Fiasco, The American Military Adventure In Iraq Part 16

A few miles to the south, at 4:30 a.m a.m., Capt. John Combs, the convoy commander, radioed back, "This is a known ambush point." It was a message he repeated frequently on the first part of the journey. Near dawn, Combs radioed back with another worrisome message: The bridge ahead had been hit with explosives. "We'll have to find another route, maybe through Baghdad," Combs said with a sigh. An hour later he called to report that the convoy had adopted Plan C: "The bridge at the secondary route is untenable, so we're going with a new route."

Asked later about this enemy tactic, Col. Dana Pittard, the commander of the brigade that had replaced Col. Hogg's in Baqubah, said the attacks on the bridges had impressed him. "The dropping of the bridges was very interesting, because it showed a regional or even a national level of organization." The insurgents appeared to be sending information southward, communicating about routes being taken by U.S. forces, and then getting sufficient amounts of explosives to key bridges ahead of the convoys. One of Pittard's combat engineers noted that several hundred pounds of explosive material and a fair degree of expertise were required to destroy a span on the solidly built expressway bridges, which could support tank traffic.

The vehicles paused for two hours while alternatives were explored back at brigade headquarters. Finally, they proceeded into the s.h.i.+te Muslim heartland south of Baghdad, along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The land was flat and hot, with farmers' fields dotted by palm groves. Above mud houses flew the black and green banners denoting s.h.i.+te Iraq. At 11:37, as the day grew sweltering, the convoy finally arrived at the Tigris. The bridge ahead was still standing. Over the radio came Combs's latest and most ominous message: "When we get to the far side, I've got absolutely no clue where we are going."

One mishap led to another. A Humvee driver, fatigued by the long haul and lulled by the warm weather, dozed off and rear-ended a truck, smas.h.i.+ng his headlights and puncturing his radiator. Trucks sitting and waiting for accidents to be resolved and bridges to be checked for explosives began to run low on fuel, necessitating a six-hour stop at the Skania Convoy Support Center, a kind of Fort Apache with gas pumps not far from the site of ancient Babylon. Hundreds of big civilian trucks supplying the U.S. military were lined up at the center, their Third World contractor drivers dozing in the shade. While the 1st Infantry Division troops waited to refuel, some watched a thunderstorm to the north that sent flashes of lightning across the entire Mesopotamian horizon. Others talked smack about how much they hated their ex-girlfriends.

At 11:00 p.m p.m. on Monday night, nearly twenty-four hours into the operation, the convoy arrived at a small town on the east bank of the Euphrates River. Groups of Iraqi men stood along the street, silently watching the vehicles pa.s.s, many of them with their arms crossed on their chests, their eyes glaring with hatred or wounded pride. "No one waved, they just stood there looking at us," commented PFC Steve Ratcliffe, a nineteen-year-old who worked at a grocery store in Sacramento until he enlisted in the Army, and now stood manning the big .50 caliber machine gun atop the sergeant major's Humvee.

As the last vehicles in the convoy crossed the river, a parachute flare shot up across the moonless night sky, then descended slowly, a white ball high to the right of the convoy. Fourhman tensed. Flares often were used by Iraqi fighters to signal comrades lying in wait for the approach of U.S. troops. A minute later, another one shot up. Then two orange flares arced up and slowly descended. Four minutes after the last flare, a flash of light and a huge noise hit the middle of the convoy. "IEDs, IEDs," Fourhman calmly but quickly said over the radio, reporting the improvised explosive devices. Red dots began zinging at the convoy from a dark grove on the left. Then there were other flashes and colors. "RPG, RPG," Fourhman radioed as rocket-propelled grenades flew in from the grove. He looked up at the .50 caliber and said, "Ratcliffe, aim for the base of fire." Ratcliffe and the driver-Spec. Sean Yebba, a twenty-two-year-old from near Boston- reacted calmly, doing their jobs. No one spoke unnecessarily. Ratcliffe swung the machine gun, searching for a target, his face illuminated only by the green glow of the night-vision scope atop his big weapon.

The convoy kept moving. "I have one wounded," came a soft, anonymous voice over the radio. About a mile farther down the road, the convoy halted to tend three wounded soldiers and repair a fuel truck hit by the bomb.

At 12:06, a call came over the radio to Fourhman. "Duke 7, birds five mikes out," meaning that the medical evacuation helicopter and the Apache guns.h.i.+p escorting it would arrive in five minutes. "Duke 7," Capt. Combs called again. "As soon as the bird lifts off, I want to get the h.e.l.l out of here." The UH-60 Black Hawk medevac helicopter arrived with its lights out, nearby but detectable only by the sounds of its rotors and engine. A wounded soldier was lifted out; he later died.

Before getting back on the road, the soldiers conducted a head count. A driver, a civilian employed by Kellogg Brown & Root, was missing. The convoy couldn't leave without him. The soldiers stood and waited, stretching their legs on the north side of the Humvees, away from the side where the shooting in the ambush had originated. Worried by the delay in resuming movement, Fourhman radioed Combs to advise looking for the missing Brown & Root driver aboard the mede-vac helicopter. The aviation unit reported back that it had taken no uninvited pa.s.sengers. Two hours later, when the aviators were again asked to check the helicopter, they found the man still hiding in it, cowering. "Let's get out of here," the sergeant major said with a sigh. "I don't like this neighborhood."

Four hours later, out in the desert west of the Euphrates, some of the big trucks in the convoy became mired in fresh mud, the result of the storms the troops had watched while ga.s.sing up. It was 2:00 p.m p.m. Tuesday when the exhausted convoy finally arrived at Forward Operating Base Duke, about 12 miles to the northwest of Najaf, out in the empty desert. A primitive Army camp with few amenities, it looked and felt like home to the exhausted men in the convoy.

Over the next several days, Iraqi fighters repeatedly brought home the message that the nature of the war had changed. In another ambush near Najaf, a group of fighters suspected to be part of Sadr's militia let a group of six U.S. armored vehicles pa.s.s their position, then placed obstacles across the highway behind them, cutting off their line of retreat. The armored vehicles were forced to move forward across a bridge. While they were on it and approaching a police checkpoint, Iraqi fighters, some of them wearing police uniforms, began firing on them.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, insurgents began dynamiting highway overpa.s.ses. Though they did not destroy the spans, they succeeded in slowing traffic, depriving U.S. supply convoys of their best defense against ambushes-speed. It is far easier to use roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades against a truck mired in traffic than it is to hit one moving at 60 mph.

