Fiasco, The American Military Adventure In Iraq Part 15

Bremer talked to Sanchez about launching a vigorous attack, and soon the Marines got a call from Sanchez's headquarters. "Go in and clobber people" was the way one officer remembered it. Conway, the senior Marine in Iraq, wanted to hear the order from Abizaid, who told him the order had come from high up- that is, either Rumsfeld or the White House. "This is what the enemy wants," Mattis protested. He had been preparing to take Fallujah for months, but didn't want to do it this way-hastily, clumsily, acting in anger rather than with cool detachment. He was ordered nonetheless to get into Fallujah within seventy-two hours. He requested to see that order in writing, but didn't get it.

"Mattis wanted to do a police operation: 'Let's find out who did this, and get them; this is a city of three hundred thousand in which a few hundred people did something,'" said another Marine general. "The answer was: 'No, go in there with the power of a Marine division.' He argued against this. What would be the consequences of doing this? Mattis knew that the consequence of sending in a big conventional unit inevitably would be large amounts of damage."

Nor was a sudden movement a militarily effective way to operate. As a summary by retired Marine Lt. Col. Frank Hoffman put it, the Marines were ordered to attack "without time to insert human intelligence a.s.sets or sensors, conduct formal reconnaissance, add reinforcements, or shape the battle s.p.a.ce."

Conway, the senior Marine commander, later publicly said that he objected to how the attack on Fallujah was ordered. "We felt like we had a method that we wanted to apply to Fallujah: that we ought to probably let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge," he said as he prepared to leave Iraq a few months later. "Would our system have been better? Would we have been able to bring over the people of Fallujah with our methods? You'll never know that for sure, but at the time we certainly thought so." He wouldn't tell reporters where the attack order originated, only that he received it from Sanchez. "We follow our orders," Conway said.

So on April 5 the Marines launched Operation Vigilant Resolve. Almost exactly a year after the fall of Baghdad, the U.S. military was again engaged in a major offensive. First, small teams of special operators went in to try to capture "high-value targets," according to the Marine summary. Next came a full-scale a.s.sault carried out by about twenty-five hundred Marines from three battalions backed up by some tanks and other armored vehicles. It quickly became a grinding, toe-to-toe fight. The enemy was better prepared than the Marines had been told to expect. "Insurgents surprise U.S. with coordination of their attacks: coordinated, combined, volley-fire RPGs, effective use of indirect fire," the Marine summary states. "Enemy maneuvered effectively and stood and fought."

Over the course of several weeks, the intense fighting was occasionally interrupted by either ceasefires or agreements that broke down, and was followed by a new round of air strikes and the use of AC-130 gunships and Cobra gunship helicopters. In order to seal off the estimated twelve hundred fighters inside Fallujah, Mattis asked for more troops-the Army's theater operational reserve-and was turned down, Lethin recalled. So, he said, Mattis stripped out troops from elsewhere in Anbar: "We thinned out our forces in the west, and turned over part of our southeastern sector [to the Army] to concentrate our forces on Fallujah." One of the results, said Toolan, was that the Iraqi National Guard commander in the town of Mahmudiyah, on the main highway south of both Fallujah and Baghdad, "went over to the dark side" and wouldn't train his people anymore. Mattis also requested that he be given another regiment of several thousand Marines, plus a tank unit, according to a Marine officer. It isn't clear where that request died in the chain of command, but the fact that he asked and didn't get them casts doubt on the Bush administration's repeated insistence that senior commanders would get more troops any time they asked for them.

The fighting environment was unlike anything Marines had trained for, a group of Marine scout/snipers wrote in an after-action review. "The layout of the city is random," they reported. "Zones distinguishing between residential, business, and industrial are nonexistent."

The roadside bomb was the everyday weapon of choice for the Iraqi insurgency, but in battles such as First Fallujah it favored the RPG. Gunnery Sgt. Nick Popaditch, a tank commander, would recall facing this weapon in the April battle for Fallujah. "The first enemy RPG was a good one, taken from very close. It was so close that I felt the heat of its rocket propulsion in my face."

Later that day, attacking into the center of Fallujah, Popaditch was in an alleyway so narrow that he couldn't traverse the turret of his tank, but he was able to keep fighting with two machine guns. Standing in the hatch of his tank, he saw one fighter shoot at him with an RPG, but not the second shooter. "I heard a hiss about a split second before it hit me," exploding inside the hatch. "I saw a bright flash of light and then nothing but blackness. I had been blinded [temporarily] in both eyes. It felt as though I had been hit in the head with a sledgehammer so I stood back up. I couldn't hear anything except a dull static-like humming in my ears. I knew at the time that it was an RPG that had hit me. I couldn't see anything so I reached up and felt my face. It was a wet and gooey feeling. My first concern was to get the tank moving out of what was obviously a bad place for it to be."

Popaditch's crew members drove the tank back to the Marines' defensive line. He focused on staying awake. Once inside Fox Company's perimeter, he climbed to the top of the turret. "When they started treating me, I knew I was safe, and I knew my family would never see a picture of me hanging from a train trestle somewhere," he said later.

As medics worked on Popaditch, mortar rounds began to hit nearby. "The corpsmen who were treating me took off their own body armor and piled it on top of me to protect my wounded body." He awoke later in darkness, sedated after his right eye had been removed. "Where am I?" he asked.

"You're on a plane to Germany, dude," came an answer out of the dark.

Popaditch also was on his way to a new life: He would receive the Silver Star for his actions, be medically retired from the Corps, and then enroll in college with the ambition of becoming a high school teacher.

A two-front war As Fallujah ground on in early April 2004, and the fighting spread to nearby Ramadi, the broad middle of Iraq, from Mosul in the north to Baghdad to Najaf in the south-central area, began to spin out of control.

