Fiasco, The American Military Adventure In Iraq Part 8

Some CPA officials maintained that it was the military's fault that the generals had been kept in the dark. They had told Sanchez's military headquarters in Baghdad about their plans, and the word simply wasn't pa.s.sed along from there. Yet not even everyone in the CPA thought that Bremer's radical privatization was the right course. "Employment is key issue," Keith Mines wrote two weeks later to CPA headquarters. What his province needed was more "Maslow" (a reference to the famed psychologist's hierarchy of human needs) and less "Friedman" (a reference to the influential free-market economist). He argued for a reversal of CPA economic policy, which should instead be built around "a large-scale public sector jobs program" akin to President Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era efforts.

The friction between the CPA and the military extended even to lower levels. "As a tactical commander, I never understood his [Bremer's] role, his relationship with Sanchez, what the role of the State Department was versus the Defense Department," said Col. Spain. "None of us understood it." That confusion was particularly difficult for Spain, who effectively was serving as the police chief of Baghdad for most of 2003, and so spanned both worlds. "Sometimes I'd be told that CPA wants the Iraqi police to do A, and then I'd be told that CJTF-7 wants the Iraqi police to do B."

Wolfowitz, asked several months later about the chain of command, blithely insisted that if anything, the problem was the opposite case. "Most of the complaints on that are that there is too much unity of command, with both Bremer and Abizaid reporting to the same guy"-that is, Rumsfeld-he said in an interview.

But even at the top of the reporting pyramid there appears to have been confusion. In a meeting in the White House situation room one day, there was a lot of "grousing" about Bremer, a senior administration official who was there recalled. As the meeting was breaking up, Rice, the national security adviser, reminded Rumsfeld that Bremer reported to him. "He works for you, Don," Rice said, according to this official.

"No, he doesn't," Rumsfeld responded-incorrectly-this official recalled. "He's been talking to the NSC, he works for the NSC."

Bremer relates a similar anecdote in his memoir, saying that Rumsfeld told him later in 2003 that he was "bowing out of the political process," which apparently meant he was detaching from dealing with Iraq-a breathtaking step for the defense secretary to take after years of elbowing aside the State Department and staffers on the National Security Council.

Col. Spain vs. the Baghdad police On a hot May day in downtown Baghdad, Col. Spain met with the senior police officers of Baghdad. They had the look of hard men. Just two months earlier they had been the sworn enemies of the American officers now summoning them to meetings.

He sat at a round table with them in a meeting room at the National Police Academy as flies buzzed in and out the open windows. It was 96 degrees. Spain talked about fuel, cars, pistols, radios, and patrols-the mundane issues that make policing work and bring security to a community. The police officials, some of them longtime Baathists, every one wearing the Saddam-like facial hair of a full black moustache and a shaved chin, seemed instead to be sizing him up. They said there was good reason the police weren't on the streets: They lacked weapons and were afraid of being attacked by both Iraqis and U.S. forces. "One of the traffic policemen was on his motorcycle this morning and was shot," said Maj. Gen. Kais Mohammed Naief, the head of traffic police. "This is the reason they don't feel safe."

Another official chimed in, "If he had a pistol, maybe they wouldn't have shot him!"

"Let's move on," Spain said. "I accept that there are cultural differences between the Iraqi police and the U.S. police. But I also think there are certain basic principles. One of them is that you must be out walking the streets, riding the streets."

An Iraqi looked back at him across the table, coldly. "But that is in normal times," he said.

After the meeting Spain strolled along the sidewalk of a middle-cla.s.s western Baghdad neighborhood, trailed by a couple of MPs. A year later, that would be a risky act, but in May 2003, Spain was able to stop and chat with shopowners, who said they wanted more security and more electricity. "America is so powerful, why can't it bring back the electricity?" asked Nahrawan Mahdi, a doctor at a women's clinic.

"Things are going to get better," Spain promised a furniture storekeeper.

Spain oversaw a big brigade-all told, including staff and support units, some 7,100 soldiers, as big as many German divisions in World War II. But he would say much later, after a tough year in Iraq, that he never really had the troops he needed. He ultimately received about twenty companies of MPs-but by then his mission required about fifty. He shrugged. "You can just sit around and wring your hands, or you can do the best you can with what you got." Over the next year Teddy Spain's MPs would be attacked 395 times and lose a total of 13 soldiers.

Abizaid calls it a war In July, Gen. Abizaid took over Central Command from Franks and instantly injected a note of realism, telling members of Congress and reporters alike that America was going to be dealing with Iraq for a long time.

As he took over, Abizaid was the Great Arab American Hope of the Army, widely seen as one of its smartest commanders, and also able to bring an in-depth knowledge of the Mideast. In their 1973 yearbook his West Point cla.s.smates described the Lebanese American cadet, who was raised in rural California, as "an Arabian Vince Lombardi______ He just couldn't accept second place." Later in the 1970s he studied in Jordan, and when the university was shut down by a student strike, he trained with Jordanian Special Forces. He also earned a master's degree in Middle Eastern studies at Harvard.

He also was known as a good troop leader. As a Ranger company commander during the 1983 invasion of Grenada, he needed to attack a Cuban-manned bunker, so he ordered one of his sergeants to drive a bulldozer toward it, and then had his men advance behind its cover. That improvised moment was memorialized in the climax of Clint Eastwood's 1986 movie Heartbreak Ridge Heartbreak Ridge-although Eastwood changed it to a Marine action because the Corps was more cooperative in helping him film. In Provide Comfort in 1991, Abizaid maneuvered his battalion aggressively yet deftly in northern Iraq.