Some insurgents also developed shockingly good methods of infiltration. When one group of fighters was captured at about this time, its members possessed identification cards that allowed them full access to U.S. military bases, recalled Kalev Sepp, the retired Special Forces officer who was an adviser on U.S. strategy in Iraq. They "even had a photograph of themselves posing with a U.S. brigade commander," he noted.

. . . and U.S. troops learn as well Before deploying to Iraq, Capt. Timothy Powledge thought that the best way to counter roadside bombs would be to aggressively pursue the person who triggered the blast. But after serving in Iraq for five months as commander of a company in the 3rd Battalion of the 7th Marine Regiment, he concluded that "hunting down the triggerman after the detonation is nearly impossible." His battalion, operating in western Iraq, was the target of 137 bomb attacks from March to July 2004, and didn't catch one bomber after the fact. What worked, he said, was awareness-having the same unit operate in the same area repeatedly, so it recognized anything out of place. To a far lesser degree, lying in wait at likely spots for bombs to be planted also worked. His unit conducted four hundred such "counter IED ambushes" and killed, captured, or disrupted likely bombers six times.

Commanders also were learning. Brig. Gen. Martin Dempsey, Sanchez's successor as the commander of the 1st Armored Division, later said that his unit had reacted far differently to Sadr's uprising than it might have a year earlier. "We had a different understanding of the things that make you successful. A year earlier we might have been too imprecise and heavy-handed."

But some units continued to use heavy-handed tactics. In May, two DIA interrogators filed complaints against the Special Operations team with which they were working. One said that he saw prisoners arriving at a detention facility in Baghdad with burn marks on their backs. (A June 2004 memo from Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, the director of the DIA, that summarized the charges doesn't indicate how those burns were suffered, but most likely they resulted from the practice of tying prisoners across the hot hoods of Humvees.) The other stated that on May 9, 2004, he had witnessed U.S. personnel taking hostage the wife of a suspected Iraqi terrorist in Tarmiya in order to compel the husband to turn himself in. "During my initial screening of the occupants of the target house, I determined that the wife could provide no actionable intelligence leading to the arrest of her husband," he wrote in a secret memorandum to his superiors. "Despite my protest, the raid team leader detained her anyway." The woman was released two days later.

On May 24, the CPA filed a memorandum to the State Department on a recent meeting in Samarra, where the 4th Infantry Division had been busy. "Sheik Nahid Faraj told the council that while no one wanted to admit it, the situation in Samarra was a direct result of Coalition Forces excesses over the past year," the cable stated. The CPA's interpretation of this critique was that the sheikhs were warning that U.S. military actions were eroding their authority, and that if the military's overly aggressive tactics continued, the sheikhs would lose control of their people.

On June 2, 2004, the CPA reported to State that "the security situation in Baghdad is a serious concern." It said that insurgents were operating in the western part of the city, that Sadr's militias were moving in the east, and that criminals were active across the city.

The spring battles end inconclusively Both the s.h.i.+te uprising and the first battle of Fallujah ended indeterminately. With Sadr, the U.S. military arrived at a negotiated solution in which he stopped his militia's attacks and U.S. forces stopped trying to "kill or capture" him, and a murder charge against him was ignored.

Col. Alan King was asked by his boss at CPA to write out talking points for a meeting with Sadr's deputies to arrange a cease-fire. King listed several issues for discussion, but the main one was an offer that U.S. forces would pull back from the streets of Sadr City and stay mainly on their bases near the area. "That was the crux-climb down from a military confrontation," said King. His thinking was that after a stand-down, the U.S. authorities would instead try to use the tribal leaders to confront Sadr. But King was taken by surprise. Without his knowledge, his boss pa.s.sed his paper to Bremer, who in turn gave it to Sanchez, who then turned it over to the commander of the 1st Armored Division, Martin Dempsey.

The next day King's phone rang. "Alan?" said a voice, which King quickly recognized as that of Dempsey, under whom he had served for a period after the 3rd ID left Iraq.

"Yes, sir," said King.

"You motherf.u.c.ker!" Dempsey said, his voice intense with anger, King recalled. "If you ever tell me what to do with my division again, I will cut your f.u.c.king nuts off." Then he hung up. After that, King avoided Dempsey. But under a deal reached on May 27, both Sadr and the Americans withdrew their forces from Najaf and the nearby town of Kufa. Despite weeks of insistence by U.S. officials that his militias give up their weapons, "Sadr was not required to surrender or disarm, though the CPA would not admit this publicly," noted Larry Diamond, the former CPA official. U.S. forces later that summer would go back into Najaf and clean out the Sadr militia there, but Sadr's forces would remain in Sadr City and launch an average of more than one hundred attacks a week in August and September. They also began establis.h.i.+ng a major presence in Basra and some other southern cities. Sadr also established an alliance of sorts with former Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi. Of the six major deputies to Sadr who had been arrested, four eventually were released.

Meanwhile, in Fallujah, with the Marines withdrawn and the Fallujah Brigade fallen apart, the Sunni insurgents and their foreign allies were digging in. They spent months building dirt berms, sniper positions, fighting bunkers, and roadblocks. Fallujah effectively became a huge, city-sized, anti-American fortress.

"It was a closed city" said Capt. Stephen Winslow, a Marine historian who spent much of 2004 in or around Fallujah. "They owned it."

That outcome deepened the ill will between some Army and Marine officers. When the 82nd was in Fallujah and eastern al Anbar in 2003-4, said Gen. Swannack, its commander, it operated with precision, attacking small groups. But after that, he said, "Fallujah became a quagmire," because the large-scale operation conducted by the Marines had worked to "alienate the population." But that a.s.sessment seems unfair-after all, Mattis had gone in with a plan to engage the population, only to be overruled and ordered to launch an aggressive attack.

Journalism under siege Life for reporters in Iraq became even more constrained in the spring of 2004. It was journalism under siege, with hotels being mortared and every trip out of them risky, made in armored SUVs and wearing body armor. Reporting trips became dashes to the Green Zone or to the front gates of U.S. military bases, where bombings were always a threat. One American newspaper had to move its reporters after men in their neighborhood were heard saying, "We are looking for the Jewish journalists." An Australian journalist was kidnapped from the steps of his hotel, but released after he persuaded his captors that his coverage was anti-occupation, which they confirmed by Googling him. At night reporters traded tales of "shark attacks"-ambushes by gunmen driving fast BMW sedans on the highways.

