Fiasco, The American Military Adventure In Iraq Part 9

The convoy sped up and escaped without losing anyone. The next morning, Poirier woke up in Tikrit determined to do better. He began putting his troops through rehearsals for better responses to ambushes, most of them based on using armored vehicles to flank and kill the enemy. "This was a turning point for me," he recalled. A few weeks later another unit was. .h.i.t in the same spot by a bomb and RPGs, killing Command Sgt. Maj. James Blankenbecler, a forty-year-old senior NCO from Alexandria, Virginia, who had recently arrived in Iraq on a.s.signment as the new top enlisted soldier in the 1st Battalion, 44th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, based at Fort Hood, Texas.

When Bremer flew home to Washington for quick consultations at the end of July 2003, his message was that the situation was far better than it appeared in news coverage. "When I got to Washington this was confirmed-that the people in the United States were not getting an accurate picture of the progress we had made here, the really very substantial progress we have made here," he said later that summer in Baghdad. "They were distracted, understandably, by the trickle of casualties coming in almost every day from Iraq, and not getting the stories, the other two hundred good news stories, about schools reopening, hospitals open- ing, health clinics opening, the lowest cholera rate in a decade this year in the south, in Basra--------- Those stories were not getting through." In fact, the U.S. oc- cupation was about to be confronted by a full-blown counterinsurgency. But as the United States entered its first sustained ground combat in three decades, this was his story, and he and the entire Bush administration stuck to it.

THE CPA: "CAN'T PRODUCE ANYTHING".

I.

went to ORHA today to meet with their commo people," Capt. Kipling wrote to her boyfriend in early June, referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority by the acronym of its original name, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian a.s.sistance. "They were not very helpful."

She was far from alone in that conclusion. The U.S. civilian occupation organization was a house built on sand and inhabited by the wrong sort of people, according to many who worked there. "No clear strategy, very little detailed planning, poor communications, high personnel turnover, lots of young and inexperienced political appointees, no well-established business processes," concluded retired Army Col. Ralph Hallenbeck, who worked at the CPA as a civilian contractor dealing with the Iraqi communications infrastructure. Personnel was an especially nettlesome issue. Hallenbeck said that in addition to being young and inexperienced, most of the young CPA people he met during his work as a contractor were ideologically minded Republicans whose only professional experience was working on election campaigns back in the United States. It was, as Zinni later commented, "a pickup team." Scott Erwin, a former intern for Vice President Cheney who worked on the budget for security forces, reported that his favorite job before that was "my time as an ice cream truck driver."

"The tour length for most civilians was initially a mere three months," the British diplomat Hilary Synnott later recalled. "This was far too brief to be effective." Capt. Kipling also noticed this personnel problem on her forays into the Green Zone. "Their turnover rate was too high to be effective," she said. "They'd get good people in, they'd get motivated, and then there would be a big bomb, and they'd all leave."

It was more serious for Brig. Gen. Karpinski. She was regaling her superior with a list of all the problems she was having one day when, she recalled, "he threw his pen down on the desk, and he said, 'We're running a prison system for an entire country by the seat of our pants. What's CPA doing?'"

She responded: "There's two experts there, and they're leaving in about thirty days."

The view from inside the zone was that of a small and beleaguered band, understaffed and underresourced. "We all worked seventeen hours a day, seven days a week, for a year," recalled Sherri Kraham, who was deputy director of the CPA budget office. To some it felt like trying to build and furnish a house while parts of it were on fire-and all the time getting advice and orders from officials thousands of miles away in Washington and London.

"The CPA was always a work in progress," observed Andrew Rathmell, the British defense intellectual who served as a strategist for Bremer and later wrote a clear-eyed a.s.sessment of his time there. "Badly flawed pre-war a.s.sumptions, which were not effectively challenged, left the coalition unprepared and under-resourced for the task it faced.... The CPA ended up creating nation-building inst.i.tutions on the run, governing Iraq at all levels, supporting a counter-insurgency campaign, reconstructing and reforming Iraqi state inst.i.tutions and implementing democratic and economic transformation."

Yet it was far from clear what all that hard work was leading to. "One of the things that struck me in the summer of 2003 was how hard people were working, but how little effect it was having," said Gary Anderson.

By mid-August, when she left the CPA, recalled Amba.s.sador Robin Raphel, a career foreign service officer, "it was very obvious to me that we couldn't do this, we could not run a country that we did not understand.... It was very much amateur hour to me, with all respect."

In another end-of-tour report, one colonel a.s.signed to the CPA summarized his office's work: "pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck."

It didn't take long to see what poor shape the organization was in, said Col. Sammons, the Special Forces officer attached to the CPA. "I soon knew what CPA meant-Can't Produce Anything." That became a standard gag among military officers dealing with the occupation authority.

