Fiasco, The American Military Adventure In Iraq Part 6

"The lead vehicle fires a warning shot to get them out of the way," Teeples later recounted to Poirier. "A gunner in one of the rear vehicles puts his head down and opens up with a fifty cal, just opens up, and lays down seven people." (A .50 caliber is a heavy machine gun, its rounds capable of penetrating many armored vehicles. When those big rounds. .h.i.t the human body they can sever limbs and explode skulls. More than one American soldier described the fire as coming from a .50 caliber; Bray later said emphatically that it was a lighter M-240.) Teeples was very clear, Poirier said in an interview, that "it was unaimed fire," and "some innocent people died."

Teeples declined to be interviewed for this book. But Lt. Col. Tobin Green, a 3rd ACR officer who was standing next to him atop the Baath Party headquarters building, said the convoy was attacked by the demonstrators. "I witnessed soldiers from the 82nd come under attack from Iraqis throwing rocks and bricks at exposed men with complete force at distances of no less than three feet. The column came under fire from enemy riflemen on the edge of the crowd," he said by e-mail.

Another 3rd ACR officer who was an eyewitness that day came down between Swannack's and Poirier's accounts.

The demonstration was approximately 200 persons-- [S]ome shots were firedfrom AK-47 a.s.sault rifles from the rear of the demonstration. Generally, these shots were not aimed, sometimes they were. The Humvee gunner from their D Co. (Ant.i.tank Company), did fire a burst of .50 cal. The Iraqi who was killed I remember the most was an elderly man who took a .50 cal round to the head at short range. Given that I was not in that soldier's position, I cannot say he made a bad call.

The Fallujah hospital director told Human Rights Watch that three people were killed that day, and sixteen wounded.

Bray argued credibly that his unit behaved well and honorably in both incidents. He noted that both before and after Fallujah, it handled difficult situations well. His one regret, he said, is that some soldiers used automatic weapons to return fire when it would have been better to respond with single shots. But at the same time, he recalled the Black Hawk Down Black Hawk Down incident in Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993, in which eighteen American soldiers had died. "I didn't want my soldiers cut off and isolated," and so didn't want them to second-guess themselves about responding when threatened. incident in Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993, in which eighteen American soldiers had died. "I didn't want my soldiers cut off and isolated," and so didn't want them to second-guess themselves about responding when threatened.

The key to the events in Fallujah, Bray said, isn't the behavior of his soldiers but the malignant character of some people in the town. By April 25, the sole policeman there who had been helping U.S. troops operate a checkpoint was shot in front of his house, and the word "Traitor" was written on his forehead. "There was something evil in that town," Bray recalled. In his view, Human Rights Watch overestimated the casualties in the first incident because it collected statistics that reflected violence all the way from Ramadi to Baghdad for a three-day period. As for the criticism by fellow American soldiers, he said it came from units fresh to Iraq and unfamiliar with the situation. "Dave [Teeples] doesn't quite understand what is happening" that day in Fallujah. "This is the first fight for him and his guys. I tell them, 'The war's not over.'" Earlier that day he had seen a 3rd ACR soldier standing on a balcony in Fallujah without any body armor on. "I told him, 'Son, you don't know where you are.'"

The incidents of April 28 and 30 became a cause celebre for the people of Fallujah, who would raise them repeatedly in negotiations with U.S. forces over the next year. "It continually comes up," said a U.S. military intelligence official who sometimes dealt directly with insurgents there.

Added Col. John Toolan, commander of the Marines who would fight a battle in Fallujah a year later, "They used it against us all the time."

Frances "Bing" West, the embedded defense a.n.a.lyst and author who has spent more time studying U.S. military operations in al Anbar province than any other unofficial observer, concluded that the Sunnis-and especially the people of Fallujah and the rest of al Anbar province-had never been defeated in the spring invasion. In that sense, the April incidents may have been not so much a cause of later troubles as a reflection of an existing problem: The Sunnis still wanted to slug it out.

At any rate, Fallujah would continue to be the victim of U.S. military absent-mindedness, with its problems underestimated and a variety of different Army units deployed to it in stopgap moves. "In Fallujah, they didn't trust us," recalled Capt. Lesley Kipling, the MP officer. "Units were constantly rotating through there. I think that is one of the biggest reasons that place never calmed down." Over the course of a few months, the city was patrolled by parts of 82nd Airborne, then by Poirier's MP-led task force, then by the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, then by part of the 3rd Infantry Division, and then by the 82nd Airborne when it returned later in 2003. Finally it would be turned over to the Marines, with a battle following soon after. "Fallujah had five different units handling it between April '03 and April '04," said one Army intelligence officer who served in al Anbar province. "This is exactly the wrong way to prosecute a counterinsurgency fight."

The 4th Infantry Division vs. the Marine Corps At the northern end of the Sunni Triangle, another Army division made a similarly belligerent entrance. In mid-April the Marines briefly occupied Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, and were preparing to turn it over to the Army's 4th Infantry Division. Unusual for an officially produced doc.u.ment, the official history produced by the 1st Division of the Marine Corps is disapproving, even contemptuous, of what it calls the 4th Infantry Division's "very aggressive" posture as that unit came into Iraq. "The lead elements of this division began to arrive in Tikrit on the 19th [of April], and were given a thorough orientation to the peaceful situation in town, and the continuing exercise in self-governance being worked with local leaders," stated the draft of the 1st Marine Division history of its time in Iraq in 2003. Despite that, it continued, [t]he arriving staff of the 4th 4th Infantry Division had a sterner perspective on the situation. They characterized their recent road march to Tikrit from Kuwait as an "attack," and remained convinced that the situation in Tikrit required a very aggressive military enforcement posture. The dichotomy between the two peacekeeping strategies was unsettling for the Marines, and many winced when Army Apache attack helicopters swooped into the division battles.p.a.ce without coordination and began to strafe abandoned enemy equipment indiscriminately, often in close proximity to Marine forces or innocent civilians. Infantry Division had a sterner perspective on the situation. They characterized their recent road march to Tikrit from Kuwait as an "attack," and remained convinced that the situation in Tikrit required a very aggressive military enforcement posture. The dichotomy between the two peacekeeping strategies was unsettling for the Marines, and many winced when Army Apache attack helicopters swooped into the division battles.p.a.ce without coordination and began to strafe abandoned enemy equipment indiscriminately, often in close proximity to Marine forces or innocent civilians.

