Fiasco, The American Military Adventure In Iraq Part 4

"In specific numbers, I would have to rely on the combatant commander's exact requirements," Shinseki replied, obeying the military protocol of deferring to the responsible commander-in this case, Gen. Franks. "But I think-"

"How about a range?" Levin interrupted.

"I would say that what's been mobilized to this point, something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers, are probably, you know, a figure that would be required." His reasoning, he added, was that Iraq was a large country with multiple ethnic tensions, "so it takes significant ground force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment to ensure that people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this."

Shinseki didn't know it, but that exchange-virtually the only discussion of Iraq in a hearing that focused more on mundane issues of military force structures and budgets-would be the most remembered public moment of his four years as chief of staff of the U.S. Army. His comments were not greeted warmly by his civilian overseers at the Pentagon. White, the Army secretary, recalled being told by Wolfowitz that Shinseki had been out of line. "He was not happy that we had taken a position that was opposed to what his thinking on the subject was."

Wolfowitz told senior Army officers around this time that he thought that within a few months of the invasion the U.S. troop level in Iraq would be thirty-four thousand, recalled Riggs, the Army general then at Army headquarters. Likewise, another three-star general, still on active duty, remembers being told to plan to have the U.S. occupation force reduced to thirty thousand troops by August 2003. An Army briefing a year later also noted that that number was the goal "by the end of the summer of 2003."

When Wolfowitz was on the Hill two days later he slapped down Shinseki's estimate. "There has been a good deal of comment-some of it quite outlandish- about what our postwar requirements might be in Iraq," he told the House Budget Committee. "Some of the higher end predictions that we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark." His reasoning, he explained, was that "it is hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army-hard to imagine."

In an intellectually snide aside, he also said that "one should at least pay attention to past experience." Bosnia, Wolfowitz maintained, wasn't the proper precedent to study. "There has been none of the record in Iraq of ethnic militias fighting one another that produced so much bloodshed and permanent scars in Bosnia," he said. Rather, one should look to the far more benign environment of Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq. At any rate, Wolfowitz said, he had met with Iraqi Americans in Detroit a week earlier. Based on what he had heard about Iraq from them, he said, "I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators, and that will help us keep requirements down." So, he concluded, "we don't know what the requirements will be. But we can say with reasonable confidence that the notion of hundreds of thousands of American troops is way off" the mark."

In keeping with this extraordinarily optimistic a.s.sessment, Wolfowitz also would a.s.sert that same day that oil exports likely would pay for much of Iraq's postwar reconstruction. "It's got already, I believe, on the order of $15 billion to $20 billion a year in oil exports, which can finally-might finally be-turned to a good use instead of building Saddam's palaces," he told the House Budget Committee. "There is a lot of money there." He repeated the point a month later to another congressional committee, saying that Iraq "can really finance its own reconstruction." As for an administration official who had told the Washington Post Washington Post that the war and its aftermath could cost as much as $95 billion, Wolfowitz said, "I don't think he or she knows what he is talking about." (By mid 2006, the cost of the war, counting the expenditures in Iraq of all parts of the federal government, would be close to triple that.) that the war and its aftermath could cost as much as $95 billion, Wolfowitz said, "I don't think he or she knows what he is talking about." (By mid 2006, the cost of the war, counting the expenditures in Iraq of all parts of the federal government, would be close to triple that.) The Army wasn't buying the optimism. Retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, who had led the U.S. peacekeeping forces into Bosnia, forecast that spring that the occupation would take 200,000 troops-almost exactly the troop total in much of 2004-5, if to the 150,000 U.S. personnel there are added 20,000 private security contractors and 30,000 allied soldiers.

The debate was far more than a technical squabble about troop numbers. Andrew Bacevich observed that Shinseki's comments amounted to a broad attack on Wolfowitz's entire approach to the Middle East. "Given that the requisite additional troops simply did not exist, Shinseki was implicitly arguing that the U.S. armed services were inadequate for the enterprise," Bacevich wrote in the American Conservative. American Conservative. "Further, he was implying that invasion was likely to produce "Further, he was implying that invasion was likely to produce something other than a crisp, tidy decision_________ 'Liberation' would leave loose ends. Unexpected and costly complications would abound. In effect, Shinseki was offering a last-ditch defense of the military tradition that Wolfowitz was intent on destroying, a tradition that saw armies as fragile, that sought to husband military power, and that cla.s.sified force as an option of last resort. The risks of action, Shinseki was suggesting, were far, far greater than the advocates for war had let on."