On April 9, 2004, Bruce Hoffman, a Rand Corporation terrorism expert who had been consulting at the CPA, was leaving the country at the end of a four-week visit. "We had three incidents on the way to Baghdad's airport, and then heard a huge explosion while we were there-it was the attack on the convoy that got Thomas Hammill." Hammill was a truck driver taken captive in one of the worst incidents involving contractors of the entire war. A twenty-six-vehicle convoy bringing an emergency shipment of jet fuel from the big U.S. base at Balad to the Baghdad airport was ambushed five miles short of its destination. PFC Jeremy Church, a National Guardsman who was a Wal-Mart security guard in civilian life, was driving for the convoy commander, Lt. Matt Brown, when he noticed that all the Iraqi cars and trucks on the highway had disappeared, leaving the Americans alone after what had been heavy traffic. A moment later a fusillade of small arms fire hit the convoy, including a bullet that knocked Brown's helmet from his head. Brown's left eye popped out of its socket and his brain began to bleed and swell. A bomb blew out a tire in the truck, but Church drove on the bare rim until he came to a base operated by a unit of the 1st Cavalry Division. He then helped organize a relief column to head back into the kill zone to rescue the survivors of the ambushed convoy, an act for which he received the Silver Star. Six drivers had been killed-some by rocket-propelled grenades, others by small arms fire, and others apparently by flames. Huge plumes of black smoke were visible for miles. Two Army soldiers on escort duty also were killed, and one was taken captive.

Around this time, Dan Senor, Bremer's spokesman, vowed at a Green Zone press conference, "We will not allow this country to head down the path toward destabi-lization." But even as he said it, it seemed like that was precisely the course Iraq was on. It was an unusual press conference, conducted in a big, formal meeting room, upholstered with an orange carpet, and featuring a soldier in battle fatigues and body armor carrying an automatic weapon and surveying the a.s.sembled reporters.

In addition to Fallujah and Ramadi, the U.S.-led coalition lost any semblance of authority in several other south-central cities, most notably in Najaf and Kut. The ability of armed U.S. forces to operate routinely in much of the rest of central Iraq diminished. The major difference from the previous nine months or so of fighting was that for the first time, even as the Sunnis were fighting in Fallujah and Ramadi, a Shiite militia was attacking across a broad area. The forces of Moqtadr al-Sadr, the rabble-rousing radical Shiite cleric who strongly opposed the U.S. presence, would take a different approach than the Sunnis, who had been doing the bulk of the fighting for many months. Just thirty years old, Sadr was the son of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq Sadr, who had been a.s.sa.s.sinated along with two of his sons in Najaf in 1999, presumably on the order of Saddam Hussein. Sadr puzzled U.S. officials, who judged him an awkward, unintelligent young man who, they calculated, could be neglected into obscurity. That view tended to underestimate the power that Sadr's populist strain of Shiism derived from nationalist sentiments. Unusually for a Shiite, Sadr's posters tended to feature the Iraqi flag, which also was flown by his followers at demonstrations.

U.S. authorities repeatedly planned to confront Sadr in 2003, leading to one of the many arguments between U.S. civilian and military leaders in Iraq. "We had a couple of operations laid down in the fall of '03 to take him out, and they got called off by CPA very shortly before execution" of the plans, said a U.S. military intelligence officer. This is just one of the many murky areas in the history of the U.S. occupation, where the buck is pa.s.sed with surprising frequency. Bremer states in his memoir of his time in Iraq that he wanted to arrest Sadr but was held back by Rumsfeld and the CIA.

"We were prepared to act," said a senior Army officer in Iraq. "We were almost there. Then we were throttled back. Due to pol-mil issues, we were told to hold off-'timing's not right.'" Instead, the U.S. military monitored the state of Sadr's militia and conducted what it called shaping operations-basically, broadcasts and leaflets-to try to diminish Sadr's influence. The militia was purchasing lots of AK-47s but not the larger caliber weapons that were thought to be necessary for anyone planning to take on the U.S. military, a senior Army officer in Iraq said a few weeks later. In addition, the militia appeared to be under strict orders to avoid confrontations with U.S. forces. Sanchez was said to be skeptical of the need to confront Sadr directly.

Sadr's weekly newspaper, al-Hawza, al-Hawza, kept up its attacks on the U.S. occupation during the fall and winter, kept up its attacks on the U.S. occupation during the fall and winter, bremer follows in the footsteps of saddam bremer follows in the footsteps of saddam, one of its headlines charged in late February. As best as can be determined, Bremer was appalled by a rampage conducted by Sadr's militia against Gypsies living in southern Iraq and, impatient with Sanchez, took the nonmilitary steps available to him. In late March he used his civil authority to shut down Sadr's newspaper. A few days later he ordered the arrest of Sadr's top deputy, Mustafa Yaqoubi, who was believed by U.S. intelligence to be the brains behind the thirty-year-old cleric. U.S. Special Operations troops apprehended Yaqoubi in Najaf before dawn on April 3-again, it isn't clear who gave them the order-and turned him over to Iraqi police. The next day a warrant was issued for Sadr's arrest.

U.S. intelligence a.n.a.lysts in Baghdad calculated that Sadr, cut off from his best adviser, likely would respond with riots and a few attacks but nothing that would last long. "You think it will spike, emotionally, for forty-eight to seventy-two hours," the senior Army officer said a few weeks later, alluding to an intelligence forecast of three to four days of angry demonstrations. "We did not antic.i.p.ate it would go to the level it did." During most of the U.S. occupation there had been around 200 incidents a week aimed at U.S. and allied forces. That had increased to 300 just once, during the Ramadan offensive in early November 2003. But the occupation forces had never seen a spike like the one in the spring of 2004- about 280 incidents in the last week of March, then about 370 in the first week of April, then 600 in the second week.

The U.S. intelligence a.n.a.lysis soon was proven dramatically off base. "I and my followers of the believers have come under attack from the occupiers, imperialism, and the appointees," Sadr said in a Friday sermon in Kufa, a town just outside the holy city of Najaf. "Be on the utmost readiness, and strike them where you meet them." What followed that battle cry grew into the most widespread fighting U.S. forces had seen since the invasion a year earlier, as Shiite fighters engaged the occupation forces for the first time. That night gunmen killed Kufa's police chief, Col. Saeed Tiryak. Four Salvadoran soldiers were caught by a mob, and one was murdered when rioters placed a grenade in his mouth and pulled the pin. The next day the police chief for Mahmudiyah, a small town just south of Baghdad, was shot to death along with his driver while pa.s.sing through a traffic tunnel in the capital. Witnesses said those attackers were dressed in police uniforms. Meanwhile, in Mahmudiyah itself, six other gunmen killed another police officer.