Strikingly, the draft of the Marine history became even more pointed when it was revised. The final version noted that the Marines threw a farewell dinner to cement relations.h.i.+ps with local tribal leaders. "The design was to use this opportunity to pa.s.s down relations.h.i.+ps based on trust and mutual respect," the history stated. "The meeting was successfully concluded, with plans for future contact with the northern tribes established." Then, it goes on to say, somewhat ominously, "the meeting might have been even more productive had senior officers from 4th Infantry Division been willing to attend."

The history dryly notes that the Marines, "despite some misgivings," turned over the area to the 4th Infantry Division and departed on April 21. "Stores that had re-opened quickly closed back up as the people once again evacuated the streets, adjusting to the new security tactics," the final draft of the history reported. "A budding cooperative environment between the citizens and American forces was quickly snuffed out. The new adversarial relations.h.i.+p would become a major source of trouble in the coming months."

The Army perspective was quite different. Lt. Col. Gian Gentile, who was executive officer of the Army brigade relieving the Marines in Tikrit, later argued, "The Marines' velvet glove covered some dangerous problems that we were soon to face." When the Army sent out a night patrol, which he said the Marines hadn't done, it encountered looters carrying off rocket-propelled grenades and mortar rounds.

Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the 4th ID commander, later said that he was "very confused" by the Marines' criticism. "It was such a short period of time" that the two services overlapped in Tikrit, he said. At any rate, he knew of only one instance of an Army Apache helicopter firing without needed clearance from the Marines.

But it wasn't just Marines who were taken aback by the 4th ID's aggressive stance. Unlike most Army divisions, it hadn't been deployed for decades, missing out on Panama, the 1991 Gulf War, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. At its home base of Fort Hood, Texas, it sometimes was mocked as the second team, taking a backseat to its neighbor, the 1st Cavalry Division. Then it was a.s.signed the role of invading Iraq from the north in the spring 2003 attack, only to be prevented from executing that mission when the Turkish government declined to permit the movement of U.S. troops through its territory.

It is remarkable how consistently other soldiers were put off by the 4th Division's stance during its early days in Iraq. "We slowly drove past 4th Infantry guys looking mean and ugly," recalled Sgt. Kayla Williams, then a military intelligence specialist in the 101st Airborne. "They stood on top of their trucks, their weapons pointed directly at civilians.... What could these locals possibly have done? Why was this intimidation necessary? No one explained anything, but it looked weird and felt wrong." Her gut sense would be borne out in the coming months, as the 4th ID would commit more than its share of abuses of Iraqis.

On April 19, as Pentagon officials continued to insist that there were enough troops to do the job and that commanders on the ground agreed with them, Maj. Gen. Mattis, one of the senior U.S. military commanders in Iraq, noted in an internal message that the incoming Army occupation force lacked sufficient numbers of troops. "The lack of Army dismounts [regular infantry] is creating a void in personal contact and public perception of our civil-military ops," Mattis wrote.

At month's end, despite the concerns about the lack of troops, the Marines were told to execute previously existing plans to pull out and head home. "Most of us were flabbergasted to be told to leave Baghdad at the end of April," recalled Marine Col. John Toolan. "I turned over my sector, which was east Baghdad, to 2nd ACR [Armored Cavalry Regiment], which had about one-fifth the capability of my regiment."

Even before he left Iraq, Toolan recalled, Mattis, his commander, took him aside and said he thought that the situation was deteriorating and that the Marines would be pulled back into Iraq eventually. "Don't lose sight of what you've learned," he recalled Mattis telling him, "because you're going to need to get your guys ready to come back." Off the top of his head, Mattis picked November 10-an easily remembered date because it is the Marine Corps's birthday-as the target date by which he wanted his troops to be ready to head back to Iraq. In fact, the deployment order would arrive on November 7.

"Mission accomplished"Publicly, at least, all was going well.

One of the roles of a president is to provide strategic context-to explain how the public, and especially how subordinate officials, should think about a situation. On May 1, 2003, President Bush ostentatiously flew in a Navy combat aircraft to the USS Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier steaming off the coast of southern California. The day is remembered, somewhat unfairly, as the occasion of Bush's Mission Accomplished speech. Bush never used that phrase, which was hanging prominently on a huge banner displayed on the s.h.i.+p's island-the tower where the captain and the flight controllers operate-so that television cameras focused on the president would pick it up. But his comments were in line with that theme. "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," he began, standing on the s.h.i.+p's flight deck. "In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." an aircraft carrier steaming off the coast of southern California. The day is remembered, somewhat unfairly, as the occasion of Bush's Mission Accomplished speech. Bush never used that phrase, which was hanging prominently on a huge banner displayed on the s.h.i.+p's island-the tower where the captain and the flight controllers operate-so that television cameras focused on the president would pick it up. But his comments were in line with that theme. "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," he began, standing on the s.h.i.+p's flight deck. "In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

He did nod toward the operations that remained, which he seemed to characterize as a mop-up job. "We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We're bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We're pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated." Doing all this, and establis.h.i.+ng democracy, "will take time, but it is worth every effort." And, as he often would do in discussing Iraq in public, he circled back to the 9/11 attacks, clearly his starting point on the road to Baghdad. "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the eleventh, 2001," he said.

