Fiasco, The American Military Adventure In Iraq Part 11

The south generally was quiet. But in early October there was a shootout between militias of two factions-one of them from the dominant Shiite group, led by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the single most powerful political figure in Iraq, and the other made up of followers of the upstart Shiite cleric Moqtadr al-Sadr. Lt. Col. Orlando was dispatched to investigate and ensure that curfews and other rules intended to curb violence were being followed. He was in a small patrol of three Humvees in the city near the compound of Mahmoud Ha.s.sani, a minor Shiite cleric, when he saw a large group of fighters lounging outside, their AK-47 a.s.sault rifles in hand. This was a violation of an understanding in the region about the amount of weaponry permitted to be displayed in public, Spain recalled-clerics were permitted bodyguards, but only in limited numbers.

Orlando got out of his Humvee and walked toward the fighters. "Look, you've been told, you can only have two AK-47s out front," he began saying, according to a subsequent Army inquiry.

One of the militiamen waved a hand at Orlando, signaling him and the two soldiers with him to lay down their weapons before coming closer. The Iraqi who was motioning swung his AK-47 upward, as if to fire. At that point, American soldiers said later, one of the Iraqis shot Orlando. One of Orlando's soldiers then shot that Iraqi. "Then all h.e.l.l broke loose," 1st Sgt. Troy Wallen later said. Wallen had been standing next to Orlando. What felt to him like a planned ambush then unfolded, as Iraqi fighters on rooftops and in alleys and storefronts opened fire on the three Humvees.

A nearby Army convoy responded to the soldiers' call for help and opened fire, an unusual action in that it involved at least four female Army soldiers. They were members of an MP unit and so not officially front-line ground combat troops, as are infantry, armor, and artillery units. Pvt. Teresa Broadwell, a twenty-year-old Texan who wanted to be a modern dancer, opened up with an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon, a light machine gun, from her turret atop an Army truck. Pvt. Trade Sanchez, a thirty-year-old mother of four, began to follow suit but was. .h.i.t in the helmet by a bullet and then knocked out of her turret by a grenade. Her face was peppered with shrapnel. Sgt. Misty Frazier, a twenty-five-year-old combat medic, ran from one wounded soldier to the next. It was the first time she'd heard hostile fire close up. Spec. Corrie Jones, twenty-seven, arrived as the shooting ended.

Three soldiers were down at the end of the short, sharp fight, either wounded or dead: Orlando and two members of his battalion, Staff Sgt. Joseph Bellavia and Cpl. Sean Grilley. Seven Iraqis were dead.

Spain was asleep in his headquarters near the Baghdad airport when he heard a knocking at his door at 12:30 in the morning. "Sir, I need you to wake up," his executive officer shouted from the hallway. She knew that he slept in his underwear and with a loaded weapon near his hand. "I need you to put down your pistol and put on your pants." In the hallway she gave him the sketchy information they had: There had been a firelight, Orlando had been injured but was talking in the Humvee on the way to be medevaced, and was going to make it. At two she woke him again: Orlando and the two others were dead. All three.

Spain felt sure that report was wrong, and stayed up the rest of the night in his headquarters trying to figure out where the miscommunication had occurred. When instead the report was confirmed, he called the battalion's executive officer and told him he was temporarily in command of the unit. He called back to the commandant of the MP school at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and arranged for a new battalion commander to be shipped out as soon as possible. He felt that he was in unknown territory. "You train for a lot, but no one trains you to lose a battalion commander," he said later.

At 8:30 in the morning, Gen. Sanchez called. The general, three ranks higher than Spain, cut immediately to the point. "What intel did you have about Kar-bala?" Sanchez demanded, according to Spain.

"Sir, I don't know what you mean," Spain responded, a bit perplexed. "That's not an area in my control."

"Don't say that," Sanchez said. "What intel did you have?"

"I don't know," Spain said, growing alarmed at Sanchez's angry persistence. What did the general mean with this line of questioning?

"You come here in two hours and brief me on what intel you had," Sanchez ordered.

At precisely ten-thirty Spain arrived at the Green Zone, walked past the Marine standing guard outside Sanchez's office, and stood before the general. Sanchez thrust a sheaf of papers into Spain's hands. Spain looked down, but as he began to read about the warning of violence in Karbala, Sanchez yanked them back. "Did you know this?" Sanchez demanded.

Spain hadn't been able to read far enough to know precisely what was meant by "this." "Sir, as far as I can tell, from what I could read, no, I didn't," he said.

"That was your battalion," Sanchez said. "Why didn't you?"

Spain now began to understand where the general was going: He was going to blame Spain for the death of Orlando. "Sir," Spain said, "your staff told me that that battalion was not under my control."

"This was your battalion," Sanchez repeated.

Spain was close to losing his temper with the senior U.S. commander in Iraq. "Sir, if you are trying to make me feel any worse about losing a battalion commander, you can't," he said. The colonel and the general glared at each other. It felt like several minutes, Spain said later, but probably was just thirty seconds. He felt that Sanchez was waiting for him to speak, but worried that if he tried to argue further he would overstep the boundaries of military courtesy, especially with a superior officer. "I was smart enough to know that anything I could say would be wrong" in Sanchez's judgment, so he kept his mouth shut and stared into the general's eyes.

"Do you have anything to say?" Sanchez finally said."No, sir," Spain said."Get out of my office and go visit your battalion," Sanchez ordered.

It was the last one-on-one conversation Spain had with Sanchez in Iraq. He almost shuddered as he recounted the experience over a year later, in his southern Virginia home, having retired from the Army after leaving Iraq. "Lieutenant General Sanchez never did tell me what I should have known about what was going on in Karbala," he said. "To me, it was my worst experience in Iraq. That was, without a doubt, the worst day."