Eastern Baghdad erupts In Sadr City, the Bronx-sized slum that forms Baghdad's eastern third, a reconnaissance patrol of soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division, which was just rotating into Iraq, ran into groups of armed fighters from Moqtadr al-Sadr's Mahdi army and was pinned down and isolated overnight. At the same time, Sadr's fighters took over all seven police stations in the sector. Eight U.S. soldiers were killed and fifty-one wounded in heavy fighting before they were rescued the next morning. Several hundred Iraqi fighters were believed killed in the encounter.

"We have had full-scale combat ops for two weeks, and the days are running together," the commander of the 1st Brigade of the 1st Cavalry, Col. Robert "Abe" Abrams, said later in the month, as he reviewed his operations. "This is not what anyone thought was going to happen." Those first few days were the most intense, he said, listing the different sorts of actions: "Defense in sector, attack in zone, movement to contact, some raids, some cordon and search. It's more intense than any CTC [Combat Training Center] rotation I've ever had." That was a striking comment, because in those maneuvers, Army trainers aimed to concentrate the experience of combat, condensing weeks of incidents into just a few days. Mortar sh.e.l.ls pounded Col. Abrams's main base, with a record of seventy-five rounds landing on May 9, 2004, recalled Dennis Steele, a reporter for Army Army magazine who was embedded there. "Back then, there was a fifty-fifty chance of a patrol making enemy contact within two hundred meters of the front gate, and the chances increased the farther it went into Sadr City," he later wrote. magazine who was embedded there. "Back then, there was a fifty-fifty chance of a patrol making enemy contact within two hundred meters of the front gate, and the chances increased the farther it went into Sadr City," he later wrote.

Like the Marines in Fallujah, Army soldiers began to develop a new respect for their foe. "The Mahdi army fought very courageously and demonstrated good tactical patience, waiting to engage until we were within effective range of their weapons systems," Capt. John Moore wrote later in describing the fighting in Sadr City. "Once battle is joined, Mahdi army elements demonstrated incredible commitment to recover their casualties and equipment."

Next to erupt were Karbala, Basra, and Nasiriyah, three of the most important cities in the south, with attacks on police stations and government offices. This was followed by a wave of kidnappings of foreigners perceived by Iraqis to be working with the occupation-not only Americans, but also Israelis, South Koreans, Russians, Chinese, and others. Sadr focused the firepower of his Mahdi army not on U.S. troops but on their local allies in the police and fledgling Iraqi military.

The Iraqi army refuses to fight Monday, April 5, also brought the second big surprise of this time: Not only were the enemy fighters better than U.S. military intelligence had thought, the Iraqi allies were worse. As the Sunni and Shiite revolts threatened to merge, American leaders decided to put the new Iraqi army to the test. As the a.s.sault on Fallujah began, commanders ordered an Iraqi battalion to go help the Marines there. It was the first time the U.S. military had sought to involve the newly formed postwar Iraqi army in its major combat operations, and it led to major disappointment. To the chagrin of U.S. commanders, the 620-man 2nd Battalion of the Iraqi Armed Forces refused to join the battle.

The trouble began when the unit was in a convoy to Fallujah-a Sunni stronghold-and to its surprise found itself under fire in a Shiite neighborhood in northwest Baghdad. Six members of the unit were wounded, two seriously. An American soldier from a patrol that came to the aid of the convoy was killed. A crowd of Shiites gathered and surged at the convoy, which then retreated to its post on a former Republican Guard base in Taji, a town north of the capital. American advisers then hoped to have the unit helicoptered to Fallujah, but so many of the Iraqi soldiers refused to go that the plan was abandoned almost as soon as it was hatched. Of a total of 695 soldiers on the rolls, 106 had deserted and another 104 refused. All the Iraqi interpreters attached to the unit-more than a dozen-also quit, one of the Iraqi battalion's Marine advisers said in an interview.

"We did not sign up to fight Iraqis," the troops said, according to Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton. When the 2nd Battalion had graduated from training camp on January 6, Rumsfeld had hailed it as a major part of the future of Iraq. Gen. Sanchez had attended the graduation ceremony and said, "We are now into the accelerated period of providing Iraqi security forces, and these soldiers look very proud, very dedicated. I have high expectations that in fact they would help us bring security and stability back to the country."

In an interview in his office in a palace in the Green Zone one steamy April afternoon a few days later, Eaton, a former chief of infantry training for the U.S. Army, said his review of the situation had found a series of problems. One was that the Iraqi troops were not informed about their actual role; they were to be given the relatively benign a.s.signment of operating checkpoints, but they a.s.sumed they were being hurled into the middle of a b.l.o.o.d.y fight, battling on the side of Americans against fellow Arabs. In intense discussions back at their base, Eaton added, "We could not move them off that mark."

Complicating communications, he said, was that the battalion had ten new U.S. advisers who had rotated into their jobs April 1, just four days before the incident, replacing the advisers who had trained the unit for months. This was a violation of the longtime principle that when training a foreign force, the advisers accompanying it into battle should be familiar and trusted. "The point is training and advising and a.s.sisting in combat," said a veteran Special Forces officer. "It takes a lot of rapport building to gain the trust of the Iraqis to work alongside our forces."

Instead, the new advisers were Marines who treated the Iraqis as if they were raw recruits at boot camp. This was not the best course in a culture that places an extraordinary premium on personal dignity, especially in interacting with distrusted foreigners. "We treated them like recruits, green as June gra.s.s," Staff Sgt. Andrew Garcia told Bing West. "We rolled them out at zero five hundred [5:00 a.m a.m.] for physical training, then spent the day drilling in infantry basics. We got in their faces, we screamed, the usual routine, gave them back their self-respect a little at a time." Garcia had come to Iraq directly from being a drill instructor at the Marine boot camp on Parris Island, South Carolina.

