Fiasco, The American Military Adventure In Iraq Part 7

This decision was another significant departure from what Garner had discussed with Rumsfeld and others before leaving Was.h.i.+ngton for Iraq. "One of our goals is to take a good portion of the Iraqi regular army" and put them to work in reconstruction, Garner had told reporters at the Pentagon in March. "The regular army has the skill sets to match the work that needs to be done." On February 19, Garner had briefed Rice, the national security adviser, on his plans for the Iraqi army. "Cannot immediately demobilize ... 300K-400K unemployed," his briefing slide stated. "Take advantage of ready labor force ... Reconstruction is labor-intensive." According to notes he prepared for that meeting, he told her of his preparations for "Iraq Regular Army: Plan for Rapid Reorganization." His plan was to use $1.2 billion in frozen a.s.sets to pay the military, police, and key civil servants for a few months. Garner had been so determined to stand up the Iraqi military quickly that he had demanded that the job of retraining not be given to the U.S. Army, which he had felt would move too slowly, but to contractors. In response, MPRI, a military consulting firm, had drawn up a detailed plan to use up to one hundred thousand Iraqi troops as the low-tech end of reconstruction projects. "Start with short, simple tasks (clear garbage, remove debris, improve drainage), then longer and more complex tasks," the company's plan stated.

"We planned to bring it back," Garner said in an interview. "I'd briefed the president on it." Having an operating Iraqi army was a key element of U.S. military planning. "Abizaid was all for it, Tommy Franks, McKiernan," the three top U.S. Army commanders in the region. Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, in particular, Garner said, "beat me up every day, saying, 'When are you going to get the army back?'" In addition, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Arabian amba.s.sador to the United States, had strongly suggested to the U.S. government that it find a way to keep together some remnant of the Iraqi military, recalled Maj. Gen. Renuart, the operations director for Central Command.

As late as May 15, a CPA Web site stated that thirty thousand former members of the Iraqi army had registered for emergency payments, of which nine thousand were sergeants and enlisted men. The Web site said that the CPA goal was to bring them back to active duty.

But on May 23, Bremer issued CPA Order Number 2, Dissolution of Iraqi Ent.i.ties, formally doing away with several groups: the Iraqi armed forces, which accounted for 385,000 people; the staff of the Ministry of the Interior, which amounted to a surprisingly high 285,000 people, because it included police and domestic security forces; and the presidential security units, a force of some 50,000. "Abruptly terminating the livelihoods of these men created a vast pool of humiliated, antagonized, and politicized men," noted Faleh Jabar, an expert on the Baathist Party who was a senior fellow at the U.S Inst.i.tute of Peace. Many of these men were armed.

In addition, Bremer's order clarified his de-Baathification standard, saying that "any person holding the rank under the former regime of Col. or above, or its equivalent, will be deemed a Senior Party Member"-and so would not be eligible for any pension payments. This cut off tens of thousands of influential Iraqis, some of them wrongly, because it mistakenly a.s.sumed that one couldn't be a senior officer without being a party member. Only later did the CPA learn that even some top Iraqi generals were not in the party, a former CPA official recalled.

Central Command was taken aback by the announcement. "We were surprised at the dissolution of the army," said Maj. Gen. Renuart, adding mildly, "so that gave us a challenge." It is a verbal tic of the U.S. military that officers tend to say challenge when they mean problem. Agoglia, working as the military liaison to Bremer, told his boss, "You guys just blindsided Centcom." That was the day, he recalled, "that we s.n.a.t.c.hed defeat from the jaws of victory and created an insurgency."

Likewise, another planner, Col. Kevin Benson, said that Bremer's move undercut the entire postwar plan: "We expected to be able to recall the Iraqi army. Once CPA took the decision to disband the Iraqi army and start again, our a.s.sumptions for the plan became invalid."

Rumsfeld was surprised by Bremer's move, said a general who spoke frequently with the defense secretary at this time. The Joint Staff was informed simply by a written note, said Col. Hughes. There was also some concern inside Feith's office. Abram Shulsky, an intelligence expert and former cla.s.smate of Wolfowitz at Cornell University and the University of Chicago, weighed in, writing a note to the Pentagon's general counsel raising concerns about the plan. "I'm not certain I like this," he wrote. "It seems to me we could accomplish the same effect if we said that the regular army... weren't dissolved, but would be thoroughly vetted and reformed."

Together, Bremer's two orders threw out of work more than half a million people and alienated many more dependent on those lost incomes. Just as important, in a country riven by sectarian and ethnic fault lines-Sunni versus s.h.i.+te versus Kurd-and possessing few unifying national inst.i.tutions, Bremer had done away with two of the most important ones. Moreover, the moves undercut the fragile remnants of the police structure. "The CPA decision to cleanse the political system of Hussein sympathizers-notably, the 'de-Baathification' effort-effectively decapitated the IPS," or Iraqi police services, a joint study by the inspectors general of the Pentagon and State Department would find two years later.

Zinni believed Chalabi had maneuvered Bremer and his subordinates into the moves. "I think the de-Baathification and the dissolution of the army was at Chalabi's insistence," he said. "Because Chalabi wanted to replace the Baathists at every level with his people. Iraqis told me this, Iraqis from inside during the war said that Chalabi was pus.h.i.+ng Bremer to get rid of all of the Baathists because he wanted to put his people in those positions, he could control them. And I think, obviously, he saw the army as a threat to him. If the army stayed intact, he wouldn't have control of the security forces."

