Fiasco, The American Military Adventure In Iraq Part 18

Lt. Carin Calvin, a weapons platoon commander in Lima Company, 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines, reported that each of his a.s.sault teams on an average day used six explosive satchel charges, three cases of mine-clearing Bangalore torpedoes, and ten shoulder-launched bazookalike a.s.sault weapons. Overall, about one-third of the rounds fired by Marines using this last weapon were in the form of the new thermobaric novel explosive. This fuel-rich warhead, which is built around a newly developed aluminum-based, long-burning explosive called PBXIH-135, was designed for urban warfare, especially multiroom buildings and sewers. Its high-temperature detonation reaches through several rooms, consuming the oxygen in them and, in addition to suffocation and burns, causes extensive injuries to anyone caught in it, including, according to Inside the Navy, Inside the Navy, a trade publication, "concussions, collapsed lungs, internal hemorrhaging and eardrum ruptures." a trade publication, "concussions, collapsed lungs, internal hemorrhaging and eardrum ruptures."

This extraordinary round of fighting in Fallujah tended to overshadow the smaller battles that broke out elsewhere around the same time. In Mosul, insurgents launched a swift and effective uprising in support of the fighters in Fallujah, causing some thirty-two hundred of the four thousand members of the city's police force to desert. Those who remained came under heavy attack. An adviser to an Iraqi police commando unit, Army Col. James Coffman, Jr., was in the middle of a four-hour-long firefight in which twelve of the Iraqi commandos were killed and another forty-two wounded. At one point, according to an Army doc.u.ment, his shooting hand was shattered and his M-4 rifle damaged, forcing him to pick up AK-47s from casualties and fire with his other hand. At another, an RPG exploded against the wall behind him. The battle only ended four hours later when U.S. Stryker armored vehicles and attack helicopters finally arrived on the scene. Of his attackers, Col. Cofrman, who later received the Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest award for valor, told the Berks.h.i.+re Eagle, Berks.h.i.+re Eagle, his hometown paper. "They were organized, they were disciplined, and they had well-placed firing plans." (It isn't clear why it took so long for the Army to come to the rescue. Coffman said by e-mail that he was in communication with the U.S. military through a Thuraya satellite phone, and that he had provided his grid coordinates-that is, his precise location on a military map. "I really have no good answer why there was a delay on the Strykers responding to reinforce the [Iraqi police] commandos," he said.) his hometown paper. "They were organized, they were disciplined, and they had well-placed firing plans." (It isn't clear why it took so long for the Army to come to the rescue. Coffman said by e-mail that he was in communication with the U.S. military through a Thuraya satellite phone, and that he had provided his grid coordinates-that is, his precise location on a military map. "I really have no good answer why there was a delay on the Strykers responding to reinforce the [Iraqi police] commandos," he said.) Conclusions on second Fallujah Marines tended to portray the second Fallujah battle of the year as a great victory. "We feel right now that we have ... broken the back of the insurgency and we have taken away this safe haven," Lt. Gen. Sattler said in Fallujah on November 18. He later wrote that it had "produced a turning of the tide in the fight against the insurgency in the al Anbar Province.... The insurgents are on the run."

Added Winslow, "These Marines have reversed the perception in the Islamic world that you can thump Americans and go home" without a response.

The Marines also thought that what they had seen in Fallujah was the sort of challenge the U.S. military would face repeatedly in the coming years. "In my opinion, Fallujah is an example of what we're going to fight in the future-and not a bad example of how to fight it," the Marine commandant, Gen. Michael Hagee, would say in a talk at the big Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, in 2005. "It is about individual Marines with small arms going from house to house, killing. We may not want to say that, but that's what it is about."

Privately, some Marines feared that the victory ultimately could prove Pyrrhic. "In the recesses of my mind, it bothered me," said Col. John Toolan. He found himself wondering, "What's the impact on a ten-year-old kid when he goes back in and sees his neighborhood destroyed? And what is he going to do when he is eighteen years old?"

Proceedings, the Navy's professional magazine, came to a similarly sober conclusion. "The Battle of Fallujah was not a defeat," wrote Jonathan Keiler, a former Marine officer. "But we cannot afford many more victories like it." the Navy's professional magazine, came to a similarly sober conclusion. "The Battle of Fallujah was not a defeat," wrote Jonathan Keiler, a former Marine officer. "But we cannot afford many more victories like it."

Probably the best a.s.sessment was that of Army Col. William Hix. The two key battles of 2004, he said, were shutting down Sadr in Najaf in August and then removing Fallujah as an insurgent sanctuary in November. "Given that containing insurgency and political progress are key elements of counterinsurgency, these 'actions' were essential to the campaign," especially for the political benefit of undercutting the ability of the insurgents to launch attacks to block the January 2005 election. "The coalition fought its way to the elections." That is likely accurate, but if major military operations were necessary preambles to political movement, it likely meant that the U.S. was in for a very long war.

Some Advice from Advisers In an official review of the performance of Iraqi forces in and around Fallujah, two Marine officers made it clear that it would be a long time before many Iraqi forces would be able to operate against insurgents on their own. "Iraqi army units are not ready for independent operations at any level," they reported. Marines sent to advise the Iraqi units found that they instead had to command them. "These companies were, by necessity, led, not merely advised, by U.S. personnel. These advisors had to run the company and conduct all external coordination such as requests for fire support, casevac [casualty evacuation] and logistic support.... The 5th Battalion advisors were taxed to the limit of their mental and physical limits [sic] by the fact that none of them had within their companies a functioning chain of command."

The one bright note emerging from the experience was that properly led and advised Iraqi units actually were more effective than Marines at some tasks, most notably in getting the population to help them find weapons caches and in interrogating detainees. Even so, the report repeatedly underscored how difficult the advisory task was-and how lengthy the job of producing effective Iraqi forces was promising to be. In addition, advisers needed to be proficient in a wide range of military skills that extended well beyond the usual infantry training. Company-level advisers needed, among other things, sound knowledge of how to use and fix military radios, training in urban warfare, the ability to operate and troubleshoot a variety of heavy machine guns, and basic training in demolitions.

Reading the doc.u.ment, Zinni was reminded of one of his two tours in Vietnam, the one in 1967 in which he advised the Vietnamese Marines. "I attended the Special Forces advisory course at Fort Bragg at the time," he wrote in an e-mail. But he was dismayed to see that nowadays the training was of necessity occurring on the job. In 1966, "We received language, culture, survival, insurgency, weapons, tactics, etc. The Marine Advisory Unit had among their ranks the very best junior officers. It was created by a remarkable officer who was with the French in Indochina. We forgot all those lessons after the war, and this one caught us by surprise, thanks to the Pentagon idiots who didn't understand what they were getting into."