The near mutiny was a setback for the Marines' plans for Fallujah. "The demonstrated unreliability of Iraqi security forces has precluded us from putting an Iraqi face on our operations in Fallujah," the Marine battle summary later noted. "The desertion of the 2nd NIA [New Iraqi Army] battalion, reported as the best in the NIA, has significantly reduced our flexibility and diminished the possibility that we can do so."

Even more troubling, it also was a strategic failure for the entire U.S. approach in Iraq, which hinged on developing a new Iraqi security force that could take over from U.S. troops. "That was stunning," recalled a veteran Army planner who had served in Iraq for most of 2003 and into early 2004. "It was the first real attempt to use Iraqi forces, and it just flopped." There was a worrisome political dimension to the situation, as well: When push came to shove, Iraqis had found it difficult to stand alongside their occupiers. "The lines are blurring for a lot of Iraqis right now, and we're having problems with a lot of security functions right now," Gen. Eaton said.

The refusal also revealed major flaws in the U.S. training effort. Some Iraqi police and soldiers felt let down by the U.S. effort to train and equip them. A subsequent report by the General Accountability Office (GAO), the congressional watchdog agency, found that in March 2004, the provisioning of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps was "months behind schedule," with the result that "no Iraqi Civil Defense Corps units possessed body armor, and many were using Saddam-era helmets for protection." In addition, as of late April, many units were still awaiting the delivery of the most basic equipment-uniforms, helmets, vehicles, radios, rifles, ammunition, and night-vision gear. "A multinational force a.s.sessment noted that Iraqis within the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps felt the multinational force never took them seriously, as exhibited by what they perceived as the broken promises and the lack of trust of the multinational force," the GAO report stated.

For all these reasons-the blurring of loyalties, American failure to properly outfit their would-be allies, and Sadr's concerted attacks on police in Shiite areas- Iraqi security forces collapsed in several cities. Almost three thousand police officers left the rolls in just one short period, the week of April 17. At about the same time, twelve thousand troops deserted the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, according to the GAO. In western Iraq, about 82 percent left; in Baghdad, about 50 percent; farther to the north and south, about 30 percent quit.

"No single mission is more important than security, and no Iraqi popular desire is clearer than that this mission be done by Iraqis," wrote Anthony Cordes-man, a respected defense a.n.a.lyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an independent Washington think tank, in a.s.sessing the training of Iraqi security forces. His verdict: "The U.S. has been guilty of a gross military, administrative and moral failure."

Less often spoken was the distrust that many U.S. officers developed of the Iraqi security forces. U.S. officers believed that many officers were in league with the insurgency, or at the very least were so fearful of it that they cooperated with it. As one Marine put it to a friend, "Any Iraqi officer who hasn't been a.s.sa.s.sinated or targeted for a.s.sa.s.sination is giving information or support to the insurgents. Any Iraqi officer who isn't in bed with the insurgents is likely already dead."

CSIS's Cordesman concluded in a spring 2005 a.s.sessment of the Iraqi insurgency, "Dual loyalty and HUMINT penetration of Iraqi security and military forces may be the rule, rather than the exception."

Through all these mistakes, said retired Gen. John Keane, the former number-two officer in the Army, "we lost about a year, to be frank about it," in training the Iraqi military. It had been a very expensive lesson, in both blood and money.

"Take f.u.c.king Vienna!"

The fighting in Fallujah was fierce, and surprisingly widespread, involving not just the city but the roads leading to it. That created quiet concern about supplies: Insurgent attacks had reduced the Marines to just two days' worth of some critical goods.

On April 7, a Marine supply convoy run by a twenty-five-man platoon was south of Fallujah when it was surprised by a sophisticated, half-mile-long ambush that began with a volley of RPG fire followed by mortar sh.e.l.ls. Then approximately ten machine guns opened up from bunkered positions, according to Marine doc.u.ments. The Marines, following their training, attacked into the ambush, killing twenty-six enemy fighters out of an estimated total of forty to sixty. One Marine was killed and six others were wounded, four severely. Marines involved in the action were awarded five of the nation's highest medals-one Navy Cross and four Silver Stars.

"We'll get Fallujah under control," Abizaid vowed in an interview on April 8. But the next day the order came down to stop. It isn't really clear where the order came from. Some Marines believed it had come from the White House. One former State Department official said on background that he thought it was ordered by Bremer, who, despite his lack of authority over military operations, was worried that the Fallujah battle was destroying support for the occupation within Iraq.

So on April 9, the first anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, the Marines found themselves implementing a unilateral ceasefire. "We were relatively close to seizing the final objectives," Col. Toolan remembered.

Mattis was furious. Thirty-nine Marines and U.S. soldiers had died-for what? "If you're going to take Vienna, take f.u.c.king Vienna!" he snarled to Gen. Abizaid, updating a famous comment made by Napoleon Bonaparte. Abizaid only nodded, Mattis recalled.

Mattis believed he had the enemy on the ropes and was within a few days of finishing them off. The insurgents lacked bunkers and ammunition. They weren't able to get additional supplies through the cordon the Marines had thrown up around the city. He went out to see Toolan, operating from a command post in Jolan, a neighborhood in northwest Fallujah. "He was very frustrated," recalled Toolan. "It was hard for him to tell me. He didn't understand why we were told to stop."

"It was like going in half-a.s.sed and then running away," said another Marine general. "They hadn't thought about the consequences. It was the same as the way they went to war, and the same way that Bremer operated."

For another two weeks, the Marines stood by, expecting to go back into the city. But then, after a series of quiet conversations among the U.S. government and its allies, word trickled down to the Marines that the White House thought that resuming the attack could shatter the coalition. Bremer told Abizaid that the Fallujah attack was threatening to fracture Iraqi support for the American presence.

"If you're not confused," Mattis told Bing West on April 26, "then you don't know how complex the situation is."