The move also resulted from Bremer's lack of experience in the region, Zinni speculated. "Bremer comes in, he doesn't know the planning. We had spent a decade psyopsing the Iraqi army, telling them we would take care of those who didn't fight. And he disbands it."

The move also worried some soldiers on the ground. When Maj. Jeffrey Madison, a finance officer working for the 1st Armored Division, heard about it, he wrote that night to his wife, "This is going to be a problem. This is going to come back and haunt us."

Col. King saw and heard the reaction close-up on the hot streets of Baghdad. "When Bremer did that, the insurgency went crazy. May was the turning point" for the U.S. occupation, he said later. "When they disbanded the military, and announced we were occupiers-that was it. Every moderate, every person that had leaned toward us, was furious. One Iraqi who had saved my life in an ambush said to me, 'I can't be your friend anymore.'"

At the end of May and in early June, dismissed ministry workers and former Iraqi army soldiers held a series of demonstrations. Some vowed they would violently oppose the U.S. decisions. "All of us will become suicide bombers," former officer Khairi Ja.s.sim told Reuters. The wire service article was distributed at the CPA with that quotation highlighted.

"The only thing left for me is to blow myself up in the face of tyrants," another officer told Al Jazeera.

Bremer insisted he wouldn't be moved. "We are not going to be blackmailed into producing programs because of threats of terrorism," he said at a press conference in early June.

The protests continued. On June 18 an estimated two thousand Iraqi soldiers gathered outside the Green Zone to denounce the dissolution decision. Some carried signs that said, Please Keep Your Promises Please Keep Your Promises. Others threw rocks. "We will take up arms," Tahseen Ali Hussein vowed in a speech to the demonstrators, according to an account by Agence France Presse. "We are all very well-trained soldiers and we are armed. We will start ambushes, bombings and even suicide bombings. We will not let the Americans rule us in such a humiliating way." U.S. soldiers fired into the crowd, killing two.

In the weeks after that, U.S. commanders grew increasingly concerned by the unrest the order caused. At about this time, Gen. Sanchez was formally promoted from commander of the 1st Armored Division to commander of V Corps, the headquarters for all U.S. military operations in Iraq. At the reception after the change-of-command ceremony, Maj. Gen. Petraeus confronted Walt Slocombe. The failure to pay ex-officers was getting U.S. troops hurt, he warned Slocombe. And the longer the demobilized Iraqi soldiers were left hanging, the more dangerous they would become. "They are really tinder out there just waiting for a spark," Petraeus told him, who then promised to press the issue. A few days later Rumsfeld approved the payment, and the officers' protests ended.

In early July, after those demonstrations stopped, the J-2-the top U.S. military intelligence staff in the country-discontinued its reporting on the former Iraqi army officers, citing the end of the protests, according to an officer who received an order related to that decision.

Perhaps just as significant as those two controversial moves of Bremer's was his third major decision: There wouldn't be an Iraqi government anytime soon, despite Garner's plan to set one up. "It simply was not possible," he later said.

He also soon began pursuing a program aimed at moving Iraq toward a free-market economy, beginning by shutting down unprofitable state-run industries. This had the political effect of further alienating the middle cla.s.s, which already had been hit by de-Baathification, and which was full of managers from those inefficient industries.

The combination of all these moves-a prolonged foreign occupation that was built on de-Baathification, dissolution of the military, and economic upheaval- radically undercut social stability and built opposition to the American presence. "What we have done over the last six months in al Anbar has been a recipe for instability," Keith Mines would write in a November memo. "Through aggressive de-Baathification, the demobilization of the army, and the closing of factories the coalition has left tens of thousands of individuals outside the economic and political life of the country."

Taken together, Bremer's approach had for many Iraqis a punitive feel, a result that was a key misstep, Wolfowitz's old mentor Fred Ikle would later observe. "Democracies that have achieved a military victory ought to refrain from seeking revenge," Ikle wrote.

Taking revenge is a Neanderthal strategy. Instead of giving priority to a policy that can transform the defeated enemy into an ally, the revenger helps the hawks on the enemy's side to recruit angry fighters who will undermine the peace settlement. During the critical weeks following the collapse of Saddam Hussein's rule in Baghdad, the emphasis on punishment and revenge clearly harmed America's long-termobjectives--- Obsessed with a desire to punish and revenge, the U.S. managers ofIraq's occupation delayed this [taking a conciliatory] approach for more than a year, at which time the United States was confronted by an organized, hostile insurgency.

The occupation takes hold It didn't take long for Iraqi resentment to become palpable. Maj. Christopher Varhola, a reservist trained as an anthropologist, recalled being at a meeting in the Green Zone in late May 2003 between Amba.s.sador Hume Horan, a senior CPA official, and a group of about 270 tribal leaders. The general mood was one of impatience with the American effort and a suspicion that it was intentionally slow, Varhola recalled. Sheikh Munthr Abood of Amara began by thanking Horan for the removal of Saddam Hussein. But, he continued, he needed to know if the United States believed itself to be an occupier or a liberator. Horan, an honest man, replied that he believed the U.S. was somewhere "in between" those two approaches.

If America was a liberator, then Americans were welcome as guests, the sheikh responded, according to notes of the meeting. "He stated however that if we were occupiers, then he and his descendants would 'die resisting us.' This met with energetic applause from the audience." Then about one quarter of those present- about sixty-five of the Iraqis at the meeting-stood and walked out.