That subtext about the nature of military force and the wisdom of using it in Iraq may have been one reason the effects of the exchange between Shinseki and Wolfowitz were so far reaching. The message the top bra.s.s received in return was that the Bush administration wasn't interested in hearing about their worries about Iraq. "There were concerns both before we crossed the line of departure and after," said one four-star general, looking back much later. "There was a conscious cutting off of advice and concerns, so that the guy who ultimately had to make the decision, the president, didn't get the advice. Well before the troops crossed the line of departure"-that is, invaded Iraq on March 20,2003- "concern was raised about what would happen in the postwar period, how you would deal with this decapitated country. It was blown off. Concern about a long-term occupation-that was discounted. The people around the president were so, frankly, intellectually arrogant," this general continued. "They knew knew that postwar Iraq would be easy and would be a catalyst for change in the Middle East. They were making simplistic a.s.sumptions and refused to put them to the test. It's the vice president, and the secretary of defense, with the knowledge of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the vice chairman. They did it because they already had the answer, and they wouldn't subject their hypothesis to examination. These are educated men, they are smart men. But they are not wise men." that postwar Iraq would be easy and would be a catalyst for change in the Middle East. They were making simplistic a.s.sumptions and refused to put them to the test. It's the vice president, and the secretary of defense, with the knowledge of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the vice chairman. They did it because they already had the answer, and they wouldn't subject their hypothesis to examination. These are educated men, they are smart men. But they are not wise men."

This senior general said he had come to believe that this disinclination to listen to the doubters would go on to help create the insurgency. By refusing to consider worst-case scenarios, the Pentagon's civilian leaders didn't develop answers to questions about how to conduct an occupation or what to do with the Iraqi army if it were dissolved. "It's almost as if, unintentionally, we were working with Zarqawi to create the maximum amount of chaos possible," he said, referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist who operated in Iraq and affiliated himself with al Qaeda.

At the time Pentagon officials publicly played down Shinseki's comments, claiming he had been mousetrapped into making them. But a month later, when the Army chief was again on Capitol Hill, he was asked about them again. Yes, he told the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, he stood by his estimate of the occupation force that could be necessary in postwar Iraq. "It could be as high as several hundred thousand," Shinseki said. "We all hope it is something less."

Wolfowitz's slapdown of Shinseki echoed for months across the military, said Sen. Jack Reed, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who as a young man had served in the 82nd Airborne. "Not only was he honest, but he turned out to be right," Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, noted two years later. "He was treated very poorly. I think it's had a chilling effect, very destructive, corrosive."

Inside the uniformed military, officers kept quiet, at least publicly. But their private unhappiness ran deep. A few weeks before the war began, one civilian deeply involved in Army affairs meditated on this sad situation. "There is so much disdain in the services right now for OSD that it has just been reduced to, 'f.u.c.k you, whatever you want, we don't.' If OSD ordered the Navy to build another carrier, the Navy would say it wanted sail power." It was not a healthy state for a military establishment to be in on the eve of war.

Myers: Iraqis will lead us to the WMD In early March, not long before the war began, Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, met with reporters for a breakfast in a plush meeting room in a downtown Washington hotel a few blocks from the White House. Like Cheney, Myers played the secret intelligence card. Some of the inside information about Iraq's WMD had been revealed by Powell in his United Nations speech, Myers said, "but there are things you can't reveal because then your sources and methods are compromised, and in some cases, people get hurt."

No, he conceded in response to a reporter's question, we don't know where the WMD are. But he wasn't worried, he added, because he was confident the Iraqis would lead American troops to the weapons stockpiles soon after the war began. "They're playing a giant sh.e.l.l game right now. That sh.e.l.l game, with forces on the ground, would come to a halt." At that point, "people will come forward and say, 'Here's where this is, here's where that is.'"

That, the nation's top military officer said, was what the war would be all about. "The ultimate objective isn't Saddam Hussein," he explained. "The ultimate objective is to ensure that Iraq doesn't have chemical or biological weapons."

Rumsfeld was similarly emphatic when interviewed by Al Jazeera, the Arabic satellite television news channel. "I would like to put it to you straight away," began Al Jazeera's Jamil Azer. "The issue between you, the Bush administration, and Iraq is not weapons of ma.s.s destruction. It is for you, how to get rid of Saddam Hussein and his regime."

The defense secretary could not have been clearer in his response. "Well, wrong," he said. "It is about weapons of ma.s.s destruction. It is unquestionably about that."

And on that issue, the Bush administration would go to war with rock-hard certainty. The last word on the issue on the eve of hostilities would be the president's: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

The planning for postwar Iraq stumbles On February 21 and 22, 2003, Garner convened experts from across the U.S. government to discuss postwar Iraq. The session was notable because, according to partic.i.p.ants, it was the sole occasion before the war when all the warring factions within the U.S. government met. The official attendance list carries 154 names, but attendees remember many more. "This was the only time the interagency really sat down at the operator level with policy presence and discussed in detail the activities each of the pillar teams had planned," recalled Col. Hughes, now retired but then on active duty. "Folks were seated on windowsills and standing in the aisles."