As a general Abizaid quickly earned a reputation as a bright thinker and a competent, low-key manager. At the Pentagon in the early 2000s, he was one of the few in the military who seemed to be able to handle Rumsfeld. As director of Joint Staff, a key inside slot, he was one of two senior officers who led the way in easing the tense relationship between Rumsfeld's office and the uniformed military. The question after he took over Central Command was whether he would live up to the high expectations people had of him.

Abizaid faced some formidable tasks: Fight a war in Iraq; prosecute an offensive against terror in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and the rest of the region; and also help bridge the gap between the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz civilian leadership of the Pentagon and the estranged Army.

At the Pentagon in July, he used his first press conference as chief of Central Command to make a major course correction. Yes, he announced, we are indeed in a war in Iraq. "What is the situation in Iraq?" Abizaid said, addressing reporters at the Pentagon after meeting with Rumsfeld. Opponents of the U.S. presence, he said, speaking with precision, "are conducting what I would describe as a cla.s.sical guerrilla-type campaign against us." He then went on to use the word the Bush administration had been dancing around for weeks: "It's war, however you describe it." This went a long way toward clearing up the strategic confusion about what the U.S. military was doing in Iraq, and how it was doing it.

Asked to explain why he was calling it a war after weeks of hesitancy by Bush administration officials to do so, Abizaid said bluntly, "Well, I think that, you know, all of us have to be very clear in what we're seeing." In that seemingly offhand comment, Abizaid was making an essential point about strategy and military operations. Abizaid knew that it matters very much whether the nation thinks it is at war, especially to the soldiers on the ground and their commanders. "The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish ... the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature," Clausewitz famously wrote. "This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive."

Strategy, correctly formulated, shapes tactics. But tactics uninformed by strategy, or misinformed by an incorrect strategy, are like a car without a steering wheel: It may get somewhere, but probably not where its driver wants it to go. "In Iraq, we fought the war we wanted to fight, not the war that was," said Bruce Hoffman, a Rand Corp. terrorism expert who consulted with the CPA. "We belatedly recognized it as a large insurgency, after dismissing it as 'dead-enders.'" This lapse gave the enemy breathing s.p.a.ce in which to organize and look for vulnerabilities in the U.S. military.

After Abizaid spoke, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita, standing at his side in the Pentagon briefing room, jumped in to attempt to undercut the crucial point the general had just made. "The discussion about what type of conflict this is, is-like so many other discussions we're having within the context of Iraq-is almost beside the point," the spokesman told the reporters. The issue to remember, he insisted, was that the fighters wanted to restore Saddam Hussein's regime. "So it's worth remembering that as we kind of have this almost kind of, you know, academic discussion, is it this or is it that." Di Rita appeared to be brushing aside the considered opinion of one of the Army's top generals, the senior commander for Iraq and the rest of the Mideast-who knew more about the area and about war than Di Rita did.

It was a moment that captured in a nutsh.e.l.l the weakness at the core of the Bush administration's national security team: Strategy was seen as something vague and intellectual, at best a secondary issue, when in fact it was the core of the task they faced. It was the same sort of limited thinking that had led the Bush team first to focus in 2002 and early 2003 almost exclusively on its plan of attack for Iraq, rather than on the more difficult but crucial consolidation of that victory, and that also led it to make wildly unrealistic a.s.sumptions about postin-vasion Iraq, and then to fail to develop operational plans as a fallback if its a.s.sumptions proved incorrect.

By failing to adequately consider strategic questions, Rumsfeld, Franks, and other top leaders arguably crippled the beginning of the U.S. mission to transform Iraq. An "overly simplistic conception of the war led to a cascading undercutting of the war effort: too few troops, too little coordination with civilian and governmental/non-governmental agencies (U.S. State Department, as one example) and too little allotted time to achieve success," concluded Maj. Isaiah Wilson.

A lieutenant killed by confusion A confused strategy can be every bit as lethal as a bullet. If a soldier fighting in Iraq is told that he isn't at war, that he is just conducting a peacekeeping operation, then his every thought and action will be different-his mind-set as he goes out the front gate, as he conducts a patrol, as he apprehends an Iraqi. On the evening of July 30, Army Lt. Leif Nott, a member of Alpha Troop of the 1st Squadron of the 10th Cavalry Regiment in the 4th Infantry Division, was killed in the eastern town of Balad Ruz at least in part by a lack of understanding of the situation in Iraq.

The action began ominously. Sgt. Brian Beem, in one patrol, saw an animal moving toward him out of the darkness. "The dog got louder and started coming forward, so I shot it," he told an Army investigator. "It was hurt and running in circles. I could not leave it like that so I shot it again. The dog died. We kept moving."

The patrol heard a mortar sh.e.l.l impact, then small-arms fire. Beem saw some people, apparently armed, walking toward his patrol. "I was concerned that they were suicide bombers," he wrote. "Why did they line up like they were and walk toward a U.S. building?" He fired a warning shot and yelled at the people to get down. It occurred to him only in retrospect that they couldn't hear his shout over the jet-engine-like roar of the engines of two nearby Bradley fighting vehicles.

In fact, he was shouting at another group of four American soldiers, led by Nott, bringing three Iraqis into an Army outpost for questioning. But Beem's patrol didn't know that. In a posture that seemed more like a cop's than a soldier's, "Nott was walking down the middle of Balad Ruz's main street with the Iraqi prisoners," the Washington Post's Washington Post's Jefferson Morley later wrote in detailing the incident. Adding to the confusion, Sgt. Mickey Anderson, a member of Nott's group, was carrying a AK-47, making him look like an Iraqi attacker to the soldiers in the Bradleys. Jefferson Morley later wrote in detailing the incident. Adding to the confusion, Sgt. Mickey Anderson, a member of Nott's group, was carrying a AK-47, making him look like an Iraqi attacker to the soldiers in the Bradleys.