Late in the spring of 2003 an Army officer filling an intelligence position in Baghdad began using some of the Iraqi exiles a.s.signed to him to conduct a quiet survey of what was being said in mosques on Fridays. He was worried that there was little unbiased, systematic reporting of Iraqi public sentiment, which he thought needed tracking. In addition, he thought it was important to get a handle on the structure of the clergy and of the alliances between them. Wanting to share his results, he went over one day and mentioned his reporting system to the communications people at CPA. They weren't interested, and told him, "That's tactical, take it to the Army." So he sought out an Army colonel, who read the reports eagerly and focused on anti-American comments made in one sermon. The colonel told the officer that the offending cleric must be arrested. The officer protested-all the religious leaders were anti-American, at least in their rhetoric. "You can't survive as a cleric if you don't denounce the Americans," the officer explained. The key, he thought, was to distinguish between those clerics who settled for using only words and those who advocated violence. Worried that additional reporting could provoke more arrest orders, as well as endanger the Iraqis gathering the information, the intelligence officer shut down his collection network.

Garner heads home In early June Garner made his exit, driving across southern Iraq to Kuwait and then flying home on a one-way ticket. The journey could hardly have been more of a comedown. In Baghdad he had been treated by Iraqis as the virtual ruler of the country. Now, as an anonymous air traveler leaving the Mideast for the U.S. on a one-way ticket, which made him an instant subject of suspicion in the post-9/11 world, he was subjected to searches at every stop along the way, from Kuwait to Dubai to Paris to Was.h.i.+ngton's Dulles airport.

Before heading home to Florida, Garner went to the White House and the Pentagon. "I told the president, you made a good choice on Jerry Bremer-he's a good, hardworking guy," said the old, white-haired general, ever the loyal team player.

Bush responded, "h.e.l.l, I didn't choose him, Rumsfeld chose him, just like he chose you."

Garner then crossed the Potomac to visit the defense secretary. "I sat down with Rumsfeld and said what I thought had gone wrong," he later said. He listed three errors. "The first was, de-Baathification went too deep. The second was: not bringing along the Iraqi army fast enough." Third was Bremer's capricious dismissal of a group of Iraqi political leaders that Garner had a.s.sembled.

Rumsfeld wasn't interested in his critique. The defense secretary said, Garner recalled, "Well, we are where we are, there's no need to discuss it." It was cla.s.sic Rumsfeld, brisk but seemingly unable to deal with mistakes made on his watch.

A Pentagon official who met frequently with Rumsfeld and Feith at this time recalled it almost as a time of stagnation. For weeks during May and June 2003, the same outstanding issues on the agenda for their morning meeting never seemed to change, this official said.

"Feith ought to be drawn, quartered, and hung," said a Bush administration official who worked with him frequently. "He's a sonofab.i.t.c.h who agitated for war in Iraq, but once the decision is made to do it, he disengages. It was clear there were problems across the board-with electricity, with de-Baathification, with translators, with training the Iraqi police-and he just had nothing to do with it. I'm furious about it, still."

Later, as the extent of the chaos in Iraq would become evident, Bush administration officials would begin blaming each other. Feith, for his part, pointed at Franks and Bremer. He told the New Yorker New Yorker in the spring of 2005 that he had sent a memo to Franks at Central Command before the war, warning him about "major law-and-order problems after the war." As for postwar planning, he said, "what people don't understand is that we had all kinds of plans. But when Bremer went over there, he was given autonomy over all kinds of plans that he didn't implement." in the spring of 2005 that he had sent a memo to Franks at Central Command before the war, warning him about "major law-and-order problems after the war." As for postwar planning, he said, "what people don't understand is that we had all kinds of plans. But when Bremer went over there, he was given autonomy over all kinds of plans that he didn't implement."

Back in Baghdad, Chalabi commented, "Jay Garner was a nice man." It wasn't clear that he meant that as praise.

Rumsfeld vs. reality The root cause of the occupation's paralysis may have been the cloud of cognitive dissonance that seems to have fogged in Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials at this time. They were not finding what they had expected: namely, strong evidence of intensive efforts to develop and stockpile chemical and biological weapons, and even some work to develop nuclear bombs. Meanwhile, they were finding what they had not expected: violent and widespread opposition to the U.S. military presence. There were no big battles, just a string of bombings and snipings that were killing U.S. troops in ones and twos, and also intimidating the Iraqi population.

But U.S. officials continued to speak about Iraq with unwarranted certainty, both in terms of WMD and the situation on the ground there. "There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that we will find the weapons of ma.s.s destruction," Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said as Baghdad fell.

For weeks in the late spring and early summer, Rumsfeld and other officials declined to say that they were facing a continuing war in Iraq. His exchanges with reporters during this period underscored what one defense expert termed the "inst.i.tutional resistance to thinking seriously" about the situation. Rumsfeld's refusal to say he was facing war sent a signal downward across the military establishment, that most hierarchical of inst.i.tutions, built to act on the words and views of those at the top.

More than at any other time in the painful history of the U.S. intervention in Iraq, even more than during the formulation of the war plan, that late spring was the point at which Rumsfeld might have made a decisive difference. Some in the military saw Rumsfeld as a strong leader, while others disparaged him as a bully. In either case, it was at this point that his strong personality could have been useful in forcing the U.S. military to understand that it was caught in a counter insurgency campaign and would need to make wrenching adjustments to win, just as other conventional militaries had in similar situations.