The Ramadan offensive Unjustified optimism would prove to be one of the enduring characteristics of the U.S. management of the war. As late as mid-October 2003, as violence was spiking, top U.S. commanders were sketching plans for a troop drawdown in the summer of 2004, cutting from 130,000 to perhaps 100,000 in the summer of 2004, and half that by the following year. (In fact, in December 2005, the level would instead be substantially higher, at 159,000.) At the same time, they hoped, Iraqi security forces would be taking responsibility for patrolling the cities while U.S. forces moved offstage, where they would play a less obtrusive role as a quick reaction force to rescue Iraqi units that got into trouble. This phased series of troop reductions was in "the advanced stages of planning, but not yet approved" by Secretary Rumsfeld, a senior official said on October 17.

To others, that talk of troop cuts was unrealistic. "There was this big emphasis on troop reductions," said a civilian U.S. official who frequently interacted with the military at Green Zone meetings. "They should have been doing a risk a.s.sessment. Instead, in that October period, CJTF-7 was focused on planning the troop rotation and the reductions that would follow. To me, it was pretty clear that security had not been achieved. They hadn't done an adequate mission a.n.a.lysis- they should have gone back upstairs and said, 'The insurgency is strong, and growing stronger, and the need to train Iraqi security forces is huge, and we need to beef up our forces to give them the s.p.a.ce to develop capacity.'"

On October 26, the night that the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, PFC Rachel Bosveld, a nineteen-year-old MP from Wisconsin in Spain's unit, was at the Abu Ghraib police station, in the town near the prison, west of Baghdad. "A mortar came in, killed her, and blew the leg off another soldier," Spain recalled. Her death was significant for two reasons. First, it was barely noted: In a departure from past wars, the loss of forty-eight female soldiers from 2003 through 2005 hardly caused a ripple in American society.

But in terms of the history of the Iraq war, Bosveld's death is significant because it-along with a rocket attack a few hours later on the hotel inside the Green Zone where Wolfowitz was staying-marked the beginning of the insurgency's Ramadan offensive. This was the first time since the invasion that the foe turned fully on U.S. forces, bringing the highest rate of American fatalities since the spring. At 6:10 on the morning of Sunday, October 26, at least six rockets struck the al Rasheed Hotel, the CPA lodging inside the Green Zone. Wolfowitz, who was staying there during a quick visit, was uninjured, but an Army officer on the floor below him was killed. The rocket barrage likely was intended to get Wolfowitz, as was the downing of a Black Hawk helicopter near Tikrit the day before, just after his visit there. The attacks were militarily insignificant but politically meaningful: The insurgents had been able to reach into the heavily protected Green Zone and threaten the life of a senior U.S. official who had been instrumental in the drive to war.

In another action the same day with political significance, one of Baghdad's three deputy mayors, Faris Abdul Razzaq a.s.sam, was a.s.sa.s.sinated by gunmen, who shot him in a cafe. The next morning, four police stations were bombed nearly simultaneously in Baghdad, some of them with trucks painted to look like police vehicles, each carrying one thousand pounds of plastic explosives. At a fifth station a bomb failed to detonate because the wire attaching it to the car battery had accidentally disconnected. The offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross also were hit, by a truck disguised as an ambulance. Altogether, more than thirty-five people were killed and hundreds wounded. "It was a horrible day, with a lot of children dying," said a former Special Forces soldier working on security issues in Iraq. "I felt like the whole city was blowing up, and I was thinking about Mogadishu."

Within a few days, another sad milestone had been pa.s.sed: More U.S. troops had died in combat since May 1, when President Bush had declared major combat operations finished, than during the spring invasion. In an odd echo of his "Bring 'em on" comment in July, Bush-who was meeting with Bremer in the Oval Office-interpreted the insurgency's escalation as a sign of progress. "The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," Bush said, Bremer at his side. "The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become, because they can't stand the thought of a free society." (This prompted an officer to send off a reporter heading to Iraq with the warning, "Be careful, or you might become another sign of progress.") "There are a lot of wonderful things that have happened since July," Bremer added. Sure, he said, there had been some "rough days." But "the good days outnumber the bad days. And that's the thing we need to keep in perspective."

Insurgent attacks grew both more numerous and more sophisticated during Ramadan 2003. In the summer there had been about ten to fifteen attacks on U.S. soldiers a day. By mid-October, that had doubled to twenty to thirty-five a day. By mid-November, as the Ramadan offensive was in full swing, they were peaking at forty-five a day. Also, for the first time, the insurgents began having success attacking aircraft. In late October, in an apparent attempt to target Wolfowitz while he was visiting, a UH-60 Black Hawk was brought down by insurgent fire; no one was killed. In early November a CH-47 Chinook was downed west of Baghdad, killing sixteen soldiers. A few days later another Black Hawk was. .h.i.t near Tikrit, killing six. Later in the month two Black Hawks collided over Mosul as one tried to evade ground fire, killing seventeen soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division.

Also, attempts to down less vulnerable fixed-wing aircraft were stepped up, with missile and rocket launches at flights at the Baghdad airport. None was successful, but one came extraordinarily close, with a surface-to-air missile's destroying an engine on the left wing of a big DHL Airbus 300 cargo jet as it took off on November 21. Attacks in Baghdad also continued, with a series of rockets launched from donkey-pulled carts at the Oil Ministry and at the Sheraton and Palestine hotels, which were full of American contractors and reporters.