Among those present, according to the official attendance list, were Bill Luti and Abram Shulsky from Feith's policy office in the Pentagon, Elliot Abrams from the National Security Council, Eric Edelman and others from Cheney's office, and, in the Central Command contingent, Brig. Gen. Steve Hawkins, the chief of Phase IV planning for that headquarters. There also were representatives from the CIA and DIA, the Treasury and Justice departments, and the British and Australian governments. At twenty-five members, the group from State was nearly the equal of the Pentagon delegation, which came from a variety of civilian and military offices.

The problems were clear. The group had been set up "far too late," according to exhaustive notes taken by one official at the meeting. There weren't enough troops in the war plan "for the first step of securing all the major urban areas, let alone for providing an interim police function." Without sufficient troops "we risk letting much of the country descend into civil unrest, chaos whose magnitude may defeat our national strategy of a stable new Iraq, and more immediately, we place our own troops, fully engaged in the forward fight, in greater jeopardy." The meeting concluded that security "is far and away the greatest challenge, and the greatest shortfall. If we do not get it right, we may change the regime, but our national strategy likely will fall apart." This issue of having sufficient troops to meet minimum requirements had been brought to Rumsfeld, "who has yet to be convinced."

What's more, the note taker wrote, "The humanitarian, reconstruction and civil affairs efforts will be tremendously expensive." That conclusion stood in direct contrast to the public statements of the Bush administration.

Of all those speaking those two days, one person in particular caught Garner's attention. Scrambling to catch up with the best thinking, Garner was looking for someone who had a.s.sembled the facts and who knew all the players in the U.S. government, the Iraqi exile community, and international organizations, and had considered the second- and third-order consequences of possible actions. While everyone else was fumbling for the facts, this man had a dozen binders, tabbed and indexed, on every aspect of Iraqi society, from how electricity was generated to how the port of Basra operated, recalled another partic.i.p.ant.

"They had better stuff in those binders than the 'eyes only' stuff I eventually got from CIA," said a military expert who attended.

"There was this one guy who knew everything, everybody, and he kept on talking," Garner recalled. At lunch, Garner took him aside. Who are you? the old general asked. Tom Warrick, the man answered.

"How come you know all this?" Garner asked.

"I've been working on it for a year," Warrick said. He said he was at the State Department, where he headed a project called the Future of Iraq, a sprawling effort that relied heavily on the expertise of Iraqi exiles.

"Come to work for me on Monday," Garner said. Warrick did.

But it wouldn't be as easy to keep him. Garner, a straightforward old soldier, didn't realize that he had walked into the middle of a running feud between the State Department and the Defense Department. There were multiple points of friction. Powell and Rumsfeld didn't seem to get along, or even be able to address their differences. There were deep disagreements between them over Iraq, and those ran down into their departments. Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, came to believe that one reason Rumsfeld's office wanted to invade Iraq with a relatively small force was "because they wanted to disavow the Powell doctrine" of using overwhelming or decisive force in military operations.

Aides at each department used the media to take potshots at the other. "A country that has its own major agencies at war is not going to fight a war well," said Dov Zakheim, who was a Vulcan-one of Bush's advisers on national security policy during the 2000 presidential campaign-and later the Pentagon's top financial officer. "And State and Defense were at war-don't let anyone tell you different. Within policy circles, it was knee-jerk venom, on both sides. Neither side was prepared to give the other a break. It began in 2001, got exacerbated during the buildup to Iraq, and stayed on." The split began at the top, but extended down to the "working level," Zakheim said, of "people who had to work with, and trust, each other-and they didn't."

So while the task and stakes facing Garner were huge-certainly the future of Iraq, possibly the future of the Mideast, perhaps that of U.S. foreign policy in the region, perhaps the future of the Bush administration-he found himself focused instead on sniping inside the Bush administration, at Warrick and others he was recruiting. Apparently there was some sort of ideological test they had failed, but it was all very mysterious to Garner, even to the extent of exactly who was administering the exam.

A few days later Garner briefed Rumsfeld on the state of his planning. The briefing slide on the Iraqi army stated that it would be "necessary to keep Iraqi army intact for a specified period of time. Serves as ready resource pool for labor-intensive civil works projects." As the meeting was breaking up and aides were leaving, Rumsfeld took Garner aside and said he had an issue he needed to discuss privately. He walked over to his desk and took out some notes, which he reviewed for a moment, Garner recalled. He then looked up and said, according to Garner, "You've got two people working for you-Warrick and [Meghan] O'Sullivan- that you need to get rid of."

"I can't, they are smart, really good, knowledgeable," Garner protested.