"n.o.body indicated any friendly personnel were on the ground," Lt. Chris Amaguer told the Army investigator. "There were shadows and silhouettes with an AK-47 identified."

"The senior scout told me to 'get those dismounts,'" Sgt. Christopher Creech stated, using Army jargon for a dismounted soldier, or infantryman. "There was not a question that these dismounts were enemy."

A machine gun on one of the Bradleys opened up on the approaching group. Several other soldiers followed suit with their rifles, as did a .50-caliber gunner aboard a tank. "Then I heard 'Oh G.o.d' from a person on the ground," Beem wrote. "In English. 'Oh my G.o.d.' English again, and this time I knew the voice. It was Sergeant Anderson. He's been my best friend for four and half years. I walked over to see him lying there with wounds on his legs and his left ankle was wrong." Nott was dead, shot in the chest.

The official conclusion of Maj. David Chase, the investigating officer, was that the fratricidal death of Capt. Nott was "primarily the result of inadequate situational awareness."

Arguably, Nott was a victim of strategic confusion in miniature. He had acted as if he were operating in near peacetime conditions, dealing with a few dead-enders-just as the secretary of defense had said. Also, if senior officials had understood that U.S. forces were indeed at war, they might have acted with more alacrity to provide soldiers such as Nott with body armor. "There was also a significant shortage of Individual Body Armored Systems (IBAS) available to the Troop," Maj. Chase wrote in his report. In fact, at the time, he wrote, there were just 9 sets of body armor to go around for 134 soldiers in Alpha Troop. "This deficiency was corrected shortly after the incident."

"This is not Vietnam!"

When Gary Anderson, the retired Marine colonel, went to see Wolfowitz about his op-ed piece in the Post Post warning that the United States might be facing a guerrilla war in Iraq, he found the deputy secretary more worried than his public comments indicated. "The way things are going, it looks like your diagnosis of the situation is correct," Wolfowitz said to him, he recalled later. "Having identified the problem, what do you recommend we do about it?" warning that the United States might be facing a guerrilla war in Iraq, he found the deputy secretary more worried than his public comments indicated. "The way things are going, it looks like your diagnosis of the situation is correct," Wolfowitz said to him, he recalled later. "Having identified the problem, what do you recommend we do about it?"

"We're in the early stages of an insurgency," Anderson replied. "We have to nip it in the bud." The danger, he said, was that Baathists not soon countered would begin to intimidate the Iraqi population. The problem was the sort of force needed to confront them, he said. U.S. troops aren't trained to wage counterin-surgency campaigns, while the Iraqi army wasn't going to be positioned to do it, and the task was well beyond the capabilities of the Iraqi police, he said. "So," Anderson said, "you need a native constabulary force, something like what the U.S. did in the Philippines and Haiti" in campaigns in those countries early in the twentieth century.

Wolfowitz liked the idea. "I think he tried to sell it to General Franks, but Franks didn't seem to think it was needed," Anderson recalled. A few weeks later, Wolfowitz asked Anderson if he would go out to Baghdad and pitch the idea to Bremer.

Anderson's employer, a defense consultant, wasn't wildly enthusiastic, but permitted him to become an unpaid adviser in Iraq. Anderson's own worry was that if he were killed there his family wouldn't get an insurance payment. "If you get yourself greased, your family is in bad shape," he warned himself.

The meeting with Bremer, in early July, didn't go well. "Bremer's a talker, not a listener," Anderson soon noticed. A flurry of questions from the career diplomat threw Anderson off his train of thought. It became clear that Bremer hadn't thought much about the issue of having a counterinsurgency militia, or that he thought this interloper from Washington had much to offer. "It was obvious that Bremer saw me as a creature of Wolfowitz," Anderson recalled. "Bremer and Wolfowitz didn't have the greatest relationship, even then."

"Mr. Amba.s.sador, here are some programs that worked in Vietnam," Anderson said, trying to redirect the conversation. He had in mind the popular forces that had been used successfully as village militias in South Vietnam.

It was the wrong word to put in front of Bremer. "Vietnam?" Bremer exploded. "Vietnam! "Vietnam! I don't want to talk about Vietnam. This is not Vietnam. This is Iraq!" I don't want to talk about Vietnam. This is not Vietnam. This is Iraq!"

"That was pretty much the end of the meeting," Anderson recalled He came away thinking that the top U.S. officials in Iraq really didn't fathom the nature of the conflict they faced. "I don't think he-or Sanchez- ever fully grasped the danger of it." The U.S. occupation stood at the edge of a precipice its leaders didn't see.

HOW TO CREATE AN INSURGENCY (II).

SUMMER AND FALL 2003.

British Lt. Gen. Aylmer Haldane concluded his memoir of his suppression of the Iraqi uprising of 1920 by noting somberly that the fight had been a near-run thing. "From the beginning of July until well into October,... we lived on the edge of a precipice where the least slip might have led to a catastrophe," the commander of the British counterinsurgency campaign wrote in The Insurrection in Mesopotamia, 1920. The Insurrection in Mesopotamia, 1920. By luck, pluck, and courage-and the timely arrival of reinforcements-he said, the British force avoided sliding over the cliff into a long and agonizing guerrilla war. By luck, pluck, and courage-and the timely arrival of reinforcements-he said, the British force avoided sliding over the cliff into a long and agonizing guerrilla war.

