The Assassins' Gate (38 page)

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FROM THE FIRST DAYS
of the invasion all the way through the occupation, a controversy persisted in Washington about whether there were enough troops in Iraq. Beginning in May 2003, Powell told Bush several times that there were not, and each time the president heard him out and then followed the advice of his secretary of defense instead. Whenever the question was put to Rumsfeld, he simply repeated his generals' assurances that no additional American divisions were needed. General John Abizaid, Franks's successor at Centcom, and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, McKiernan's successor as commander of ground forces in Iraq, said again and again that they had enough troops to do all the missions they had been assigned. This had the sound of a reply with a catch—for what were the missions? The debate in Washington was fixed, the answer predetermined by the phrasing of the question. One of Paul Bremer's aides said that the administrator never looked worse than the day he was told by Rumsfeld in a video teleconference that he couldn't have any more troops. After leaving Iraq, Bremer criticized the troop levels, but while he was in Baghdad he never publicly broke with the administration's united front that preserved the fiction. Some champions of the war, such as Senator John McCain, Robert Kagan, and William Kristol, began to get nervous as summer turned to fall and the forces that the administration assumed would be provided by foreign countries never materialized. Other neoconservatives remained sanguine. Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute spent a few days in Iraq in September and published an op-ed in
The New York Times
expressing her satisfaction with troop levels. Richard Perle asked me rhetorically, “What would be accomplished by having patrols up and down the highway? The point of our presence there, it seems to me, is not to make sure that all the highways are open all the time. That isn't how this is going to be won, in my view. This is going to be won when we have a flow of intelligence that identifies the guys we're fighting.”

Unless you had an ideological stake in it, this controversy didn't survive your first contact with Iraqi reality. There weren't enough troops to patrol the road between Baghdad International Airport and the city center so that visitors didn't have to take their life into their hands upon arrival. There weren't enough troops in the city streets to act even as a deterrent to someone who wanted to steal a car or shoot up a convoy or assassinate an official. There weren't enough troops to guard a fraction of the million tons of munitions left lying around in dumps all over Iraq that were being steadily looted by insurgents. There weren't enough troops to provide a token presence along Iraq's borders with Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, which might dissuade some jihadis and intelligence agents from infiltrating across. There weren't enough troops to prevent militias from gaining control of entire provinces. There weren't enough troops on the major highways to keep bandits and insurgents from terrorizing the truckers carrying essential goods, such as reconstruction materials or even food for the Green Zone. There weren't enough troops to allow CPA officials to do their jobs.

Perhaps the connection between patrolling highways and winning the war was too abstract for those supporters of administration policy who never went to Iraq, and for a few who did. It shouldn't have been that hard. Why would Iraqis join the American effort when their personal safety, or even a minimum of public order in their country, couldn't possibly be upheld by the occupying forces?

The number of American soldiers in Iraq, which hovered around 135,000, sometimes spiking or dropping by ten or twenty thousand in response to events, reflected nothing other than Rumsfeld's fixed idea of military transformation. If more troops had to be found and sent, the direction in which he wanted to take the twenty-first-century military would be called into serious question. It's hard to imagine that Rumsfeld suffered even private doubts about this: He had a vision, and the messy aftermath of the Iraq War wasn't going to turn him aside. General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had the legal authority under the Goldwater-Nichols Act to ask for a meeting with the president in case the secretary of defense rejected his advice. “Myers knows—he's got to know by now,” a senior official said. “He's got a goddamn Marine as his vice chairman. They should have gone over and said, ‘Mr. President, we don't have enough troops,' and suffered the consequences. The consequences, in my view, would have been the president and the vice president siding with the secretary of defense and the chairman leaving. But at least he would leave with the idea that ‘I've exercised my right under Goldwater-Nichols and I feel better.'” Instead, Myers kept his counsel and his job. There was always the example of General Shinseki to dissuade him and other senior officers from excessive candor. A few of them found ways to get the point across privately. Officers in Iraq talked off the record about the need for two more divisions. As Senator Joe Biden was boarding a helicopter at the end of one of his visits, a Marine general rushed up and said, “Senator, if anybody tells you we have enough troops over there when you get back, tell them to go to goddamn hell.”

The top civilians in the administration, and the top brass at the Pentagon, and the top officials in Iraq all held on to their positions and failed the men and women they had sent to carry out their policy. They failed in the most basic obligation to give those men and women what they needed. The slow, mismanaged arrival of armored vehicles and bulletproof plates for flak vests was only the most conspicuous demonstration of how the Iraq War, like every war—just or unjust, won or lost—became a conspiracy of the old and powerful against the young and dutiful.

As the war went on, I noted how often Paul Wolfowitz traveled to Iraq. Sometimes he was accompanied on these three- or four-day excursions by a coterie of sympathetic journalists who then filed stories about how well it was all going. But it was impossible not to see that Wolfowitz himself was deeply moved by the commitment of soldiers in mess halls and combat hospitals, how (he said) they buoyed his morale rather than the other way around, how well he listened to them (the battalion commander I met in Kirkuk was disarmed by the deputy secretary's attentiveness when they had a few minutes together), how poignantly he spoke, ashen faced, after the rocket attack on the Rashid Hotel that killed an Army lieutenant colonel on the floor just below his. Then Wolfowitz's visit would end, and he would return to Washington, where he was never able or willing to do the most important thing he could for the soldiers, which was to give them what they needed. Over time, it became hard to think of the dedication of soldiers like John Prior, the resourcefulness and good faith with which they undertook their task, and not feel a particular bitterness.