Rumsfeld said it was out of his hands. "This comes from such a level that I can't do anything about it," he said, according to Garner. That could mean only one thing: The purge had been ordered by someone at the White House, and not just from some underling on the staff of the National Security Council. Garner felt his group, just getting off the ground, was being hamstrung. Worried and upset, he went to see Stephen Hadley, the low-key deputy to Condoleeza Rice at the NSC. Again he was faced with a senior official telling him it was out of his hands. "I can't do anything about it," Hadley told Garner.

Garner then had one of his staffers call around national security circles in the government to find out what was going on. "He was told the word had come from Cheney," he recalled.

When Powell got word of the ouster of Warrick and O'Sullivan, he called Rumsfeld and asked, "What the h.e.l.l is going on?" Rumsfeld responded that the work of postwar planning had to be done by people devoted to the task who supported the policy The tug-of-war over Garner's personnel picks never really ended. "Anybody that knows anything" was removed, Armitage said later. "They didn't like Warrick and Meghan [O'Sullivan], because they were both inconvenient-you know, wanted the facts to get into the equation. These were not people who stood up for the party line, that we'd be welcomed with garlands. We b.i.t.c.hed about it, and all Rumsfeld said was, 'I got the higher authority.' And he didn't say whom. Well, not many higher."

Garner to Feith: "Shut the f.u.c.k up or fire me"

On March 11, Garner met the media at the Pentagon for a backgrounder, which meant he spoke under ground rules that allowed reporters to identify him at the time only as a senior defense official. Among the principles he laid down for postwar Iraq was that an obtrusive U.S. role would be short and the Iraqi army would continue to exist. "We intend to immediately start turning some things over, and every day, we'll turn over more things," Garner said. "I believe that's our plan." As for the Iraqi military, "a good portion" would be useful to work in the reconstruction of the country. "We'd continue to pay them. Using army allows us not to demobilize it immediately and put a lot of unemployed people on the street." The overall duration of the U.S. presence, he said, would be short. "I'll probably come back to hate this answer, but I'm talking months."

Each and every one of these statements was destined to be reversed just eight weeks later, when Garner would be succeeded in mid-May by Amba.s.sador L. Paul Bremer. But the comment that got Garner in trouble that day in the Pentagon wasn't any of those. Rather, it was his repeated denial of any intention to give a role to Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. When specifically asked about working with the group the Iraqi exile had formed as the putative core of a new government, Garner was dismissive. "I think you're going to see a lot of people putting forth groups," he said. Nor, he said, was he seeking to hire INC members for his humanitarian operations.

The undersecretary of defense for policy was livid with him afterward for his att.i.tude toward Chalabi, Garner recalled. "Feith loved him." One day during planning sessions, "Feith spent an afternoon extolling the virtues of Ahmed Chalabi. He said, trying to show how good Chalabi was, 'You know, Jay, when you get there, we could just make Chalabi president.'" (Many in the uniformed military had a different view of Chalabi. "I never liked him, and none of my a.n.a.lysts ever trusted him," said a military intelligence official.) After the briefing Feith summoned Garner and shouted at him over the disrespect shown Chalabi. "You've ruined everything, how could you say this?" Feith said, according to Garner.

"Doug, you've got two choices," Garner remembers responding. "You can shut the f.u.c.k up, or you can fire me." Garner thought afterward that Feith had settled for the first of the two options. But he also was told that he wasn't allowed to speak to the media, even on background. One result was that over the next several weeks, relations between his group and a frustrated press corps worsened notably. And then, by mid-May, he would find out that Feith and others at the Pentagon essentially had settled on option two.

The next day Garner took his whole staff out to Fort Meade, a sprawling Army base in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, for training in the use of pistols, maps, and other military basics. Two days later, as the training was ending, Rumsfeld called and asked for a final briefing. It was a Friday, and the Garner group was leaving for Kuwait on Sunday.

Garner went down to the Pentagon on Sat.u.r.day, March 15. "What are you going to do for de-Baathification?" Rumsfeld asked, according to Garner.

Garner saw two possibilities. Either the locals will have killed the most offensive Baathists, or over time, the locals will point them out. So, Garner said, his plan was to remove just two people in each ministry and major government office-the top Baathist and the chief personnel officer. "Well, that sounds fine with me until we get you a policy," Rumsfeld responded.

Garner also reviewed with the defense secretary his plans for dealing with famines, epidemics, and oil fires-the problems he expected to face upon arrival in Iraq. At the end, Rumsfeld appeared uneasy, Garner recalled. "I'm very uncomfortable with this," the defense secretary told Garner.

Garner was almost speechless. "This is a h.e.l.l of a time to tell me," he said. "I'm leaving tomorrow."

No, said Rumsfeld, I'm not objecting to your perspective on the likely problems. "It's not the plans, it's the people," he said, according to Garner. There were too many outsiders, too many State Department types. "I think we should have Defense Department people."

