The Assassins' Gate (47 page)

The military kept claiming that its intelligence was getting better, tips were pouring in faster than intelligence officers could handle them. And yet the number of daily attacks kept rising and growing more sophisticated. In November, the bloodiest month since the invasion, the Pentagon estimated that the insurgency included five thousand fighters. This struck most people who had spent time in Iraq as improbably low. The United States still seemed reluctant to give this new, hidden enemy its due, as if, Hammes said, “This insurgency thing is an aberration, so we can get on with” the high-tech revolution in military affairs. He added, “There seemed to be kind of a feeling of ‘So what if it's a guerrilla war?' It really shocks people when you say that superpowers are zero and five against insurgents.”

Arguably, the only modern success has been the British victory over communist guerrillas in Malaya in the 1950s, which took ten years. More than a year into the Iraq War, Hammes wrote an op-ed for
The New York Times
about Sir Harold Briggs, the retired British general who devised the political-military plan that led to the defeat of the communists in Malaya. After it appeared, Hammes got a call from Douglas Feith's office: Would he write it up as a memo to the undersecretary by the following Monday? “Seems they'd never heard of Briggs,” Hammes said. He duly wrote the memo and sent it to the Pentagon. By then Feith was traveling; time went by, and Hammes never heard back. “Maybe it was the ten-year number that soured them,” he said. “But if they haven't heard of Briggs, we're in trouble.”

Kalev Sepp, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who taught at the Navy's Center on Terrorism and Irregular Warfare, went to Iraq twice in 2004. In the late eighties, as a Special Forces major, he had served as an adviser to a Salvadoran army brigade in what was a qualified, if brutal, success in counterinsurgency, and then he analyzed the Central American wars in his dissertation at Harvard, where he met Drew Erdmann. Sepp, like Hammes, was one of the independent thinkers on the margins of the military who had watched senior leadership fail to understand America's strategic situation in the wars that followed September 11. (In Iraq, as in Vietnam, one continually found more insight among midlevel civilians and military than at the top—because the political pressure at that altitude was low enough for clear thinking to take place, and because their intellectual candor made professional advancement less likely.) Sepp was first recruited to study military intelligence in Iraq by General Abizaid, and he arrived at the palace in Baghdad in January 2004. He soon discovered that the officers working in the CPA felt a barely concealed or nakedly obscene contempt for most of their younger, inexperienced civilian counterparts rotating in and out on ninety-day tours. He also found that Lieutenant General Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq, and his staff had grown defensive to the point of paranoia toward anyone coming from outside. By then, things were going badly enough that any offer of help was seen as an attempt to place blame. There was plenty to go around—almost everyone realized that Sanchez was in way over his head—but relief of command at such a high level would have been an admission of failure, so Sanchez's job was secure (he would only be punished after Iraq, when he failed to get his fourth star).

At the palace, Sepp met an Army Special Forces colonel who sat two desks away from the door to Bremer's inner office. Sepp engaged the colonel in conversation, trying to get a sense of the CPA's strategic thinking, and at one point he used the word “insurgency.” The colonel held up his hand. “There is no insurgency here,” he said. “There's a high level of domestic violence.” At V Corps headquarters out in Saddam's old lakeside hunting lodge by the airport, Sepp found an atmosphere that suggested the routine business of staff work back in Heidelberg rather than any reckoning with a worsening war. The party line in Baghdad reflected the unimaginative approach that Sepp had seen coming from the Rumsfeld Pentagon. It was “kill-capture”: Success was measured in the number of insurgents and of top-level Baathists from the deck of playing cards who were eliminated. No one seemed able to explain why, with all the dead or detained, the number of insurgents kept increasing. The strategy was all wrong, Sepp realized. Instead of an emphasis on threats, it should have been on effects, the desired end-state, which would have put the center of action in the lives of Iraqis. “The most important thing is security—the security of the people,” Sepp said. “The problem was, we seized on the idea that
our
security was the most important thing. This is where there's some sacrifice involved. The people have to be secured first.”