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IN THE SUMMER OF
2003, morale in Prior's battalion was under serious strain. In their first six months in theater, some soldiers had a total of three days off. Others were stretched so thin that they had begun to report “ghost patrols” back to headquarters—logging in scheduled patrols that didn't actually take place. Few junior officers in the battalion planned on staying in the Army after their current tour. Alcohol use, which was illegal for soldiers stationed in Iraq, had become widespread, and there had been three suicides in other battalions at the base. Relations between young Americans at the end of a four-day patrol rotation and the host country nationals tended to deteriorate, according to one officer, into “guys kicking dogs, yelling at grown men twenty years older than they are, and pushing kids into parked cars to keep them from following and bothering them.” In September, soldiers in a platoon from Charlie Company beat up a group of Iraqis they'd caught moving around the perimeter of their outpost in Zafaraniya; the soldiers were disciplined with loss of rank and, in one case, confinement. Everyone suffered from the stress of heat, long days, lack of sleep, homesickness, the constant threat of attack (about which they were fundamentally fatalistic), and the simple fact that there were nowhere near enough of them to do all the tasks they'd been given.

A soldier in Prior's battalion wrote me a lengthy account of the problems:

The reason why morale sucks is because of the senior leadership, and by this I don't necessarily mean the battalion commander or company commanders, but the brigade and division commanders, and probably the generals at the Pentagon and Central Command too, all of whom seem to be insulated from what is going on at the ground level. Either that or they are unwilling to hear the truth of things, or (and this is the most likely), they do know what is going on, but they want to get promoted so badly that they're willing to screw over soldiers by being unwilling to face the problem of morale, so they continue pushing the soldiers to do more with less because Rummy wants them to do more with less and get us out of here quickly. These people are like serious alcoholics unwilling to admit there even is a problem.

The soldier wasn't a defeatist. He was simply describing what anyone who spent time with American troops in Iraq knew. His letter concluded:

I'm not pessimistic about the country of Iraq because things are getting better and will continue to do so, albeit slowly. There are great things we're doing here, much has already been done, yet much more remains to be accomplished, and what we need now is the money, people, and most importantly, time to do it. We'll win, that's for sure, and this won't be another Vietnam; I truly believe that.

John Prior was also a believer. The Army was going to be his career, and in Iraq, which he called his first “real-world deployment,” he was gaining invaluable experience doing things that were not taught in basic training but that would be increasingly central to the missions of the American military and its next generation of leadership.

I once asked Prior whether his night work, the raids and arrests, threatened to undo the good accomplished by his day work—if, essentially, the mission was impossible. He didn't think so: As the sewage started to flow and the schools got fixed up, Iraqis would view Americans the way the Americans saw themselves, as people trying to help. But Prior was no soft-shelled humanitarian. He called himself a foreign-policy realist. Fixing the sewer system in Zafaraniya, he believed, was an essential part of the war on terror. Terrorists depended on millions of sympathizers who believed that America was evil and Americans only wanted Middle Eastern oil. “But we come here and we show that we're honest, trustworthy, we're caring, we're compassionate,” Prior said. “We're interested in them. We're interested in fixing their lives. Not because we have to, but because we can, because we can be benevolent, because we
are
benevolent. Then you start denying them refuge.” Once, while monitoring one of the local mosques during Friday prayers, Prior heard the imam say that some Americans who weren't Muslims followed the tenets of Islam better than some actual Muslims in the Arab world. The Zafaraniya sewer system was worth dying for, Prior believed, because fixing it reduced the chances of terrorists striking Boston, where his fiancée lived.

I never think about John Prior without remembering one particular incident. On the canvas of the war and occupation it was a tiny speck, but it stayed with me as other, more significant events have not. I was riding in Prior's Humvee when we got stuck in a mass of cars at an exit off a Baghdad highway. In the usual chaos of the roads, drivers were swinging over from the far lanes to jump the exit line, which was backing up traffic well down the highway. After a few minutes, Prior got out of the front passenger seat and, walking briskly among the stalled cars, positioned himself at the head of the off-ramp, where the cheaters were trying to slip into line. He held up his hand and directed them to continue along the highway. Reluctantly, one after another, they began pulling out of the line, and the backup eased. But one man kept inching ahead toward Prior, who finally slammed his hand on the hood of the car, glared at the man through the windshield, and swung his arm around to point down the highway. “Come on, guy, what're you doing?” Prior muttered. The man stared back in fury, and I thought he might keep moving forward until he ran Prior over. Instead, he braked, hung his head, and left the line. It was an amazing display of nerve—Prior was completely exposed, with none of his men beside him, a foreign soldier taking it upon himself to impose order. The drivers he prevented from exiting no doubt resented it, but other drivers waved thanks. I wondered how many soldiers would have done the same thing. Most American convoys hurtled through Baghdad, chewing up asphalt and curbs, with little concern for the rules of the road or Iraqi drivers. At that moment I felt the whole American project in Iraq depended on such actions and reactions, all of them idiosyncratic, unpredictable, hair-trigger.

In late October 2003, I spoke with Prior on the phone from Baghdad. The sewage ponds had been cleaned up, and security in his sector had improved with better intelligence. The council members were being paid sixty dollars a month and ran their own meetings. Abdul-Jabbar Doweich had a job as a security guard. But, for various reasons, the money in the Commanders Fund for reconstruction had been shut off—something to do with a lawsuit by disabled Gulf War veterans, or recalcitrant new cabinet ministers. Current projects were quickly running out of money; some of Charlie Company's contractors were being threatened by loan sharks, and much of the work was coming to a halt. Hearing this, I remembered something Prior had said as we were driving into Saddam Hussein's village. “The most frustrating thing is we can't do more for them. My hands are tied, everybody's are.” And he added, “It's hard to know at what level the hand tying starts.”

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