In both image and word that day, what Bush did was tear down the goalposts at halftime in the game. But even as he spoke it was becoming clear on the ground that contrary to official expectation the stockpiles of WMD weren't going to be found. The poor intelligence on WMD would continue to haunt troops in the field-and, arguably, helped arm and protect the insurgency that would emerge in the following months. In bunkers across Iraq there were tens of thousands of tons of conventional weaponry-mortar sh.e.l.ls, RPGs, rifle ammunition, explosives, and so on. One estimate, cited by Christopher Hileman, a U.S. intelligence a.n.a.lyst for Mideast matters, was "more than a million metric tons." Yet U.S. commanders rolling into Iraq refrained from detonating those bunkers for fear that they also contained stockpiles of poison gas or other weaponry that might be blown into the air and kill U.S. soldiers or Iraqi civilians. The COBRA II invasion plan unambiguously stated, "The Iraqi Ministry of Defense will use WMD early but not often. The probability for their use of WMD increases exponentially as Saddam Hussein senses the imminent collapse of his regime."

Such cert.i.tude made American commanders wary of destroying weapons bunkers. "You never knew which one was WMD, okay?" said one regretful Marine battalion commander. So the bunkers often were bypa.s.sed and left undisturbed by an invasion force that already was stretched thin-and the insurgents were able to arm themselves at leisure.

The U.S. focus on WMD also provided a kind of smokescreen that unintentionally protected the insurgents during the spring of 2004. One senior military intelligence officer recalled arguing that a good roadmap of the nascent opposition in Fallujah could be developed simply by translating the roster of residents of that city-that the U.S. military possessed-who had volunteered for suicide missions against Israel. Then, he recommended, map their houses and visit each one-as soon as possible. But he couldn't "get it translated-all the a.s.sets were focused on WMD." Thousands of weapons experts, translators, and other specialists, along with all their support personnel, were working to find unconventional weapons that didn't exist, and soon were being attacked with conventional weapons that did but that had been ignored by U.S. officials.

The United States loses the initiative When top Pentagon officials refused to acknowledge the realities of Iraq, the opportunity to take hold of the situation slipped between the fingers of the Americans. In military terms, in April and May, the U.S. military lost the initiative-that is, it stopped being the side in the conflict that was driving events, acting at the time and place of its choosing. "When the statue came down, that moment, we could have done some great things," Zinni said, looking back. "The problem is, we had insufficient forces to secure and freeze the situation and capitalize on that moment."

A year later, a formal Pentagon review, led by two former secretaries of defense, James Schlesinger and Harold Brown, came to a similar conclusion about the lack of mental agility at the Pentagon. "In Iraq, there was not only a failure to plan for a major insurgency, but also to quickly and adequately adapt to the insurgency that followed after major combat operations," they wrote, along with two other members of the panel appointed to review the military establishment's handling of Iraq during the summer and fall of 2003. "The October 2002 Centcom war plan presupposed that relatively benign stability and security operations would precede a handover to Iraq's authorities."

When those rosy a.s.sumptions weren't borne out, the Pentagon's leaders.h.i.+p failed to adjust, most notably by sending more troops. Keith Mines, a State Department diplomat a.s.signed by the CPA to al Anbar province in 2003, later wrote an a.n.a.lysis of how what he called "the minimalist force structure" undercut the occupation in the summer of 2003. He was uniquely placed to do so: A former Special Forces officer, he had a solid understanding of both military and political tactics and a feeling especially for how they interact. "First," he wrote, "a larger force could have stopped the looting," which tainted the occupation and destroyed necessary infrastructure. For lack of troops, the border was left largely open, a particular problem in western Iraq, where he operated, and where ji-hadists could move freely across from Syria. In addition, there weren't enough soldiers to train Iraqis, and so contractors were used, but their "timeline stretched into 2006 before the new force would begin to deploy." But the worst effect may have been the lack of adequate troops to manage detainees-a problem top commanders in Iraq wouldn't recognize until 2004, after it had led to a scandal that damaged the American image globally. The oddity, Mines concluded, was that there were two known models for successful counterinsurgency operations, and the U.S. had managed to avoid both. One was El Salvador in the 1980s, where a tiny group of just fifty-five U.S. military advisers had worked with local military units. The other was postwar Germany, where a large and overwhelming force was garrisoned. But in Iraq "we have worked the middle ground, with just enough forces to elicit a strong response from Iraqi nationalists but inadequate forces to make the transition work."

Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who would command the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq for a year, said that the initial U.S. approach helped create the mess that followed. "We set ourselves up for what happened when we violated two principles that are absolutely fundamental for success. One is unity of command. The other is ma.s.s." In other words, he argued, the U.S. approach failed to heed two of the most basic rules of military operations: First, have everybody working toward the same goal, with one person in charge. Second, have enough people and machines to get the job done. Together these flaws "led directly to Abu Ghraib," because inadequate leaders and overstrapped units were given tasks far beyond their limited abilities and resources.

Col. Teddy Spain, from his front-row seat as chief of U.S. military police forces in Baghdad, came to agree with that a.s.sessment. In April, Spain made his first foray into Baghdad, conducting a reconnaissance mission before moving his headquarters north to the capital. He was surprised by what he saw. "The first time I went into Baghdad, they were breaking into ministries and burning buildings, but I didn't have the a.s.sets-all my people were down south guarding supply routes and EPWs," or enemy prisoners of war.