But the Marines had no uncertainty about their unhappiness with the outcome. As Lethin, the division operations officer, noted, "Our job was not to be emotional. Our job was to put lipstick on that pig as best we could."

Fallujah in enemy hands The end of the first battle of Fallujah was one of the lowest points of the entire U.S. military effort in Iraq. "Most of Fallujah is returning to normal," President Bush a.s.serted on April 28, after a series of aerial bombardments. It was a stunningly inaccurate statement. Not one of the objectives of the Marine attack had been achieved. The attack order, as stated in a Marine briefing, was to "capture/kill the murderers of the coalition contractors while conducting offensive operations ... to restore law and order and build long-term stability." The desired end state, as stated in that briefing, was to make it impossible for terrorists to destabilize the city again. When the fight ended, the murderers had not been apprehended and law and order had not been restored. What's worse, in the following weeks it would become painfully clear that it was the murderers of the contractors who enjoyed free rein in the city, not the Marines. "We turned the city over to the Fallujah Brigade-which was made up of people we'd been fighting against," said Toolan.

It was a moment that would have been comic were it not so tragic. The Fallujah Brigade was created as a fig leaf for the U.S. withdrawal. When told that the city would be controlled by this new Iraqi organization, Abizaid is said to have called Bremer and asked, "'Why did you create the Fallujah Brigade?" In his memoir Bremer reports that his own reaction to the creation of the brigade was "What the h.e.l.l is going on?" In fact, the brigade had been cooked up between the CIA and the Marines as a way of ending the political standoff over the city. "The MEF [Marine Expeditionary Force, the senior Marine headquarters in Iraq] came up with the idea, and floated it to CJTF, and they approved it," Lethin later said with evident regret. "My opinion, that was hiring the inmates to run the asylum."

It soon became clear that the members of the Fallujah Brigade had far more in common with the insurgents than they ever would with the Marines. The Iraqi officer chosen to lead the brigade, Ja.s.sim Mohammed Saleh, a former commander of a brigade of the old Republican Guard, entered Fallujah wearing the green uniform and red beret he had worn as a major general in Saddam Hussein's army. When authorities learned more about his background-Bremer's spokesman, Dan Senor, said much later that "Saleh oversaw the slaughtering of five thousand" Shiites in Karbala in 1991-they removed him from the position. But that was just a face-saving move. The fact was that the U.S. military had stopped fighting, withdrawn from the city, and left it to the other side.

Gen. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, attempted to put a good face on this strange outcome. "I'm going to try to set the record straight," he proclaimed during a Sunday morning interview on Fox News. "The reporting to date has been, let me just say, very, very inaccurate. Here are the facts." The situation was being controlled by commanders on the ground-"primarily them, not us here in Washington"-he said, somewhat surprisingly, given the reports from senior Marine commanders that they were ordered from the highest levels first to attack and then to unilaterally cease fire. More brazenly, he portrayed the creation of the Fallujah Brigade as just one more step in the "Iraqification" of security. "You know, we want Iraqis to do this work, and that's-this is a microcosm of what we want to happen all over Iraq." The members of the brigade were "Iraqis that have shown up that want to be helpful. If they can be helpful, fine."

But as was often the case in his public explanations and discussions of this war, the chairman's comments had only a loose relationship with the realities of Iraq, where there was little dispute that the outcome in Fallujah represented a setback for the U.S. cause, and most certainly wasn't something commanders wanted to replicate elsewhere. The arrangement was a "stunning victory" for the insurgency, charged a memo written by Nathaniel Jensen, a State Department diplomat attached to the CPA. As for the Fallujah Brigade, he added, "I strongly doubt it will work."

"I looked Iraqis in the eye, and they were thinking, 'We can get rid of these guys,'" recalled a Special Forces veteran who was working on security issues. "That was the day we lost the initiative. The Iraqis realized that they could kick our a.s.s-that they had the option to bring the fight to us."

"This turn of events represented a political victory for the insurgents," wrote Ahmed Hashim, the expert on the Iraqi insurgency at the U.S. Naval War College. "The United States had backed down, and, more important, had negotiated with the enemy. It also was a military victory: the insurgents had fought the Americans to a standstill."

"We won," agreed an Iraqi insurgent in Fallujah.

It wasn't long before the Fallujah Brigade became indistinguishable from the insurgency. Wearing their old Iraqi army uniforms, some of its members, far from being "helpful," began shooting at Marines based on the eastern edge of the city. The U.S. military said it considered the brigade to be disbanded. The eight hundred AK-47s issued to the brigade wound up in the hands of insurgents, as did some heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, U.S. officers said.

Fallujah, which the Marines had hoped to make a showcase for how to fight smarter and better in Iraq, instead had become an international rallying point for anti-American fighters. "In June, after we had turned everything over to the Fallujah Brigade, Fallujah was like a siren, calling to the insurgents," said Toolan, commander of the 7th Marines. "It was like the bar in Star Wars" Star Wars" All summer long, he said, foreign fighters poured into the city. All summer long, he said, foreign fighters poured into the city.

The fighting in the area wore on quietly for months. It reverted to the previous pattern of U.S. raids and occasional air strikes on the one hand, and insurgent car bombs, sniper firings, and mortar attacks on the other. Both sides knew that another big battle was looming. The insurgents dug 306 fighting positions in Fallujah, many of them well-constructed bunkers rigged with explosive b.o.o.by traps. "There were constant probing actions, attacks, attempts to move weapons caches," Toolan recalled. By late summer, when it became clear that it would take a major battle to pacify the city, the Marines pulled back and waited for the U.S. presidential election campaign to conclude. They were determined not to fight half a battle again, and some in the military thought the next round would be so ugly that it shouldn't be waged until after the election was past. The experiment of the Fallujah Brigade was also p.r.o.nounced dead, with the Iraqi unit officially disbanded in early September.