Colin Powell's regrets Another old Vietnam adviser, Secretary of State Powell, privately agreed with many commanders that there weren't enough forces to get the job done. On November 12,2004, just ten days after the presidential election, and as Second Fallujah was still under way, he saw Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the White House and told them that there weren't sufficient forces on the ground- whether American, British, or Iraqi-to provide security. "We don't have enough troops," Powell said, according to a U.S. official who reviewed the top-secret transcript of the meeting. "We don't control the terrain." (Oddly, Bremer surfaced at about the same time, saying in speeches in the fall of 2004 that a lack of adequate troops had hampered the occupation. "We paid a big price for not stopping it, because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," he said about the looting of Baghdad. "We never had enough troops on the ground") Powell also submitted his resignation to Bush that day, although it wasn't made public until the following week. After leaving office Powell would spin his record, talking about how he had won victories within the Bush administration and with allies. Yet, sadly, he also would seem to recognize that his term as secre- tary of state is likely to be remembered mainly for making the false case at the United Nations in February 2003 that Iraq possessed a threatening a.r.s.enal of weaponry. At the time it was seen as a moment that cemented a statesman's rep- utation, but by the time he left office it had come to be seen as rather the oppo- site, a speech that left a sour taste at the end of decades of public service. "I'm the one who made the television moment," he told the London Daily Telegraph Daily Telegraph in his in his first post-State Department interview. "I was mightily disappointed when the sourcing of it all became very suspect and everything started to fall apart. The problem was stockpiles. None have been found. I don't think any will be found____ I will forever be known as the one who made the case."

By contrast, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose findings were brushed aside by Powell in 2003, and who called the day the United States invaded Iraq "the saddest in my life" because he was so sure the Bush administration's a.s.sertions about Iraq's weapons stockpiles were wrong, would receive the n.o.bel Peace Prize in the fall of 2005.

Bush vs. the realities of Iraq President Bush talked frequently to Rumsfeld and his top commanders, and he generally insisted that steady progress was being made. But in the fall of 2004 he began to hear some unusually pessimistic a.s.sessments of the situation. "I told the president in November [2004] ... that we weren't winning, and he was shocked," a former senior administration official recalled in an interview. "And John Negroponte backed me up. I called John and said, 'I told the president this and I want you to know it, so if you've got a different view'... and he said, no."

One reason the administration could drift along in its own world, this official added, was because it simply refused to admit mistakes or to act to correct or remove those who made them. "What I object to is, [and] what you see throughout this administration, [is that] there is no accountability." As an example he cited the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, for which only a handful of soldiers were punished. "The biggest stain on our soul I can imagine," he said, "and there's just no accountability."

In December 2004, two unvarnished official reports. .h.i.t the White House. The first was a somber a.s.sessment by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, at that point the agency's largest station. Called an aardwolf in agency jargon, the a.s.sessment enjoys special status under CIA regulations. It cannot be edited by the amba.s.sador, and it is delivered directly to the agency's director. Just a few other copies are distributed, and only to people at the top of the government, with recipients including the president, the secretaries of state and defense, and the national security adviser. "We face a vicious insurgency, we are going to have 2,000" dead, the CIA station chief's report stated, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official with direct access to the doc.u.ment.

A few days later, on December 17,2004, according to a former senior administration official, President Bush received an extensive briefing on the situation from Army Col. Derek Harvey, a senior U.S. military intelligence expert on Iraq. Unlike most U.S. military intelligence officials involved in the region, Harvey understood Arabic, and also had a Ph.D. in Islamic studies. He had a far less rosy view than what the president had been hearing. CIA and NSC officials who already had received the longer, four-hour version of his briefing sat in. The insurgency was tougher than the American officials understood, Harvey told the president, according to three people present at the meeting. "It's robust, it's well led, it's diverse. Absent some sort of reconciliation it's going to go on, and that risks a civil war. They have the means to fight this for a long time, and they have a different sense of time than we do, and are willing to fight. They have better intelligence than we do." The insurgents had managed to mount about twenty-six thousand attacks against U.S. forces and Iraqis during 2004, and the trends weren't good.

The president wanted to know where Harvey was coming from. Who was he? And why should his minority view, so contrary to the official optimism, be believed? Harvey explained that he had spent a good amount of time in Iraq, that he had conversed repeatedly with insurgents, and had developed the belief that the U.S. intelligence effort there was deeply flawed.

The other officials present weren't entirely at ease with Col. Harvey and his perspective. "There was always a view that Harvey was a little over the top," especially in his certainty that he was right and everyone else was wrong, said a former senior administration official.

Okay, what about the Syrian role? the president asked.

One of the CIA officials spoke up to say that his agency didn't see clear financing coming from Syria. The CIA long had thought that Harvey and other military intelligence officials were overemphasizing the role of Syria and foreign fighters in Iraq.

No, Harvey bluntly responded with striking specificity, in fact, we do. "We see four different tracks of financing from Damascus. All go to Ramadi, to the tune of $1.2 million a month. And it is based, in a very Arab way, on relations.h.i.+ps and shared experiences. And all the sigint [signals intercept intelligence] isn't going to tell you that." But don't focus on the foreign fighters, Harvey told the president, breaking a bit with the orthodox view in military intelligence. We've zeroed in on them too much because our intelligence apparatus can intercept their communications. But they aren't at the core of the Iraqi insurgency, which is "the old Sunni oligarchy using religious nationalism as a motivating force. That's it in a nutsh.e.l.l."

In the wake of the briefing, a study group led by retired Army Gen. Gary Luck was sent to Iraq to review operations there. Among its conclusions, reported back to the president in February 2005, was that the security situation was worse than was being depicted, the insurgency was gathering steam, the training of Iraqi security forces was slower than officials had said, and the U.S. intelligence operation continued to be deeply flawed. In his peculiar way, Bush would take many months before his public comments began to reflect this more sober a.s.sessment. Even then, in a series of speeches on Iraq late in 2005 and early in 2006, he would refer to setbacks only in vague terms.

The commanders move on The Marines' Gen. Mattis left Iraq in the summer of 2004, having seen seventeen of the twenty-nine men in his headquarters company killed or wounded in the previous five months. "It's fun to shoot some people," Mattis said a few months later to a meeting of military officers, retirees, and contractors in San Diego. "Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a h.e.l.l of a hoot. I like brawling." Such sentiments weren't all that unusual for Mattis-it was how he talked to his Marines. But in this case he did it with a TV news camera rolling. "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil," he said, thinking back to his time on the ground in that country in 2001. "You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a h.e.l.l of a lot of fun to shoot them."