Instead, Rumsfeld's self-confident stubbornness made him a big part of the problem. The defense secretary's vulnerability wasn't that he made errors, it was that he seemed unable to recognize them and make adjustments. Andrew Rathmell, a British defense expert who served as a strategic planner at the CPA, later wrote: The fact that pre-war planning a.s.sumptions proved to be badly flawed is not a sign of a systemic problem in itself-mistakes happen and the weakness of the Iraqi state surprised many observers. The systemic problem was that these a.s.sumptions could not be effectively challenged in the coalition political-military planning process. This unwillingness to challenge a.s.sumptions and question established plans persisted during the course of the occupation, giving rise to the ironic refrain among disgruntled coalition planners that "optimism is not a plan." This failure was compounded by a persistent tendency in both the military and civilian chains to avoid reporting bad news and not to plan for worst case, or other case, contingencies.

As Baghdad was looted, the defense secretary seemed to freeze. Rumsfeld was having difficulty recognizing the reality of what was happening in Iraq, and instead was arguing powerfully for his mistaken point of view. "Donald Rumsfeld is a remarkably complex study, with huge reservoirs of talent and intelligence, marred by towering hubris," retired Army Col. Lloyd Matthews, a former editor of Parameters, Parameters, the Army's premier journal, commented that summer. "He's up, he's down, and he'll continue in this sine wave pattern throughout his public career, and very likely be down at the end, because he fails to realize that despite his gifts, he is in a business where defeats are inevitable, where all victories are fleeting, and where one's best defense is the homely quality of grace and humility which he so sorely lacks." the Army's premier journal, commented that summer. "He's up, he's down, and he'll continue in this sine wave pattern throughout his public career, and very likely be down at the end, because he fails to realize that despite his gifts, he is in a business where defeats are inevitable, where all victories are fleeting, and where one's best defense is the homely quality of grace and humility which he so sorely lacks."

On June 19, Rumsfeld appeared at the Pentagon briefing room, Garner standing by his side. He wouldn't call the situation in Iraq a war: "There's no question but that in those regions where pockets of dead-enders are trying to reconst.i.tute, General Franks and his team are rooting them out." He also engaged in a verbal sleight of hand about the forty-two U.S. soldiers who had died in Iraq in the previous six weeks, since Bush's declaration that the war was over. "Look, you've got to remember that if Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., were the size of Baghdad, we would be having something like 215 murders a month," he said. "There's going to be violence in a big city. It's five and a half million people." In fact, there probably were many more murders than that in the chaos of Baghdad. It wasn't unusual at that time to see cars swerving around a dead body lying in morning traffic. What Rumsfeld was looking at were the statistics on the deaths of U.S. troops-that is, the people trying to bring security to the area. So the equivalent would not be the murder rate in the general population but among law enforcement personnel. If 215 police officers were being killed monthly in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., it would be regarded as a major crisis-as indeed was the case in Baghdad at the time, despite Rumsfeld's anodyne insistence that "the coalition is making good progress."

On the same day, Wolfowitz, testifying on Capitol Hill, portrayed the nascent insurgency as "remnants of the old regime." He told the House Armed Services Committee, "I think these people are the last remnants of a dying cause."

At the time, Wolfowitz also was arguing that the situation in Iraq didn't qualify to be considered a war. "I think it is worth emphasizing that these guys lack the two cla.s.sical ingredients in a so-called guerrilla war, if that's what you want to say they are conducting," he said. "They lack the sympathy of the population, and they lack any serious source of external support." In retrospect, it appears that Wolfowitz was wrong on both counts: Iraqi sympathy for anti-American forces was growing, and external support was coalescing, because many top Iraqi Baathists had taken refuge in Syria, from where they were able to send in money and fighters, and also to where they could begin receiving aid from supporters in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and elsewhere in the Arab world.

To be fair, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were reflecting what they were hearing from some subordinate commanders. On June 18, Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, which had taken over in Tikrit, emphatically rejected the idea that he was facing an insurrectionary movement. "This is not guerrilla warfare," he told reporters. "It is not close to guerrilla warfare because it's not coordinated, it's not organized, and it's not led. The soldiers that are conducting these operations don't even have the willpower. We find that a majority of the time they'll fire a shot, and they'll drop the weapon, and they'll give up right away. They do not have the will. And, in most cases, I'm not sure they really believe in what they're doing."

Odierno launched a series of operations-Peninsula Strike, Desert Scorpion, Sidewinder, and Ivy Serpent-that were portrayed as efforts to mop up bits and pieces of the Iraqi military and the Baathist Party leaders.h.i.+p. Looking back on that time over a year later, he said, "I didn't believe it was an insurgency until about July. What we really thought was, remnant." After the first and second operations, "I thought that would be the end of it." But while Odierno's mistaken a.s.sessment may explain why Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz spoke as they did, it doesn't excuse them. One of the most important responsibilities of senior leaders is to a.s.sess a given situation and set the strategic response.

By month's end, the media was baiting Bush administration officials, asking them at every opportunity whether they were willing to admit they were in a war in Iraq. Isn't it accurate to call it a guerrilla war? a reporter asked Rumsfeld as the defense secretary emerged from a closed meeting with senators on Capitol Hill. "I don't know that I would use the word," Rumsfeld said. Rather, he said there was "no question" that criminals and "leftover remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime" were being unhelpful.