With those troops, he said later, he might have been able to bring security to Baghdad. If he had had those MP units that had been dropped from the invasion plan months earlier, "I think we could have taken control of the streets much better. I think Baghdad would have been different. I just didn't have the a.s.sets." He would prove not to be alone in these bitter regrets.

HOW TO CREATE AN INSURGENCY (I).

SPRING AND SUMMER 2003.

M.

y soldiers are starting to lose their positive att.i.tudes and are constantly asking when we will go home," Capt. Lesley Kipling, the MP officer, wrote to her boyfriend on May 9.

The feeling of postwar impatience was the same at the Pentagon, recalled an officer who was on the Joint Staff at that time: "There was a mind-set by the first part of May: Major combat operations are over, let's think about drawing down the force."

From late spring to midsummer 2003 was a time of meandering and drift for the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It took months for incorrect a.s.sumptions to begin to be discarded and for commanders to recognize that large numbers of U.S. troops were going to be in Iraq for some time. "In the two to three months of ambiguous transition, U.S. forces slowly lost the momentum and the initiative they had gained over an off-balance enemy," Maj. Isaiah Wilson later wrote. "During this calm before the next storm, the U.S. Army has its eyes turned toward the ports, while Former Regime Loyalists (FRL) and budding insurgents had their eyes turned toward the people. The United States, its Army, and its coalition of the willing have been playing catch-up ever since."

As the situation turned violent, some U.S. soldiers began to question why they were in Iraq. "Motivation was not a problem during the initial stages, however once we transitioned into SASO [stability and support operations, the U.S. military term for peacekeeping] it became a problem," one Army lieutenant observed that summer on an Internet discussion board for young officers. "It didn't take much time before I realized that they were lacking any sense of purpose________ They didn't know why they weren't going home, why they couldn't see their first child born, and why we were helping an ungrateful and hostile populace."

Added an intelligence officer who was attached to a Navy SEAL unit at the time, "The air went out of the tires almost overnight."

Watching sofas go by Baghdad was falling apart in front of the eyes of the U.S. military, with buildings being looted and parents afraid to let their children outside, but no one had orders to do anything about it. Looking back several years later, Col. Alan King, the head of civil affairs for the 3rd Infantry Division, spoke of April 2003 with a slow, chilled tone of horror in his voice. "I got to Baghdad and was told, 'You've got twenty-four hours to come up with a Phase IV plan______ On the night of April 8, Col. [John] Sterling, the chief of staff of the 3rd ID, came to me and said, 'I just got off the phone with the corps chief of staff, and I asked him for the reconstruction plan, and he said there isn't one. So you've got twenty-four hours to come up with one.'" King was stunned. He had been asking for months for just such a plan, and had been told that when the time came, he would be given it.

Lacking clear orders about what to do once in Baghdad, the 3rd ID more or less stayed in place in the capital. "You didn't find many dismounted patrols with the 3rd ID," recalled Jay Garner, a retired Army general and not one to lightly criticize his old peers. "They kind of stayed with their platforms"-that is, their tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles.

On April 6, Lt. Douglas Hoyt, a platoon leader with the 3rd ID, saw looters for the first time. "I remembered looking through the sights on my tank at people and trying to determine if they were hostile or not," he recalled later. He didn't stop them. "It was not our mission at the time."

The division's official after-action review states that it had no orders to do anything else: "3RD ID transitioned into Phase IV SASO with no plan from higher headquarters," it reported. "There was no guidance for restoring order in Baghdad, creating an interim government, hiring government and essential services employees, and ensuring that the judicial system was operational." The result was "a power/authority vacuum created by our failure to immediately replace key government inst.i.tutions." In a surprising criticism for an Army division to make-especially one that had led the way in toppling an enemy government- the 3rd ID report laid the blame for all of this at the feet of its chain of command, leading to Franks to Rumsfeld and Bush: "The president announced that our national goal was 'regime change.'Yet there was no timely plan prepared for the obvious consequences of a regime change."

The report also faulted the political thinking that led American forces to be declared liberators rather than occupiers, because that led military commanders to operate in a hands-off way that allowed the chaos to increase in Baghdad. "As a matter of law and fact, the United States is an occupying power in Iraq, even if we characterize ourselves as liberators," stated the staff judge advocate's section of the division report. "Because of the refusal to acknowledge occupier status, commanders did not initially take measures available to occupying powers, such as imposing curfews, directing civilians to return to work, and controlling the local governments and populace. The failure to act after we displaced the regime created a power vacuum, which others immediately tried to fill."

"No one had talked about what would happen when we got there," said Capt. David Chasteen, a 3rd ID officer. "There was no plan for that. They literally told us once we got there they'd pull us back out, take us home. Once we got there it was a cl.u.s.terf.u.c.k, just trying to figure out what to do." Normally the division's officer for coordinating defenses against nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks, Chasteen was a.s.signed in Baghdad to work at the city's international airport, which had become a giant U.S. military base. "I was customs, immigration, looking at people's pa.s.sports, I had no idea what I was doing. Such a nicely planned operation that went so well, why didn't anyone think about what the next step would be?"

It wasn't just a lack of planning or guidance from civilians that led to the U.S. inertia, it also was a lack of understanding or interest among senior military commanders. "The civilian leaders.h.i.+p did not foresee the need for extensive Phase IV operations, and thus did little planning beyond near-term relief," said one Pentagon official who was involved in war-gaming the invasion plan, and who later quietly a.n.a.lyzed its failures. "This was fine with the military, which had traditionally focused on Phase III operations, did not want to do Phase IV operations, and figured that someone else would step in."