The world of reporters narrowed steadily in late 2003 and early 2004, recalled Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Baghdad bureau chief. He kept a map in his hotel room in which he crossed off roads as "no-go zones." First to go off-limits were the roads south of Baghdad, with Highway 8, the road to Hillah, becoming known as "the highway of death." One afternoon he pa.s.sed several cars there that had been shot up. The next day he learned that seventeen people had been killed along that stretch just before he came through it. Then a CNN crew was shot up on that road. Next to be lost was the road west to Fallujah, then the road north to Tikrit and Mosul. Finally even the airport road-the path to escape from Iraq-became a kind of gauntlet. By late March, parts of the city of Baghdad itself began to be crossed off as too dangerous. Security became so bad that even the short drive across the city to the Green Zone carried risks that made reporters wonder whether it was worth it just to listen to officials-some of whom themselves rarely ventured out of the zone-talk in press conferences about the steady progress being made. "The whole world of foreign correspondence changed in Iraq," Chandrasekaran said. "We started out like other reporters-go out, report, do a day trip, come back, write the story. By the end, I wasn't going anywhere much. Sometimes press conferences in the Green Zone. And also bringing Iraqis to the hotel. And an awful lot of reporting by remote control, sending out Iraqis to report on a bombing, and giving them questions to ask." Baghdad bureau chief. He kept a map in his hotel room in which he crossed off roads as "no-go zones." First to go off-limits were the roads south of Baghdad, with Highway 8, the road to Hillah, becoming known as "the highway of death." One afternoon he pa.s.sed several cars there that had been shot up. The next day he learned that seventeen people had been killed along that stretch just before he came through it. Then a CNN crew was shot up on that road. Next to be lost was the road west to Fallujah, then the road north to Tikrit and Mosul. Finally even the airport road-the path to escape from Iraq-became a kind of gauntlet. By late March, parts of the city of Baghdad itself began to be crossed off as too dangerous. Security became so bad that even the short drive across the city to the Green Zone carried risks that made reporters wonder whether it was worth it just to listen to officials-some of whom themselves rarely ventured out of the zone-talk in press conferences about the steady progress being made. "The whole world of foreign correspondence changed in Iraq," Chandrasekaran said. "We started out like other reporters-go out, report, do a day trip, come back, write the story. By the end, I wasn't going anywhere much. Sometimes press conferences in the Green Zone. And also bringing Iraqis to the hotel. And an awful lot of reporting by remote control, sending out Iraqis to report on a bombing, and giving them questions to ask."

In April 2004, John Burns, a veteran foreign correspondent for the New York Times, New York Times, was kidnapped south of Baghdad along with his photographer. "We were taken hostage for twelve hours and driven out into the desert, blindfolded, and put at some risk," he said in a television interview. He also was shown the knife that he was told would be used to kill him. was kidnapped south of Baghdad along with his photographer. "We were taken hostage for twelve hours and driven out into the desert, blindfolded, and put at some risk," he said in a television interview. He also was shown the knife that he was told would be used to kill him.

A few months later, Farnaz Fa.s.sihi, a Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal reporter based in Baghdad, sent out her usual periodical update to family and friends. It had been a rough time for Western journalists in Iraq, the thirty-one-year-old Iranian-born, American-educated reporter wrote in her e-mail. "Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest," her two-and-a-half-page missive began. "I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, can't strike a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in anything but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news stories, can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can't and can't." reporter based in Baghdad, sent out her usual periodical update to family and friends. It had been a rough time for Western journalists in Iraq, the thirty-one-year-old Iranian-born, American-educated reporter wrote in her e-mail. "Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest," her two-and-a-half-page missive began. "I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, can't strike a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in anything but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news stories, can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can't and can't."

But she wasn't simply frustrated; she was growing angry with the official American portrayal of the situation. "Despite President Bush's rosy a.s.sessments, Iraq remains a disaster," she wrote, "... a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come." It was a "raging barbaric guerrilla war." Moreover, journalists recently had been subjected to special targeting for abduction. She came away from a U.S. emba.s.sy cautionary briefing even more alarmed. "We were somberly told our fate would largely depend on where we were in the kidnapping chain once it was determined we were missing," she reported. "Here is how it goes: criminal gangs grab you and sell you up to Baathists in Fallujah, who will in turn sell you to al Qaeda."

More than the daily reports of car bombings, which had a sameness to them, Fa.s.sihi's letter captured the feeling of being a Westerner in Baghdad at the time. Reporters who received it forwarded it to each other, and soon it was being posted on Web sites. Some in the military pointed to the letter as evidence of a media bias, especially because of its criticism of President Bush, but that was tempered somewhat by the fact that Fa.s.sihi wrote for the Wall Street Journal, Wall Street Journal, the most conservative major American newspaper. Lt. Jonathan Morgenstein, an unusually liberal Marine specializing in civil affairs, recommended to friends back home that they read her account, calling it "a laser-sharp portrayal of the reality of Iraq today." the most conservative major American newspaper. Lt. Jonathan Morgenstein, an unusually liberal Marine specializing in civil affairs, recommended to friends back home that they read her account, calling it "a laser-sharp portrayal of the reality of Iraq today."

The U.S. military itself also presented somewhat of a threat to reporters. Approaching a checkpoint was always worrisome, with rifles and machine guns pointed at approaching cars by troops not inclined to take the chance of letting a suicide bomber get too close. Nor was checkpoint duty pleasant for soldiers: They were given three seconds in which to act against a suspicious vehicle, with the first shot fired into the pavement in front of the car, the second into the grille, and the third at the driver. "We told them, you don't have the right not to shoot," recalled Lt. Gen. John Sattler, a commander of the Marines in western Iraq. "It's not about you. You are being trusted by everybody behind you. You are the single point of failure."

But it was even harder for those on the other end of the rifle barrel. Not only were reporters handled with great suspicion, they were sometimes singled out as especially threatening to the security of U.S. troops. For example, U.S. government officials were taught in an official 2004 CPA briefing on bomb threats that the "presence of news crews may be an indicator" of an imminent bomb attack. "Bomber does not want his picture taken, but he loves to have his dirty work on film," the briefing explained.

The odd result of the deterioration in security was that the harder it became to collect information, the easier it was for the Bush administration to a.s.sert that steady progress was made in Iraq but that cowed reporters simply weren't seeing it.

Winning tactically, losing strategically ?