This was the meaning of hearts and minds (a phrase, Sepp reminded me, first used by John Adams about the American Revolution): the establishment of a government to which Iraqis would be willing to risk giving their allegiance. The insurgents understood better than the Americans that the battle was for the loyalty of the population. They began slaughtering police recruits in part to show Iraqis that the new institutions couldn't protect them. But the Americans, having dissolved the old Iraqi security forces, didn't adapt quickly, didn't seriously train and equip the new police, didn't ensure the safety of Iraqis who came forward with intelligence. The early training efforts were focused on the formation of a conventional Iraqi army—the lowest priority, with a hundred and sixty thousand foreign troops already in Iraq. The trainers weren't the experts from Special Forces, who were originally created to train foreign armies, but who were being used in Iraq to kick down doors. The Pentagon didn't want the job of training Iraqi soldiers, and instead it was done by the CPA using a private contractor. Walter Slocombe, Bremer's adviser on security, told me, “If we had been able to say at the beginning that training up the Iraqi army is a military mission, that would probably have been a good thing. The military didn't want to do it.” A private corporation called Vinnell, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman, was hired on a $48 million contract. “They were supposed to train twenty-two battalions,” Sepp said. “They trained six—half of the soldiers deserted, and the remainder were judged untrained.” An officer on Abizaid's staff came to inspect Vinnell's work. “He was furious, he was
furious,
at how bad the training was and how bad the equipment was that Vinnell was giving the Iraqi soldiers.” The military took over the job from its inept contractor, but precious time had been lost, and with it the confidence of the Iraqi public.

The Bush administration, seeing an exit strategy, wanted to claim high numbers of trained forces in a hurry and went for bargain-basement soldiers and police. Sepp said, “It was a failure of military leadership to look at political leadership and say, ‘I appreciate that there's a presidential election coming up, but this is how it has to be done.'” The Pentagon and the occupation authority kept issuing utterly misleading figures on manpower and training. Even in 2003, Rumsfeld and Bremer threw around numbers in the range of 150,000, but in June 2004, the small print of a CPA report on the new police force revealed that fewer than six thousand out of almost ninety thousand had received serious academy training lasting more than two or three weeks. As a result, during the April uprising the undermanned, underequipped police abandoned their stations all over the south, and the new soldiers trained by battalions like Prior's collapsed; national guardsmen refused to board helicopters that would ferry them to join the fight with Americans against fellow Iraqis.

T. X. Hammes volunteered to go to Baghdad in January 2004 to work on training and found that the American operation was staffed at less than 50 percent. There was no system for printing out Iraqi ID cards in Arabic or getting cash salaries to soldiers in an efficient way. By September, when recently promoted Lieutenant General David Petraeus was trying to make up for all the lost time, the level of staffing was still only 60 percent. It was the same problem of bureaucratic inertia in Washington that was bedeviling the reconstruction. “It is clear that the only way you get out of Iraq is to train Iraqi security forces,” Hammes said. “This administration absolutely failed to do that.” Because of manpower regulations, Hammes was recalled to Washington after two months even though he'd volunteered for a year, knowing as well as anyone the importance of the training to counterinsurgency in Iraq.

“The U.S. failed to treat the Iraqis as partners in the counterinsurgency effort for nearly a year, and did not attempt to seriously train and equip Iraqi forces for proactive security and counterinsurgency mission until April 2004,” Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who followed the training closely, wrote in July 2004. This failure followed directly from the Pentagon's original sin of willful blindness in the face of the insurgency. “The U.S. wasted precious time waiting for its own forces to defeat a threat it treated as the product of a small number of former regime loyalists (FRLs) and foreign volunteers, and felt it could solve without creating effective Iraqi forces.” The new Iraqi security forces, resenting their low pay and inferior equipment, seemed to feel that they were being asked to fight for the United States, not Iraq. Without the brutal discipline of Saddam's army, most of them were incapable of becoming cohesive fighting forces and quickly fell apart under fire. A CPA official once said to me that a lot of the bravest, most dedicated, most idealistic Iraqis seemed to be fighting on the other side.