Brig. Gen. David Fastabend told the story of reading an article in which a fellow Army general was quoted as saying that Army doctrine hadn't prepared him for what he faced in Iraq during the late spring of 2003. When he met this officer, Fastabend, who was involved in developing doctrine-that is, how to think about how to fight and operate-questioned him about that statement. "I don't understand why you said that," Fastabend said. "Look, in 1993 we introduced 'military operations other than war,' and then we introduced the idea of 'full-spectrum operations.' From '97 to 2001 we introduced the idea that operations are a seamless combination of offense, defense, stability, and support. How could you say that your doctrine didn't prepare you for what you experienced in Baghdad?"

"Yeah, Dave, I know," this officer responded. "I read all that stuff. Read it many times, and thought about it. But I can remember quite clearly, I was on a street corner in Baghdad, smoking a cigar, watching some guys carry a sofa by-and it never occurred to me that I was going to be the guy to go get that sofa back."

The pacification of Ar Rutbah One of the notable exceptions to this sense of drift was in areas where Army Special Forces operated, in far northern and western Iraq. Those soldiers were much more accustomed to living and working with foreign populations.

The experience of Army Maj. Jim Gavrilis showed the road that unfortunately was not taken by the overwhelming majority of the U.S. military in Iraq. At six o'clock on the morning of April 9, the career Special Forces officer drove into Ar Rutbah, the only town of any size in far western Iraq. His troops had come under intense fire from this town of about twenty-five thousand people, but he didn't enter it in a hostile fas.h.i.+on. "I understood that this was a war of liberation and therefore the people were ultimately the center of gravity," he later wrote, in a simple sentence of great insight. "As a result, it was natural for us to focus on the people and build positive relations.h.i.+ps with them."

He drank tea with Bedouins in the desert, smoked cigarettes with farmers near the towns, and broke bread with police chiefs, and even with Iraqi army officers. He listened. He ate with his fingers, as they did. He emphasized that it was their country and that he was a guest who hoped to help. "Our behavior sent the clearest message," he later wrote. "We showed we cared more about the people of Ar Rutbah than did the Saddam Fedayeen." This was a cla.s.sic counterinsurgency move, implemented at the most opportune time-before there was an insurgency.

Along the same lines, Gavrilis moved quickly to empower the locals. By the time the calls rang out from the minarets for noon prayers on the day he arrived, he had named an interim mayor. He also took steps to integrate the local police into his checkpoints. "This allowed the Iraqis to do their part and increased their comfort with us," he recalled. And, "in practical terms, the police knew who was from the city and who had legitimate business."

He co-opted the existing power structure. When some sheikhs came to complain about looting, he knew some of them were behind those acts, he said. So he put those very sheikhs in charge of a neighborhood-watch program-and held them accountable for any continued looting, with U.S. troops monitoring the situation in random patrols. "The stealing dropped to almost nothing." He also gave relief food supplies to the sheikhs and imams, because he realized that they knew who really needed it. To help the rest of the population obtain food, he lent his satellite phone to local merchants so they could contact business partners in Jordan. "In a day, the market had fresh fruit and vegetables, and fresh fish and meat for the first time in months."

One hallmark of his approach was a humility about his role and his limited ability to alter a culture whose roots reached back to the days of Abraham and Ezekiel. "The laws and values of their society and culture were just fine," he wrote. "All we needed to do was enforce them." Emphasizing this att.i.tude of restraint, he lived simply, not moving into any palaces, as conventional U.S. forces were doing elsewhere in Iraq.

He also took a gentle approach to de-Baathification. First he offered to turn the Baath Party headquarters-"the nicest building in the city"-into a hospital. He also developed a renunciation form in which people who were becoming part of the interim government repudiated the party and pledged to serve and protect the people of the new Iraq. Signing the form wasn't done punitively. "It was more of a commencement where we congratulated each person for their courage in turning this new leaf," he wrote. Those who wanted to sign the form in private were allowed to do so. "Simply put, de-Baathifcation meant political change, not political purge."

At any rate, he preferred a functioning city administered in part by some former Baathists to a stricken one stripped of them. "By quickly establis.h.i.+ng an effective Iraqi alternative to the regime and not alienating anyone, we made resistance irrelevant," he said.

The one area in which Gavrilis took a hard line was on violence. No one but U.S. forces were permitted to carry a weapon. "I made it very clear ... that I retained the monopoly on the use of force."

In sum, he treated Iraqis as partners. Rather than seek to break the structure of an ancient society, he sought to use it to achieve his ends. But he was careful in establis.h.i.+ng those goals and realistic in seeking to achieve them, acting with both humility and common sense. In other words, he took almost the opposite course that the U.S. occupation authorities based in Baghdad would dictate in the following months. He left Ar Rutbah on April 23. By midsummer, the atmosphere in those towns in the province, from Ar Rutbah east to Fallujah, would be far more hostile.

Garner's troubled tenure In Baghdad, meanwhile, Garner was off to an uneven start. His initial moves were making Ahmed Chalabi uneasy-and the Iraqi exile had better contacts in the U.S. government and in the media than the retired general did. Garner found that he had a particularly difficult relations.h.i.+p with Chalabi as well. "Very tense," he said. "He didn't like me." The reason for the mutual unease, Garner believed, was that Chalabi thought that control of Iraq would be turned over to him. "I think he'd been led to believe that by Perle and Feith," Garner said later. And Garner didn't like that idea. "I thought he was a thug, very sleazy." When he heard a year later that Chalabi allegedly had been pa.s.sing intelligence to the Iranian government, "I thought, 'No s.h.i.+t.'"