"Boss, we're losing," a young major told Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, one of the top U.S. generals in Iraq, after the rough month of April. Others were arriving at similar conclusions. When Col. Paul Hughes returned home from Iraq that spring to serve out his time until retirement in a post at the National Defense University, he decided to take a public stand on the conduct of the war. "Unless we ensure that we have coherency in our policy, we will lose strategically," he told the Was.h.i.+ngton Post, Was.h.i.+ngton Post, knowing that these types of on-the-record remarks from an active-duty officer who had served in Baghdad would appear prominently in the newspaper. "I lost my brother in Vietnam," he said, in explaining his decision to go public. "I promised myself when I came on active duty that I would do everything in my power to prevent that [sort of strategic loss] from happening again. knowing that these types of on-the-record remarks from an active-duty officer who had served in Baghdad would appear prominently in the newspaper. "I lost my brother in Vietnam," he said, in explaining his decision to go public. "I promised myself when I came on active duty that I would do everything in my power to prevent that [sort of strategic loss] from happening again.

Here I am, 30 years later, thinking we will win every fight and lose the war, because we don't understand the war we're in."

One Army general predicted the Army would start falling apart in the spring of 2005, while another one said flatly it was time for Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to go. "I do not believe we had a clearly defined war strategy, end state and exit strategy before we commenced our invasion," he said. "Had someone like Colin Powell been the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ], he would not have agreed to send troops without a clear exit strategy. The current OSD refused to listen or adhere to military advice."

Was the United States in fact losing in Iraq? That was the question posed in May 2004 to Chuck Swannack, who had spent much of the previous year in western Iraq. "I think, strategically, we are," he said. "I think, operationally, maybe we are. But tactically, we are not."

In the spring of 2004, Swannack recounted in a later interview, "three things went wrong in Iraq." First, he said, was the Abu Ghraib scandal, "a tactical miscue by seven or eight people that had strategic consequences." Hard on its heels was the Marine Corps's siege of Fallujah, a move he argued broadly alienated the Sunni population. Third, the confrontation with Moqtadr al-Sadr similarly estranged much of the s.h.i.+te population. The United States had indeed dug itself a deep hole, and it wasn't clear that it knew how to climb out of it.

When Army mine expert Paul Arcangeli returned to Iraq late in 2004, having been away since the previous summer, "it bore no resemblance to the country I was in" a year earlier, he said. In the summer of 2003 he had freedom to leave the Green Zone as he pleased. "The difference between now and then is incredible," he said at the end of 2004. "They're driving 60 miles an hour through the Green Zone, combat style. It feels like they are no longer masters of their domain. They really do not rule the country."

There was no good military solution, he said. "I don't want to say we've lost, but everything we do helps us lose. More patrols-bad. Less patrols-bad. How do we get out of it? I don't know." The American people also were beginning to worry. In late May 2004, the majority of people surveyed by the Was.h.i.+ngton Post/ Was.h.i.+ngton Post/ABC poll said the war in Iraq was not worth fighting. It was the first time that the majority of respondents in that poll felt that way.

Gen. Zinni came to a similar conclusion. "I have seen this movie," he said in April 2004. "It was called Vietnam."

THE PRICE PAID.

t the end of its first twelve months in Iraq the Army began to confront the ii fact that it had suffered its first significant setback since the Vietnam War: The security situation had worsened, essential services were still not restored, and Iraqi faith in the American occupiers was dwindling. Some three hundred thousand U.S. troops had served there. The invasion force, and then the first rotation of the occupation, had gone home-the 101st Airborne, the 4th Infantry Division, the 1st Armored Division, and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. They had been replaced by the 1st Infantry Division, the 1st Cavalry Division, the Marines, and a grab bag of National Guard and Reserve units, all thrown into missions for which those backup forces hadn't been designed. And it was increasingly clear that the units that had gone back to the United States would be coming back for a second tour. The Army had little to show for its time in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad but eight hundred dead and five thousand wounded. It was a shaken inst.i.tution, losing good people and provoking others to question it as it hadn't been in decades. fact that it had suffered its first significant setback since the Vietnam War: The security situation had worsened, essential services were still not restored, and Iraqi faith in the American occupiers was dwindling. Some three hundred thousand U.S. troops had served there. The invasion force, and then the first rotation of the occupation, had gone home-the 101st Airborne, the 4th Infantry Division, the 1st Armored Division, and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. They had been replaced by the 1st Infantry Division, the 1st Cavalry Division, the Marines, and a grab bag of National Guard and Reserve units, all thrown into missions for which those backup forces hadn't been designed. And it was increasingly clear that the units that had gone back to the United States would be coming back for a second tour. The Army had little to show for its time in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad but eight hundred dead and five thousand wounded. It was a shaken inst.i.tution, losing good people and provoking others to question it as it hadn't been in decades.

The death of a "star man"

"I'm extremely proud of the soldiers in my platoon," 2nd Lt. Leonard Cowherd, a twenty-two-year-old tank platoon commander in the 1st Armored Division, wrote to his hometown newspaper, the Culpeper Culpeper (Virginia) (Virginia) Star-Exponent, Star-Exponent, in March 2004. "They have endured countless hards.h.i.+ps here in Iraq as well as the overall hards.h.i.+p of being away from one's home and family." Two months later, on May 16, Cowherd was shot and killed by a sniper in Karbala. He was just short of a year of the first anniversary of his graduation from West Point. His death was a painful reminder of how much the Army-and the country-was losing. in March 2004. "They have endured countless hards.h.i.+ps here in Iraq as well as the overall hards.h.i.+p of being away from one's home and family." Two months later, on May 16, Cowherd was shot and killed by a sniper in Karbala. He was just short of a year of the first anniversary of his graduation from West Point. His death was a painful reminder of how much the Army-and the country-was losing.

When a memorial service was held a week later, four hundred mourners arrived at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, a small building in Culpeper that had been used as a Civil War hospital. There were so many people in attendance that some watched the proceedings on video in a tent outside. The day was warm, and attendants served bottles of chilled water. "A beautiful kid," retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who had taught Cowherd at West Point, and who delivered one of the eulogies, noted afterward in clipped military fas.h.i.+on. "Star man ... enormous maturity... great athlete ... historian ... very strong spiritual character. Went armor. Married his childhood sweetheart. His wife is an Army brat and daughter of a West Pointer." The two had announced their engagement at McCaffrey's apartment at West Point.

Cowherd's widow, Sarah, a schoolteacher whom he had married eleven months earlier, said, "He was my everything, and he was ever since the day I met him. My heart, my soul, my friend, and my husband."

Family, friends, and many of the dozens of young officers who attended the funeral met at a Culpeper pub that night for a wake. Cowherd's father-in-law, retired Army Lt. Col. Anthony Cerri, described the evening for those who weren't there: "Amidst the open beams, the cigarette smell, and the dim lighting, two guys with electrified acoustic guitars played songs like 'Tennessee Waltz' and 'Take Me Home to West Virginia' and 'Whiskey for My Men and Beer for My Horses.' We drank, and talked, and laughed, and yes-even danced a little.... We were there to tell Leonard stories and family stories and military stories. And we cried and held each other when the need arose."