By the time the CPA was done away with a year later, the U.S. effort in Iraq had suffered a severe and perhaps crippling setback.

CPA administrator L. Paul Bremer III Presiding over this mess was Bremer, by all accounts a smart and diligent man, but not the right person for the job-that is, someone who could provide strategic leadership to inspire a diverse collection of people suddenly brought together to handle an ill-defined, difficult, and expanding mission. Hallenbeck said it was his impression that Bremer was "reclusive" and wasn't comfortable with anyone. He recalled that on July 4,2003, there was a pool party to celebrate the American independence day. Looking for lunch, he walked out to the party and saw people cl.u.s.tering at one end of the pool around a visiting Army general, who was asking about their work on morale. Bremer appeared a half hour later. "He looked totally alone-like he didn't recognize anybody. Alone." Eventually, Bremer's spokesman, Dan Senor, took Bremer around to introduce him to people. "That was Bremer's style," Hallenbeck said.

Nor did Bremer lead his people in such a way as to help them confront the organization's flaws. His morning meetings in the summer and fall of 2003, as Iraq descended into guerrilla war, "were bizarre," recalled Gardner, one of the Army colonels at the CPA. "You'd go around the table. He'd say, Anybody got anything?' Most of the time it was 'nope,' 'nope,' 'got nothing.'"

His own work style also tied their hands. "He chose to micromanage," said Dov Zakheim. "Nothing could be done without his okay." This was the biggest single problem in the financial pipeline from Washington, D.C., to Iraq, he said. "Bremer wanted to control the expenditure of money in the field, but he didn't have the people in the field to expend it."

The very structure of the CPA also hurt Bremer, giving him great responsibility without commensurate power. Bremer was understaffed and underbudgeted. He was in the frustrating position of having authority over every aspect of the occupation except for security-the one essential element that was arguably the prerequisite for everything else. "We had a proconsul model, but we didn't give Bremer the power to go with it," said one State Department official, referring to the wide authority that the ancient Roman system gave to the governors of its provinces.

Life in the zone The CPA existed in a never-never land in Saddam's old palace complex behind high walls in downtown Baghdad. There was a sharp disconnect between its cool, quiet Green Zone and the real world beyond the miles of tall concrete Jersey security barriers that ringed the zone. Some in the U.S. military called the CPA's slice of central Baghdad Oz. To many within the CPA, the rest of Iraq was the Red Zone.

At first, life in the newly created American sector was rough. "We were working 120-hour weeks in Baghdad," recalled Hallenbeck. "It wasn't like we could go home on the weekends." Lacking rooms, he and his colleagues were sleeping on the palace lawn and living on MREs-the military's subsistence-level packaged rations. In the middle of all this, Pentagon auditors appeared and asked to see his company's timecards. But within a few weeks, the quality of life improved notably in the zone-in sharp contrast to the rest of Iraq, where conditions generally were deteriorating. It was a four-square-mile area that felt very different from the rest of Iraq, a novel mix of palm trees and third-rate Iraqi palaces interspersed with Bradley fighting vehicles and a few bombed-out buildings. It was isolated from the city's giant traffic jams and shaded by many more trees than grew elsewhere in Baghdad. It also was attuned to different realities than prevailed beyond its blast walls. Inside the zone, the telephones had a 914 area code, from New York's Westchester County, where the phone system was based. On one visit to the CPA's Office of Strategic Communications, all the televisions but one were tuned to Fox News. "It's almost like being at Walt Disney's version of Arabian Nights," Arabian Nights," said Army Reserve Maj. Jay Bachar, who spent a year working on civil affairs issues in the zone. "I lived in a villa that was originally owned by a Republican Guard colonel." It featured six bedrooms, a hot tub on a balcony, and three Iraqi maids. "We lived very large." said Army Reserve Maj. Jay Bachar, who spent a year working on civil affairs issues in the zone. "I lived in a villa that was originally owned by a Republican Guard colonel." It featured six bedrooms, a hot tub on a balcony, and three Iraqi maids. "We lived very large."

The zone was at the center of one of the most important cities in the Arab world, but inside CPA headquarters the food resembled that of an American high school. Busy staffers would line up at lunchtime for paper plates of hot dogs and baked beans, and would wash them down with cold cans of Coca-Cola. Oddly for being in a Muslim country, "it seemed like seventy-five percent of the entrees were pork, or pork based-pork rings, pork chops, fish-shaped pork, I guess. Pork in our salads, pork stew," said Alex Dehgan, who worked on a special nonprolif-eration project aimed at gainfully employing Iraqi weapons scientists. "I think Halliburton must have gotten a great deal on pork somewhere."

Nighttime offered just a few choices-more work, exercise, or drinking. "Time off for me was going to the gym," recalled Larry Diamond, who worked for the CPA a few months later, when it was better established. The gym, he wrote, was "a state-of-the-art facility with dozens of weight machines, free weights, floor mats, running machines, bikes, and elliptical trainers, packed almost constantly with sweating civilians and trim, muscular soldiers."