In the spring of 2003, U.S. commanders had fought the war they wanted to fight-lightning fast, relatively bloodless, and generally predictable. But in the summer and fall of 2003, from the beginning of July into October, they slipped over the precipice Haldane had avoided and fell into the war their Iraqi enemies sought. The vulnerabilities that had plagued Haldane returned to haunt this new occupation force-most notably, insufficient troops and supply lines that were dangerously long and exposed to attack. Haldane also had faced insurgents who appeared to be led by former Iraqi officers, and he too had watched his Iraqi police officers desert as fighting intensified. In a comment that foreshadows the haphazard nature of the U.S. occupation authority, the British in 1920, Haldane wrote, were hampered by having a "scratch and somewhat incongruous team" of administrators, with the majority possessing "little exact knowledge of the people they were called upon to govern."

But unlike Haldane, the United States wasn't able to put down the insurgency quickly. In the summer of 2003, the enemy brought it on, as President Bush had taunted them to do, and the U.S. military found itself enmeshed in a guerrilla war for the first time since the Vietnam War. In early summer it was still safe for an American to jog along the east bank of the Tigris in the morning, to lunch on chicken cordon bleu at a nice restaurant in western Baghdad's heavily Baathist Mansur district, and even to walk out at night to visit nearby friends. By late fall of 2003 such actions would still be possible but a bit foolhardy. Two years after that they would be absolutely suicidal, an invitation to being kidnapped or shot on the spot.

Arming, financing, and recruiting the insurgents It isn't clear that a large and persistent insurgency was inevitable. There is some evidence that Saddam Hussein's government knew it couldn't prevail conventionally, and some captured doc.u.ments indicate that it may have intended some sort of subversion campaign against occupation. The distribution of arms caches, the revolutionary roots of the Baathist Party, and the movement of money and people to Syria either before or during the war all argue for some advance planning for an insurgency. "I believe Saddam Hussein always intended to fight an insurgency should Iraq fall," Maj. Gen. Swannack, Jr., said in November 2003. "That's why you see so many of these arms caches out there in significant numbers all over the country." But the U.S. approach, both in occupation policy and military tactics, helped spur the insurgency and made it broader than it might have been.

Every insurgency faces three basic challenges as it begins: arming, financing, and recruiting. A peculiarity of the war in Iraq is that the Iraqi insurgency appears to have had little difficulty in any of these areas, in part because of U.S. policy blunders. The missteps made in 2003 appear to be a major reason that the anti-U.S. forces burgeoned despite their narrow appeal, both geographically and ideologically.

In the first area, arms, the unusual situation in Iraq favored the enemy. It was a land awash in weaponry and explosives, both in small collections distributed by Saddam Hussein's government before the U.S. invasion, and in huge dumps, some of them the size of small cities. In this area, policy decisions made at the Pentagon aided the nascent insurgency, because U.S. forces lacked the manpower to monitor the big dumps, let alone unearth the far-flung caches. Had the Iraqi military not been disbanded, it might have been used to cordon off those large caches. There certainly would have been some leakage, but less than occurred with no guards whatsoever in most places.

Finance is a murkier area, but here too U.S. decisions appear to have unwittingly aided the enemy. Before and during the U.S. invasion, intelligence surveillance observed convoys of trucks and cars heading from Baghdad to Syria. At the time there was some speculation that these were carrying weapons of ma.s.s destruction or manuals and other technical knowledge related to their manufacture. In retrospect, it appears that many of those convoys actually were carrying top Baathists and their families, and their cash, gold, and other valuables, some of which later would be used to support the insurgency from outside the country. Yet about a year would pa.s.s before the U.S. military would launch a serious effort to gain control of Iraq's borders-a step that is a prerequisite to mounting an effective counterinsurgency campaign.

But it was in the third area, recruiting, that the U.S. effort inadvertently gave the insurgency its biggest boost. Finding new members is usually the most difficult of tasks for the insurgent cause, especially in its first growth, because it requires its members to expose themselves somewhat to the public and to the police. U.S. policies-both military and civilian-helped solve that problem. The de-Baathification order created a cla.s.s of disenfranchised, threatened leaders. (Also, the Baath Party likely was more comfortable with its fugitive status than many a deposed ruling party would have been. "The Baathist Party was born in an insurgency and continued to operate like one," even when in power, noted one Special Forces officer who served in Iraq. "You joined a cell, and reported to the cell leader.") But those leaders still needed rank-and-file members. The dissolution of the army gave them a manpower pool of tens of thousands of angry, unemployed soldiers. "When we disbanded the Iraqi army, we created a significant part of the Iraqi insurgency," said Col. Paul Hughes, who worked for Bremer on strategy issues. On top of that, the lack of U.S. drive and the sense of drift at the CPA gave the Baathists a much needed breather.

A professionally unprepared army The U.S. Army in Iraq-incorrect in its a.s.sumptions, lacking a workable concept of operations, and bereft of an overarching strategy-completed the job of creating the insurgency. Based on its experience in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Army thought it could prevail through "presence"-that is, soldiers demonstrating to the local population that they are in the area, mainly by patrolling. "We've got that habit that carries over from the Balkans," said one Army general. Back then, patrols were conducted so frequently that some officers called the mission there DABing, for Driving Around Bosnia.

The flaw in this approach, wrote Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek, a civil affairs officer, was that after the public opinion began to turn against the Americans and see them as occupiers, "then the presence of troops ... becomes counterproductive."