Chalabi, for his part, was doing his best during this period to undercut Garner. "The problem with Garner was that he was employing Baathists in senior positions, and the U.S. press got hold of that," Chalabi later said. "They went ahead and put in the New York Times New York Times that Baathists were being made to run the university, Ministry of Health.... That created a big fuss with the United States, because the U.S. policy was de-Baathification." Chalabi acknowledged that he was pus.h.i.+ng this view "very hard" at the time. that Baathists were being made to run the university, Ministry of Health.... That created a big fuss with the United States, because the U.S. policy was de-Baathification." Chalabi acknowledged that he was pus.h.i.+ng this view "very hard" at the time.

Also, even as it occupied Baghdad, the U.S. government was still undecided on the basics of what it planned to do there. Most notably, officials went back and forth on the issue of whether to maintain the Iraqi military. The U.S. military generally advocated keeping the Iraqi forces relatively intact. "We'd been briefing, 'Keep the Iraqi army,'" said a military intelligence officer. "It is solid, it has structure and discipline, and credibility inside Iraq."

In mid-April, Abizaid "strongly recommended" to the Pentagon that a substantial Iraqi army be established immediately, according to an internal summary of a secure video teleconference. This interim force would have three divisions- the U.S. Army at the time had just ten, for the entire world-and would "take over internal security functions as quickly as possible," the doc.u.ment stated. A subsequent memo noted that there was an "urgent need to maintain order, suppress various militias, put an Iraqi face on security and relieve burden on Coalition military." Wolfowitz, who partic.i.p.ated in the video teleconference, expressed concern about having the Iraqi army perform internal security missions. But he and Abizaid concluded by agreeing to start up a force and worry later about its mission.

By month's end, Central Command staffers were hard at work on this New Iraqi Corps, which they inevitably acronymized as the NIC-not knowing that that sound was Arabic slang for "f.u.c.k." When, several weeks later, this was pointed out to U.S. officials, the planned organization was renamed the New Iraqi Army. Garner's team began to work toward the goal of a.s.sembling Iraqi army units-talking to former officers and getting their advice about how to go about it.

At the same time, there was growing unease back in Was.h.i.+ngton with Garner's performance. Rice was told that "Garner just isn't pulling things together," recalled Franklin Miller, the National Security Council's staff director for defense issues.

On the night of April 24, Garner was standing in the looted mess of Saddam Hussein's main palace downtown, broken gla.s.s under his shoes, when Rumsfeld called to tell him that a retired diplomat named L. Paul Bremer III would be coming in as a presidential envoy. "He asked me to stay on under Bremer, but I said that wouldn't work. He asked me to stay on for a transition, and I said I would."

American leaders.h.i.+p goes MIA One of the unexplained oddities of this time was the absence of much of the nation's top military leaders.h.i.+p: Just as the situation in Iraq was deteriorating, there was a series of retirements and replacements among the top commanders handling it. The changes would occur just as Garner was succeeded by Bremer, with ill effect.

At the top of the chain of command for operations in Iraq, Gen. Franks seemed quickly to have detached from Iraq issues. Some of those who worked with him found him remote and even out of touch in the weeks after the fall of Baghdad. Franks was getting ready to retire, while Abizaid was not yet confirmed by Congress to succeed him as the top U.S. military commander for Iraq and the rest of the Mideast. A Pentagon official said that top officials got wind at one point that Franks planned to fly from the Mideast to Tampa, pick up his wife, and take a long weekend, maybe in the Bahamas. Franks ultimately was ordered not to. He "put his pack down early," said a former senior administration official. "He couldn't even be found a lot of the times."

"Franks was strangely absent" in May and June of 2003, agreed Army Col. Gregory Gardner, who was serving at the CPA. "He blew into Baghdad once, signed the freedom order, and left. It was like, 'I've done it, I did the offensive operations.' I really felt he was disengaged."

Franks, who declined to be interviewed for this book, wrote in his own that "Phase IV was actually going about as I had expected"-which, if it were indeed true, would make his decision to retire from the battlefield all the more inexplicable. Even more bizarrely, Gen. Franks later would blame journalists for the lack of an adequate U.S. military response to the situation. "I remember a time long about the 9th, 10th, 11th of April of last year where there was a lot of media coverage of the fact that Saddam's statue came down in Baghdad," he said in Was.h.i.+ngton late in 2004. "And then pretty soon there was created-and I would not take credit as the guy who created an expectation, I will just say that all of the reporting, and none of it was evil-but the reporting we all saw kind of created an expectation, 'Well probably peace is going to break out very, very quickly.'" This attempt by a top commander to s.h.i.+ft responsibility to the media for poor military leaders.h.i.+p and a flawed understanding of the strategic situation is unbecoming- especially because it was uttered not in the heat of the moment but almost eighteen months after the fact.