Three days later, Rumsfeld was pressed on the issue once again by reporters at a Pentagon briefing. "Can you remind us again why this isn't a quagmire?" asked CNN's Jamie Mclntyre, a veteran of over a decade on the Pentagon beat. "And can you tell us why you're so reluctant to say that what's going on in Iraq now is a guerrilla war?"

"I guess the reason I don't use the phrase 'guerrilla war' is because there isn't one, and it would be a misunderstanding and a miscommunication to you and to the people of the country and the world," Rumsfeld responded.

Mclntyre's easygoing persona often obscures the toughness of his reporting. He persisted, reading aloud to Rumsfeld the official Defense Department definition of guerrilla war: "military and paramilitary operations conducted in enemy-held or hostile territory by irregular ground indigenous forces."

"This seems to fit a lot of what's going on in Iraq," Mclntyre noted.Rumsfeld brushed aside his a.s.sertion. "It really doesn't," he said.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who always seemed to make his top priority staying in step with Rumsfeld, also insisted that the situation was better than it looked-or than the media was reporting. "There's been a lot of work done," Gen. Myers said in early July. "A lot of the country is relatively stable." Over the next year, Myers would make similar comments, repeatedly insisting that the situation was better than it looked, even as Iraq descended into guerrilla war and hundreds of U.S. troops died. This pattern of fatuity raises the question of whether Myers provided in private the blunt advice that Rumsfeld and other senior officials needed to hear.

Behind closed doors, some were telling Rumsfeld and Myers to think again. Gen. Jack Keane, the Army's number-two officer, who had taken over many functions of the top job as s.h.i.+nseki's term waned, including many contacts with Rumsfeld, insisted in a meeting of the Joint Chiefs that it was essential to understand the nature of the war in Iraq. It was, he said, according to an officer who was there, "a low-level insurgency that has the potential to grow." Keane warned that it was time to come to grips with that fact.

President Bush's response to the growing violence in Iraq was even more painfully wrong than Rumsfeld's. The defense secretary was mistaken in understanding the situation, but the president's comments may have actually exacerbated it. On July 2, Bush took the unusual step of taunting Iraqis and others violently opposed to the U.S. presence in Iraq. "There are some who feel that the conditions are such that they can attack us there," he said. "My answer is: Bring 'em on. We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation." The president's words were reported and remembered in Iraq and across the Middle East. A year later, the Islamic Jihad Army would issue a communique that pointedly inquired, "Have you another challenge?"

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez In mid-May the 1st Armored Division moved into Iraq, and at month's end it took over as the leading edge of the occupation in the capital. Its commander was Army Maj. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who soon would be promoted and given command of the U.S. ground effort in Iraq. If there is any tragic figure at the top of the American effort in Iraq, it is Sanchez. He was by all accounts a good man, somewhat gruff, but hardworking, dedicated, and doing what he was trained to do. But there are few people who contend that he was the man for the job, or that he succeeded in Iraq.

Sanchez was an American success story, a dirt-poor Mexican American kid from the Rio Grande Valley who became the first in his family to go to college and then rose to become a senior commander in the U.S. Army. He joined the Army, he said in an interview at the Baghdad airport on the day the 1st Armored Division took responsibility for the capital, because "I saw that as a means of escaping poverty."

He explained: "We lived on welfare, in a single-parent home. When you grow up like that, the military looks pretty darn good." In the Army he had studied systems a.n.a.lysis, had led a battalion under Gen. McCaffrey in the 1991 Gulf War, had been director of operations at Southern Command (the U.S. military headquarters for operations in South America), and commanded the peacekeeping force in Kosovo.

"Rick Sanchez is a great guy given a really, really hard job," said Maj. Gen. Renuart, who worked closely with him. "I think he's a smart thinker, intuitive.... I'm not sure anyone anyone could have been totally successful in that environment." could have been totally successful in that environment."

There was, and is, much to respect about Sanchez, even if one thinks that he failed as a commander in Iraq. "I think there are some really admirable qualities," said Maj. Gen. Petraeus, who reported to him for a year. "A degree of patience, stoicism, indefatigability, capacity to deal with enormous pressure and demands, requests from above and below, impatience from above and below, probably a lack of understanding from above and below. An appreciation of the complexity of the issues with which he was dealing, and yet he essentially maintained his cool through all of this, which is really something quite extraordinary."

Even so, the methodical Sanchez often appeared overwhelmed by the situation, with little grasp of the strategic problems he faced. The opinion of many of his peers was that he was a fine battalion commander who never should have commanded a division, let alone a corps or a nationwide occupation mission. "He was in over his head," said Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek, who served in Iraq in 2003. "He was a fulfillment of the Peter Principle," which holds that people working in hierarchies such as the U.S. Army are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence, at which point they tend to fail spectacularly.

"It was my view after seeing him that Rick Sanchez was exactly in the wrong place," said Richard Armitage, the former number-two official at the State Department, who is blunter when speaking on the record than most Was.h.i.+ngton officials are when speaking on a background, not for quotation basis. "He was much too secretive. He and Bremer, if they didn't hate each other, they could barely tolerate each other, let's put it that way. And when you look in retrospect, a lot has improved since Rick went out.... I came away from my first meeting with him saying that this guy didn't get it."

Sanchez's most visible failing was his relentless focus on minutiae. He was aware that subordinates criticized him for that. "I am very comfortable with a macro look at things-unless I see we have issues," he said one day in his headquarters at the Baghdad airport. When he saw a troubled area, he said, he was determined to dive into it. "When I see we are not paying attention to detail, I get into that," he said. "It is the deep, penetrating questions that embarra.s.s people. I can be pretty rough and penetrating, and sometimes that can get embarra.s.sing if you don't know what you're talking about."