When his remarks were posted on the Web site of the NBC affiliate in San Diego, it caused a minor fuss. Hagee, the Marine commandant, issued a statement that said, "I have counseled him concerning his remarks, and he agrees he should have chosen his words more carefully." Mattis's many supporters in the Marines came away worried that he had damaged his chances of succeeding Gen. Hagee as commandant.

The television station's Web site did not report Mattis's far more serious point that day, about the fighting in Iraq. It is "almost embarra.s.sing intellectually," he said, that U.S. military thinkers were looking at unlikely war scenarios to help them plan the future structure of the U.S. military, instead of closely studying the real war under way in Iraq. "Don't patronize this enemy," he warned. "They mean business. They mean every word they say. Don't imagine an enemy somewhere in the future, and you're going to transform so you can fight him. They're killing us now. Their will is not broken. They mean it."

After two sterling tours in Iraq-first as the only American division commander to leave behind an area in which the insurgency wasn't active, and then in turning around much of the training effort-David Petraeus came back to a senior job at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in the Army's training command, overseeing the education of officers and the writing of doctrine. These were not insubstantial jobs, and they fit with his academic background-he has a Ph.D. from Princeton. But despite carrying a promotion to lieutenant general, the post was a relative backwater compared to the jobs that the Army's most successful general in Iraq might have expected to be sent to, such as head of planning for the Joint Staff, or perhaps director of the Joint Staff. After all, two generals who arguably had failed in Iraq had received promotions and higher ranks-Lt. Gen. Sanchez was tapped for a four-star command, but was held up by congressional skepticism of his handling of Abu Ghraib, and the 4th ID's Maj. Gen. Odierno received a third star and an important job as military a.s.sistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a position that effectively has become the liaison between the military and the State Department.

Meanwhile, unusually, two other division commanders retired upon finis.h.i.+ng a.s.signments in Iraq: the 82nd Airborne's Gen. Swannack and the 1st Infantry Division's Gen. Batiste, who told friends he was disgusted with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Likewise, Col. Teddy Spain retired from the Army not long after getting back, and quickly found a good job in civilian life overseeing a major corporate security operation. He still checked the news on Iraq every day before going to work, and then again when he came through the door in the evening. "It does break my heart," he said. "My old sergeant major tells me all the police stations we renovated have been burned."

Despite such outcomes, Tommy Franks held on to the notion that he had won a famous victory. "Let's not be too hard on our own country," he said in Was.h.i.+ng- ton in 2004. "The plan was just fine. The plan was OK__________ It was not the one- hundredth-percentile plan because we didn't know everything."

Franks sometimes was contradictory in his discussions of Iraq. In his memoir he said, "Phase IV was actually going about as I had expected-not as I had hoped, but as I had expected." Yet in promoting that book he told reporters, "I don't know that I expected an insurgency."

Pressed again on this subject a few months later, he responded by pus.h.i.+ng back. "We spend a lot of time in this country trying to find fault," he said. "I am not a fault seeker. My personal frustration, my personal bias, is a lot of times, we spend a lot of time trying to pick the flyspecks out of the pepper," instead of trying to move forward. This was, of course, a way of belittling his critics and of minimizing the problems that he had helped create.

Like him, the Bush administration followed one of its basic patterns and hung tough. A few weeks later, Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Franks, Bremer, and Tenet-three of the figures most responsible for the mishandling of Iraq in 2003 and 2004. Among other things, Bush said the three men had "made our country more secure."

Rumsfeld bulled on as defense secretary. Aides said he was focused on transforming the military, seemingly unaware that history almost certainly will judge him largely on his mishandling of the Iraq war. In December 2004 his bl.u.s.tery facade cracked a bit at a town hall meeting with National Guard troops in Kuwait, where they were preparing to deploy northward into Iraq. Rumsfeld faced a series of skeptical questions from the soldiers, mainly about problems in receiving adequate equipment. "Our vehicles are not armored," said Spec. Thomas Wilson, an airplane mechanic with the Tennessee Army National Guard. "We're digging pieces of rusted sc.r.a.p metal and compromised ballistic gla.s.s that's already been shot up ... picking the best out of this sc.r.a.p to put on our vehicles to take into combat. We do not have proper ... vehicles to carry with us north."

Rumsfeld's reply struck many as callous or dismissive. "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have," the defense secretary said. "They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

When another soldier asked an additional pointed question about inadequate gear, there was some chatter in the crowd. Rumsfeld responded in a manner unusual for him, pleading the weakness of age. "Settle down," he told the soldiers. "h.e.l.l, I'm an old man and it's early in the morning. I didn't take-just gathering my thoughts here."

If Rumsfeld is widely blamed for the botched occupation, Wolfowitz is even more closely a.s.sociated with the decision to invade. His repudiation of Gen. s.h.i.+nseki's estimate of the necessary size of the U.S.-led invasion force likely will go down as the most memorable moment of his time as deputy defense secretary. In the wake of the January 2005 election in Iraq, Wolfowitz appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee and essentially argued that his view of the situation in Iraq had been vindicated. He returned to one of his favorite themes: He had confronted the modern version of the n.a.z.is, and they now were hooked up with the terrorists of 9/11. "The secret security forces of the former regime-best a.n.a.logized, I think, to the Gestapo and the SS of the n.a.z.i regime-are now allied with new terrorists drawn from across the region," he said. "Like their Baathist allies, these new terrorists are ideologically opposed to democracy and fearful of what the success of freedom in this important Arab country will mean for them."

Wolfowitz left the Pentagon for the presidency of the World Bank a few months later, in April 2005. In a subsequent interview he said he really had no regrets. "Three years is a very short time into this," he said. "War is a tough business. This has been a tough war. The early stages were much easier than we feared they would be, and the subsequent stages were much tougher than people antic.i.p.ated."

Several months later Gen. Myers stepped down as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. In September 2005, on his final day of congressional testimony in that position, Sen. John McCain questioned Myers's record of rosy a.s.sessments. "Things have not gone as we had planned or expected, nor as we were told by you, General Myers," the Arizona Republican said.

Myers responded that he had never been all that positive about the situation. "I don't think this committee or the American public has ever heard me say that things are going very well in Iraq," he said, inexplicably.

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE?.

2005.

I.

n 2005, the U.S. military fought a rolling series of battles across central Iraq in an attempt to tamp down the insurgency and permit Iraqis to move forward politically: Parliamentary elections were held in January, a const.i.tutional referendum was held in October, and a national a.s.sembly was elected in December. Following Casey's campaign plan, U.S. forces focused first on Baghdad, then in the summer of 2005 turned to Tall Afar in northwestern Iraq to try to seal the Syrian border, and then in the fall fought in the small towns along the Euphrates Valley between the capital and that border. The idea of this incremental approach was to clear and hold territory, rather than simply to fight and withdraw. Once again, troop numbers proved the limiting factor: U.S. troops did the clearing, and there were only so many of them, and Iraqi forces were supposed to do the holding, and there were even fewer of them that were effective.