Fallujah was emblematic of what would be a Sisyphean year for U.S. troops. There would be two battles for Fallujah, two for Najaf, a running battle in eastern Baghdad for much of the year, and finally an effort to retake Samarra, which was thought to have been pacified in 2003 by the 4th Infantry Division, but had again grown unruly. Also at this time, the fighting in Baghdad involved both Sunni insurgents, who were fighting in the western part of the city, and Shiite fighters, mainly in Sadr City. At one point, the 1st Armored Division had troops engaged near Abu Ghraib, on the western outskirts of Baghdad, for seventy-two straight hours. "I've got to tell you, we've killed a lot of people carrying weapons and RPGs this week," Brig. Gen. Hertling, a deputy commander of the division, told the a.s.sociated Press. "And when I say a lot, I am talking in the hundreds."

Myers, as usual, managed to portray the spring explosion as positive. At a Baghdad press conference on April 15 he called it "a symptom of the success that we're having here in Iraq." With Lt. Gen. Sanchez at his side, he said, "I think it's that success which is driving the current situation, because there are those extremists that don't want that success."

Less than forty-eight hours later, the U.S. military closed long sections of two of the major highways running into Baghdad, saying the step was a necessary response to a series of attacks and bombings. Privately, U.S. commanders expressed concern about their supply lines. At one point, according to Bremer, a military officer at the CPA ordered that the Green Zone go on food rationing. "The guys in Baghdad were really concerned, and thought they'd have to evacuate Baghdad," recalled one general.

The incredible shrinking coalition The U.S.-led effort in Iraq stood on three legs: U.S. forces, Iraqi forces, and international forces. As a result of the wave of violence, the second leg and then the third began to crumble.

"We've got a huge coalition," President Bush had insisted in March 2003. "As a matter of fact, the coalition that we've a.s.sembled today is larger than the one a.s.sembled in 1991, in terms of the number of nations partic.i.p.ating." But the son's wasn't a solid alliance, based on common interests, as the father's had been, but rather a jerry-rigged series of deals that couldn't survive much pressure. Countries sent soldiers to Iraq as a political favor to the U.S. government, and except for the British contingent, that good turn didn't extend to getting them into combat. One CPA official recalled sitting at a meeting in March 2004 at which first Bremer and then Sanchez chewed out the Spanish commander, who was preparing to pull out, and who was making the case for cooperating with the militias. "Bremer dressed him down, and said, 'We don't talk to militias, they're illegal,'" this official recalled. (A few months later, after Bremer's departure, the U.S. military began not only talking to militias, but aiding and equipping some of them.) "Except for the Brits, they weren't there to fight," this CPA official recalled. "The Dutch did good patrols, on foot. The Italians only patrolled by vehicle.... The j.a.panese didn't patrol at all." In fact, he said, under their rules of engagement, which provided only for self-defense, the j.a.panese weren't permitted to secure their own perimeter and had to rely on the Dutch to do it. Nor did their rules allow them to come to the aid of others under attack. The Thai battalion's rules didn't even allow them to leave their camp near Karbala, said Army Col. Peter Mansoor, because they were in Iraq for humanitarian work that under current conditions couldn't be done.

Indeed, some coalition partners felt that they had been brought into the country under false pretenses-that is, signed up for a peacekeeping mission that partly through American bungling had deteriorated into combat. "We came for Phase IV-security and stabilization operations," said Lt. Gen. Mieczyslaw Bie-niek, the Polish paratrooper who commanded the multinational division operating in south-central Iraq. That was how his mission statement was framed to him. But, he added, "it has never happened.... All of a sudden, against our will, we find ourselves in the combat zone." That caught him in a bind: His parliament had forbidden him to conduct offensive operations, yet when he said that to U.S. officers, they treated him as if he were shirking his duty.

Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka was later scathing about the U.S.-led effort in Iraq. "It failed totally," he said at an international forum on nation building held in Sweden. "Many mistakes, major mistakes, have been committed."

This set of political circ.u.mstances made the coalition strategically vulnerable. Many troops in Iraq were deployed on the diplomatic understanding that they would not really be in harm's way-a condition that proved easy for the foe to challenge. When so attacked, the multinational units "lacked the cohesion needed to respond quickly to the uprising," Michael Knights, a defense a.n.a.lyst at the Washington Inst.i.tute for Near East Policy, noted.

In May 2004, Spain withdrew its contingent of thirteen hundred troops, which had made up a big part of Bieniek's multinational division. Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua also pulled out their small contingents, totaling about nine hundred people. During that summer, the Philippines left after a Filipino contractor in Iraq was taken hostage. Hungary left at the end of the year, and the Netherlands and Ukraine withdrew in 2005. Poland, Bulgaria, and Italy, probably the three strongest European supporters of U.S. policy in Iraq, also in 2005 announced plans to leave eventually.

To a surprising degree, the rump coalition consisted of veterans of the Warsaw Pact. Of the thirty-one countries that would remain as troop-contributing nations by the fall of 2004, more than half were former communist states, and more than one third hadn't existed as sovereign nations when the United States fought the first Gulf War. (Those eleven recently born states were: Azerbaijan, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Slovakia, and Ukraine.) Some of the other, older nations were trivial players on the global stage-among those listed on the State Department's official internal list of coalition partners were Albania, El Salvador, and Tonga. Altogether, the troop contribution of the thirty-one coalition partners amounted to less than twenty-four thousand. The real "coalition of the willing" that was in Iraq was the one of international jihadists flocking to Iraq to fight the Americans, tartly commented Marine Col. Hammes. "These are people willing to fight."

The thin green line Because of the pervasive hostility of the population in much of central Iraq from Mosul to Najaf, U.S. troop levels felt thin. The official line was that there were adequate numbers, but privately many commanders said they lacked enough soldiers for the mission, and that they had to move units around and leave gaps that were soon filled by insurgents. One of the hard-earned lessons of 2003 and the spring of 2004 was that the most dangerous form of presence was being intermittent. Moving a unit in, spending a few weeks, and then moving it elsewhere tended to identify allies-a town's mayor, its police chief, local interpreters-and then leave them vulnerable to attack. When those allies were left exposed and then killed, or intimidated into supporting the insurgency as they often were, the net of the entire U.S. military movement was a loss. Yet U.S. commanders tended not to see the killings of Iraqi allies as tactical setbacks, and still would boast that they had never lost an engagement in Iraq.