But what Sanchez saw as incisive leaders.h.i.+p, some around him saw as trivially minded distraction. "All trees, no forest," said one State Department official. "A great logistician, but what's he doing commanding American forces in that part of the world? Not a strategic or political thought."

On top of that, Sanchez was placed in the middle of an extraordinarily difficult and tangled command situation. In other U.S. occupations, the commander had been a four-star general, such as Douglas MacArthur in postwar j.a.pan and Lucius Clay at the same time in Germany. Sanchez was a three-star-that is, a lieutenant general-and in fact the most junior one in the U.S. Army. He jumped from commanding a division of fewer than 20,000 troops to leading a combined U.S. and allied force of about 180,000 men and women. And in doing so he was woefully undersupported-the Pentagon calculated that he needed a headquarters staff of 1,400 but during 2003 he was given a fraction of that, at one point hitting a low of just 495.

"The whole staffing of CJTF-7 [the new name for Sanchez's command, the top U.S. military headquarters in Iraq] at the time was completely inadequate," said an Army colonel who worked with it in Iraq and later, while at the Army War College, studied its troubles. "Putting a division commander in charge of a corps [a group of divisions, support units, and staffs], then giving him responsibility for a whole country in the throes of insurgency, multinational forces, an army corps, a MEF [Marine Expeditionary Force, similar to reinforced Army division], et cetera, with the staff for a single corps was too broad a mandate. No commander with Sanchez's experience level and resources should have been saddled with this responsibility."

That understanding was symptomatic of a far larger problem: Sanchez was working for a chain of command that was laboring under a series of false a.s.sumptions about postwar Iraq, and that didn't understand the situation it was facing, and so it was consistently underestimating the difficulties it faced and the resources it would need to devote to the problem. On top of that, he was burdened by a jerry-rigged command structure, in which there was no one American official, civilian or military, on the ground in Iraq in charge of the overall American effort. Rather, both Sanchez and Bremer reported up to Secretary Rumsfeld, who was at the Pentagon, some seven thousand miles away. "Unity of command is a universal principle" in military operations, noted Army Reserve Maj. Michael Eisenstadt, who served as an intelligence officer on the staff of Central Command; it is especially important in putting down an insurgency, he said, because "you need to integrate your political, economic, and military activities."

Even within the military effort, confusion reigned, especially in the ambiguous but crucial area where military operations supported the functions of the civilian occupation authority. Most crucially, the detention of prisoners was supposed to be an Iraqi function-but because there was no Iraqi government, it became the task of CPA. And because the CPA lacked the personnel, resources, or inclination to handle that job, it had the military do it, even though military commanders didn't report to the CPA. This was one reason the situation at the Abu Ghraib prison would get out of hand in the following months: No one was really in charge of overseeing it.

So it was natural that Sanchez would struggle in the following months. Subordinates report that he tried to focus on achieving victory through quantifying progress, rather than by looking at hazier but perhaps better indicators, such as the quality of the Iraqi police or the polls about what concerned the average Iraqi. "I don't think he ever understood the people aspect, that he had to win the will of the Iraqi people," said one subordinate who speaks Arabic and so paid more attention to Iraqi life than most officers.

In personal interactions he also could be difficult. He tended to strike other officers as remote. Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, his fellow lieutenant general in Iraq, later described him in a legal statement that grew out of the Abu Ghraib situation as "pretty introverted."

People who worked directly for him are less forgiving. "He would rip generals apart on the tacsat"-the military's tactical, satellite-based communications network-"with everybody in the country listening," said one officer who served under Sanchez on the V Corps staff. This was a violation of a fundamental rule of good U.S. military commanders: praise in public, chastise in private.

The result, said Capt. Kipling, was that "Sanchez was not a popular commander." She, too, had heard tales from friends in his headquarters, located not far from hers, that "he liked to tear people down in public."

Nor were Iraqis spared his temper. "I didn't like the way he talked to the Iraqi Governing Council," said one of Sanchez's subordinates. "I mean, these guys are on our side-show a little respect!" It struck this officer that Sanchez, unlike some other Americans, always went into their chambers in the Green Zone armed.

"There is no reason he had to. We were surrounded by his bodyguards, their bodyguards, and a contracted company of Gurkhas and a platoon of tanks.... It was like he didn't trust them. It was clear to them."

With groups perceived by U.S. officials as potential rivals for control, Sanchez was even rougher. "He was never conciliatory," this officer recalled. During the summer of 2003, he remembered, U.S. forces raided an office of SCIRI-the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the main s.h.i.+te group that had opposed Saddam Hussein, but that also had close ties to the Iranian government. The soldiers took cash, weapons, and printing presses. SCIRI officials protested, saying that the office was a newspaper and that both the presses and weaponry were legal. The SCIRI officials also stated that they had provided the location of the office to the U.S. Army. Upon investigation, that claim was verified-it turned out that they had told a Special Forces captain who hadn't pa.s.sed on the information. "They had been within their rights to have printing materials and some AK-47s, but Sanchez wouldn't apologize," the officer recalled. SCIRI never got back its machines, weapons, or money.

In midsummer the insurgency began to erupt, with a series of bombings in Baghdad and widespread small-arms attacks on U.S. patrols. Sanchez responded by descending into minutiae. "The more he got snowed under, the more he focused on what he could do, instead of what he should do," the same officer remembered.