Gen. s.h.i.+nseki, the chief of the U.S. Army, left the stage at about the same time. Neither Defense Secretary Rumsfeld nor Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz attended the scorned general's retirement ceremony. Wolfowitz asked to come but s.h.i.+nseki declined to invite him. It was an extraordinary situation: While the nation was at war and American soldiers were dying, the Pentagon's top civilians were estranged from the Army's leaders.h.i.+p. What's more, it was the second bitter departure of an Army four-star general under Rumsfeld: Gen. Henry "Hugh" Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had retired in 2001, just weeks after 9/11, disgusted with Rumsfeld and feeling he had recklessly disregarded sound military advice.

s.h.i.+nseki struck two dissonant themes in his farewell address that warm June day. First, there was a difference between being a boss and being a leader. "Mistrust and arrogance are ant.i.thetical to inspired and inspiring leaders.h.i.+p," he said in reference to the contumely of his civilian leaders. (This was "a subtle rebuke to Secretary Rumsfeld," according to a biographical pamphlet by veteran journalist Richard Halloran that was written with s.h.i.+nseki's cooperation and published by the Hawaii Army Museum Society.) His second theme was even more sensitive. Looking at Iraq as his Army career ended, s.h.i.+nseki said, he was reminded of the war where his career had begun, Vietnam, where he had been wounded three times, the last time losing half his right foot to a land mine. It was striking that the chief of the Army was the first major public figure to draw this a.n.a.logy, only two months into the occupation. "The current war brings me full circle to where I began my journey as a soldier," he said. "The lessons I learned in Vietnam are always with me." One of his warnings was that the Army needed to be big enough for the missions a.s.signed it. "Beware the twelve-division strategy for a ten-division Army," he cautioned. Then he retired and all but disappeared from public view, a samurai ashamed of the behavior of his shogun. Over the next couple of years he would surface only a few times in low-profile speeches far from Was.h.i.+ngton-in Georgia, California, and Hawaii.

After Gen. Keane declined the job of succeeding s.h.i.+nseki, Rumsfeld, in an unusual move, pa.s.sed over all the Army's active-duty three- and four-star generals- normally the ones who would be considered-to appoint as chief a retired general named Peter Schoomaker. When Rumsfeld's aides first contacted Schoomaker, they reached him on his cell phone in his pickup truck near rural Hico, Texas, a bit north of Fort Hood. The retired general thought he might be getting a prank call from the rancher he'd just left. Furthering the Army's isolation, Schoomaker was an outsider. He had spent most of his career in Special Operations, which often acts-and is treated-as if it were a separate service from the Army.

On the ground in Iraq, the structure of U.S. forces also was in flux. After being told for two weeks that both the 1st Cavalry Division and 1st Armored Division would be deploying, Col. Agoglia was told on April 30 that the 1st Cav wouldn't be coming after all-and that the 3rd ID would be leaving after the 1st AD arrived. "So we have a net gain of zero," he calculated to himself. "You're kiddin' me!"

In addition, instead of having Iraq run by Gen. McKiernan and his staff at CFLCC, the headquarters for the ground invasion force, the staff of V Corps, a smaller group, was going to be put in charge. This meant that an experienced team that had worked for months on Iraq issues was being replaced by a smaller, less capable, and less seasoned staff. McKiernan's headquarters was especially attuned to the tribal structure of Iraqi society, an intelligence officer recalled: "They were sent home, and that expertise and capability went with them. We spent from May '03 to December '03 trying to rebuild that capability."

What's more, a general named Ricardo Sanchez was going to take over V Corps at the same time. "So now you have the most junior headquarters in theater, with the most junior commander in theater, taking over," Agoglia recalled. "You've got the entire military chain of command changing." Agoglia also moved, rewarded for his two years of nonstop work in the frying pan of planning wars for Gen. Franks by being thrown into the fire as the military liaison between the CPA and Central Command.

Bremer's opening blunders Bremer headed for Iraq in early May, determined to show that there was a new sheriff in town. In a memo to the Pentagon's general counsel written just before his departure, he noted his desire "that my arrival in Iraq be marked by clear, public and decisive steps" to "rea.s.sure Iraqis that we are determined to eradicate Sad-damism." One of those steps, he decided, would be the total dissolution of the Iraqi army. He attached the draft of an order to that end that, he said, "Walt Slo-combe has suggested that I issue ... immediately after my arrival." (Slocombe was a former Pentagon official who had agreed to be Bremer's adviser on defense issues.) On May 12, 2003, Bremer arrived in Baghdad aboard a Special Operations MC-130 Combat Talon aircraft. He and Garner overlapped for just a few weeks. Garner had told Rumsfeld he would stay as late as early July, but soon found that his views weren't particularly welcome. "Bremer didn't want my advice__________ He's a hardworking guy, twenty hours a day. But he cut me out the first day, didn't have me to any of his meetings. So on the third day he was there, I said, 'Jerry, I'm going home.' We just didn't get along."

For his own part, Bremer, a veteran diplomat who had gone on to work as a consultant, was taken aback by the situation on the ground. "I found a city that was on fire, not from the war, but from the looting," he later said. "I found a city where there was virtually no traffic except for American military vehicles or coalition tanks and Humvees, a city where there was a lot of gunfire still going on."

In mid-May, Bremer quickly made three moves that radically altered the American approach to Iraq and went a long way toward creating support for an anti-American insurgency Oddly, these early moves contradicted the decisions made by President Bush on March 10 and 12 at briefings on postwar Iraq, according to an administration official who partic.i.p.ated in both. "They were not the decisions that the administration had reached," Richard Armitage confirmed in an interview.

One of the first things Bremer did after arriving in Iraq was show Garner the order he intended to issue to rid Iraq of Baathist leaders.h.i.+p. "Senior Party Members," it stated, "are hereby removed from their positions and banned from future employment in the public sector." In addition, anyone holding a position in the top three management layers of any ministry, government-run corporation, university, or hospital and who was a party member-even of a junior rank-would be deemed to be a senior Baathist and so would be fired. What's more, those suspected of crimes would be investigated and, if deemed a flight risk, would be detained or placed under house arrest.

Garner was appalled. This went far beyond what he had planned for months and, in fact, had briefed for Rumsfeld and President Bush. The message Garner had given his subordinates, recalled his strategy chief, Col. Paul Hughes, was, "Let them sort out their own de-Baathification-either kill them or force them to leave."