The U.S. military jargon for this was boots on the ground, or, more officially, the presence mission. There was no formal doctrinal basis for this in the Army manuals and training that prepare the military for its operations, but the notion crept into the vocabularies of senior officers. For example, in May 2003, as the 1st Armored Division prepared to move from Kuwait to Baghdad, Col. Jackson Flake, the division chief of staff, said its task there would be to provide a safe and secure environment. To achieve that, he explained, "We've got to conduct patrols to give these citizens a sense of security," and also to work with civilian authorities to get the infrastructure up and running. A briefing by the division's engineering brigade stated that one of its major missions would be "presence patrols."

"Flood your zone, get out there, and figure it out," Sanchez ordered one of his brigade commanders at a meeting in a dusty command tent outside a palace in the Green Zone later that May. And he wanted the troops to get out there on foot, he added: "Mounted patrols tell me we are zipping through neighborhoods. I want American soldiers on the ground talking to people.... Your business is to ensure that the presence of the American soldier is felt, and it's not just Americans zipping by."

But what if this approach creates problems rather than solves them? In the spring and summer of 2003, few U.S. soldiers seemed to understand the central-ity of Iraqi pride, and the humiliation Iraqi men felt to be occupied by this Western army. Foot patrols in Baghdad were greeted during this time with solemn waves from old men and cheers from children, but with baleful stares from many young Iraqi men.

The push for intelligence U.S. commanders tended to blame their troubles, at least in public, on their lack of good intelligence about their foe. Who was the enemy? How many were there? What were their motivations? How did they operate? Where did their financing come from? Who controlled them? Were they independent cells or did they have a central control? What were their links to Saddam Hussein's regime? What was the relationship between former regime members and their old enemies in the fundamentalist Islamic groups? There were surprisingly few good answers to those questions, then or now.

More than most large organizations, the U.S. Army generally tries to confront and remedy its shortcomings. Newspapers, for example, rarely pause after covering major crises to figure out what they did right, what they did wrong, and what they should remember the next time they face a similar incident. The Army, to its credit, routinely tries to learn from such encounters, in part because of the lethality of mistakes in its line of work. It calls this the lessons learned process, and incorporates the efforts in its major training maneuvers. For example, after each major step in operations at the National Training Center, the Army's premier large unit training facility, commanders pause to critique their own moves. "Observer-controllers" stand by to provide factual data and so ensure that the critique is more than just a barroom quarrel about who did their job best. This process even has its own office, the Center for Army Lessons Learned, or CALL, based at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, an old cavalry post perched on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, on the eastern edge of the Great Plains.

In the summer of 2003 CALL sent a team to Iraq to review intelligence-gathering efforts in Iraq. The team found a series of wide-ranging problems in using technology and in training and managing intelligence specialists. Younger officers and enlisted soldiers were unprepared for their a.s.signments, "did not understand the targeting process," and possessed "very little to no a.n.a.lytical skills," the CALL team found. It said that there were 69 "tactical human intelligence" (HUMINT) teams working in Iraq, and that they should have been producing at least 120 reports a day, but instead were delivering a total average of 30. Overall, it said, the teams lacked "guidance and focus." They also were overwhelmed, and at least 15 more teams were needed. Nor did combat leaders understand how to use their intelligence specialists. "HUMINT teams and MI [military intelligence] commanders who were frustrated at the misuse of HUMINT a.s.sets by maneuver commanders ... believed that combat arms officers did not understand the management and capabilities of HUMINT a.s.sets," the report said. Also, operations across Iraq were impeded by the lack of competent interpreters; those they had were "working to the point of burnout," and also were being misused. "We can no longer afford to send interpreters in 'support' of units to buy chickens and soft drinks."

Other insiders noticed additional problems. The U.S. military intelligence apparatus tended to overfocus on the role of foreign fighters, a senior Army official later noted, because those fighters tended to use telephones, e-mail, and the Internet-and thus could be monitored by signals interception. So long sessions with top commanders would focus on the movements of four Saudi Arabian citizens while entire tribes in the Sunni Triangle were emerging unnoticed as centers of the insurgency. "The real guys weren't using phones or the Internet," he said. "They were based on human relationships," and so operated below the radar screen of U.S. military intelligence.

In the late summer and early fall of 2003 top commanders launched an extraordinary push to improve the performance of the lackl.u.s.ter military intelligence operation in Iraq. "Actionable intelligence is the key to countering the insurgency," Gen. Abizaid said later, looking back at this time. "All of us were looking for actionable intelligence that would lead us to unlock the leadership of the insurgency." He was especially frustrated that good information gathered at the battalion and brigade levels wasn't making it up the chain of command to the division and corps intelligence operations, where it could be "brought into an overarching theater understanding of the problem." What was the enemy? How was it organized, peopled, trained, and indoctrinated? What did it want, if anything, besides expelling the U.S. forces?

Militaries, like all big organizations, tend to do what they know how to do, rather than what they might need to do differently to address the situation they face. As French counterinsurgency expert Bernard Fall said in a 1964 speech to a U.S. military audience about flaws in the U.S. approach in Vietnam, "Everybody likes to fight the war that he knows best; this is very obvious. But in Vietnam we fight a war that we don't 'know best.' The sooner this is realized the better it is going to be."

It took many years for the Army to adjust in Vietnam, and it would take time-though less than in Vietnam-to do so in Iraq as well. "When it is this huge, this heavy a conventional presence, you're going to get the inst.i.tutional response," said one general, himself an unconventional thinker from the conventional side of the Army. "They're going to do what they're trained to do."