Publicly, U.S. commanders kept a "steady as she goes" att.i.tude. "We think the insurgency is waning," Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling, who now was an a.s.sistant commander of the 1st Armored Division, told reporters in Baghdad on November 7. "The ones who continue to fight are losing their support." Hertling had been skeptical about some aspects of the invasion a year earlier, when he was on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But now he was in combat, losing soldiers, and was determined to make their sacrifices worthwhile. "The majority of soldiers feel we are making progress every day, and we are beyond the hardest part," he said, speaking at Freedom Rest, his division's rest-and-recreation outpost in a former Iraqi officers' club in the Green Zone, where soldiers were sent for a few days of sleeping on hotel-quality sheets, sitting by the swimming pool, and generally pretending they weren't in Iraq.

But behind the scenes there was concern among commanders. In just two weeks, some sixty American soldiers had died. As the Ramadan offensive intensified, worry grew that the enemy would attempt to stage a spectacular series of attacks on Eid, the holiday that ends the holy month. "We believed there would be an Eid al-Fitr culmination, so it was a ramp-up to stop that," Swannack said later. In Anbar province, "we got their attention."

There was a new edge of toughness to the public comments of American officials at this time. On November 11, Rumsfeld, defining the situation quite differently than he had in June, told a television interviewer, "We're in a low-intensity war that needs to be won, and we intend to win it."

The same day, Sanchez told reporters in Baghdad, "We're going to get pretty tough. And that's what's necessary to defeat this enemy. And we're definitely not shy about doing that when it's required, and we will do that in a precise, intel-driven mode."

The next day both sides made major moves. A car bomb hit the Italian military headquarters in southern Iraq, killing eighteen Italians and eight Iraqis. It was the deadliest attack on a coalition partner of the U.S.-led occupation. It was also the greatest loss of life suffered by the Italian military since World War II.

On the U.S. side, the 1st Armored Division launched an operation in Baghdad called Iron Hammer that involved twenty-six artillery and mortar attacks and twenty-seven missions by strike aircraft. AC-130 gunships, which carry machine guns and a 105 millimeter cannon, began flying nightly missions over Baghdad. To curb the IED attacks, soldiers were ordered to shoot to kill anyone seen digging holes alongside roads at night. In Baqubah, Lt. Col. Mark Young, commander of a battalion in the 4th Infantry Division, said that more tonnage of munitions was used by his unit than ever before in Iraq. "This is to demonstrate one more time that we have significant firepower and can use it at our discretion," he said. To any American familiar with one of the most basic concepts of counterinsurgency campaigns-that they succeed when a minimum of firepower is employed-that was a troubling statement.

Holsbek vs. Hogg in Baqubah Lt. Col. Holshek, the civil affairs officer in Baqubah, was growing increasingly frustrated with att.i.tudes like that, especially when he saw them displayed by his commander, the aggressive Col. Hogg. One day during a briefing in November, Holshek took the unusual step of challenging Hogg with a question. "Sir, what is the battles.p.a.ce?" he asked.

For a tough combat commander like Hogg, the answer was self-evident: In conventional war, it usually is wherever you are fighting the enemy. "His answer was, basically, 'the bad guys,'" Holshek recalled.

"Sir, wrong answer," said Holshek, who with his shaved head looks a bit like a young Telly Savalas. Holshek was in a pushy New York mood that day, prodding Hogg to recognize that this wasn't a conventional war, it was something else altogether, and it needed to be fought as such. "In counterinsurgency," Holshek remembered telling the colonel, "the battles.p.a.ce isn't physical, it's psychological. The battle is for the people."

Killing people really wasn't the point, he continued. "Bottom line is, you can kill every bad guy, and there will be two more tomorrow-until you start focusing on their support, active or pa.s.sive, in the resident population." Holshek was saying that the Iraqi people were the prize in this fight, not the playing field. Here he was introducing Hogg to cla.s.sic counterinsurgency doctrine, which holds that the objective is first to gain control of the population, and then win their support. What's more, he said, moving out onto even thinner ice with his boss, "your actions are having second- and third-order effects that will kill your soldiers down the road. I'm not selling Girl Scout cookies" (in other words, this isn't just so we can be nicer; this is so we can win). "I am here to keep your soldiers from getting killed." Hogg's tactics could wind up doing just that. He asked his commander to imagine himself the head of a household in an Iraqi village. "Two o'clock in the morning, your door bursts open. A bunch of infantry guys burst into the private s.p.a.ce of the house-in a society where family honor is the most important thing-and you lay the man down, and put the plastic cuffs on? And then we say, 'Oops, wrong home?' In this society, the guy has no other choice but to seek rest.i.tution. He will do that by placing a roadside bomb for one hundred dollars, because his family honor has been compromised, to put it mildly." Simply to restore his own self-respect, the Iraqi would then have to go out and take a shot at American forces.

Another tactic Holshek argued against was the use of 155 millimeter high-explosive artillery fire to respond to mortar attacks on the base. "Sir, I'm not a maneuver guy," he recalled saying, "but the best way to respond to mortar fire is with boots on the ground-presence patrolling, work with the Iraqi cops, get the intel. Find out where it is, lie in ambush on the guy's two or three known firing points, and get the guy."

Hogg didn't say much during this lecture from a subordinate, or after it, but Holshek believed he absorbed it. Then, two weeks later, Hogg convened his operations officer, his information operations officer (actually an artillery officer detailed to handle that task), and Holshek, and said, "You guys need to fix this."

In the following weeks, the brigade's operations began to change. "He started to evolve," Holshek recalled. "He started to shift operations, started using my CA [civil affairs] teams more effectively." Hogg began to understand that when you make a mistake, you apologize, explain how it occurred, and give the householder one hundred dollars. "We had much better integration of CA with the maneuver units. We had CA on raids."