Yet despite a solid year of fighting and those three major elections, by the end of 2005, the insurgency had intensified. The number of bomb attacks had increased steadily, eventually hitting eighteen hundred a month in the fall of 2005. In addition, the bombs became more powerful, capable of utterly destroying an armored Humvee. Another twist was that some bombers figured out how to attach propane or jellied gasoline, effectively creating napalm bombs. "We got better armor, they started getting better ordnance," Col. Bob Chase, the operations chief for the 2nd Marine Division, said after fourteen Marines and an Iraqi civilian were killed in a single blast under an amphibious a.s.sault vehicle near Haditha in August 2005.

There would be a total of 34,131 insurgent attacks in 2005, compared to 26,496 in the previous year. "The insurgents are getting a lot better," said Sgt. 1st Cla.s.s Charles Ilaoa, an American Samoan platoon sergeant operating at an outpost southwest of Baghdad called San Juan. In his first tour, he said, it was easier to spot homemade bombs. Now "the IEDs are a lot more complicated.... They have more sophisticated, deeply buried ones." Likewise, said a Humvee gunner, Sgt. James Russell, in 2003 it was common to come across insurgents in the open, carrying AK-47 a.s.sault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. "Now you don't see them," he said. Overall, during the year the insurgency remained as robust and lethal as ever, noted Jeffrey White, a former a.n.a.lyst of Middle Eastern affairs at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The U.S. military also was changing. Pushed by his two counterinsurgency advisers, Sepp and Hix, Gen. Casey endorsed the concepts of counterinsurgency and began to indoctrinate incoming unit commanders in that way of thinking. Late in 2005 he established a COIN Academy-the military's acronym for counterinsurgency-at the big U.S. military base at Taji, just north of Baghdad, and made attending its course there a prerequisite to commanding a unit in Iraq. Back in the United States, Petraeus, now at Fort Leavenworth, the Army's central educational establishment, made the thousands of Army officers who were students there also begin to study this peculiar way of war, so unlike what the U.S. Army had studied for the previous three decades.

A different war In 2005, American soldiers began to think about the war in ways that would have been unrecognizable two years earlier. The major Army units deployed to Iraq in 2005 and 2006-the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, the 4th Infantry Division, the 101st Airborne-were full of veterans on their second tours who had been trained to take a new approach. During his first tour two years earlier, recalled Army Sgt. James Eyler, "the mind-set of the whole unit was, if they pose a threat at all, shoot to kill." Back then, "we didn't trust any Iraqis," he added, as he manned a machine gun atop a Humvee and prepared to go out on a raid one humid night in Baghdad in February 2006. Eyler said he was forcing himself to be more patient with Iraqis. "Now we understand that to get out of here, we're going to have to." Added Russell, the Humvee gunner, "It's a lot less brute force and a lot more hearts and minds now."

There was also a quiet and uncomfortable awareness that the U.S. military committed several major errors in 2003-4. "The first time we were here, there was a lot of overreacting," said Staff Sgt. Jesse Sample. "Now, with experience, we react a lot more calmly." Preparing for a convoy on a particularly bomb-infested stretch of highway south of the capital, Sample added, "This tour is 180 degrees different from the last time." Now, he said, "we don't roll out into the city intimidating anyone we see."

On his first tour, Sgt. Kris Vanmarren saw his mission as being to "bust up the insurgency." The second time, he said, it was geared more toward supporting Iraqi security forces-outfitting their checkpoints, helping with their training, and providing perimeter security for their operations. "The focus has definitely s.h.i.+fted," agreed Capt. Klaudius Robinson, the Polish-born commander of a cavalry troop based south of Baghdad. On his second tour, he estimated, he spent half his time on engagement with the population, perhaps a quarter working with Iraqi forces, and "maybe twenty percent going after the bad guys." Robinson noted that every patrol he sent out included an interpreter, in contrast to the first year of the U.S. military presence. "It's a huge difference" being able to communicate clearly instead of using "hand signals and broken English."

The changes were particularly noticeable in the 4th ID, which had had such a checkered first tour. For its second tour, the division had its own cultural adviser, who wrote a kind of advice column on Islamic and Iraqi mores in the Ivy Leaf, Ivy Leaf, the division newspaper. Even shooting had changed. The rules of engagement that govern the use of force had grown much tighter, and most soldiers interviewed said they thought the new restrictions were for the good. "It's a little bit harder. You're kind of tied down," said Ilaoa. Even so, he said, "we treat locals a lot better and have a lot better relations with them." In 2003, if two men were seen walking on a road in the middle of the night and carrying shovels, they would be a.s.sumed to be planting bombs and be shot, said Capt. John Moris. But "what was allowed during the first tour in Iraq, isn't," he said. Now the order likely would be to detain and question the men, if possible. the division newspaper. Even shooting had changed. The rules of engagement that govern the use of force had grown much tighter, and most soldiers interviewed said they thought the new restrictions were for the good. "It's a little bit harder. You're kind of tied down," said Ilaoa. Even so, he said, "we treat locals a lot better and have a lot better relations with them." In 2003, if two men were seen walking on a road in the middle of the night and carrying shovels, they would be a.s.sumed to be planting bombs and be shot, said Capt. John Moris. But "what was allowed during the first tour in Iraq, isn't," he said. Now the order likely would be to detain and question the men, if possible.

Overall, the U.S. effort was characterized by a more careful, purposeful style that extended even to how Humvees were driven in the streets. For most of the occupation, "the standard was to haul a.s.s," noted Lt. Col. Gian Gentile, commander of the 8th Squadron of the 10th Cavalry Regiment, which was based in the sewagedrenched southern suburbs of Baghdad. He now ordered his convoy drivers to travel at 15 miles per hour. "I'm a firm believer in slow, deliberate movement," he said. "You can observe better, if there's IEDs on the road." It also was less disruptive to Iraqis and sends a message of calm control, he noted.