That unimaginative reaction is hardly a new phenomenon. Field Marshal Saxe, an innovative eighteenth-century French general, complained that "very few men occupy themselves with the higher problems of war," so that "when they arrive at the command of armies they are totally ignorant, and, in default of knowing what should be done, they do what they know." The U.S. mission in Iraq was overwhelmingly made up of regular combat units, rather than smaller, lower profile, Special Forces troops, and in 2003 most conventional commanders did what they knew how to do: send out large numbers of troops and vehicles on conventional combat missions.

"You had to do operations to drive intelligence," said a senior military intelligence official who was in the middle of this drive. In retrospect, he said, "We were not sophisticated or calibrated in our approach. You know the old saying, 'If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail'?"

In the late summer of 2003, senior U.S. commanders tried to counter the insurgency with indiscriminate cordon-and-sweep operations that involved detaining thousands of Iraqis. This involved "grabbing whole villages, because combat soldiers [were] unable to figure out who was of value and who was not," according to a subsequent investigation of the 4th Infantry Division's operations by the Army inspector general's office. On top of that, Army commanders failed to ensure they had a system to process thousands of people. At first, prisoners were held on U.S. bases, but by late summer they were shipped to Abu Ghraib prison to be held by a small unit of demoralized MPs there. By the fall of 2003 this approach would swamp the system and undercut the aim of improving intelligence, because there weren't enough interrogators on hand to detect the genuine adversaries among the thousands of innocent or neutral Iraqis caught up in the sweeps.

It is important to bear in mind the lack of a coherent counterinsurgency strategy at the top. Had there been one, commanders likely wouldn't have used such self-defeating tactics. "When you're facing a counterinsurgency war, if you get the strategy right, you can get the tactics wrong, and eventually you'll get the tactics right," said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a veteran of Special Forces in the Vietnam War. "If you get the strategy wrong and the tactics right at the start, you can refine the tactics forever but you still lose the war. That's basically what we did in Vietnam." For the first twenty months or more of the American occupation in Iraq, it was what the U.S. military would do there as well.

Iraq in midsummer 2003 Paul Wolfowitz was worried about Iraq. Bremer didn't tell him much, so he worked the military channels relentlessly, with a Churchillian drive for information. "There is no limit to the level of detail the depsecdef depsecdef requests," an official at Central Command griped in an e-mail to a military lawyer on July 7, 2003. Wolfowitz traveled to Iraq that month to rally support. Privately, he may have been worried that Gary Anderson was right about a growing insurgency, but publicly he would argue that steady progress was being made. At lunch one day at the al Rasheed Hotel, which was inside the checkpoints of the Green Zone and had been turned into a CPA dormitory, the deputy defense secretary was relentlessly upbeat. He had with him a handpicked group of reporters and columnists, journalists whose articles had displayed a sympathy to his views, among them the requests," an official at Central Command griped in an e-mail to a military lawyer on July 7, 2003. Wolfowitz traveled to Iraq that month to rally support. Privately, he may have been worried that Gary Anderson was right about a growing insurgency, but publicly he would argue that steady progress was being made. At lunch one day at the al Rasheed Hotel, which was inside the checkpoints of the Green Zone and had been turned into a CPA dormitory, the deputy defense secretary was relentlessly upbeat. He had with him a handpicked group of reporters and columnists, journalists whose articles had displayed a sympathy to his views, among them the Washington Washington Post's Jim Hoagland, the Post's Jim Hoagland, the Wall Street Journal's Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot, and Paul Gigot, and Vanity Fairs Vanity Fairs Christopher Hitchens. "The judicial system is functioning at a rudimentary level," he began that hot July day. "Neighborhood councils are stood up. The police force is at sixty percent of requirements." He saw similarly good trends in education and medicine. "It is pretty amazing," he insisted as waiters brought more seltzer water. He was dismissive of the Middle Eastern-area experts who were warning that Iraq was in a dangerous position, and that security was deteriorating. "The great majority seem astonishingly pessimistic," he said. Christopher Hitchens. "The judicial system is functioning at a rudimentary level," he began that hot July day. "Neighborhood councils are stood up. The police force is at sixty percent of requirements." He saw similarly good trends in education and medicine. "It is pretty amazing," he insisted as waiters brought more seltzer water. He was dismissive of the Middle Eastern-area experts who were warning that Iraq was in a dangerous position, and that security was deteriorating. "The great majority seem astonishingly pessimistic," he said.

Abizaid, also at the lunch table, loyally supported his boss's views. "The impatience of the press is always of some interest to me," he said. "The progress here is quite remarkable, actually." Looking over the white tablecloth set with cande-labras to the buffet of lamb, rice, and vegetables at the end of the room, swaddled in the tight security of the Green Zone, it was almost possible for a moment to believe they were correct.

To a degree, Wolfowitz was reflecting what he was hearing from top commanders. Even in the Sunni Triangle, U.S. officers were surprisingly optimistic at the time. They weren't over the hump, but they were close, some said. After lunch Abizaid headed up the Tigris Valley in a swift Black Hawk helicopter, flying low and escorted by two Apache attack helicopters. Palm groves, vineyards, and gardens of eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes flashed by underneath his aircraft. At a meeting that afternoon in Tikrit, one brigade commander in the 4th Infantry Division rea.s.sured him, "My read, sir, is we're on the tail end of this."

"Our a.n.a.lysis says attacks are going down," added another 4th ID commander."Sir, he's getting weaker," said a third officer. "We're breaking his back.""The gloves are coming off"

The insurgency didn't begin with an announcement or a major event. Rather, it was like a change in the weather. "In three towns that summer-Hit, Fallujah and Khaldiya-I would hear an Iraqi proverb repeated over and over as the occupation lurched on, violence of all kinds escalated, and more Iraqis were killed," Anthony Shadid later wrote. "'The mud is getting wetter,' people said. Things are getting worse, it meant."