"We need to send significantly more troops and equipment," Larry Diamond wrote in a memorandum to national security adviser Rice on April 26, 2004, shortly after the conclusion of his tour at the CPA. "In my weeks in Iraq, I did not meet a single military officer who felt, privately, that we had enough troops. Many felt we needed (and need) tens of thousands more soldiers, and at this point (within the limits of the possible) at least another division or two"-that is, at least an additional fifteen thousand to thirty thousand troops.

U.S. forces in Baqubah, a dusty town that is a forty-five-minute drive northeast of Baghdad, were fighting pitched battles in April 2004 with Shiite militiamen but lacked sufficient forces to see whether some of those fighters were driving up the highway from Baghdad's Sadr City slum, forty-five minutes to the south. "We've had reports of busloads of armed guys coming up from Baghdad, but we didn't have the combat power to check it out," said Maj. Kreg Schnell, the chief intelligence officer for the Army brigade based outside Baqubah.

As a stopgap, in mid-April thousands of troops from the 1st Armored Division and other units that had been in Iraq for twelve months had their time in the country extended. Some were just hours from leaving Iraq when they were told they'd be staying for another few months. But they took the news with surprising equanimity. Many soldiers in one battalion credited their commander, Lt. Col. John Kem, for handling the situation in a reasonable way. When he got the word on April 9, he immediately called all the soldiers in the unit into formation and spoke to them. "There were a few hysterics, a few tears," recalled Kem. He told them to take a day to wallow in their unhappiness and then to put it behind them. This approach helped the unit avoid the morale problems that plagued the 3rd Infantry Division in June 2003, when its postwar tour in Baghdad was unexpectedly extended. Back then, the grumbling was so bad, with soldiers denouncing President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, that orders were issued to shut up.

Also, a year on the ground in Iraq had brought a new realism to the troops' a.s.sessments of the situation. Few expected overnight solutions anymore, as many troops had in Iraq during the spring of 2003. "It's going to have to be a permanent presence here," Lt. David Dake of Savannah, Georgia, said one morning over a breakfast tray of scrambled eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, pancakes, and cake, all prepared and delivered by the contractor Kellogg Brown & Root. "We're going to be here a long, long time." As Dake's hearty morning meal indicated, the soldiers were also enjoying a considerably better quality of life than the 3rd Infantry had the previous year, when its stay in the rubble of Baghdad was extended.

The battalion's base on an island in the Tigris also felt surprisingly safe, with a moatlike lake on one side and the broad river on the other. Located just above the northernmost of the thirteen bridges spanning the river in Baghdad, the base was. .h.i.t by a mortar sh.e.l.l or two on most nights, but no one had ever been killed by those attacks, which were minor compared to those at many U.S. bases. The troops also had hot showers and big television sets showing a variety of American news, sports, and entertainment programs. For hunger pangs between meals, a snack bar served kabobs and cheeseburgers. Each of the Internet cafes boasted fifteen to twenty terminals, which during the evenings were full and had waiting lines. One popular subject being researched: the cars the troops planned to buy with all the money they were saving while serving in Iraq. Capt. Michael Bairn, of Corpus Christi, Texas, commander of the battalion's Bravo Company, said many of his soldiers had saved ten thousand to twenty thousand dollars over the previous year-and now would get one thousand dollars a month bonus pay for each of the three months of their extended duty. On a bulletin board at the battalion headquarters a sign read dilbert of the day: the key to happiness is self-delusion. dilbert of the day: the key to happiness is self-delusion.

The unit made it look easy, but it wasn't. Turning the 1st Armored Division around and throwing it back into the fight required extraordinary feats of leadership and logistics management. When the order came down to stay in Iraq for an additional ninety days, after it already had been there for one year, the division was well into its redeployment. More than seven thousand of its soldiers already had left the country, and about half of its major pieces of equipment were in Kuwait. Even more significant, in preparation for leaving, the division had drawn down its supplies of ammunition and other consumable commodities. "By April 8, almost all stockpiles were gone," Maj. Martha Granger, an officer in the division's support command, later wrote.

The most profound cost to the 1st Armored Division was that during the additional three months it would spend in Iraq it would lose more than forty soldiers.

A small hard war The feel of the war changed in the spring of 2004, both politically and tactically. In May, for the first time, a majority of Americans polled-51 percent- said the war wasn't going well, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. That was double the percentage in January. At the same time 53 percent of those polled favored keeping U.S. troops in Iraq until it had a stable government. In the spring of 2004 it also became common to see U.S. troops having their blood types inked into the cloth of their helmet covers.

In early April the insurgency offensive hit Baqubah, just northeast of Baghdad. "You knew it was coming," recalled Capt. Oscar Estrada, a member of the 415th Civil Affairs Battalion, who was working at the CPA office in downtown Baqubah. "The tension was in the air." An intelligence a.n.a.lyst had said to expect an attack at 1:00 p.m p.m.-that is, 1300 on the twenty-four-hour military clock. As a cautionary step, he recalled, all Iraqi workers were asked to leave the CPA office, and Iraqi National Guard soldiers still there were disarmed. "They weren't too happy about it." Sure enough, at precisely 1300, a "crump"-like boom of a mortar sh.e.l.l impacted. Then several more hit. For once, Estrada thought with perverse satisfaction, the intelligence had been good.

Iraq felt different after that April offensive, he recalled. He brought an unusual background to his Army position as a civil affairs officer-he specialized in working with local government and with relief groups to coordinate humanitarian operations and other services. Born in Nicaragua, he had studied international relations at the University of California at Berkeley, where he also had joined ROTC. "I always thought that military service was part of being a man and a good citizen," he said later. He then spent eight years in the Foreign Service before leaving to attend the University of Michigan's law school, which he had almost completed before being called to active duty and sent to Iraq. It was his second major deployment, having served in Kosovo earlier. He was a thirty-six-year-old reservist captain with a decidedly independent point of view.