Gentile and other U.S. commanders also spent their time differently. Where they once devoted much of their efforts to Iraqi politics and infrastructure, they had s.h.i.+fted their focus more to training and supporting the Iraqi police and army. "I spent the last month talking to ISF commanders," noted Gentile. "Two years ago I would have spent all my time talking to sheikhs." Real progress was being made in training Iraqi forces, especially its army. U.S. commanders had been surprised to find that an Iraqi soldier-even one who was overweight and undertrained- was more effective standing on an Iraqi street corner than the most disciplined U.S. Army Ranger. "They get intelligence we would never get," said Gen. Abizaid. "They sense the environment in a way that we never could." An afternoon spent with one Iraqi army brigade in western Baghdad showed that while it occasionally was poor at keeping its American advisers informed, it was capable of competently carrying out basic military functions. When it set up an impromptu checkpoint on a busy thoroughfare in a neighborhood known for its hostility to U.S. forces, it maintained consistent security, with soldiers on the perimeter vigilantly facing outward, and it also was able to control civilian movements. Underscoring Abizaid's point, the soldiers checking each automobile engaged in friendly conversation with drivers in a way that Americans simply could not.

The growing availability of Iraqi troops began freeing up U.S. forces. When Capt. Robinson came across a bomb planted in a southern Baghdad intersection, he stopped to make sure that an Iraqi army unit already at the scene had the situation under control, then moved on. "Two years ago, we would have had to handle this," and spent most of the day at the intersection waiting for the Army's bomb disposal experts to show up, he noted as his Humvee pulled away "Now, they've got the road blocked off."

The quality of life of most soldiers also improved remarkably. Almost all troops, except those out at patrol bases and other outposts, slept in air-conditioned rooms and had ready access to the Internet. Forward Operating Base Falcon was in a rough area southwest of Baghdad called the Triangle of Death, but inside its high blast walls it was a different world, with a cafe, a mess hall serving abundant food, and even a pseudo nightclub, the Velvet Camel, that served alcohol-free beer and advertised that "every Friday night is Hip-Hop Night," featuring "the Desert Pimps"

At Mosul, where one mess hall featured a particularly artful pastry chef, a cynical Air Force sergeant watched a convoy of heavily armored military trucks roll into the base, and then commented, "This place is a cross of Road Warrior Road Warrior and Las Vegas-it's catered, well lighted, and with good movies, and then there is this barren desert and a fight over oil. Also like Las Vegas, most people lose." and Las Vegas-it's catered, well lighted, and with good movies, and then there is this barren desert and a fight over oil. Also like Las Vegas, most people lose."

In contrast to 2003-4, when some troops ate mainly prepackaged rations, food was plentiful, and tailored to the palates of young men happy to dine on unlimited cheeseburgers, soft drinks, and ice cream. Dinner one night in January 2006 in one of the four big mess halls at the U.S. base at Balad offered entrees of baked salmon, roast turkey, grilled pork chops, fried crab bites, breaded scallops, and fried rice. The smiling servers standing behind those dishes were from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. Soldiers who were still hungry could hit the two salad bars, the sandwich line, or a short-order stand. There were also two soup offerings and a dessert stand near the exit with chocolate mint and vanilla ice cream, banana pudding, pumpkin pie, cherry pie, and yellow cake. For those bored with the mess halls, there were a Subway, a Pizza Hut, and a Popeye's, an ersatz Starbucks called Green Beans that served up triple lattes, and a twenty-four-hour Burger King. The abundance was such that military nutritionists were beginning to worry. In 2003, the average U.S. soldier had lost about ten pounds while stationed in Iraq for a year. "Now they gain that much," reported Maj. Polly Graham, an Army diet.i.tian at Balad, the biggest U.S. base in Iraq.

Other amenities also were being laid on. Balad boasted two s.h.i.+ny PXs, where fifteen soldiers a day on average bought a television. The biggest change in buying preferences over the previous two years, said one PX manager, John Burk, was that T-s.h.i.+rts advertising service in Iraq were no longer selling quickly. "A lot of people don't want s.h.i.+rts with oif oif on it," he said. "They want clothes they can wear when they get home, and OIF has kind of lost its pizzazz." on it," he said. "They want clothes they can wear when they get home, and OIF has kind of lost its pizzazz."

Yet these two major changes in the U.S. military-a better understanding of counterinsurgency and a better quality of life-may have been fundamentally at odds. In order to keep a volunteer force relatively happy and willing to come back for third and perhaps fourth tours, the Pentagon had to provide a high quality of life for its people. But cla.s.sic counterinsurgency doctrine says that the only way to win such a campaign is to live among the people. One of the nine hallmarks of failure identified by Kalev Sepp was "military units concentrated on large bases"-and that was precisely the new force posture of the U.S. military. In this way the military, for all the changes it was making, was still a square peg in the round hole of Iraq.

Brother, can you spare a COIN?

Gen. Casey's way of rounding that peg was to create the COIN Academy and to make attendance mandatory for new commanders, starting in late 2005. "When the insurgency started, we came in very conventional," said Army Col. Chris Short, the Special Forces officer who was the new school's commandant. Its curriculum taught that the U.S. military needed to fight differently. As a sign on the wall in an office near Short's put it, "insanity is doing the same thing the same way and expecting a different outcome."

Some commanders balked at the idea of parting with their troops for the five-day course, which covered subjects from counterinsurgency theory and interrogations to detainee operations and how to dine with a sheikh. When told that he had to leave his battalion of Marines in Fallujah to come here, recalled Lt. Col. Patrick Looney, his reaction was disbelief: "You're s.h.i.+ttin' me!"

"I didn't want to come," concurred another student, Lt. Col. David Furness, commander of the 1st Battalion of the 1st Marine Regiment, which was operating between Baghdad and Fallujah, "but I'm glad I came."

Again and again the immersion course, which thirty to fifty officers attended at a time, emphasized that the right answer was probably the counterintuitive one, rather than something that the Army had taught the officers in their ten or twenty years of service. The school's textbook, a huge binder, offered the example of a squad that busted into a house and captured someone who had mortared a U.S. base. "On the surface, a raid that captures a known insurgent or terrorist may seem like a sure victory for the coalition," it observed in red block letters. "The potential second- and third-order effects, however, can turn it into a long-term defeat if our actions humiliate the family, needlessly destroy property, or alienate the local population from our goals."

But even at the school there were doubts about how much the U.S. military really could change. Speaking inside his sandbagged office in Taji, Short said he was disturbed by "this big-base mentality" that kept tens of thousands of troops inside the FOBs, or forwarding operating bases, which they would leave for patrols and raids. He knew that cla.s.sic counterinsurgency theory held that troops must live among the people as much as possible, developing a sixth sense of how the society works.

The major criticism of the school offered by students was that it would have been better to have had the education six months earlier, when they were training their troops to deploy to Iraq, rather than after the units had arrived. Col. Short's tart response was that that wasn't a bad idea, but the Army back home hadn't stepped up to the job. "They didn't do it for three years"-the length of the war at the point he was talking. "That's why the boss said, 'Screw it, I'm doing it here.'"