The wrong doors continued to be smashed on occasion, but when they were, Holshek would issue a letter that stated, "We are sorry for the intrusion, we are trying to help here, and it is a difficult business, and we sometimes make mistakes. If you have information that would help us, we would be grateful." The cash equivalent in dinars of one hundred dollars would accompany the note. Those gestures of regret didn't really win over Iraqis, Holshek recalled later, but he said he thought they did tend to tamp down anger, and so curtail acts of revenge.

Maj. Wilson, the historian and 101st planner, later concluded that much of the firing on U.S. troops in the summer and fall of 2003 consisted of honor shots, intended not so much to kill Americans as to restore Iraqi honor. "Honor and pride lie at the center of tribal society," he wrote. In a society where honor equals power, and power ensures survival, the restoration of damaged honor can be a matter of urgency. But that didn't mean that Iraqis insulted by American troops necessarily felt they had to respond lethally, Wilson reflected. "Honor that is lost or taken must be returned by the offender, through ritualistic truce sessions, else it will be taken back through force of arms." In Iraq this sometimes was expressed in ways similar to the American Indian practice of counting coup, in which damaging the enemy wasn't as important as demonstrating that one could. So, Wilson observed, an Iraqi would take a wild shot with a rocket-propelled grenade, or fire randomly into the air as a U.S. patrol pa.s.sed. "Often the act of taking a stand against the 'subject of dishonor' is enough to restore the honor to the family or tribe," whether or not the attack actually injured someone, he wrote. "Some of the attacks that we originally saw as 'poor marksmanship' likely were intentional misses by attackers pro-progress and pro-U.S., but honor-bound to avenge a perceived wrong that U.S. forces at the time did not know how to appropriately resolve." But U.S. troops a.s.sumed simply that the Iraqis were bad shots.

Tactics: force vs. effectiveness Counterproductive tactics, like the ones Holshek confronted Hogg about, were all too common in the U.S. military in 2003, and well into 2004. "Heard a horror story this afternoon," Marine Col. T. X. Hammes wrote in his diary one evening.

They had been taking sniper fire from a building for six nights. So that day, they send a civic action team to the high-rise building it came from and they ordered everyone to evacuate because the building was going to be destroyed. That night, two AC-130s pumped rounds into it until it was reduced to rubble. Made lots of friends that way. Suggestion that perhaps they should set an ambush and either kill or capture the sniper since he is being so predictable but that idea was rejected. We had to demonstrate our firepower to these people.

It wasn't the big headline-grabbing mistakes that undercut the U.S. effort as much as the daily, routine operations of U.S. troops not trained for counterinsurgency. A study by the Center for Army Lessons Learned warned especially against the practice of taking hostages.

Tactics such as detaining the family members of anti-Coalition forces, destroying the houses of captured suspects, destroying the houses of captured suspects without judicial due process, and shooting at Iraqi vehicles that attempt to pa.s.s Coalition vehicles on major highways may bestow short-term tactical advantages. However, these advantages should be weighed against Iraqi sentiments and the long-term disadvantages a.s.sociated with the image this creates. It is a practice in some U.S. U.S. units to detain family members of anti-Coalition suspects in an effort to induce the suspects to turn themselves in, in exchange for the release of their family members. units to detain family members of anti-Coalition suspects in an effort to induce the suspects to turn themselves in, in exchange for the release of their family members.

These tactics led in the wrong direction. T. E. Lawrence, the British adviser to Arab guerrillas during World War I, once denned tactics as "the means toward the strategic goal, the steps of its staircase." The tactics that many U.S. commanders used in Iraq in 2003 led away from the strategic goal of winning the political support of the Iraqi people.

Ultimately, eighty-two U.S. troops died in November 2003, making it the worst month of the war up to that point. The Ramadan offensive wore on Teddy Spain. On November 9, a convoy of his MPs came under small arms attack in Baghdad. Sgt. Nicholas Tomko, a twenty-four-year-old reserve MP from Pittsburgh, was killed. The loss was on Spain's mind when he watched Fox News that evening. "It talked about Michael Jackson, and about Martha Stewart, and so on," he recalled, "and about fifteen minutes into it, they said, 'Oh, and yeah, we lost a soldier in Baghdad today.'" He also was upset by fellow commanders who "talked about losing soldiers like they'd talk about losing a weapon."

No, Spain thought. "This is forever." He walked over to his computer and began to write, trying to translate his pain into words. "These heroes left wives, husbands, children and other loved ones behind," he wrote. "They all had great plans for the future, but none of them had planned on dying in combat. These soldiers will never see their children graduate from high school, will never attend their weddings, will never coach their Little League baseball teams." In the following weeks, as warplanes droned overhead at night, Spain returned to this doc.u.ment, adding to it during his quiet times before sleep. He would put it aside sometimes, then remember it on other bad days and open it again, and hone it. He was determined to tell the world about these losses, make them felt, have them remembered.

The Bush administration moves to plan B Privately that fall, Bush administration officials were more worried than they let on in public. Officials at the White House, Pentagon, and State Department began the week of September 8 puzzling over an op-ed piece by Bremer that had appeared in the Washington Post Washington Post that Monday morning. According to some accounts the article blindsided Bush administration officials back in Washington. In it Bremer laid out a plan for a lengthy, seven-step roadmap to end the U.S. occupation. It actually boiled down to three major goals, in order: First, a const.i.tution would be written and ratified by Iraqis. Next would come a national election. Only after that would the U.S. occupation authority be dissolved. that Monday morning. According to some accounts the article blindsided Bush administration officials back in Washington. In it Bremer laid out a plan for a lengthy, seven-step roadmap to end the U.S. occupation. It actually boiled down to three major goals, in order: First, a const.i.tution would be written and ratified by Iraqis. Next would come a national election. Only after that would the U.S. occupation authority be dissolved.