He tended to pepper his staff and subordinate commanders with questions about logistics and "metrics"-how to measure progress-rather than strategy. "His style was hard edged and prosecutorial," recalled another Army officer who worked with him. That approach didn't serve him well, because it discouraged the delivery of bad news. "He didn't realize he wasn't getting good, strong advice, because people would just roll over."

The occupation at the tipping point During this time in mid-2003 it was possible, moving around Baghdad, to sense the occupation teetering on the edge. A walk with an Army patrol through a middle-cla.s.s neighborhood in western Baghdad brought home the deepening misunderstanding that characterized this period. At about 10:20 a.m a.m., it was 98 degrees when the patrol moved out through the concertina wire that protected their outpost and past two Bradley fighting vehicles parked out front. The patrol was configured so that one fire team of four soldiers was in front, and another in the back. In the middle, leading the patrol, was Staff Sgt. Nathaniel Haumschild, of Stillwater, Minnesota, accompanied by a medic. Haumschild's evaluation was that "maybe ten percent are hostile. About fifty percent friendly. About forty percent are indifferent."

"Everybody likes us," Spec. Stephen Harris, a twenty-one-year-old from Lafayette, Louisiana, said, as the patrol moved through streets drenched in sun. He thought the people wanted the U.S. troops to stay. "Oh, yeah," he said, taking a slug from his canteen. His a.s.sessment of the neighborhood: "I'd say ninety-five percent friendly."

Residents gave different estimates-at best, 50-50, and at worst, a significant majority holding hostile views. Sentiments often broke down along the religious cleavages that mark the country. s.h.i.+te residents hailed the Americans for ending Hussein's rule, which was particularly brutal toward their sect. "An American dog is better than Saddam and his gangs," said Alaa Rudeini, as he chatted with a friend on the sidewalk. Awatif Faraj Salih, whose eight-year-old daughter Rasul was among the children at the nearby Nablus Elementary School, feared what would happen if they departed. "If the Americans left," she said, a white scarf draped over her head, "ma.s.sacres would happen in Iraq-between the tribes, between the parties, and between the Sunnis and s.h.i.+tes, of course."

To Mohammed Abdullah, standing on the sidewalk as the ten-man patrol pa.s.sed his gated house, their presence was "despicable." In a white dishdasha, dishdasha, a long Arab robe, the thirty-four-year-old winced as the soldiers moved along his street, automatic weapons slung across their chests. "We're against the occupation, we refuse the occupation-not one hundred percent, but one thousand percent," he said. "They're walking over my heart. I feel like they're crus.h.i.+ng my heart." a long Arab robe, the thirty-four-year-old winced as the soldiers moved along his street, automatic weapons slung across their chests. "We're against the occupation, we refuse the occupation-not one hundred percent, but one thousand percent," he said. "They're walking over my heart. I feel like they're crus.h.i.+ng my heart."

To the Americans, this was Sector 37 North, frequently marked as hostile on U.S. military maps of Baghdad, in part because it was a stronghold of Baath Party loyalists. The airport highway that ran along the southern side of the neighborhood was fast becoming one of the most dangerous roads in the world, with daily mine and RPG attacks on U.S. convoys. But soldiers on the patrol said they did not feel particularly threatened. "Basically, people are pretty friendly," said Lt. Paul Clark, a Bravo Company officer from Baltimore.

To residents this was Yarmuk, a western Baghdad neighborhood of proud professionals living in two-story, adobe-style houses that would fit nicely into a wealthier corner of Albuquerque or Santa Fe, New Mexico, the walls enlivened by palm trees and red bougainvillea.

At 11:03 and 100 degrees, Pfc. Kasey Keeling, of Denton, Texas, was walking second in the patrol, carrying the big M-249 squad automatic weapon, a machine gun. Behind his sungla.s.ses he looked back and forth, up and down. "I scan the windows, rooftops, heavy brush, looking for anything out of the ordinary," he said. The most alarming indicator of danger? An absence of children. "There are always kids around," he said. "No kids, you start to wonder."

There were no children on Yarmuk's Fourth Street, a Sunni area where sentiments were distinctly uneasy. Mohammed Abdullah, standing with his neighbors, insisted he would fight the Americans. "They said they came to liberate us. Liberate us from what? They came and said they would free us. Free us from what?" he asked. "We have traditions, morals, and customs. We are Arabs. We're different from the West." As he watched Keeling and the others pa.s.s, he called Baghdad a fallen city, a hint of humiliation in his words. It was akin, he said, to the invasion in 1258 of Hulagu, the grandson of Genghis Khan, whose destruction of Baghdad ended its centuries of glory. The Americans, he said, let the National Library burn and permitted looters to ransack the National Museum of Antiquities. "Baghdad is the mother of Arab culture," he said, "and they want to wipe out our culture, absolutely."

At 11:30, it was 103 degrees as the patrol arrived at the Rami Inst.i.tute for Autistic and Slow Learners, a house on a side street with a big lime tree shading its walled front yard. They left their weapons outside, under a guard. In the small school, they knelt and talked gently with the children, encouraging them to respond. Sgt. Michael Callan, of Dumfries, Virginia, put his helmet on one child's head. He visited all five cla.s.srooms. The soldiers lingered for more than half an hour. When they emerged they looked pleased with themselves. They liked helping the school. They admired its teachers, and their hearts went out to the children.