The Army back home was also trying to change, especially as more senior officers returned with the message that change was urgently needed. At Leavenworth, Gen. Petraeus made studying counterinsurgency a requirement at the Army's Command and General Staff College, where midcareer officers are trained. In an adjacent inst.i.tution, the School of Advanced Military Studies, where the Army educates the planning specialists colloquially known as its Jedi knights, thirty-one of seventy-eight student monographs in the 2005-6 academic year were devoted to counterinsurgency or stability operations, compared with only a couple two years earlier. David Galula's monograph, "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice," only recently unknown at Leavenworth, became one of its bookstore's best sellers. "It's a survival thing for us," said one student, Maj. Scott Sonsalla.

The Army and Marine Corps also engaged in a joint rewriting of the U.S. military manual on counterinsurgency. "What we're trying to do is change the culture, to modify that culture, that solving the problem isn't just a tactical problem of guns and bombs and maneuver," said retired Army Col. Clinton J. Ancker III, director of the doctrine-writing office at Leavenworth, and one of the leaders of the revision effort. Conscious that it largely had walked away from counterinsurgency after the Vietnam War-the subject was not mentioned in the mid-1970s' version of the Army's key fighting manual-the Army was trying to ensure that the mistake was not repeated. "This is about inst.i.tutional change, and the whole Army is included. It is kind of a generational change," said Petraeus.

The 3rd A CR leads the way But the most striking place to see how the Army was changing was in Tall Afar, a town of about 250,000 in far northwestern Iraq, near the Syrian border. As the U.S. military had reduced its presence in northern Iraq in 2004, insurgents had taken over the medieval-feeling town, which is dominated by an old castle on a hill in its center. Just as Fallujah in central Iraq was used as a base to launch attacks on Baghdad, the biggest city in the country, they made Tall Afar a base from which to send suicide bombers and other attackers 40 miles east into Mosul, the major city in the north.

The unit given the job of fixing the situation was the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. In sharp contrast to its mediocre first tour in Iraq, the unit did an extraordinary job in recapturing Tall Afar. The 3rd ACR's campaign in 2005 "will serve as a case study in cla.s.sic counterinsurgency, the way it is supposed to be done," said Terry Daly, a retired intelligence officer who specializes in the subject. The Army agreed: When U.S. military experts conducted an internal review of the three dozen major U.S. brigades, battalions, and similar units operating in Iraq in 2005, they concluded that of all those units the 3rd ACR had done the best at counterinsurgency.

The 3rd ACR's campaign really began back at its home base at Fort Carson, Colorado, in June 2004, when Col. H. R. McMaster took command of the unit and began to train it for going back to Iraq. His approach was that of a football coach who knew that he had a bunch of able and dedicated athletes, but that he needed to retrain them to play soccer. McMaster was an unusual officer. Like many of the most successful U.S. commanders in Iraq, he was well educated, and had earned a Ph.D., in his case in military history at the University of North Carolina, where his subject had been the failures of the Joint Chiefs during the U.S. decision to intervene in the Vietnam War. But like the Marines' Gen. Mattis, he also was a dynamic leader, constantly moving among his troops and talking to them. He taught them from the outset that the key to counterinsurgency is focusing on the people, not on the enemy. He changed the standing orders of the regiment: Henceforth, all soldiers would "treat detainees professionally"-which hadn't happened with the 3rd ACR during its time in Iraq in 2003-4. McMaster visited every component unit in the regiment to reinforce that message, telling every soldier in his command, "Every time you treat an Iraqi disrespectfully, you are working for the enemy." Recognizing that dignity is a core value for Iraqis, he also banned his soldiers from using the term "/zo/'i" as a slang to describe them, because he saw it as inaccurate and disrespectful of their religion. (It actually means someone who has made the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.) Cultural understanding became a major part of the regiment's training. One out of every ten soldiers received a three-week course in conversational Arabic, so that each small unit would have someone capable of basic exchanges. McMaster distributed a lengthy reading list for his officers that included studies of Arabian and Iraqi history and most of the cla.s.sic texts on counterinsurgency. He also quietly relieved one battalion commander who just didn't seem to understand that such changes were necessary.

McMaster also challenged U.S. military culture, all but banning the use of PowerPoint briefings by his officers. The Army loves these bulleted briefings, but McMaster had come to believe that the ubiquitous software inhibits clarity in thinking, expression, and planning.

When the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment moved into northwest Iraq in May 2005 it faced a mess. In 2003, a U.S. commander faced with an insurgent stronghold in a city likely would have immediately set about staging a major raid. He would sweep up suspects and move back to his base somewhere else. In 2005, McMaster took a sharply different tack, spending months preparing before attacking the entrenched insurgents in Tall Afar. That indirect approach demonstrated the key counterinsurgent quality of tactical patience, something that didn't come easily to the U.S. military.

McMaster began his preparations by dismantling the insurgents' support infrastructure outside the city. He had the 3rd ACR bolster the security operation along the Syrian border, in an effort to cut off support and reinforcements from coming in. He then eliminated safe havens out in the desert, beginning in June with a move against the remote town of Biaj, which had become a way station and training and outfitting post for those fighters coming in from Syria. Immediately after the 3rd ACR took Biaj, Iraqi forces set up a small patrol base there. "This was the first 'clear and hold,'" McMaster recalled in his plywood-walled office on a base just southwest of Tall Afar. State Department officials heard about this move and briefed their boss, Condoleezza Rice, on it. A month later she mentioned it in congressional testimony.

One of the keys to winning a counterinsurgency is to treat prisoners well, because today's captive, if persuaded to enter politics, may become tomorrow's mayor or city council member. As more remote small towns surrounding Tall Afar were "rolled up," recalled Maj. Chris Kennedy, the 3rd ACR's executive officer, Iraqi police immediately moved into each-and were reminded to treat the locals well, a departure for some heavily s.h.i.+te police units operating in the Sunni-dominated region.

The 3rd ACR also set up a system to poll all its detainees on how well they were treated, and also to interview some about their political views. "The best way to find out about your own detainee facility is to ask the 'customer,'" said Maj. Jay Gallivan, the regiment's operations officer. This system of checking with detainees was unique to the 3rd ACR, and it apparently worked: In sharp contrast to the unit's first tour in Iraq, not one 3rd ACR soldier was charged with acting abusively during the regiment's second tour, McMaster said.

In late summer, McMaster started receiving more cooperation from local Sunni leaders who had been sympathetic to the insurgency. One reason, according to U.S. military intelligence a.n.a.lysts, was that some insurgents were unhappy with their foreign allies, who seemed determined to start a civil war. Another was that McMaster did something few commanders had been willing to do in public: Admit the obvious and say that U.S. forces made mistakes in Iraq. "We understand why you fight," McMaster told Sunni leaders with ties to the insurgency. "When the Americans first came, we were in a dark room, stumbling around, breaking china. But now Iraqi leaders are turning on the lights." The conciliatory concession helped break down barriers of communication, he said, and made them willing to listen to his conclusion: The time for legitimate resistance had ended. This in fact was a threat, stated as politely as possible.