"It was very clear to us from Bremer's leadership that he thought it would take the Iraqis a long long time before they were going to be able to take over," said a CPA strategist. time before they were going to be able to take over," said a CPA strategist.

Bremer's plan had one huge flaw: It lacked essential support both in the United States and in Iraq. "Bremer hadn't cleared the piece with his higher-ups in the Pentagon or the White House, and here he was describing a drawn-out American occupation," columnist David Brooks reported ten months later in the New York Times. New York Times. "Iraqis would take their time writing a const.i.tution, and would eventually have elections and take control of their country. For some Bush officials, this was the lowest period of the entire Iraq project. They knew they couldn't sustain an occupation for that long, yet they had no other realistic plan for transferring power to Iraqis." "Iraqis would take their time writing a const.i.tution, and would eventually have elections and take control of their country. For some Bush officials, this was the lowest period of the entire Iraq project. They knew they couldn't sustain an occupation for that long, yet they had no other realistic plan for transferring power to Iraqis."

There was another even bigger problem looming: Ayatollah Sistani, the most important political figure in Iraq, "declared it unacceptable to have a const.i.tution prepared by unelected actors," recalled Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British aide to Bremer.

The same month, Robert Blackwill, a former U.S. amba.s.sador to India who also taught at Harvard, was brought in to the National Security Council to revamp Iraq policy. Blackwill was known throughout national security circles for riding roughshod over underlings and bureaucratic compet.i.tors. "His M.O. is to spook people-'the world is falling apart,'" and then to cover himself in glory by proposing the solution, said a former senior administration official who admires Blackwill's political skills but not his character. "And he spooked Condi, for about a month, in the fall of '03." Rice was receptive to Blackwill's pitch. At that time, "it was clear that things were going badly, [yet] we were getting no reporting" from CPA about its actions and their effects.

Rice had been growing profoundly frustrated with Bremer, this official said. She had been receiving so little information from him that summer that, in order to a.s.sess the real state of events at the CPA and in Iraq, she began reading the diplomatic reports that the British emba.s.sy in Washington pa.s.sed to her staff. "Hadley and Rice were avid consumers" of the inside information coming from British diplomats in Baghdad, he said. Among other things, Blackwill convinced Rice that Bremer needed to heed Sistani, and that the long-term occupation the administrator contemplated wasn't viable. Rice in turn took those thoughts to President Bush.

In a series of meetings with Rumsfeld, and then with Rice and Bush at the White House, Bremer and the Bush administration reconsidered the mission of the CPA, and ultimately decided to abandon the idea of having the United States formally occupy Iraq for several years. The seven-step plan was dropped. On November 15, Bremer unveiled a new, swifter plan that abandoned the goal of having a const.i.tution and general elections before the U.S. government relinquished sovereignty. Instead, the United States would officially hand over power less than eight months later, at the end of June 2004.

The move was startling to almost everyone involved in the occupation. "The decision on 15 November ... came as a complete surprise to CPA administrators," remembered Hilary Synnott, the British diplomat who was the CPA regional coordinator for southern Iraq at the time.

It was indeed a major reversal: Instead of a long-term occupation, the U.S. government would seek to depart as soon as humanly possible. "It was clear that Plan A wasn't going to work," said Patrick Clawson, an Iraq hawk who long had argued for limited goals-basically, remove Saddam Hussein and leave. After more than a year of pursuing sweeping aspirations, such as transforming the politics of the Middle East, he said, "it was the first time we pulled back dramatically from objectives. I read that as the first time we said we weren't going to achieve everything we said we wanted to do."

After the November 15 agreement, Bremer's handling of the CPA felt much more constrained, recalled Charles Costello, who worked as a contractor on local governance issues. "I think from November on, he was just an administrator," he said. "They were calling the shots in Washington."

Convoys through h.e.l.l The structure of U.S. forces in Iraq may have undermined the goal of winning; its big bases required a huge support system. These forward operating bases featured many of the comforts of home, from Internet cafes to mess halls offering a surprising variety of good food. They also separated the troops from the population and so violated a key tenet of counterinsurgency campaigning. The cla.s.sic way to conduct such a campaign would have been to have only support troops, such as mechanics and logisticians, on the big facilities, with combat forces operating out of small patrol bases and other outposts located among the people.

In particular, keeping those big bases supplied with everything from gasoline to ice cream required a constant stream of convoys. Every day roughly eight hundred trucks headed north from Kuwait to supply the U.S. military effort. Hundreds more ran ancillary convoys inside the country. "Every single thing that we provided to our soldiers had to be brought in through Kuwait," Sanchez noted later.

Protecting the convoys was a major effort, taking up many military resources. The Polish-led multinational division operating in the south estimated that it spent about one quarter of its time and energy keeping open the two major U.S. supply lines, dubbed Route Tampa and Route Sue. Largely unseen and unnoticed by reporters and other observers of the war, these convoys were a major cause of friction with Iraqis as they traversed Iraq. "I told Colonel Rudesheim about some abuse of civilians that occurred that day in his sector," recalled an Army civil affairs officer. Soldiers from another unit, when convoying through his area, were shooting at pa.s.sing cars without provocation, the officer reported. Rudesheim responded, "Oh, s.h.i.t, those guys come into my sector and do it, and their own leaders don't stop them."

Official reports described a lack of fire discipline in the conduct of convoys. "The British sector ... is relatively free of anti-Coalition attacks, yet American convoys moving north from Kuwait from the British sector have fired at British contractors who drove near the American vehicles on a major highway," noted the Center for Army Lessons Learned.