Rumsfeld was replicating in microcosm with Garner nit-picking he had done with Franks over the war plan. There the numbers had been tens of thousands, but here the issue was just a few dozen people. Garner said it was simply too late to rejigger the staff. Instead, Rumsfeld exacted a promise that on the long airplane ride to Kuwait, Garner would review his roster and see if any last-minute subst.i.tutions could be made.

Even then, Feith and his aides didn't give up. A week later, Garner recalls, one of them, Ryan Henry, called him in Kuwait with a list of Defense Department picks for Garner's staff. "When are they gonna be here?" Garner asked. Henry, an a.s.sistant in Feith's policy office, said he didn't know. Well, said Garner, I'm going to be in Baghdad in a couple of weeks.

Three days later, Henry called him again. "There's a little glitch in that list," he said.

"The whole G.o.dd.a.m.n list is a glitch," snarled Garner.

"Well, the White House wants to put in some of their own people," Henry said, according to Garner. The result, he said, was that some staff members didn't appear in Baghdad until the end of May-an absence that may have helped undercut the U.S. presence during the crucial transitional period.

Meanwhile, he said, the continued squabbling between Defense and State made Garner's staff feel unsupported, even beleaguered, as it prepared for its mission. "That DoD fighting with the State Department-that caused all sorts of despair on the team," Garner said.

One day while Garner and his team were still waiting in Kuwait to head into Iraq, Col. Hughes was told to go out to the airport to pick up Lawrence Di Rita, a brash ex-Navy officer who was one of Rumsfeld's closest aides, and who was being sent out to Iraq more or less as the personal emissary of the defense secretary. For Hughes, who was working on long-term strategy for Garner, it was an opportunity to get the inside skinny from someone familiar with the thinking at the top. So as they were driving on the broad freeway back down into Kuwait City, heading toward the Kuwait Hilton, Hughes brought up the subject. I'm putting together a strategy paper for postwar Iraq, and would welcome your input, he said.

Don't bother, he recalled Di Rita responding. "Within 120 days, we'll win this war and get all U.S. troops out of the country, except 30,000," Di Rita said, Hughes recalled. Di Rita also told him that the office of the secretary of defense "viewed Haiti, Kosovo, Bosnia, and even Afghanistan as failures, and this wasn't going to be their failure."

The next morning they had breakfast together. "Look," Hughes said, "this is the good, the bad, and the ugly." The good was the hard work Garner's group had done. The bad was that there was going to be a war. "But the ugly is the shenanigans that are going on inside the Beltway between State and Defense." Di Rita just stared down into his eggs and didn't respond, Hughes recalled.

"That was the last real conversation I ever had with him," Hughes added.

Di Rita, for his part, remembered the conversations differently. First he flatly denied that the conversation had occurred. "I never said anything approaching what he says I said," he insisted in a telephone interview. "It is false." Later, in a face-to-face interview, he said that before arriving in Kuwait he visited Centcom's headquarters in Qatar, where he had heard much discussion of quick troop reductions. "I may have repeated some of that thinking when I got to Kuwait," he said.

The Unified Mission Plan drawn up by Garner and his staff during that period in Kuwait was surprisingly clear-eyed. It began with the statement, "History will judge the war against Iraq not by the brilliance of its military execution, but by the effectiveness of the post-hostilities activities." Nor did it expect a free ride: "The potential for instability is likely to exist for some time after the war is over. The most probable threat will come from residual pockets of fanatics, secessionist groups, terrorists and those who would seek to exploit ethnic, religious, and tribal fault lines."

Yet at the same time, Garner had a short-term conception of his task that seems to have led him to underestimate it. He seemed to think he faced simply a larger version of Provide Comfort, the 1991 relief operation in the north, said a U.S. government official who was involved both in that earlier effort and in the U.S. occupation in 2003. "That was a big mistake-it was not going to be a big Provide Comfort," this nonmilitary official said. When Garner was told that he needed a large and well-designed information management system, he would respond, "If it's not useful in two weeks, we don't want it; our time is short, and this job's going to be over quick."

Experts' prewar concerns about postwar Iraq In the messy aftermath of the invasion, the Bush administration tended to dismiss critics as "Monday morning quarterbacks." That phrase conveniently disregarded the fact that many of the critics had expressed their worries before the war even began, in part because of the accounts they were hearing from insiders at the Pentagon and in Garner's organization.

"I don't see a lot of operational risks in the front end," Frank Hoffman, a consultant to the Marine Corps who is steeped in military history, said on March 12.

"I think the larger risks are the length and costs of post-Iraq stability operations and the opportunity costs we will be incurring."

Likewise, retired Col. John Warden, one of the Air Force's brightest strategists since the Vietnam War, wrote the same day in an e-mail, "Biggest risk by far is strategic and is in the post-war period. When the British took over after WWI from the Ottomans, they found themselves being a.s.sa.s.sinated from almost the first day and saw the whole area in open rebellion within a year.... What do we do when small bands of fanatic Muslims start creeping across the border from Iraq, Syria, or Saudi Arabia?" The bottom line, he added, was that the United States faced a "very high risk from the strategic side with years of difficult and very expensive occupation."