May 26 brought the burial in Arlington National Cemetery. "The day was early-summer, Southern gem," wrote Cerri. "Hot but not stifling. Blue sky with wispy white." Then the hea.r.s.e's doors were opened. "I placed my hands upon my daughter's shoulders . .. and I felt her shudder." The young officer was laid to rest in Site 7983 of Section 60 of the cemetery. The ceremony was conducted with grace and precision. A bagpiper played "Amazing Grace" and walked into the distance, "til the strains faded in the cicada whine." Then the 3rd Infantry Regiment, the Old Guard that serves at the cemetery, fired a rifle salute. "The 21 guns were three, crisp firings of seven," Cerri wrote. "The Old Guard does not make mistakes." "Taps" was played, and the U.S. flag that had adorned the casket was folded and presented to the lieutenant's young widow. "Leonard's wife ... my Kiddo. Leonard was her everything."

The Army loses another officer As Lt. Cowherd was being buried, Capt. Estrada was finis.h.i.+ng the essay he had begun in his green notebook that argued that the Army's entire approach to Iraq was wrongheaded. In early June he went public with those concerns. What happened to him next was very different from the death of Lt. Cowherd, but it is still a tale of loss. The reserve civil affairs officer showed his essay to Maj. Peter Davis, his company commander, and then to some other civil affairs officers. He didn't encounter a lot of disagreement, he said later. His sense was that his peers agreed that the actions of the U.S. Army were alienating the Iraqi people. "I think it generally reflected the frustration that many of us were experiencing," he said later. Estrada decided to send the essay to the Was.h.i.+ngton Post, Was.h.i.+ngton Post, which in years of working at the State Department he had come to consider his hometown newspaper. He casually mentioned the submission to a military lawyer with whom he sometimes worked. "He told me, as long as I didn't reveal cla.s.sified information or attack the president, I was within my rights." which in years of working at the State Department he had come to consider his hometown newspaper. He casually mentioned the submission to a military lawyer with whom he sometimes worked. "He told me, as long as I didn't reveal cla.s.sified information or attack the president, I was within my rights."

On June 6, 2004, the Post's Post's Sunday Outlook section carried Estrada's lengthy opinion piece questioning what the Army was doing in Iraq and how it was doing it. Estrada related the question he had heard at the Buhriz water treatment plant- Sunday Outlook section carried Estrada's lengthy opinion piece questioning what the Army was doing in Iraq and how it was doing it. Estrada related the question he had heard at the Buhriz water treatment plant-Why?-and the puzzlement he felt after the thoughtless killing of the farmer's cow.

I think of... the children who burst into tears when we point our weapons into their cars (just in case), and the countless numbers of people whose vehicles we sideswipe as we try to use speed to survive the IEDs that await us each morning. I think of my fellow soldiers and the reality of being attacked and feeling threatened, and it all makes sense-the need to smash their cars and shoot their cows and point our weapons at them and detain them without concern for notifying their families. But how would I feel in their shoes? Would I be able to offer my own heart and mind?

Clearly, the U.S. effort was losing the faith of Capt. Estrada. After the article appeared, his commander called him in and ordered him to proceed to Forward Operating Base Warhorse to see Col. Dana Pittard, the commander of U.S. forces in the sprawling region from the eastern suburbs of Baghdad to the Iranian border. At that first meeting, Estrada recalled, "Colonel Pittard asked why I wrote it, expressed his view that it was too negative, said he was disappointed, and asked if I could continue to do my job or if I wanted to leave." Estrada said he wanted to stay with his unit. "He said that was fine, and I left."

The next day Estrada was summoned again by the colonel. "I went in, and he told me he'd lost confidence in me and wanted me out of his AO"-area of operations. Pittard also told Estrada that the article was inaccurate, because the caretaker's father at the Buhriz water plant had been visited by a battalion commander and had signed a paper saying he hadn't been mistreated. Estrada thought to himself that if he were an Iraqi and an American lieutenant colonel showed up with a well-armed security entourage, he also would sign whatever was put before him.

Among many civil affairs and other Special Forces soldiers, there was a good deal of sympathy for Estrada's comments. In their view, there was no governing strategy, and because of that lack, battalion and brigade commanders were each fighting their private wars, often employing tactics that alienated Iraqis. But not all civil affairs officers sided with him. Capt. Trampes Crow, who was operating about 85 miles to the north, said his experiences were "nearly polar opposite." In an e-mail to friends, he accused Estrada of wallowing in pessimism and spending too much energy dissecting problems and not enough in devising solutions.

Most of the soldiers at Baqubah were regular Army, and they tended to dismiss Estrada's critique as the disenchanted whining of someone who didn't understand that there was a war on, and that harsh methods sometimes were required. Among some active-duty troops there also was a feeling that this sort of defeatist att.i.tude was a problem among undertrained, half-civilian reservists. (Almost all Army civil affairs units are from the reserves.) Capt. Thomas Johnson, commander of F Troop, 4th Cavalry, who was the Bravo 6 officer referred to in the story of the killing of the cow, accosted Estrada in the cavernous mess hall at Warhorse. "He kept asking me if I knew that the man whose cow had been killed had been compensated," Estrada later said. "I said yes, and tried to explain that it didn't matter. But he wasn't buying my argument, and kept getting in my face." Finally, Maj. Davis, Estrada's company commander, who was also at the table, told Johnson to back off.

That night Estrada would be sleeping at the Warhorse base, and Maj. Davis noted that the room he was a.s.signed didn't have a lock on its door. "I think he feared for my safety that night," Estrada said, thinking the concern was justified. "I did halfway expect those guys to look for me and try to do something, given the level of anger they exhibited." After that day, whenever Estrada was visiting Warhorse, he would pick up his food at the mess hall and take it elsewhere. Next Estrada found that his two-week leave, during which he had planned to fly back to the United States to be married, had been canceled. In mid-June Estrada was transferred to a job near the Iranian border, far to the east, where he served out the rest of his tour.