The Marine Corps, also operating in southern and central Iraq in the summer of 2003, found that some convoys also were run sloppily, especially those from support units such as mechanics and clerks. The Marines called those Army convoys manatees, after the big, slow-moving, and defenseless herbivorous sea mammals that are frequently run over by speedboats in the waterways of Florida. "The Army drivers typically wore CD headphones, a.s.sistant drivers were most often asleep, and few wore helmets or flak jackets as the convoys made their way along routes Tampa and Sue," reported the 1st Marine Division's official history. "There were few crew-served weapons mounts on the vehicles, and these were often unmanned as they were uncomfortably hot in the blazing Iraqi sun." The Marines also were critical of the fact that when the Army trucks were fired on, they simply would speed up rather than stop and attempt to kill their attackers. One nervy Marine response was to put Trojan horse trucks on the convoy routes. These bait vehicles carried around the outside of their truckbeds stacks of MRE ration boxes filled with sand. Inside the ring of boxes would wait Marines, ready to return fire or chase their attackers on foot. The tactic worked for a few days before the am-bushers moved away from the roads.

But not all the trucks were driven by U.S. military personnel, or even by American citizens. Many had at the wheel Indians or other third-country nationals with no vested interest in helping the U.S. cause. These people simply wanted to survive the year and take home their pay to capitalize a small business or build a house. In 2003, there was talk in Iraq that some of them broke the rules prohibiting them from carrying weapons, which they would shoot at any Iraqi who they felt came too close to them on the road.

Partly through Darwinian forces, U.S. military convoy operations radically improved in the fall of 2003 and the spring of 2004. Rather than drift along wearing earphones playing pop music, gunners wore two-way radio headsets and riot-style face shields that were deemed capable of stopping rifle fire. And trucks were carrying double sets of radios so they could communicate with both their parent unit and the unit whose area they were traveling through.

The number of bomb attacks on logistics convoys increased steadily, with an average of about thirty a week in 2005, according to Brig. Gen. Yves Fontaine, head of the Army's 1st Corps Support Command. That was double the number a year earlier, he said. But he added that because of the increase in the armoring of vehicles, the number of casualties declined. Even so, U.S. troops operating the convoys were deeply affected by the experience. When Army researchers surveyed more than two thousand U.S. troops serving in Iraq in 2004, they found that about 19 percent of those in transportation and support units suffered from acute stress or post-traumatic stress disorder. The comparative figure for combat units was 11 percent, and for other units, just 7 percent.

Despite the improvements, trigger-happy convoys would continue to undercut U.S. efforts to win over the populace. The number of Iraqis who died in this way is unknown. Lt. Col. Todd Wood, a battalion commander in the 3rd Infantry Division, complained to a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco Chronicle about troops pa.s.sing through his area of operations on Iraq's Highway 1. "Seems like I pick up a lot of people's pieces around here," he said. "These ... patrols that drive around and shoot people have been a thorn in everybody's side all year." about troops pa.s.sing through his area of operations on Iraq's Highway 1. "Seems like I pick up a lot of people's pieces around here," he said. "These ... patrols that drive around and shoot people have been a thorn in everybody's side all year."

His senior NCO, Sgt. Maj. Samuel Coston, added, "I hate the fact that American soldiers ride around killing civilians. All you got to say is, 'I felt threatened, the car was driving aggressively,' and you shoot. They have no remorse. They just keep on driving."

Col. Herrington sends a warning In the fall of 2003, knowing she faced trouble, Brig. Gen. Fast, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in the country, asked one of the "wise men" of the Army intelligence community to fly over to review her operations. The report that would result appears to have been the first major internal recognition that the U.S. effort in Iraq had run off the tracks.

Retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington was a veteran of Army counterinsurgency operations in the Vietnam War, where he was a particularly effective part of the Phoenix Program, a controversial covert effort to capture or kill Vietcong leaders in rural areas. William Colby, the CIA operative who oversaw the program and later became head of the agency, claimed that it eliminated sixty thousand Vietcong agents. That estimate had been greeted with skepticism, but after the war, observed historian Stanley Karnow, top Communist figures reported that Phoenix had done enormous damage. Madame Nguyen Thi Dinh, a Vietcong leader, told Karnow that she considered the program "very dangerous." She recalled that "we never feared a division of troops, but the infiltration of a couple of guys into our ranks created tremendous difficulties for us."

Herrington was one of the last Americans out of Saigon, lifting off the roof of the U.S. emba.s.sy at five-thirty on the morning of April 30,1975. A few years later he wrote a well-received book about the Phoenix operation, t.i.tled Silence Was a Weapon: The Vietnam War in the Villages. Silence Was a Weapon: The Vietnam War in the Villages. He went on to run intelligence operations for the Army in Panama and during the 1991 Gulf War, and later taught at the Army War College when Fast was a student there. She likely remembered that, unusual for an officer, he was an expert in interrogation, something that military intelligence officials tend to think of as "sergeants' work." He went on to run intelligence operations for the Army in Panama and during the 1991 Gulf War, and later taught at the Army War College when Fast was a student there. She likely remembered that, unusual for an officer, he was an expert in interrogation, something that military intelligence officials tend to think of as "sergeants' work."

Herrington arrived in early December and was stunned by what he found. The main prison, Abu Ghraib, was stuffed with six thousand prisoners. "The problem of overpopulation at Abu Ghraib is serious, and must be resolved urgently," he warned in a thirteen-page report to Fast submitted on December 12, 2003. "The facility is a pressure cooker where it is only a matter of time before prisoners stage an uprising." But that was the least of the problems, he concluded, because it was easily solved.