"What will be the reaction in this country when/if nothing much is discovered regarding WMD?" asked Daniel Kuehl, a professor at the National Defense University, in an e-mail on March 10. Also, said Kuehl, an airpower expert who had been a planner in the 1991 war, "I think the course of the war itself will be measured in a few weeks, but the Reconstruction (upper case intended, as a comparison to our own 1865-76) will last years. It won't be a physical reconstruction so much as a political one."

Yet where the critics went off course was in predicting that domestic political effect of prolonged fighting in Iraq, the first sustained ground combat involving U.S. forces since the Vietnam War. Most of those who correctly envisaged a difficult occupation also wrongly foresaw that Bush's presidency would be severely hampered by that outcome, rather than sailing to reelection even as the Iraqi insurgents launched a fierce offensive. Nor were Bush's fortunes much damaged by the failure to find stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons. It may be that the Bush administration's misjudgment of the outcome in Iraq was balanced by its more accurate sense of the mood of the post-9/11 American public, which had suffered three thousand dead that day, and in the years that followed would prove more tolerant of military casualties and less sensitive about the reasons for going to war in Iraq than many experts expected.

On March 18, Rep. Ike Skelton sent a second letter to Bush. He still felt that he didn't understand what the president had in mind. Among other things, he was worried about "a ragged ending to a war as we deal with the aftermath." This time the White House sent two National Security Council staffers, Eliott Abrams and Stephen Hadley, to Capitol Hill to rea.s.sure Skelton. "They told me, 'It's going to be all right, Ike,'" he recalled, shaking his head slowly.

The Bush administration's official line of empty optimism would reach its nadir a few weeks later when Andrew Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, a.s.sured Ted Koppel on Nightline Nightline that the U.S. government's contribution to rebuilding Iraq would be just $1.7 billion. Koppel, incredulous, asked him if he was really suggesting that that number would be the total tab. that the U.S. government's contribution to rebuilding Iraq would be just $1.7 billion. Koppel, incredulous, asked him if he was really suggesting that that number would be the total tab.

"Well, in terms of the American taxpayers' contribution, I do, this is it for the U.S.," Natsios responded. Other countries would chip in. "But the American part of this will be $1.7 billion."

Koppel later returned to this question: It's going to be that number no matter how long it takes? Absolutely, said Natsios. "That is our plan and that is our intention," he said. Then, characteristically of the Bush administration at this time, he attacked those who said it would cost more. "These figures, outlandish figures I've seen, I have to say, there's a little bit of hoopla involved in this." (Oddly, six months later, Rumsfeld said he doubted that Natsios ever had said this: "He is administrator of AID, and he has to know that the total cost, to use your phrase, of reconstruction in Iraq is not 1.7, and I just can't believe he said that," the defense secretary said at a Pentagon press conference.) Since then, the American taxpayer has paid more than ten times Natsios's predicted figure, with no end in sight, to rebuild in Iraq. And that is before the cost of the continuing war-as of the middle of 2006, a total of about $250 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service, which includes expenditures by both the Pentagon and the State Department.

Heading north without a plan As war was about to begin, everything was ready except for one thing: a real war plan. The official view at the Pentagon is that solid planning was done. "The idea that the U.S. government had no plan for the aftermath of war is false," Wolfowitz insisted in July 2003. It was just, he said, that "every plan requires adjustment once conflict begins."

But many other partic.i.p.ants disagree, as-increasingly-do military historians who have examined the record. Lt. Gen. Kellogg was one of the senior members of the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, overseeing systems for the command and control of forces. "I was there for all the planning, all the execution" of the Iraq war plan, and then later served in Iraq. "I saw it all." But what he never saw was a real plan for Phase IV-that is, what to do after toppling Saddam Hussein's regime. "There was no real plan," Kellogg said. "The thought was, you didn't need it. The a.s.sumption was that everything would be fine after the war, that they'd be happy they got rid of Saddam."

Despite the many studies and briefings done, wrote Maj. Isaiah Wilson, who served as an official Army historian during the spring 2003 invasion and later as a strategic planner in Iraq, "there was no Phase IV plan" for occupying Iraq after the combat phase. While various offices had produced studies, he said in a paper later delivered at Cornell University, there was "no single plan as of 1 May 2004 that described an executable approach to achieving the stated strategic endstate for the war."

Marine Col. Nicholas Reynolds, an official Corps historian, agreed that he found nothing worthy of being considered a plan: "Nowhere in Centcom or CFLCC had there been a plan for Phase IV that was like the plan for Phase III, let alone all of the preparations that accompanied it, including the cross talk during its development, the many rehearsals of concept drills, and the exchange of liaison officers."