Special Forces vs. the Army Special Forces troops like Estrada were leading indicators of the problem the U.S. military faced. Better educated than most soldiers and trained to be culturally sensitive, SF soldiers were among the first to speak out and criticize the approach the military was taking. Estrada was typical of Army Special Forces officers in believing that the U.S. military still could prevail in Iraq, but only if it radically altered its approach. "I think we need to pull back," Estrada said. "Not pull out, but find a way to stop feeding the insurgency. Our presence there is feeding the fire." Like many others in Special Forces, he recommended revising the U.S. military presence to make it look more like the one in Afghanistan, where conventional troops are largely kept out of sight, and where the U.S. bases around the country are small facilities manned mainly by Special Forces troops.

By June 2004, most Iraqis endorsed that view. In a poll conducted for the CPA in the country's biggest cities, two thirds said they opposed the U.S. presence. But an even larger portion said the foreign troops should minimize their presence. On the question of whether the U.S. bases should be moved away from cities, 82 percent agreed. And Iraqis were almost unanimous in their view that U.S. troops should stop conducting street patrols, with 94 percent supporting such a change.

It became increasingly common for Special Forces soldiers to say that the regular Army was not fighting the insurgency effectively, and perhaps was not capable of doing so. Special operators also began to argue that they were not being employed well or even being allowed to do their jobs correctly. Lt. Col. Rich Young, a Special Forces officer who served in Baghdad from March to August of 2004, said much later that the first patrol he went on was with engineers from the 1st Cavalry Division. "I asked, 'What is this patrol about?' They said, 'It's a presence patrol.'" That made little sense to Young, especially as so many patrols were being bombed in the spring and summer of 2004, resulting in casualties to U.S. troops and doing little to rea.s.sure Iraqi bystanders. "We've been through a couple of years now, and IEDs are blowing off, and the people are tired of it."

The training of Iraqis as it was structured in 2003 and early 2004 also was heavily criticized in Special Forces circles. Foreign internal defense (FID) is a cla.s.sic Special Forces mission, but in Iraq it was carried out mainly by contractors and members of the conventional side of the military. "One of the biggest failures of OIF will be the improper use of SF," said one Special Forces officer. He argued that SF should have been involved from the beginning in training security forces,... living, working, eating, and fighting with these forces to build strong bonds-because in Iraq, like [in] most countries we deal with, relations.h.i.+ps are everything. If we had done this instead of allowing contractors and conventional forces and reserves to conduct basic training like committee training we might be much farther along.

Another Special Forces officer criticized the emphasis on raids and other direct action missions, which he felt came at the expense of the training mission, and also were counterproductive. "We have become locked on kill or capture as a mission statement_____ The kill or capture charter has led to chasing bad guys (and subsequently making more)." Indeed, in the fall of 2003, the commander of 5th Special Forces Group, the unit specializing in Middle Eastern operations that was full of Arabic speakers, withdrew his A Teams from the Iraq countryside and consolidated them in Baghdad, where they focused almost exclusively on those direct action missions, according to an intelligence expert who disapproved of the move. "This move surrendered influence in the countryside and failed to secure Baghdad," commented Kalev Sepp, the counterinsurgency expert who later was brought in by top commanders to review their operations.

The Army's base structure, with a string of big establishments around the country that were ringed by high dirt walls, barbed wire, and watchtowers, also bothered Special Forces officers, who knew that cla.s.sic counterinsurgency doctrine calls for living and moving among the people. "We have the wrong force structure to fight the insurgents," one SF veteran wrote to a friend in 2004. He continued: The big Army is like a mammoth elephant trying to squish the mouse. It is slow, bureaucratic and fearful of loss. The enemy have freedom of action, decentralized operations and care little about the political or environmental impacts of the actions as long as it gets on CNN or CBS. The more we go to bunker mentality and pull away from the people, the harder it will be. We are making this war longer than it has to be. Every day the big Army tries to get more operational control over the only force trained and ready for the FID mission needed here-SF. They want us to stay in the wire and coordinate to the BCT/DIV [brigade combat team/division] level for every action.

The perceived misuse of Special Forces had an especially pernicious effect, because dangling in front of demoralized SF troops were thousands of private-sector security contractor jobs, a clear alternative in which they could still work in a combat environment with trusted comrades but operate as they liked, and in the process receive far better compensation. "Because it is not being employed correctly, we are suffering from a growing attrition problem," said one senior Special Forces officer in the spring of 2004. "SF troopers are getting out to take lucrative jobs-the difference being they can go do important work with more autonomy, and as a side benefit make some more money." While the leaders of the special operations community thought the exodus was driven simply by the salaries, this officer disagreed: "I have been talking to a lot of senior NCOs, warrant officers, and junior officers who just want do their job the way they have been trained."

The Special Forces critique of the U.S. military approach was supported by many contractors-who as noted often were former SF themselves, and were more outspoken about what they saw. Dave Scholl, an Arabic-speaking veteran of the 5th Special Forces Group, became pessimistic about the prospects for the U.S. effort as he knocked around Iraq working on security for reconstruction projects. "We are the hated occupier," he wrote in a 2004 essay that circulated by e-mail among occupation insiders. "How many Iraqis have seen an American who wasn't pointing a gun at them?" His radical recommendation: Draw down the U.S. military and aid presence, freeze all reconstruction, and only venture out to build something when asked to do so by a delegation of Iraqis.

In Vietnam, the professional critique offered by Special Forces counterinsurgency experts was never accepted by conventional commanders. "The Special Forces were the only soldiers who had the knowledge and experience to point out the answer, but the Regular Army absolutely wouldn't listen to them," Robert Wright, the official historian of the 25th Infantry Division, told Lt. Col. Nagl, author of a study of the Army's failure to adapt during the Vietnam War. "They'd have listened to the French before they listened to their own Special Forces."

In Iraq, the views of Special Forces officers ultimately would find a warmer reception. At first theirs was clearly a minority view, disparaged as barely patriotic. But by the end of 2004, as the war dragged on, their views would gain a new respect. And by the end of 2005 they would become almost the conventional wisdom-not dominant among all commanders, but understood by many, and embraced by most planners and strategists studying how to alter the U.S. military's approach. By then, even President Bush would promise in a speech at Annapolis, "We will increasingly move out of Iraqi cities, reduce the number of bases from which we operate, and conduct fewer patrols and convoys." That was what officers such as Capt. Estrada had been talking about for a long time. But by the time the president made his speech, all that Estrada wanted to do with the U.S. military was leave it.