He arrived in Iraq in February 2004. "Back in February, you'd get IEDs, but there weren't that many direct attacks. In February, there were areas you could go to that after April you wouldn't go in without a company"-that is, perhaps 120 infantrymen. When the insurgency launched its offensive in April "it was just a shock. It was like a movie, with constant indirect fire-mortars, bombs, artillery, even a helicopter went down. The April attacks just changed everything. I think it changed the att.i.tudes of soldiers. And it emboldened the enemy. For the units that arrived in the spring, it put them into a warrior mentality. It was a full-out war. Everything was allowed. I remember a company commander saying on the net that he didn't have room to maneuver an Abrams tank. The battalion commander said, 'Park it in the house, just park it in the house.' It was like World War II."

As a civil affairs officer who focused on the local population, Estrada thought that harsh tactics like that were profoundly unproductive. "I felt like we were falling into a trap-getting suckered into going out and provoking people into joining the insurgency." His views crystallized one day in early May on a mission to nearby Buhriz to a.s.sess the state of that city's water treatment plant. He took down all the information about the town's daily requirements for potable water, and its need for a working pump and high-capacity filters. Then he asked about security. "The treatment plant manager tells me that his biggest threat is coalition soldiers, who shoot up the compound whenever the nearby MP station and government building are attacked. He shows me the bullet holes and asks, 'Why?'" The plant caretaker then tugged on Estrada's sleeve and took him to his father, who described being beaten by American soldiers when he was detained. Estrada felt a "wave of shame" as he left the caretaker's hut.

That night he stayed up late in his office in Baqubah and wrote a summary of his views as an a.s.sessment that could be included in his commander's daily "sitrep," or situation report, for higher authorities. Three months of confusion and frustration poured out. He thought about an incident a few weeks earlier on a road east of Baqubah the soldiers called RPG Alley. The groves of date palms along the road provided insurgents with hiding places from which to fire their rocket-propelled grenades. When a unit ahead of them in a convoy reported taking fire from one such grove, he recalled, everyone began firing-automatic weapons, grenades, and .50 caliber heavy machine guns.

"What the h.e.l.l are we shooting at?" he had screamed at a buddy as he fired his M-16.

"I'm not sure," the soldier had responded. "By that shack. You?"

"I'm just shooting where everybody else is shooting," Estrada had said, continuing to squeeze off rounds.

When the firing ended, he heard the commander on the radio. "Dagger, this is Bravo 6. Do you have anything, over?"

"Roger____ We have a guy here who's pretty upset. I think we killed his cow, over."

"Upset how, over?""He can't talk. I think he's in shock. He looks scared, over." "He should be scared. He's the enemy.""Uhm, ahh, roger, 6.... He's not armed and looks like a farmer or something." "He was in the grove that we took fire from. He's a f.u.c.king bad guy." "Roger."

Estrada wondered what was gained from that minor incident, and what was lost. "Did his family depend on that cow for its survival? Had he seen his world fall apart? Had we lost both his heart and his mind?" Fundamentally, Estrada was asking himself whether the U.S. Army should be in Iraq, and if so, whether it was approaching the occupation of Iraq in the right way. "I was beginning to come to terms with serious doubts about our cause," he later said, "and whether even if I accepted that our cause was just, our day-to-day actions did anything to champion it."

The insurgents get smarter . . .

One of the most striking aspects of the fighting in the spring of 2004 was the increasing sophistication of insurgent tactics. "We started to lose visibility of the enemy in the March, April, May time frame," Sanchez said later, in a statement given in legal proceedings related to the Abu Ghraib scandal. "In the March, April, May time frame when the fighting was heaviest, we were having a h.e.l.l of a time figuring out what his organizational structures were, how he was conduct- ing operations and how the heck it was that he was managing to do the things he did to us in April, where it was some very coordinated, synchronized operations."

He added: "What happened to us in April was a major effort on the part of the Saddam loyalists.... They cut our LoCs [lines of communication] by coordi- nated attacks on bridges_____ So in the April time frame, the enemy significantly stepped up their activity to the point where we experienced the higher number of attacks in the last 18 months."

The new tactics of the enemy were notably on display when the 1st Infantry Division moved south to Najaf, into what had been the area covered by the faltering multinational division led by the Poles, to confront Sadr's militia. It was the single biggest operation conducted by the U.S. military since the invasion of Iraq a year earlier.

At midnight one warm April night, one of the big convoys prepared to leave Baqubah-where fighting was still going on-for Najaf. Sgt. James Amyett, a scout from Searcy, Arkansas, sat on the hood of a Humvee and faced a cl.u.s.ter of soldiers who stood around him in the dark. "We're going south," said Amyett, whose intensity made him appear older than his twenty-three years. "We go out from the front gate and straight through RPG Alley. There's going to be shooting. I guarantee it. There's a ninety-nine percent chance we're going to get hit. If they shoot, kill them. Shoot them in the f.u.c.king face." He looked at the two soldiers who would man the .50 caliber machine guns atop the two Humvees. "Gunners, controlled bursts," he ordered, meaning that they should not fire indiscriminately, and should conserve ammunition. "If a gunner gets. .h.i.t, roll out of the way so a guy can jump up and keep it rocking. No hero bulls.h.i.t." In a firefight, he said, "keep it simple. Just squeeze the trigger and kill the f.u.c.kers."

At 2:19 a.m a.m. on a Monday morning, the forty-four-vehicle convoy rolled out through the maze of bomb barriers at the front gate of the base near Baqubah. The parade comprised not just tanks, Humvees, and Bradley fighting vehicles, but many of the more exotic parts of the U.S. Army inventory, such as the new Stryker armored vehicle, huge portable bridges, and special trucks for carrying M-l Abrams tanks. The convoy was scheduled to take six hours, but the cautious Amyett warned his men that it could take twice that long.

Sgt. Maj. John Fourhman, a forty-six-year-old grandfather of seven from Columbus, Georgia, pointed at a cl.u.s.ter of palm trees along the side of the road. "This is the gauntlet," he said, a frequent launching pad for rocket-propelled grenades.