*   *   *

THE SUNNI INSURGENCY
fed on the unhappiness of a minority group that had essentially run Iraq since its creation and foresaw a diminished role in the new order, especially after the abolition of the army and debaathification made the point clearer than it needed to be. The insurgency's backbone—its organizers, financiers, suppliers—were officials of the Baath Party and the regime's many intelligence and security services. Shadowy messages began to appear bearing the name “Party of the Return.” But from early on, the character of the insurgency was more complicated than the rearguard action of a ruling party whose moment in history had passed. What could be called Sunni nationalism took root in some Iraqis who had never greatly benefited from the Baath Party. Their motives were various and overlapping: patriotism, religion, personal resentment over some injury done by American soldiers. The insurgency remains poorly understood in part because it defies easy categorization.

I met a tribal sheikh from Ramadi named Zaydan Halef al-Awad, who had fled the American military to Amman, Jordan. A traditional man, he had seen the Americans as partners who could benefit his tribe, and he said that he had joined the insurgency only when their behavior made it impossible to cooperate. “We Iraqis have a nature, which is revenge. If my cousin kills my brother, I have to kill him. If the Americans come from thousands of miles away and dishonor our women and hurt our children, how can I spare them?”

He had almost nothing in common with the young Iraqi a reporter for the London weekly
Observer
met in Baghdad. He had been a fan of Bon Jovi and American movies before the war and had welcomed the invasion, imagining a new life of freedom, travel, and consumer goods, until the spectacle of civilian deaths and looting turned him into a full-fledged insurgent in an independent seven-man cell (while he continued to hold down his day job in a government ministry). This fighter's grievances were a mix of economic hardship and national pride that amounted to no clear political agenda. He found the foreign jihadis in Iraq too bloody and irrational to work with.

Iraq's Sunnis were the country's modernizers, and in the cities they tended to be more secular than the Shia. But Islamist ideology, which had taken hold in other Arab countries with repressive and corrupt secular regimes, quickly spread through occupied Iraq in a particularly virulent form, the default worldview of a suddenly dispossessed group. A friend of one of my translators, who had been a partying and carefree student before the invasion, fled to Yemen, grew his beard, and became a collector of beheading videos. Sometimes the transformation happened in less than half an hour.
The Washington Post
reported the story of an overweight and unemployed thirty-two-year-old college graduate who spoke some English and lived with his mother in Adhamiya. Until the night American soldiers raided the house, he had accepted their presence in Iraq. But that night they humiliated him by mockingly spreading his secret girlie magazines across his bed next to his Qur'an. Twenty minutes later the soldiers were gone, and the young man began to slap his mother, screaming that Americans were devils. He spent the night in the mosque, and when he came home the next day he threw out all the foreign-made cheese in the refrigerator, burned all the Western images in the house, and forbade his mother to watch Western news or movies. When she brought home antianxiety medication for her troubled son, he refused the pills: The yellow ones were from Jews and the red ones from evil foreigners. As the world would discover with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, military occupation and sexual shame are a combustible mix. In the eyes of Iraqi men, the trespasses of the soldiers frequently crossed a line into the most sensitive realm. Raids sometimes caught the women of the household in their nightgowns, and there was a persistent rumor that night-vision goggles had see-through capabilities. The young man in Adhamiya probably suffered the same psychological troubles as his overweight, unemployed, living-with-mother counterpart in America. But in Iraq there was a violent ideology ready to answer his moment of crisis.

The Iraq War proved some of the Bush administration's assertions false, and it made others self-fulfilling. One of these was the insistence on an operational link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. In fact, Saddam had always kept a wary distance from Islamist terrorist groups; he co-opted conservative Sunni imams in Iraq only to use them as window dressing. But after the fall of the regime, the most potent ideological force behind the insurgency was Islam and its hostility to non-Islamic intruders. Some former Baathist officials even stopped drinking and took to prayer. The insurgency was called
mukawama,
or resistance, with overtones of religious legitimacy; its fighters became mujahideen, holy warriors; they proclaimed their mission to be jihad.