McMaster strengthened his position in another innovative way: by taking his officers for an outing with Iraqi army officers during which he conducted a staff ride-the military term for a formal professional examination of a historic battlefield-of a spot near Mosul where Alexander the Great had routed the army of the Persian Empire. It was a subtle way of showing that the Americans recognized that they were representatives of one of the world's youngest cultures trying to work with a people from one of the world's oldest.

With the insurgency's support infrastructure weakened in outlying areas, McMaster moved on Tall Afar. But even then he didn't attack it. First, following the suggestion of his Iraqi allies, he ringed the city with a dirt berm nine feet high and twelve miles long, leaving just a few checkpoints where all movement could be observed. This was a nod to the counterinsurgency principle of being able to control and follow the movement of the population. Building on that, U.S. military intelligence had traced the kins.h.i.+p lines of different tribes, enabling the 3rd ACR to track departing fighters to likely destinations in the suburbs of the city. As they fled the impending attack, some 120 were then rounded up. Next, to minimize the killing of innocents, civilians were strongly encouraged to leave the city for a camp prepared for them just to the south. Some more insurgents were caught trying to sneak out with them.

Finally, in September 2005, after four months of preparatory moves, Mc- Master launched his attack. By that point, there were remarkably few fighters left in the city. Those who remained seem to have expected a swift U.S. raid that they would counter with scores of IEDs-that is, roadside bombs. Instead, U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies moved slowly, clearing each block and calling in artillery strikes as they spotted enemy fighters or IEDs, using firepower precisely and quickly.

Next came Phase IV: Unlike the invading U.S. forces in the spring of 2003, Mc-Master had a clear plan in hand for his postcombat operations. He also knew how he wanted to measure his success: Would he asked, Iraqis-especially Sunnis-be willing to join the local police, to "partic.i.p.ate in their own security"? The first step in Phase IV was to establish twenty-nine small bases across the city. That, along with steady patrolling, gave the American military and its Iraqi allies a view of every major stretch of road in the compact town, which measured only about 3 miles by 3 miles. This degree of observation made it extremely difficult to plant bombs. Also, said Lt. Col. Chris Hickey, who commanded the U.S. troop contingent inside the city, "It gives us great agility." Instead of predictably rolling out the front gate of his base, he was able to order an attack to come from two or three of the small bases that dotted the city. Unlike most commanders, who ate and worked on big forward operating bases and then ventured out into Iraqi society, Hickey lived in the city, sleeping back at the base only rarely. From his perch downtown, he said, "1 hear every gunshot in the city." His conclusion: "Living among the people works, if you treat them with respect." When Iraqis' electricity went out, his did as well, except for military communications equipment that was hooked to a freestanding generator.

Ultimately, fourteen hundred police were recruited, of which about 60 percent were Sunni, many of them from elsewhere. In addition, by year's end the city was patrolled by about two thousand Iraqi troops, and it had a working city council and an activist mayor. Tips on insurgent activity began to pour into a new joint operations center. The Army officer running the center, Lt. Saythala Phonexayphoua, a Laotian-American West Point graduate, said it had been "a surprise, the actionable intelligence we get. We get cell phone calls-'there's an insurgent planting an IED.'"

But there were two nagging problems even in this most successful of U.S. operations. First, by midwinter the 3rd ACR was getting ready to go home, its one-year tour of duty coming to an end. The city's mayor, Najim Abdullah al-Jubouri, was extremely unhappy about that prospect. "A surgeon doesn't leave in the middle of the operation!" the mayor exclaimed to McMaster and Hickey over a lunch of lamb kabobs and bread. He waved his index finger under McMaster's nose. "The doctor should finish the job he started." They tried to calm him down. "There's another doctor coming," Hickey ventured. "He's very good." But the mayor had seen other American units in Tall Afar, and he believed they didn't know how to coordinate with Iraqi forces as well as the 3rd ACR. "When you leave, I will leave too," the mayor threatened. "What you are doing is an experiment, and it isn't right to experiment on people." In the spring of 2006, there were worrisome signs of increasing insurgent activity in the city. In mid-April, the 1st brigade of the 1st Armored Division, which had replaced the 3rd ACR, rounded up all military-age males, defined as from eighteen to sixty-five years old, in one part of Tall Afar. "This was the mother of all military-age roll-ups," commented Col. Sean MacFarland, the brigade commander.

Nor was it clear that McMaster's example could be followed elsewhere in the country by American commanders. The biggest problem the United States faced in Iraq was Baghdad, a city about thirty times the size of Tall Afar. With the current number of U.S. troops in all of Iraq, it would be impossible to copy the approach used in Tall Afar, with outposts every few blocks. "Baghdad is a much tougher nut to crack than this," said Maj. Jack McLaughlin, Hickey's plans officer. Standing in the castle overlooking the city, he said, "It's a matter of scale-you'd need a huge number of troops to replicate what we've done here."

Ultimately it appeared that McMaster's approach in Tall Afar would prove to be yet another road not taken. In 2006, much of the rest of the U.S. military in Iraq was pursuing a different course. Instead of living among the people, as cla.s.sic counterinsurgency dictates, they were closing smaller outposts and withdrawing to a handful of big super FOBs.

Journalism at its limits Baghdad was indeed much tougher. Almost all foreign reporters in the country were based there. With the pa.s.sage of time during 2004-5, their ability to work became increasingly constrained. The conditions were some of the most dangerous any journalists have ever experienced. A spate of kidnappings of journalists continued, with a macabre pattern established in which someone would disappear, then surface on an Internet video, and then sometimes be released. In just three years, eighty-four journalists were killed in Iraq, more than the sixty-six killed during twenty years of fighting in Vietnam, from 1955 to 1975. For journalists working in Iraq, observed USA Today's USA Today's Jim Michaels, "oftentimes the decisions are between bad and worse." Jim Michaels, "oftentimes the decisions are between bad and worse."