Corporate mercenaries There was a flip side to the heavy reliance on all those security contractors: They amounted to a small private army that existed outside the U.S. chain of command and wasn't subject to U.S. military discipline or even U.S. law. One day in February 2004, Marine Col. T. X. Hammes, who was serving at CPA's headquarters, was driving in the city just across the Tigris from the Green Zone. He was in his Marine battle fatigues, but somewhat disguised by a windbreaker and a civilian cap. At the first traffic circle east of the river, his beat-up Toyota Land Cruiser was forced to the side of the road by a carload of gun-toting private security guards who were escorting a CPA official. Hammes looked closely at the rifle pointed nearest him. "I was trying to see if his finger was on the trigger guard, because then you're four pounds of pressure from being gone," he said. He understood what they were doing, and why. "They did it because their single mission was to get their guy through," without regard to the effect they had on the population of the capital. But they didn't understand that "just by getting their guy around, they were out making enemies."

He understood why they were necessary. "We didn't have enough troops," he said. "But they scared the h.e.l.l out of me. These shooters, you'd see them in the gym. Steroids, tension, and guns are not a good mix." Nor were all of sterling character: One company, ArmorGroup, employed a former British Royal Marine named Derek Adgey who in 1995 had been jailed for four years on ten counts of soliciting murder by pa.s.sing information to Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair's Ulster Freedom Fighters, a Loyalist gang in Northern Ireland.

Fundamentally, the bodyguards' mission differed from that of the U.S. military, noted Hammes. "The contractor was hired to protect the princ.i.p.al. He had no stake in pacifying the country. Therefore, they often ran Iraqis off the roads, reconned by fire, and generally treated locals as expendable." Yet Iraqis saw them as acting under American authority. "You have loosed an unaccountable, deadly force into their society, and they have no recourse."

One of the aspects of the Iraq war that historians are likely to remember is the heavy reliance on these corporate mercenaries, or private security contractors, as they were called. In 2003-4 alone, some $750 million was spent on them, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office; by early 2006, the total expenditure had amounted to over $1 billion. When the U.S. troop level was about 150,000, and the allied troop contributions totaled 25,000, there were about 60,000 additional civilian contractors supporting the effort. Of those, perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 were shooters-that is, people hired as bodyguards or for other security roles, rather than as truck drivers, cooks, and other support personnel. Most of those hired to perform security functions were Iraqi, but many- at least 6,000, and perhaps many more-were Americans, South Africans, Fijians, and other nationalities. To put this in perspective, private security firms were fielding about as many combat forces as the total non-U.S. contingent in the coalition.

The armed contractors, or "trigger pullers," comprised the rough equivalent of at least one Army division, but they had a higher casualty rate than the military units. During 2003 and 2004 private contractors suffered at least 275 deaths and 900 wounded, which was, the Brookings Inst.i.tution's Peter Singer observed, "more than any single U.S. Army division and more than the rest of the coalition combined." Others said that the number of casualties might be far higher, because the numbers made public included only U.S. citizens that by law had to be disclosed to the U.S. Labor Department. So, for example, the loss of a Nepali guard bombed at a checkpoint or of an Indian truck driver in an ambush of a convoy might not show up in that data.

The contractors had two high-profile tasks in 2003-4, and their efforts at both provoked much unhappiness. The first was training Iraqi forces. The near mutiny of an Iraqi army battalion in the spring of 2004 underscored how badly that had gone. Subsequent reviews by Army experts found that the training effort had been a numbers game, placing too much emphasis on the quant.i.ty of trained Iraqis and too little on their quality. It especially had faltered in developing a chain of command-that is, leaders trusted both by Iraqi foot soldiers and the American advisers. The company doing much of the initial training work was Vinnell, which had a one-year contract valued at $24 million to train nine battalions of one thousand men each. "American observers from U.S. Central Command headquarters a.s.sessed the military basic training conducted under contract by the Vinnell Corporation to be unsatisfactory, and the contract was terminated," Sepp, the retired Special Forces expert in counterinsurgency, told a congressional committee.

The security work of contractors was even more controversial. Col. Hammes's experience on the road that February day was all too common in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004. Scholl concluded that these personal security details had done much political damage to the U.S. effort, especially where they were most active-in the capital: "If there are one hundred PSDs a day in Iraq (there are) and they each anger one hundred people in a day (they do), that is ten thousand Iraqis a day getting extremely agitated at us over the past year."

Nor was there a system of accountability for such excesses. "Even when contractors do military jobs, they remain private businesses and thus fall outside the military chain of command and justice systems," Peter Singer observed in a Foreign Affairs Foreign Affairs article. article.

Tensions between troops and contractors arose frequently. In May 2005 the Marine Corps accused a security detail from Zapata Engineering, a company with a contract to dispose of explosives, of shooting wildly at Iraqis and U.S. troops while driving west from Baghdad toward Fallujah. The nineteen contractors, sixteen of them Americans and the other three Iraqi translators, were treated like regular security detainees. They were disarmed and made to wear blackout goggles while being moved to a detention facility, where they were held for three days before being s.h.i.+pped out of the country. Some of them later said they had been handled roughly and jeered by Marines as rich contractors, but the Marines insisted in a statement that the Zapata men were given the standard treatment and handled "humanely and respectfully."

Contractors, for their part, complained to GAO investigators that they were more often on the receiving end of fire. "Private security providers have told us that they are fired upon by U.S. forces so frequently that incident reports are not always filed," the GAO reported. It noted two instances of pa.s.sing military convoys shooting at private security vehicles, and a third of a checkpoint opening fire, allegedly without warning, on another such vehicle. A total of twenty incidents were reported in the first five months of 2005, but the actual number likely was higher, the GAO concluded.

The Army at ebb tide By mid-2004 more and more officers in the Army were growing vocal in their unhappiness with their leaders, not just with the civilians around Rumsfeld but also with their own superiors in uniform. Some expressed the feeling that a generation of conformist generals was the problem. "They are organization men," one Army colonel said dismissively. "They are extremely careful."

Others found themselves in an unsettling round of soul searching about the inst.i.tution to which they had given their adult lives. "You're starting to get the undercurrent in the Army, a feeling of breaking faith, that 'people aren't being truthful with me,'" said another Army colonel, a longtime true believer. "You've got guys who want to get out, their terms are up, and instead they're being sent back to Iraq for a second tour. The things that we are doing to get the job done now, for a third Iraq rotation out there, may be really hurting us in the long term." Recruiters and trainers were being pulled from their a.s.signed tasks and sent to Iraq-a cla.s.sic way of solving today's problems while worsening tomorrow's. Then this colonel used a word that was coming up all too often in discussions of the Army in Iraq: "What we are doing is 'counterproductive.'"

THE CORRECTIONS.

SPRING 2004.