But outside, neighbors took a very different view of the troops' visit to the women who run the school. Saif Din and his friend, Mohammed Ahmed, said they suspected the American soldiers were having s.e.x with the female teachers inside. "Only G.o.d knows," Ahmed said. "I haven't seen it with my own eyes. But I've heard about things."

"We don't like it," said Din, wagging his finger. "We don't like it."

At 12:40 the patrol pa.s.sed the two green Bradleys and stepped through the Army base's concertina wire. A soldier greeted them with cold cans of strawberry and cola soda. They stripped off their helmets, flak jackets, and the uniform jackets called blouses and set down their weapons. "They love us," concluded Spec. Seneca Ratledge, the medic, a soldier of Cherokee heritage from Riceville, Tennessee.

A tangled chain of command One day in the summer of 2003, Col. Teddy Spain, the MP commander in Baghdad, turned to the general to whom he reported, the 1st Armored Division's Martin Dempsey, and said, "Sir, who the h.e.l.l is in charge?" Dempsey was too disciplined to say it-instead he just urged Spain to hang in there, Spain recalled later-but the real answer was: no one. Or at least, not anyone who understood the situation on the ground.

Confusion about the U.S. chain of command in Iraq began on the ground in Iraq and extended all the way back to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. The first question was the ambiguous nature of the CPA itself. Was it a federal agency, part of the U.S. government, most likely the Defense Department? On the one hand, Bremer reported to Rumsfeld, and was himself paid by the U.S. Army, according to a subsequent study by the Congressional Research Service. Yet the CPA's Web sites ended in .com, not the .gov used by the U.S. government. And when a Turkish mobile telephone company protested the award of a CPA contract, the report noted, the U.S. Army Legal Services Agency flatly stated, "The CPA is not a federal agency."

The congressional report concluded, "No explicit, unambiguous and authoritative statement has been provided that declares how CPA was established, under what authority, and by whom, and that clarifies the seeming inconsistencies among alternative explanations for how CPA was created."

On top of that, the relations.h.i.+p between the civilian and military wings of the occupation-the CPA and Sanchez's headquarters-was murky. Officially, Bremer and Sanchez had the same ultimate boss: Sanchez reported to Abizaid, who reported to Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, while Bremer reported directly to Rumsfeld. Bremer refused to talk to Feith and often wouldn't respond to Wolfowitz. "He ignored my suggestions," Wolfowitz said later. "He ignored Rumsfeld's instructions." But Rumsfeld was seven thousand miles away and frequently busy with overseeing other aspects of the U.S. military establishment. "The postcom-bat phase was pretty fuzzy on who was in control, what the command relations.h.i.+ps would be," said a general who was involved in some of that planning at the Pentagon. "It was not well thought out." At any rate, Bremer left subordinates with the impression that he really believed he reported to the president.

Again, the effect was that the U.S. occupation in its very nature violated the fundamental military principle of unity of command-that is, having one person in charge of the effort, so that all hands have a common goal and work together toward it. The need for such unity is especially p.r.o.nounced in a counterinsurgency campaign, which is more difficult to oversee than conventional operations, and in which military actions must always be judged by their political effects. "Chain of command-of all the problems in Iraq, this was the biggest problem," said one former senior CPA official. "You've got to hold one guy responsible. Otherwise, a guy looks at a problem and he can say, 'That's not mine.'"

Another general, a specialist returning from a visit to Iraq, was similarly puzzled. "If you held a gun to my head and told me, 'Tell me what the chain of command is for your people in Baghdad!'-well, I'd just be babbling," he said.

Even at the time, people in the CPA were aware that the system setup wasn't working. On October 1, 2003, Keith Mines, the CPA representative in al Anbar province, wrote in his weekly memo to Bremer, "It would be beneficial to all if there were an integrated national plan that took account of the divergent efforts by CJTF-7 and CPA and attempted to blend a functional [Iraqi security] force from them." Instead, he continued, what he saw was a "refusal by these two parties to join in a common effort."

Sometimes difficult command situations can be resolved through what Gen. Zinni during 1991's Operation Provide Comfort called handcon-that is, cooperation ensured through goodwill and symbolized by a handshake. But no such generosity of spirit seemed to exist between Sanchez and Bremer. "When I attended Sanchez's morning meetings, it was clear to me that they didn't connect," said Army Col. Lloyd Sammons, a Special Forces reservist who served in the CPA in 2003-4. "I felt there was more than just a division of their professional positions. They didn't communicate."

Every month Bremer and his top officials met in the Green Zone with the senior military commanders-Gen. Sanchez, the division commanders, and the commanders of the separate brigades-at what the Army called the monthly commanders' meeting. At the meeting on November 4,2003, three CPA officials and a general who was there recalled, senior Army officers lashed out at the CPA's free market and de-Baathification policies for throwing people out of work and alienating a large part of the population. They also were openly unhappy with the lack of consultation between the CPA and commanders in the field. "It was quite a spat," recalled one of the CPA officials.

Maj. Gen. Petraeus said he was "astonished" that the CPA's plans had been developed without discussion with affected U.S. commanders, according to the verbatim notes taken at the meeting by a CPA official. "We have huge staffs that can partic.i.p.ate," the 101st Division commander added. "It is a mistake to have planning isolated in Baghdad."

Maj. Gen. Odierno supported this protest. "Yes, the campaign plan has to be worked out at all levels," he said. "Frankly my sense is you want to cut us out. Every day we're getting less resources. We've lost momentum in the last forty-five to sixty days."