As the Iraqi mud moistened, the American gloves were removed. The U.S. military escalation occurred consciously. On August 4, 2003, U.S. authorities reopened the prison west of Baghdad called Abu Ghraib, which was notorious since it had been used to punish the enemies of Saddam Hussein. And at around two o'clock on the morning on August 14, Capt. William Ponce, an officer in the Human Intelligence Effects Coordination Cell at Sanchez's headquarters, sent out a memo to subordinate commands. "The gloves are coming off regarding these detainees," he told them. His e-mail, and the responses it provoked from members of the Army intelligence community across Iraq, are sadly illuminating about the mind-set of the U.S. military during this period. They suggest that the U.S. military was moving in the direction of inst.i.tutionalized abuse.

Capt. Ponce stated that Col. Steve Boltz, the second highest ranking military intelligence officer in Iraq, "has made it clear that we want these individuals broken"-intelligence jargon for getting someone to abandon his cover and relate the truth as he knows it. Ponce then went on to wave the b.l.o.o.d.y shirt, a move that would raise eyebrows among some of his e-mail's recipients. "Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks," he wrote. So, Ponce ordered them, "Provide interrogation techniques 'wish list' by 17 AUG AUG 03." 03."

Some of the responses to his solicitation were enthusiastic. "I spent several months in Afghanistan interrogating the Taliban and al Qaeda," a soldier attached to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, operating in western Iraq, responded just fourteen hours later, according to the time stamp on his e-mail. "I firmly agree that the gloves need to come off." With clinical precision, he recommended permitting "open-handed facial slaps from a distance of no more than about two feet and back-handed blows to the midsection from a distance of about 18 inches____ I also believe that this should be a minimum baseline." He also re- ported that "fear of dogs and snakes appear to work nicely."

The 4th Infantry Division's intelligence operation responded three days later with suggestions that captives be hit with closed fists and also subjected to "low-voltage electrocution."

But not everyone was so sanguine as those two units' operations. "We need to take a deep breath and remember who we are," cautioned a major with the 501st Military Intelligence Battalion, which supported the operations of the 1st Armored Division in Iraq. (The officer's name was deleted in official doc.u.ments released by the Army, as were those of other writers in this e-mail exchange.) "It comes down to standards of right and wrong-something we cannot just put aside when we find it inconvenient, any more than we can declare that we will 'take no prisoners' and therefore shoot those who surrender to us simply because we find prisoners inconvenient." This officer also took issue with the reference to rising U.S. casualties. "We have taken casualties in every war we have ever fought-that is part of the very nature of war.... That in no way justifies letting go of our standards.... Casualties are part of war-if you cannot take casualties then you cannot engage in war. Period." The "bottom line," he wrote emphatically in conclusion, was, "We are American soldiers, heirs of a long tradition of staying on the high ground. We need to stay there." His signature block ended with a reference to "Psalm 24: 3-8," which begins with the admonition, "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart." But this lucid and pa.s.sionate response was a voice in the wilderness. The major was arguing against embarking on a course that the Army had already chosen to take.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the commander of all prisons in Iraq, was growing concerned about conditions at Abu Ghraib, she said later in a sworn statement. On August 16, insurgents mortared the prison, killing six Iraqi prisoners and wounding at least forty-seven others. At that point the prison held Iraqis brought in under the old regime or as criminals, but not suspected insurgents caught by U.S. raids. In the wake of that incident Karpinski went to see Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, Sanchez's deputy commander, to ask for help.

"They're prisoners, Janis," Wojdakowski dismissively said to her, she later recounted. "Did you lose any soldiers?"

"I could have," she recalled telling him.

"They didn't care," she said, according to her statement, in which she also said that "Sanchez didn't care until two MI soldiers were killed" a month later.

In the following weeks and months, she added, "the divisions kept giving us more prisoners. 'Well, increase capacity' Where would you like me to increase capacity?" The answer, she said, was "'Cram some more tents into the compound.'"

About ten days later, the first suspected insurgents captured by the United States arrived at Abu Ghraib, Karpinski later recalled. It was the middle of the night when helicopters arrived carrying thirty-five of them. "My battalion commander is calling me frantically, saying, 'Do you know anything about this? Why are we getting these people?'"

On August 31, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, commander of the detainee operation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where 660 suspected al Qaeda and Taliban members were held and interrogated, arrived in Iraq to help U.S. commanders improve their intelligence operation, or as his subsequent report put it, "to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence." His team of seventeen experts didn't always get a warm reception. "There was a great deal of animosity on the part of the Abu Ghraib personnel," a subsequent investigation by Army Maj. Gen. George Fay found.

One of the core conclusions Gen. Miller reached during his ten-day visit was that Abu Ghraib should be operated more like the prison he had run on Guantanamo, most notably by using the conditions of detention to soften up prisoners for questioning. "[T]he detention operations function must act as an enabler for interrogation," Miller stated in his own report, which bore the cla.s.sification "secret/noforn," meaning that it wasn't to be shared with foreign allies.

His recommendation failed to take into account the vast difference between the U.S. base on Cuba's eastern end-a secure and remote area, completely under U.S. military control-and the chaos that surrounded Abu Ghraib, perched in the no-man's-land between Baghdad and Fallujah, a combat zone profoundly hostile to the foreign military presence in its midst. What's more, the ratio of guards to prisoners at peaceful Guantanamo was about 1.4 to 1, while at Abu Ghraib, which was regularly being mortared, the guards were heavily outnumbered, with a ratio of about 1 for every 10 prisoners. As more detainees flooded in, the ratio worsened to 1 to 20, according to Karpinski.