The reason for this omission, said Army Col. Gregory Gardner, who served on the Joint Staff and then was a.s.signed to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the U.S. occupation headquarters, as his last post before retiring, was that it was seen as unnecessary. "Politically, we'd made a decision that we'd turn it over to the Iraqis in June" of 2003, recalled Gardner. "So why have a Phase IV plan?"

Eclipse II, as the Army's plan for Phase IV operations was code-named, was founded on three basic a.s.sumptions, all of which ultimately would prove false. These were, according to an internal Army War College summary: * That there would be large numbers of Iraqi security forces willing and able to support the occupation. Or, as the War College's Strategic Studies Inst.i.tute put it in PowerPointese, "Availability of significant numbers of Iraqi military and police who switched sides."* That the international community would pick up the slack from the U.S. military-that is, "significant support from other nations, international organization, and nongovernmental organizations." It isn't clear what this a.s.sumption was based on, given the widespread and building opposition to the U.S.-led invasion.* That an Iraqi government would quickly spring into being, permitting a "quick handoff to Iraqi interim administration with UN mandate."A Rand Corp. study written in 2005 after a review of the cla.s.sified record noted in a matter-of-fact manner, "Post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction were addressed only very generally, largely because of the prevailing view that the task would not be difficult." It recommended that in future, to remedy such shortsighted thinking, "some process for exposing senior officials to possibilities other than those being a.s.sumed in their planning also needs to be introduced."

When a.s.sumptions are wrong, everything built on them is undermined. Because the Pentagon a.s.sumed that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators and that an Iraqi government would be stood up quickly, it didn't plan seriously for less rosy scenarios. Because it so underestimated the task at hand, it didn't send a well-trained, coherent team of professionals, but rather an odd collection of youthful Republican campaign workers and other novices. Nor did it send enough people. In part because of the poor quality and sheer lack of CPA personnel, the U.S. occupation authorities would prove unable to adjust their stance quickly when a.s.sumptions proved wrong. Because of that incompetence, the CPA would be unable to provide basic services such as electricity, clean water, and security to the Iraqi population, and so in the fall of 2003 it would begin to lose the lukewarm support it had enjoyed.

But on March 19, 2003, that unfortunate chain of consequences still lay hidden in the future. "I hope this thing goes down as fast as everyone thinks," Capt. Lesley Kipling, an Army communications officer on the staff of Col. Teddy Spain, the MP commander, wrote that night to her boyfriend, an Army captain back in Germany. But just in case, the small brown-haired female officer wrote as she sat in her tent near the Iraqi border, please put in the mail a new leg holster to hold her 9 millimeter pistol.

PART II.

BATTLE.

MARCH-APRIL 2003.

History will record that America's strategy for fighting terrorism was a good strategy, that the plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom was a good plan-and that the execution of that plan by our young men and women in uniform was unequalled in its excellence by anything in the annals of war," Gen. Franks a.s.serted in his memoir, American Soldier. American Soldier.

It now seems more likely that history's judgment will be that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 was based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history It was a campaign plan for a few battles, not a plan to prevail and secure victory. Its incompleteness helped create the conditions for the difficult occupation that followed. The invasion is of interest now mainly for its role in creating those problems.

In the spring of 2003 the U.S. military fought the battle it wanted to fight, mistakenly believing it would be the only battle it faced. This was a failure of thinking, and planning, and the first of several strategic missteps that would place the U.S. occupation of Iraq on a foundation of sand. "I like Rumsfeld," said one Air Force general. "I appreciate him. But he should have said to Franks sometime in 2002 that there was an error of omission" in the failure of the plan to consider how to consolidate the victory. "Looking back on it, it was the absolute wrong thing to do" to go to war with a half-baked plan, he said. "Once they made the decision that there would be a separate plan for the postwar, that was the mistake."

Others blame Franks for devising a plan that didn't link actions on the ground to the ultimate goal of the war. "It was a horrible war plan," said Washington Inst.i.tute for Near East Policy's Patrick Clawson, "because everybody was saying that you need to fight the war in such a way that you stand up a new authority afterward-and the war plan didn't have a depth of thinking about that." In military terms, there was a disconnect between the stated strategic goal of transforming the politics of Iraq and the Mideast and the plan's focus on the far more limited aim of simply removing Saddam Hussein's regime.

COBRA II, the ground component of the cla.s.sified U.S. war plan, began by flatly stating the intention of the nation in going to war: "The purpose of this operation is to force the collapse of the Iraqi regime and deny it the use of WMD to threaten its neighbors and U.S. interests in regions." The plan that follows that statement of intent is designed to achieve that relatively narrow goal. "The end-state for this operation is regime change," COBRA II states a few paragraphs later.