If issued as written, the order Bremer was carrying would lead to disaster, Garner thought. He went to see the CIA station chief, whom Garner had seen work well with the military. "This is too hard," Garner told the CIA officer, who read it and agreed. The two allies went back to Bremer.

"Give us an hour or so to redo this," Garner asked.

"Absolutely not," Bremer responded. "I have my instructions, and I am going to issue this."

The CIA station chief urged Bremer to reconsider. These are the people who know where the levers of the infrastructure are, from electricity to water to transportation, he said. Take them out of the equation and you undercut the operation of this country, he warned.

No, said Bremer.

Okay, the veteran CIA man responded. Do this, he said, but understand one thing: "By nightfall, you'll have driven 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists underground. And in six months, you'll really regret this." (The U.S. intelligence estimate was that the party had a total members.h.i.+p of 600,000 to 700,000, of which between 15,000 and 40,000 were senior members, depending on how one counted.) Bremer looked at the two. "I have my instructions," he repeated, according to Garner, though it isn't clear that he really did, as the policy he was implementing wasn't what had been briefed to the president. A few months later, the veteran CIA man would leave Baghdad, replaced by a far more junior officer. In the fall of 2005 he would resign from government service.

The next day, Bremer met in his conference room-the only big room in the palace with working air conditioners-with his senior CPA staff members. He showed them the de-Baathification order. "They went nuts and said, 'You can't do this,'" recalled Gardner, the Army colonel a.s.signed to CPA. "It just cleaned out the ministries. The guys said, 'We can't run our ministries now.'"

"I was extremely vocal with the people who were coming in that that was a huge mistake, that it really did not reflect the experience of these kinds of situations for the past twenty years," agreed David Nummy, a former a.s.sistant treasury secretary who is an expert on the financial systems of transitioning and developing countries. He called on his knowledge of Ukraine, Bosnia, and Kosovo to argue that Iraq "was not the first totalitarian system we had engaged with, not the first one-party state that we had worked with, and that there was absolutely no experience in any country that said that being a member of the dominant political party meant you were a bad guy."

Bremer again refused to budge. His response, said Gardner, was that he wasn't bringing up the issue for discussion but rather just to inform them of what was going to happen. It appears that with this move, Chalabi, operating behind the scenes, had won a major victory. Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Kellogg, Jr., then on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recalled that Chalabi had been a strong backer of the radical de-Baathification plan Bremer brought with him. "He was calling for total de-Baathification, which was extreme."

"I think the world of Jerry Bremer," said Kellogg, who sat across from Bremer on the Special Operations C-130 aircraft that took them into Iraq. "He is personally courageous, and a good guy." But his management style didn't work well. "If you went up to him and said, 'You gotta do this, because your way is wrong,' he'd blow you off. So you'd have to work the sides. We'd kind of work around him."

On May 16, De-Baathification of Iraq Society was issued over Bremer's signature as Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 1. It purged tens of thousands of members of the Baath Party-perhaps as many as eighty-five thousand. Ultimately, nine thousand would seek and be granted exemptions permitting them to go back to work. "I did that because I thought it was absolutely essential to make it clear that the Baathist ideology, which had been responsible for so many of the human-rights abuses and mistreatment of the people in the country over the last forty years, had to be extirpated finally and completely from society, much as the American government decided to completely extirpate n.a.z.ism from Germany at the end of the Second World War," Bremer said later.

Ultimately, the U.S. military in Iraq came to have a mixed view of the purge. Maj. Gen. Swannack spoke for many when he later said, "I was not very happy from day one with the de-Baathification program."

A 101st Airborne Division summary of issues for a meeting at the CPA later that year listed the "Big Five" concerns of the division commander, Maj. Gen. David Petraeus: "Arbitrary de-Baathification" was at the top of the list. One of Petraeus's brigade commanders, Col. Joe Anderson, later summarized the effect of Bremer's order: "All of a sudden you say, 'These guys are not part of society'... These were guys and gals in the doctor arena, in the professor arena, that you can't do without" in running a society.

But not everyone agreed. Brig. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who commanded the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad-and so had more top Baathists in his area of operations-said that in retrospect, Bremer's radical de-Baathification was the right move to make for changing Iraq, albeit a somewhat difficult one. If it hadn't been done, he said, "it would have gone easier for us in the near term, but less well for the Iraqi population in the long term."

Bremer dissolves the Iraqi armed forcesNext came the dissolution of the Iraqi army and national police force.

"We didn't disband the army," Walter Slocombe would later contend. "The army disbanded itself."

That's not the way many others remember what happened. "We were working with the army when we were told to disband them," recalled Marine Maj. Gen. Mattis.

Col. Hughes discussed the moment he learned about this order with the same pa.s.sion that he recounted the events of 9/11, when his side of the Pentagon was. .h.i.t by a fuel-laden jet. He was on leave in the United States, staying at a hotel in Boston for his daughter's graduation from Emerson College. One day just before leaving town, he idly turned on the hotel room's television to check the news. "They were saying on Channel Four that the Iraq army was being abolished." Incredulous, Hughes spoke to the television. "What?" "What?" The report made no sense to him. At Garner's behest he had spent the previous several weeks working on the future of the Iraqi military. Before going on leave he had been meeting every day with a group of Iraqi generals, and with them had developed a list of 125,000 former Iraqi soldiers. The report made no sense to him. At Garner's behest he had spent the previous several weeks working on the future of the Iraqi military. Before going on leave he had been meeting every day with a group of Iraqi generals, and with them had developed a list of 125,000 former Iraqi soldiers.