forties, a small, stoop-shouldered man with
thinning hair and an air of stoical gloom. I first met him in the
summer of 2003, and on each subsequent visit to Iraq I looked him
up. Over the past three years, he has grown increasingly skeptical
about the motives of the Americans, Iraqi politicians, religious
leaders, and the country's neighbors. Yet he pursued with great
persistence an idea that had first come to him after the fall of
Saddam: he wanted to open a "psycho-social rehabilitation
clinic" that would rebuild the humanity of his countrymen.
Dr. Butti believed that, after decades of dictatorship, wars,
sanctions, and occupation, Iraqis need to learn to talk, to think,
to tolerate. He had registered his proposal for the clinic with
the occupation authority and successive Iraqi ministries, but none
of them had given him support. Last year, a Baghdad newspaper
owner donated funds, and in January the Al Janna Center finally
opened.
In the waiting room, brightly colored
abstract paintings by patients hung on the walls. Up a narrow
flight of stairs, there were several small meeting rooms where Dr.
Butti planned to hold lectures, poetry readings, computer-training
courses, and women's mental-health group meetings. The center was
humble and barely furnished, but, amid the grinding ugliness and
violence of Baghdad, it felt like an oasis of calm. "If we
gain humanitarian care for our patients, then the rebound will be
a humanitarian movement in all the society," Dr. Butti said.
"This place is not just a scientific institute. It's also a
place for literature and arts. We are trying to educate people
about communication."
Dr. Butti lives in Dora, the mixed
neighborhood in south Baghdad that has been particularly violent.
"There are no direct clashes in the streets, but when every
day you have one or two of your acquaintances killed, this is
civil war," he said. Most of his friends and colleagues are
leaving Iraq, along with much of the country's professional class.
When we sat down in his office, with cups of
tea, he said, "Let me tell you about my own conflict."
His conflict was simple: to stay or to leave. Last May, his young
daughter was badly injured when her school bus was hit by a
suicide car bomb. After that, his wife, who is also a doctor,
insisted that the family move to Abu Dhabi. Yet Dr. Butti has
finally achieved something tangible in Iraq, and to leave now
would be like abandoning a child. "I feel like someone who's
been cut from the roots," he said.
Dr. Butti's decision depends on what happens
in the next few months, and on the formation of a new government.
He doesn't have much hope for improvement any time soon, but he is
looking for some sign of stability. "Or it will go into a
civil war, and all will be lost, and there will be nothing to be
done here anymore. It's either this year or none." He added,
"Not one of the Iraqis believes that you Americans should
leave tomorrow. Even the Sunni leaders-they announce it in the
media, but that's for, let's say, public use. They know that we
can't have the American Army leaving the country right now,
because, excuse me to say, George Bush did a mess, he must clean
it." He shrugged and smiled, in his pained way. "We are
attached in a Catholic marriage with our occupiers. It's not
possible to have a divorce."
He walked me outside into the sunlit garden.
On the street, a car passed by slowly. For an hour, I had
forgotten to be afraid, and now that we were saying goodbye I was
reluctant to go. In the past we had always shaken hands, but on
this occasion Dr. Butti kissed my cheeks, in the Iraqi way.
Perhaps he felt, as I did, that we might not meet again for a long
time.
|