But the United States wasn't invading Iraq just to knock off a regime. "If the intent of operations in Iraq in 2003 was merely 'regime destruction,' which it was not, then the short, decisive warfighting operation of March and April 2003 might in itself have const.i.tuted success," Maj. Gen. Jonathan Bailey noted shortly after retiring from the British army in 2005. "In all other respects it might have been counterproductive."

A false startFittingly, a war justified by false premises began on false information.

Combat commenced on March 20, 2003, in Iraq-it was still the evening of March 19 in Washington, D.C.-with a volley of cruise missiles and bunker-penetrating bombs against Doura Farms, a group of houses sometimes used by Saddam Hussein located in a palm grove on the western bank of the Tigris in the southern outskirts of Baghdad. After the CIA received hot intelligence indicating that Saddam was there, Tenet rushed with the information to the White House, and the decision was made to accelerate the invasion plan. At the time, it was thought the air strike might have killed or wounded Saddam, but in fact he seems to have been nowhere in the area. The activity in the tree line that had excited the CIA that day likely was just the security guards and farmhands from DouraFarms. Sajad Ha.s.san, a guard at the main gate, said in an interview that everyone knew war was coming and that the U.S. bombing would target Saddam's palaces, so they had moved their families and most valuable possessions into the groves nearly a mile outside the walls of the compound. "We were d.a.m.ned sure the presidential palaces would be bombed," he said.

Richard Perle later concluded that the U.S. government had been fooled. "There is reason to believe that we were sucked into an initial attack aimed at Saddam himself by double agents planted by the regime," he would tell the House Armed Services Committee in April 2005. "This was, I believe, a successful intelligence operation by Saddam Hussein in which we were led to believe that he was in a certain location, and he wasn't there."

What followed on the U.S. side was a very conventional campaign designed as an attack by one state's military on another's, Maj. Isaiah Wilson later concluded. "It was a war focused operationally on the destruction of the Iraqi army- the state's warfighting capability-and destruction of the Hussein state apparatus," he wrote. In this sense, he added, it was effectively "a continuation" of the 1991 war.

The ground attack began at dawn on March 21, when it was still March 20 back in Washington, the reason some accounts differ on the date. The total U.S.-led invasion force consisted of fewer than three Army divisions, plus a big Marine division and a British division. Underscoring the relatively small size of the force, there were just 247 Army tanks in the force driving into Iraq from Kuwait, and about an equal number of Bradley fighting vehicles. The entire ground invasion force amounted to about 145,000 troops, including the British contribution- that is, well under half the size of the force that Gen. Zinni had called for in his Desert Crossing invasion plan. In March 2003 there was just one heavy Army division, the 3rd Infantry Division, plus a helicopter-rich light division, the 101st Airborne, and two infantry brigades (from the 82nd Airborne and a freestanding unit, the 173rd Airborne Brigade) plus some Special Operations units, for a total of about 65,000 troops. The Marine contingent added another 60,000, and the British 1st Armored Division some 20,000. They were attacking a weakened Iraqi military that was one-third the size it had been in 1991, but which still fielded about 400,000 troops and 4,000 tanks and other amored vehicles. More significantly, it would develop, the Iraqis also had in waiting tens of thousands of irregular fighters called fedayeen.

The 3rd Infantry Division-despite its name, it is a unit heavy in tanks and other armored vehicles-sprinted about 90 miles from the Kuwaiti border across the desert to An Nasiriyah, where it seized a key airfield and, even more importantly, some bridges over the Euphrates. After turning those key spans over to the Marines, the division turned left and charged northward along the western bank of the Euphrates, toward Karbala. The Marines secured the southern oil fields, then moved north and began crossing the Euphrates around Nasiriyah and attacking up into the land between the rivers. British armored forces, meanwhile, peeled to the right from Kuwait to besiege Basrah, Iraq's second biggest city. Much smaller numbers of Special Operations troops swarmed into the far west, where their mission was to prevent Scud missile launches against Israel, and into the north, where they linked up with Kurdish fighters.

It didn't take long for the Iraqi side to begin operating unconventionally. The first taste of what lay in store for the Americans in Iraq for the next several years came just over one day into the war, early on March 22, when Sgt. 1st Cla.s.s Anthony Broadhead, a platoon sergeant in the Crazy Horse troop of the 3rd Infantry Division's cavalry unit, the spearhead of the division, was looking out of a tank heading toward a bridge in As Samawah, a town 60 miles past Nasiriyah on the invasion route. He waved at a group of Iraqis. Instead of waving back, they began attacking with AK-47 rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars, riding at the American tanks in pickup trucks. "For the first, but not the last time, well-armed paramilitary forces, indistinguishable, except for their weapons, from civilians- attacked," recorded the Army's official history of the invasion. Another taste of the difficult future waiting for the United States in Iraq came several days later, when four U.S. soldiers were killed in Najaf in the first suicide car bombing of the war.