A larger concern was how detainees were being treated, and not just by a handful of demoralized Army Reservists at Abu Ghraib. He was shocked by the behavior of Task Force 121, an elite interagency team of about one thousand CIA paramilitaries and black Special Operations forces devoted to finding Saddam Hussein and his top allies. Iraqis "who had been captured by Task Force 121 showed signs of having been mistreated (beaten) by their captors," he wrote, with some having injuries noted by medical personnel. Herrington was no innocent- the Phoenix Program killed thousands-but he was disappointed, he wrote, with the actions of the task force, and especially the sense that it was routine and acceptable to beat prisoners. One officer told him that he knew about the beatings. "I asked the officer if he had reported this problem. He replied that, 'Everyone knows about it.' I advised the officer that this [response] was inadequate." (The Red Cross likewise reported that high-value detainees were being brought in severely burned, apparently from being made to lie across the hoods of vehicles as they were transported, tied down like slain deer.) Herrington, by contrast, had made a point of treating his prisoners generously-feeding a hungry Vietcong captain in a restaurant, and putting up a captured North Vietnamese sergeant in his villa, and at one point, a week into the latter's captivity, handing him a loaded M-16 rifle as a sign of trust.

Broadly interpreting his mandate, Herrington went on to critique the entire U.S. military campaign. He repeatedly singled out the big sweeps that were resulting in the imprisonment of thousands of Iraqis that fall and winter. "Conducting sweep operations in which many persons are detained who probably should not be detained, and who then wind up incarcerated for three to six months, is counterproductive to the Coalition's efforts to win the cooperation of the Iraqi citizenry," he advised Fast.

In some instances, it appeared that U.S. commanders, in seeking to shut down the insurgency in their areas of operations, were using tactics that effectively made them recruiting sergeants for it. Herrington was especially bothered by the actions of Gen. Odierno's 4th Infantry Division, which was headquartered in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, near the northern apex of the Sunni Triangle. "Princ.i.p.ally due to sweep operations by some line units-the 4th ID was consistently singled out as the major offender-the number of detainees" was rising steadily, he wrote. He emphasized that point five pages later: "Some divisions are conducting operations with rigorous detention criteria, while some-the 4th ID is the negative example-are sweeping up large numbers of people and dumping them at the door of Abu Ghraib."

He also told Fast to look into the practice of taking family members of suspects into custody. "Recommend that you check to see if, as we were told, some detainees arrive at Abu Ghraib who were detained because the correct target of a raid was not home, so a family member was taken in his place ... who would then be released when the target turns himself in. This practice, if it is being done, has a 'hostage' feel to it."

Army combat units were part of the problem, Herrington suggested. Looking at them reminded him of his time in Vietnam when he saw such units alienate local populations. "They were often heavy-handed, reliant on ma.s.sive firepower, and could undo in a few hours what we had striven to accomplish with the people for months." A radically different, far more sophisticated approach was needed, Herrington suggested. Set up an amnesty program and induce insurgent leaders to turn themselves in. There were three good ways to put an insurgent out of business: The preferable way was to foster desertion; the second best was to capture and interrogate them. "Last resort is to target and kill them." Yet that last thinking was at the heart of the approach that Sanchez and many of his division commanders were taking-especially in the Sunni Triangle.

Overall, Herrington concluded, the Army should change its way of thinking about what it was doing in Iraq. "Keep the U.S. profile as low as possible going forward," he wrote. Effectively, the veteran interrogator had turned the Sanchez critique on its head: It's not intelligence that is the problem here, it is your troops and tactics. Alter your tactics and your intelligence will improve, just as night follows day. In the following months that criticism would become the conventional wisdom among Special Forces officers, civil affairs specialists, and even some regular Army unit commanders. But at the time it was a novel, even radical, view.

Only two copies of the report were made, with Herrington keeping one and leaving the other with Fast. There is no indication that Gen. Sanchez, the most conventional of commanders, was interested in overhauling his approach in such a revolutionary way. Four months later, orders issued to his subordinate commanders still routinely called for "killing or capturing" the insurgents.

Yet over a year later, after the Abu Ghraib scandal shook the Army, a cascade of reports and investigations vindicated Herrington's views. It is worth quoting at length the conclusions of one investigator, Maj. Gen. George Fay, because in retrospect they read like an obituary for the strategy and tactics employed by the U.S. military in Iraq to respond to the insurgency in 2003.

"There was a general consensus," Fay wrote, from interviews with, among others, Sanchez and then Brig. Gen. Barbara Fast, that as the pace of operations picked up in late November-early December 2003, it became a common practice for maneuver elements to round up large quant.i.ties of Iraqi personnel in the general vicinity of a specified target as a cordon and capture technique. Some operations were conducted at night resulting in some detainees being delivered to collection points only wearing night clothes or under clothes. Sgt. Jose Garcia, a.s.signed to the Abu Ghraib Detainee a.s.sessment Board, estimated that 85%-90% of the detainees were of no intelligence value based upon board interviews and debriefings of detainees. The Deputy C2x, CJTF-7, CIVILIAN-12 [that is, the number-two military intelligence official and a U.S. official operating in Iraq whose name wasn't being released] confirmed these numbers.

The effect of those numbers of innocents was unintentionally to provide cover to the insurgents also detained, Fay concluded.

Large quant.i.ties of detainees with little or no intelligence value swelled Abu Ghraib's population and led to a variety of overcrowding difficulties. Already scarce interrogator and a.n.a.lyst resources were pulled from interrogation operations to identify and screen increasing numbers of personnel whose capture doc.u.mentation was incomplete or missing. Complicated and unresponsive release procedures ensured that these detainees stayed at Abu Ghraib-even though most had no value.

The U.S. military response to the rise of the insurgency was fundamentally misguided. An effort to squeeze out more intelligence, involving thousands of American troops and profoundly disrupting the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis, swamped the intelligence system. The American offensive was undone by a combination of overwhelmed soldiers and indiscriminate generals-especially the 4th ID's Odierno, who sent too many detainees south, and his immediate superior, Sanchez, who should have seen this and stopped it.