Over the next several months, hundreds of raids were conducted and over ten thousand Iraqis were detained, many of them hauled away from their families in the middle of the night and held without any notification to those families for weeks. All told, in the first eighteen months of the occupation, some thirty thousand to forty thousand Iraqis would pa.s.s through U.S. detention facilities, according to a legal statement given by Gen. Sanchez.

By the end of September, Abu Ghraib held more than 3,500 prisoners. A month later that number had almost doubled-but there were still only 360 MPs to guard them, Karpinski said. The huge effort in the late summer and fall of 2003 led directly to the widespread abuses of prisoners that came to be known, far too narrowly, as "the Abu Ghraib scandal." Those thousands of prisoners eventually would overwhelm the undermanned, undertrained, underequipped, undersu-pervised, and incompetent Army Reserve unit running the prison. And the tactics used in the push for intelligence aided the insurgency it was aiming to crush by alienating large segments of the Iraqi population.

The old prison was growing so crowded that the original purpose of detaining insurgents was being undercut by the sheer number being held. Col. Teeples, who commanded the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which is smaller than a division and lacked its own seasoned interrogators, said later in sworn testimony, "Several times when we had detainees,... they were really bad guys, and we'd try to get them moved to Abu Ghraib, [but] there was no room."

During this crucial period, the U.S. military seemed more concerned about its own well-being than about Iraqis, said Lt. Col. Holshek, who during the summer of 2003 was based at Tallil air base in southern Iraq. "We had all this hardware, all these riches at hand, yet we didn't do anything to help," he said of that time. An extraordinary part of the U.S. military effort was devoted to providing for itself, with a huge push to build showers, mess halls, and coffee bars, and to install amenities such as satellite television and Internet cafes. "At Tallil there were eleven thousand people, hundreds of millions of dollars being spent, and not a G.o.dd.a.m.n thing being done for the people downtown, so we looked like an occupation power. And we were-we behaved like one. The message we were sending was, we didn't care much about the Iraqis, because we didn't do what we needed to do on things like electricity. And we also looked incompetent."

War comes calling Lt. Brendan O'Hern, a platoon leader in the 82nd Airborne Division, found out he was at war in a very hard way, in a short action on a scorching hot summer day in Baghdad when his unit was guarding a weapons amnesty collection point. "It was 120 degrees out and there was no relief from the sun," he wrote in a memoir posted on companycommand.com, a semiofficial Web site for younger Army leaders.

At about 3:00 p.m p.m., a volley of rocket-propelled grenades flew at his unit from a nearby house, leaving their signature trail of blue-gray smoke. Several soldiers were blown into the air. One of the rockets, still burning, lodged in a leg of Cpl. Hilario Bermanis, and another soldier pulled it out with his bare hands. Another hit Spec. Gavin Neighbor, a twenty-year-old from Somerset, Ohio, who having finished his guard turn was resting in a nearby bus.

Back at their base, "[e]veryone was in complete shock as we had no injuries prior to all this, over almost three months of combat ops, including some pretty heavy stuff in the early days of the war," O'Hern wrote. It turned worse when his company commander told him a few hours later that Spec. Neighbor was dead. "I was blown away," he recalled. He gathered his men and told them the news. "We just stood there together for a long time, with guys crying or in shock. Neighbor was honestly one of the best soldiers in the platoon, if not the best. He really meant a lot to everyone, and guys took it pretty hard."

O'Hern told the soldiers to make sure to talk to work through their grief, rather than to try to ignore it. Over the next couple of days he found that conversing with them when they were alone worked best. "We'd talk about whatever felt right, whether it was joking about the two guys or talking about what people did during and after the attack, or just something to distract the guy," he wrote.

But O'Hern neglected himself. "I tried to be hard and be the rock the guys could lean on." But he later decided that that was the wrong approach, because he wound up feeling "a tremendous amount of guilt," and he plunged into a severe depression. "I did not really eat or sleep for six or seven days, but just lay around blaming myself in private and focusing on the platoon, outwardly," he wrote. "Eventually I hit a very low point and realized I'd better get some help or I would be in trouble." A talk with Neighbor's squad leader helped, especially because it developed that the other man was having a similarly difficult time.

O'Hern learned from the grim experience. "Up until that day, what we did was little more than a live-action video game," he concluded. After it, "[e]very move I make, every plan that I put together, is now scrutinized from every angle. I have realized that I must be prepared at all times, and that the attack will come when I least expect it. There is a voice inside that senses when something's not right, and I am steadily training myself to always listen to it."

Later that summer, Lt. Col. Poirier, the MP battalion commander who had been in Fallujah and then moved to Tikrit, had his own wake-up call from the insurgency. It came at about eleven o'clock at night, when he was convoying back up to Tikrit-about a three-hour Humvee drive from Baghdad-after a "useless" meeting at Camp Victory, near the Baghdad airport, on police issues. He had been noticing flares arcing in the sky to the west of the highway, and was beginning to suspect that someone was tracking his convoy's movement. A bit south of Samarra, he was out of radio range from his headquarters, so the issue was up to him, as the commander.

"I was trying to figure out a plan-go west?-when all h.e.l.l broke loose- mortars, machine guns, RPGs," he recalled. One deadly RPG cut diagonally through the cab of his Humvee, pa.s.sing before his face and behind his driver's head. Two thoughts immediately pa.s.sed through his mind. First was, "Oh, s.h.i.t, we got caught flat-footed. The next thought was, If I survive this, I will hunt down every guy doing this."