O.

ne day early in 2004, Col. Alan King, the civil affairs and tribal specialist at the CPA, held an unhappy meeting at a Baghdad mosque with Sheikh Harith al-Dari, the chairman of the a.s.sociation of Muslim Scholars, a hard-line group with links to the Sunni insurgency. The encounter had been arranged to discuss the security situation, but the sheikh was clearly bothered by another issue. He changed the subject and began to speak in a matter-of-fact manner about what he had been hearing of cruel, even s.a.d.i.s.tic, handling of prisoners by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison west of the capital.

King was having none of it. "I got really p.i.s.sed," King later recalled. He was personally affronted by such allegations. "I said, 'I'm an American soldier, we don't act that way.'" So, King concluded, confrontationally, "If you've got pictures, doc.u.ments, you show me." And if you don't, he added, don't insult me with these false allegations.

Four months later, after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke and the images of torture and cruelty had gone around the world, King would receive a tart message from the sheikh: Have you seen enough pictures now? Have you seen enough pictures now?

The Bush administration offered three basic rationales for the U.S. intervention in Iraq: the threat it believed was posed by Saddam's WMD; the supposed nexus it saw between Saddam Hussein's government and transnational terrorism; and the need to liberate an oppressed people. In the spring of 2004, the first two arguments were undercut by official findings by the same government that had invaded Iraq, and the third was tarred by the revelation of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

The arguments evaporate In January 2004, David Kay, as he stepped down from his post as head of the Iraq Survey Group, the U.S. government intelligence organization created to hunt for Saddam's weapons of ma.s.s destruction, announced that he concluded that Saddam Hussein had destroyed his weapons stockpiles in the 1990s, but had tried to bluff about still having them in order to maintain an image of power. "Everyone was wrong," Kay said.

President Bush was asked about this by Tim Russert on Meet the Press Meet the Press on February 8, 2004. Though difficult at spots to follow, the exchange is worth reproducing at length, because it captures Bush at his most exposed on the issue, facing a tough questioner who has time and is permitted to follow up at length: on February 8, 2004. Though difficult at spots to follow, the exchange is worth reproducing at length, because it captures Bush at his most exposed on the issue, facing a tough questioner who has time and is permitted to follow up at length: Russert: The night you took the country to war, March seventeenth, you said this: The night you took the country to war, March seventeenth, you said this:"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that theIraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weaponsever devised."President Bush: Right. Right.Russert: That apparently is not the case. That apparently is not the case.Bush: Correct. Correct.Russert: How do you respond to critics who say that you brought the nation to war under false pretenses? How do you respond to critics who say that you brought the nation to war under false pretenses?Bush: Yes. First of all, I expected to find the weapons. Sitting behind this desk making a very difficult decision of war and peace, and I based my decision on the best intelligence possible, intelligence that had been gathered over the years, intelligence that not only our a.n.a.lysts thought was valid but a.n.a.lysts from other countries thought were valid. And I made a decision based upon that intelligence in the context of the war against terror. In other words, we were attacked, and therefore every threat had to be rea.n.a.lyzed. Every threat had to be looked at. Every potential harm to America had to be judged in the context of this war on terror. And I made Yes. First of all, I expected to find the weapons. Sitting behind this desk making a very difficult decision of war and peace, and I based my decision on the best intelligence possible, intelligence that had been gathered over the years, intelligence that not only our a.n.a.lysts thought was valid but a.n.a.lysts from other countries thought were valid. And I made a decision based upon that intelligence in the context of the war against terror. In other words, we were attacked, and therefore every threat had to be rea.n.a.lyzed. Every threat had to be looked at. Every potential harm to America had to be judged in the context of this war on terror. And I made the decision, obviously, to take our case to the international community in the hopes that we could do this-achieve a disarmament of Saddam Hussein peacefully. In other words, we looked at the intelligence. And we remembered the fact that he had used weapons, which meant he had had weapons. We knew the fact that he was paying for suicide bombers. We knew the fact he was funding terrorist groups. In other words, he was a dangerous man. And that was the intelligence I was using prior to the run-up to this war. Now, let me-which is-this is a vital question-Russert: Nothing more important. Nothing more important.Bush: Vital question. And so we-I expected there to be stockpiles of weapons. But David Kay has found the capacity to produce weapons. Now, when David Kay goes in and says we haven't found stockpiles yet, and there's theories as to where the weapons went. They could have been destroyed during the war. Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered into Iraq. They could be hidden. They could have been transported to another country, and we'll find out. That's what the Iraq Survey Group-let me-let me finish here. But David Kay did report to the American people that Saddam had the capacity to make weapons. Saddam Hussein was dangerous with weapons. Saddam Hussein was dangerous with the ability to make weapons. He was a dangerous man in the dangerous part of the world. And I made the decision to go to the United Nations. By the way, quoting a lot of their data-in other words, this is unaccounted for stockpiles that you thought he had because I don't think America can stand by and hope for the best from a madman, and I believe it is essential-I believe it is essential-that when we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent. It's too late if they become imminent. It's too late in this new kind of war, and so that's why I made the decision I made. Vital question. And so we-I expected there to be stockpiles of weapons. But David Kay has found the capacity to produce weapons. Now, when David Kay goes in and says we haven't found stockpiles yet, and there's theories as to where the weapons went. They could have been destroyed during the war. Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered into Iraq. They could be hidden. They could have been transported to another country, and we'll find out. That's what the Iraq Survey Group-let me-let me finish here. But David Kay did report to the American people that Saddam had the capacity to make weapons. Saddam Hussein was dangerous with weapons. Saddam Hussein was dangerous with the ability to make weapons. He was a dangerous man in the dangerous part of the world. And I made the decision to go to the United Nations. By the way, quoting a lot of their data-in other words, this is unaccounted for stockpiles that you thought he had because I don't think America can stand by and hope for the best from a madman, and I believe it is essential-I believe it is essential-that when we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent. It's too late if they become imminent. It's too late in this new kind of war, and so that's why I made the decision I made.

Despite Bush's theories that the case for WMD might still be made, the negative returns would continue to pour in. In October 2004, Charles Duelfer, who suceeded Kay as head of the ISG, produced the group's final findings. There was no such a.r.s.enal, the weapons inspector concluded in a one-thousand-page report. Saddam had indeed eliminated his weapons in the early 1990s, but had tried to preserve the intellectual and physical ability to restart the weapons programs at some point. Duelfer also said that he had found no evidence of an effort to buy uranium from other countries. And he testified to the Senate that, as some a.n.a.lysts had suspected, the aluminum tubes Iraq was buying, which the Bush administration had made central to the argument that Iraq was developing a nuclear capability, were indeed