Thinking about dying became a daily part of the job. A Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post reporter, Jackie Spinner, said at the end of nine months in Iraq, "There were days, strings of days, when every morning I was prepared to die." One day near the Abu Ghraib prison, two men tried to shove the small, reserved Spinner into a car. Confusing her beginner's Arabic phrases, she tried to yell that she was a journalist, but instead shouted, "I'm a vegetarian"-which also was true, but irrelevant. She was rescued by two pa.s.sing Marines. Spinner took to sleeping in the dark, dusty stairwell of her hotel, for fear of being slashed by flying gla.s.s if a mortar sh.e.l.l detonated outside her bedroom window. reporter, Jackie Spinner, said at the end of nine months in Iraq, "There were days, strings of days, when every morning I was prepared to die." One day near the Abu Ghraib prison, two men tried to shove the small, reserved Spinner into a car. Confusing her beginner's Arabic phrases, she tried to yell that she was a journalist, but instead shouted, "I'm a vegetarian"-which also was true, but irrelevant. She was rescued by two pa.s.sing Marines. Spinner took to sleeping in the dark, dusty stairwell of her hotel, for fear of being slashed by flying gla.s.s if a mortar sh.e.l.l detonated outside her bedroom window.

Gina Cavallaro, a staff reporter for Army Times, Army Times, an independent newspaper, wrote of becoming friendly with Spec. Francisco Martinez, a lively twenty-year-old artilleryman from Puerto Rico, where she had grown up. A few days later she cradled his head as he died after being shot in the back near Ramadi. an independent newspaper, wrote of becoming friendly with Spec. Francisco Martinez, a lively twenty-year-old artilleryman from Puerto Rico, where she had grown up. A few days later she cradled his head as he died after being shot in the back near Ramadi. "No te me duermas," "No te me duermas," she said to him-"don't fall asleep." After he was gone, she wrote, she "cried like a baby." she said to him-"don't fall asleep." After he was gone, she wrote, she "cried like a baby."

Coming home proved to be one of the hardest aspects of the job. Reporters would get by on adrenaline, building up a c.u.mulative debt of stress that began to be repaid when they landed back in a normal place. Realizing her newsroom was unprepared to help her, Cavallaro sought out counseling, but found it difficult to locate someone who understood what it means to be mortared every day. "You gotta help yourself when you get back" she said, "because right now there's no culture in the newsroom that says, Help reporters when they get back."

Hearing this, Sig Christenson, the San Antonio Express-News's San Antonio Express-News's military reporter, commented at a meeting of military correspondents, "When you come back from Iraq, if you feel a little disconnected and crazy, you are." After one reporting tour he went camping for several weeks in the high desert of Texas and New Mexico to clear his head. During the day he would hike. At night he sipped Wild Turkey whiskey and read T. R. Fehrenbach's military reporter, commented at a meeting of military correspondents, "When you come back from Iraq, if you feel a little disconnected and crazy, you are." After one reporting tour he went camping for several weeks in the high desert of Texas and New Mexico to clear his head. During the day he would hike. At night he sipped Wild Turkey whiskey and read T. R. Fehrenbach's Lone Star, Lone Star, a history of the Texans, by the light of his campfire. "It was very cool reading about how the Comanche Indians, using a form of guerrilla warfare strikingly similar to our opponents in Iraq, drove the Spaniards out of New Mexico and much of the Texas plains," he said. "They'd ride their horses up to one thousand miles, raid a Spanish encampment, and then split up into dozens of smaller groups, making it impossible for the king's soldiers to wage effective punitive expeditions on the Indians." It made him wonder how the United States could prevail in Iraq. a history of the Texans, by the light of his campfire. "It was very cool reading about how the Comanche Indians, using a form of guerrilla warfare strikingly similar to our opponents in Iraq, drove the Spaniards out of New Mexico and much of the Texas plains," he said. "They'd ride their horses up to one thousand miles, raid a Spanish encampment, and then split up into dozens of smaller groups, making it impossible for the king's soldiers to wage effective punitive expeditions on the Indians." It made him wonder how the United States could prevail in Iraq.

The Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Steve Fainaru finished a reporting tour in late 2004 in which he had been subjected to several mortar attacks, and once had a bomb detonate near him in Baghdad that killed several Iraqi soldiers. He traveled from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan, had a nice dinner, and the next day flew to New York to stay with a female friend. In the middle of the night, he awoke, rose to go to the bathroom, walked a few steps, and blacked out. He woke up on the bathroom floor. "The next day I felt okay," he said a few months later. "But ever since then, I've been a step slow." Steve Fainaru finished a reporting tour in late 2004 in which he had been subjected to several mortar attacks, and once had a bomb detonate near him in Baghdad that killed several Iraqi soldiers. He traveled from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan, had a nice dinner, and the next day flew to New York to stay with a female friend. In the middle of the night, he awoke, rose to go to the bathroom, walked a few steps, and blacked out. He woke up on the bathroom floor. "The next day I felt okay," he said a few months later. "But ever since then, I've been a step slow."

Many military officers, meanwhile, grew deeply distrustful and resentful of the media, feeling that it focused on the negative-bombings and casualties- while neglecting the positive, such as political progress and reconstruction efforts. "I would speculate that the vast majority of American soldiers,... by the time they left Iraq, we pretty much hated them," said Maj. Jay Bachar, an Army Reserve civil affairs officer. "They are bald-faced liars________ I could just go on and on, but the media clearly, clearly as any soldier over there will tell you, have an anti-U.S. agenda and are willing to propagandize falsehoods in furtherance of their own agenda."

The battle of Baghdad By late 2005, the war was settling into the area in and around Baghdad. Inside the capital it promised to be primarily a political fight over the makeup of the future government, and whether there would be one that worked, or a civil war, which appeared increasingly likely. But on Baghdad's outskirts, the effort remained very much a military campaign. The flat agricultural plain south and southwest of the capital "is what I would call the most lethal area in Baghdad," said Col. Todd Ebel, a brigade commander there.

This became the war of "the 'Iyahs," as American troops called the cl.u.s.ter of hard-bitten towns named Mahmudiyah, Yusufiyah, Latifiyah, and Iskandiriyah. They had become insurgent strongholds, with a rash of bombings, kidnappings, and shootings that intimidated locals into cooperating. Not coincidentally, these towns between Baghdad and Karbala also lay on the fault line between Sunni Iraq and s.h.i.+te Iraq, and likely would be a flash point for any civil war. It also became known to U.S. troops as the land of the big IEDs, because of the huge roadside bombs there, some consisting of two five-hundred-pound bombs buried under cement plates that concealed them from the Army's metal detectors. When troops of the 101st Airborne first pushed into the area to establish a patrol base, they ran a gauntlet of bombs, with one platoon encountering fourteen in a three-hour stretch. "My job, above all things, is to keep them out of Baghdad," said Capt. Andre Rivier, the Swiss American commander of Patrol Base Swamp, a half-ruined house bristling with dull black machine guns and surrounded by green sandbags, s.h.i.+n-deep mud holes, and shadowy palm groves. "The important thing is to keep them fighting here. That's really the crux of the fight."

By taking the battle to rural-based insurgents, the Army hoped to gain the initiativ