The capture of Saddam Hussein Yet what Gen. Odierno and the 4th ID are remembered for is something very different-in fact, for what may be the high point of the U.S. occupation.

"We got him!" Bremer exclaimed to reporters on December 14. After thirty-eight weeks of searching, Operation Red Dawn, involving six hundred conventional and Special Operations troops, had caught Saddam Hussein hiding in a hole on a farmstead near the village of Dawr, 10 miles southeast of Tikrit and not far from his birthplace of Auja. An informant had said that an important person was there, amid the palm groves and orange orchards. One soldier noticed a prayer rug over a dirt spot that looked swept recently. The rug was removed, and a Styrofoam lid was found underneath it. After it was lifted-carefully, in case it was b.o.o.by-trapped-it revealed a square-cut hole resembling a mineshaft.

Under standard procedures, said Col. James Hickey, the smart, sad-eyed commander of the operation, soldiers would have dropped a grenade or fired into the "spider hole." But before they could, two hands appeared in surrender. Saddam was taken into custody by a combination of Special Operations troops and members of the 4th Infantry Division.

At last, some commanders thought, the corner had been turned. Not only had Saddam been caught, he hadn't even put up a fight-a circ.u.mstance that appeared to undercut the heroic image he had tried to construct. Bremer presented the moment to Iraqis as a potential turning point in the life of their nation. "This is a great day in your history," he said. "With the arrest of Saddam Hussein, there is a new opportunity for members of the former regime, whether military or civilian, to end their bitter opposition. Let them come forward now in a spirit of reconciliation and hope, lay down their arms, and join you, their fellow citizens, in the task of building the new Iraq."

Some U.S. commanders, caught up in the euphoria of the moment, said at the time that they believed it the beginning of the end of the insurgency. "The Wicked Witch is dead," rejoiced Lt. Col. Henry Arnold, a battalion commander in the 101st Airborne, based near the Syrian border. "The capture of Saddam Hussein will have a tremendous negative impact on the Baathist insurgency, and it is all good news for us and the future of Iraq." He predicted that most of the former regime elements, or FRE, active in the insurgency now would be demoralized. "I believe that the majority of the FRE will melt away and begin to reintegrate into normal society."

"I think this puts a nail in the coffin of hopes that the Baath Party could ever regain control of Iraq," an Army general said. "There is no longer any central figure around whom such a movement could coalesce."

Indeed, in the next few weeks the U.S. military obtained the best information it had seen in months. "The peak was in the December timeframe after we took down Saddam and captured him," Gen. Sanchez said in a legal statement given later. On Christmas Eve, Fadhil Mohammed Ahmed, who was believed to be commanding former members of the regime in launching attacks in Baghdad, turned himself in. (He actually had to go to four U.S. checkpoints before finding a soldier willing to take him into custody, said an Army officer.) January and February 2004 were good times for U.S. military intelligence, recalled one senior officer. "We were rolling up the Baathists," he said. "We had them on their heels in Diyala and al Anbar"-the provinces flanking Baghdad on the east and west. At one point some five hundred insurgent fighters pet.i.tioned for amnesty, he said, and ringleaders were putting out feelers for surrender.

This might have been the moment for a political opening to the Sunnis, capitalizing on the stunning capture by reaching out to wavering enemies, said an Army intelligence officer who was based in Anbar at the time. "I think we missed an incredible opportunity to bring the Sunnis into the fold during that December-January time frame," he said. "A lot of infrastructure spending and a push to reach out to religious and tribal leaders could potentially have changed the course of the war."

But neither the CPA nor the Bush administration was inclined to offer reprieves, recalled the first officer. "That was the great missed opportunity," he said with palpable regret.

At the time Sanchez was hearing rea.s.suring reports from subordinate commanders. The number of attacks appeared to be dwindling. The 4th ID's Maj. Gen. Odierno contended that the back of the insurgency was broken. "The former regime elements we have been combating have been brought to their knees," he told reporters. "Capturing Saddam was a major operational and psychological defeat for the enemy." He described the insurgency as "a fractured, sporadic threat, with the leadership destabilized, finances interdicted, and no hope of the Baathists' return to power." There were just a "handful of cells" left fighting in his area, the northern and eastern parts of the Sunni Triangle, he said. In terms of reconstruction, he added, "we see constant improvement. And so it is getting better.... [W]e are making significant progress." He even offered a time line: "I believe within six months you're going to see some normalcy. I really believe that."

In al Anbar province, the 82nd Airborne's Swannack was almost as optimistic. "We have turned the corner, and now we can accelerate down the straightaway," he told reporters on January 6.

But even at the time of the capture, there were indications that the ultimate payoff wouldn't be as good as commanders hoped. "That was a very unpopular event in al Anbar province," recalled Keith Mines. "They didn't like to see the whole thing of checking his teeth on TV. They thought he should be handled with dignity." He emphasized this in his weekly update to Bremer, recording that he was seeing "outrage at how Iraq's former leader has been publicly humiliated."

Nor did the display of Saddam play well in other parts of the Arab world. "No Arab and no Muslim will ever forget these images. They touched something very, very deep," a Moroccan journalist named Khalid Jamai told Reuters, the news service. "It was disgraceful to publish those pictures. It goes against human dignity, to present him like a gorilla that has come out of the forest, with someone checking his head for lice."

Ultimately, the capture of Saddam would prove to be the prelude to a new, more determined phase of the war. It is possible that removing Saddam from the equation made it easier for some of the Iraqis who hated Saddam but also disliked the Americans to support the insurgency. "We are not fighting for Saddam," Ahmed Ja.s.sim, a religious student in Fallujah, said around this time. "We are fighting for our country, for our honor, for Islam. We are not doing this for Saddam."