Another evening pursuit was television. "Television in the Green Zone had some of the strangest TV channels," said Dehgan. Out of just fifteen channels, two were dedicated to fashion, and another after 11:00 at night showed only Germans playing video games.

Then there was alcohol. Eventually the zone boasted seven bars, including one for security contractors and another, more exclusive one operated by the CIA called the Babylon. The biggest one was the disco at the al Rasheed Hotel, which was, Dehgan said, "mainly staffed with intoxicated security contractors--------------------------- There were maybe four hundred intoxicated men and three women in the middle of it."

Soldiers arriving from austere, dusty bases elsewhere in Iraq sometimes were shocked by what they saw in the zone, recalled one officer. Thursday and Friday nights in the zone's bars, he said, had a wide-open feel to them. "Everyone was drunk, and the mission was to hook up. Military guys would walk in there, and their eyes would get big."

Nor were some of the zone's inhabitants much connected to the country they were ostensibly remaking. "There was just a level of ignorance" that was surprising, Hallenbeck said. "There were maybe seven thousand people in the Green Zone, and very few spoke Arabic or ever got out." Even if they had wanted to get outside the confines of their protected area, CPA rules made it difficult: "If you had to go outside the Green Zone, you'd have to have two military vehicles and four armed guys. You'd go in and apply for that, and get your name on the list for escort support. You'd go in at eleven at night and make sure you were good to go, and come back in the morning and find you had been superseded by a higher priority project."

The isolation deepened as the security situation worsened in the summer and fall of 2003. "A lot of people in the Green Zone, in the bubble, never got out to speak with Iraqis," recalled Peter Khalil, an Australian who worked at the CPA on national security policy. "It was easier at first, but then a fortress mentality developed." This was the political effect of the rise of the insurgency: It was driving a wedge between the occupation authority and the Iraqi people.

The result was that all some CPA officials knew of Iraq was what they saw on TV or heard in the mess hall. As a State Department official put it, "You had this odd situation where the journalists knew more about the situation than the briefers did, because the journalists moved around and the briefers generally didn't get out of the Green Zone much."

Richard Armitage said that the State Department grew increasingly worried by the tone of life inside the zone. "I defined it as the bar scene from Star Wars" Star Wars" he said in 2005. "The people running to and fro, young people in very heady positions, they didn't have a clue what they were doing." State was so alarmed that one of the orders given to John Negroponte and his aides when they were sent out to replace Bremer in 2004 was, "Clean up that G.o.dd.a.m.n Green Zone." Armitage's instructions to Amba.s.sador James Jeffrey, the number-two American diplomat in Iraq, were, "I don't want to see people running around with arms out there drinking beer; I don't want to see people I don't know who they are carrying weapons; clean up this freaking place; send people home." he said in 2005. "The people running to and fro, young people in very heady positions, they didn't have a clue what they were doing." State was so alarmed that one of the orders given to John Negroponte and his aides when they were sent out to replace Bremer in 2004 was, "Clean up that G.o.dd.a.m.n Green Zone." Armitage's instructions to Amba.s.sador James Jeffrey, the number-two American diplomat in Iraq, were, "I don't want to see people running around with arms out there drinking beer; I don't want to see people I don't know who they are carrying weapons; clean up this freaking place; send people home."

The CPA vs. the media Relations between the occupation authority and the foreign press corps rapidly deteriorated. By the summer of 2003, Pamela Hess, a veteran defense reporter for the UPI wire service, recalled, "The media operation at CPA was abominable. The mechanics of it were ridiculous." Requests for interviews were filed on slips of paper to a military office, which would then deliver them to the CPA. Arriving in Baghdad for a one-month reporting tour, Hess submitted a series of requests in writing on her first day in the city. "Four weeks later, when I left Baghdad, my requests had never even been formally acknowledged-although a CPA spokesman confirmed they had been received-and none were ever acted upon."

The CPA press office seemed to see itself more as a monitor of the media than as a provider of information. One opportunity the CPA offered up was covering the new garbage collection service in Baghdad. For lack of any other story one August day, Carol Williams of the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times dutifully decided to do it. As frequently happens in journalism, she found more than she'd expected: Many of the trash crews were small children who were being shaken down by their bosses for a third of their wages, which amounted to three dollars a day. Iraqis she interviewed were upset by the situation and eager to discuss it, in part because the legal minimum age for such work was supposed to be fifteen. dutifully decided to do it. As frequently happens in journalism, she found more than she'd expected: Many of the trash crews were small children who were being shaken down by their bosses for a third of their wages, which amounted to three dollars a day. Iraqis she interviewed were upset by the situation and eager to discuss it, in part because the legal minimum age for such work was supposed to be fifteen.

CPA officials weren't pleased by her coverage. The next time Williams was at a press briefing, she checked in with a press officer about another article she was pursuing on the provision of clean water-there was a local angle for her paper because some of the engineers were from California. She was informed that interviews she had been promised might not occur because of her handling of the trash story. In fact, she recalled, "I never did get access to the water engineers."

In Hess's view, the CPA's relationship with the press soured fundamentally because of the insistence by officials that all was going well, and the consequent determination of reporters to disprove that contention. "Had they been more willing to admit that things were bad instead of putting lipstick on the pig, I think reporters would have been kinder," she said. "I think we felt compelled to rub their noses in it, to try to make them admit it, and maybe do something about it."

Meanwhile, the CPA ceded the playing field in other, more important ways. Charles Krohn, a veteran of Army public affairs, was surprised when he served in Baghdad to see that the CPA early on lifted the ban on TV satellite receivers, but failed to begin satellite broadcasting until months later, in January 2004, leaving a gap in which Iraqis got all their news from Arab stations essentially hostile to the U.S. presence. "What this means is that for the first nine months, we essentially forfeited the contest for hearts and minds to the compet.i.tion," he wrote later.

The CPA vs. the U.S. military Underneath the poor image was a poor reality: The CPA was ineptly organized and frequently incompetent, working badly not only with Iraqis and the media, but even with the U.S. military, its partner in the occupation. There are different points of view on almost any issue in Iraq, but there is surprising unanimity, from both sides of the fence, that the relationship between the CPA and the military began badly and deteriorated further with time.

Sherri Kraham said the CPA-military relationship was "very poor." She explained, "I don't think we spoke the same language."

"The CPA-what a dysfunctional arrangement that was!" exclaimed Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004-5. "It was nuts!"

"We would have been better off if CPA hadn't shown up," said Col. Clarke Lethin, the chief of operations for the 1st Marine Division, which fought in Iraq first in the 2003 invasion and then in the 2004 occupation. "We just built friction into the system."

A general who served in Iraq went even further, saying that the occupation authority "was the single greatest a.s.set the enemy had."

Fundamentally, the CPA and the military had different conceptions of what the United States was doing in Iraq. The civilians, more in line with Bush administration thinking about transforming Iraq and the region, implemented policies that set out to change the politics, economy, and even the culture of Iraq. The military, less culturally sympathetic to the administration's revolutionary goals, thought of its mission as almost the opposite, calling it "stability and security operations." "The military was there to win the conflict, find Saddam and then keep the peace," retired Rear Adm. David Oliver, a veteran submarine officer and an astute a.n.a.lyst of the politics of defense, wrote later in a short memoir of his time devising the CPA's budget. After the war, the military sought to keep the population quiet, while the CPA "focused on change," which meant that it was bound to provoke vocal and violent reactions from some Iraqis opposed to those changes. For example, Oliver noted, as the CPA was seeking to normalize commerce by opening banks, which would rea.s.sure merchants that they could conduct business without fear of being robbed of the cash they had to keep on hand, some U.S. commanders were walking into banks and demanding piles of cash from government payrolls to pay for local cleanup projects.

CPA officials were aware of the military's pervasive unhappiness with them. "The 101st and 4th ID are beginning to get frustrated by the lack of progress in key reconstruction work," stated the occupation authority's internal situation report of June 18,2003. "Recent negative developments in Mosul indicate growing frustrations over perceived inaction by CPA over re-employment of former military officers."

Outfitting Iraqi police was another of those points of friction that emerged in the following weeks. "They were useless," Lt. Col. Poirier, who was trying to set up police forces in Tikrit and Samarra, recalled. "The guidance from them changed daily-'Get the police white uniforms,' then, 'No, get blue uniforms.'"

In al Anbar province, Gen. Swannack was growing increasingly frustrated as he tried to get local police outfitted. In August he put in a requisition request for flak vests, communications equipment, and vehicles for the Iraq security forces working with his troops. There was a clear and pressing requirement, he said: "You need the comms so they can call you when they got in trouble. You need vehicles to get to the battle. You need flak vests so you can fight." First he was told the gear would be delivered by November 1. Then he was told it would be delayed until December. When that month came and went, he called on January 1 to inquire again, only to be told that the CPA official in charge of that contract had gone home on Christmas vacation and had decided not to return. In February he finally went public with his frustration, mentioning it at a press conference-and then the equipment began to arrive.

The CPA and the military also diverged on the PR campaign. In October 2003, as the White House was launching a public relations campaign to emphasize how well things were going in Iraq, Sanchez began to go out of his way in briefings to warn that there would be more insurgent attacks that could inflict many casualties on U.S. forces. For example, on October 2, Rumsfeld and Myers used a Pentagon news conference to chastise the media for not covering all the good news out of Iraq. "Today is D plus 198 in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and while there is no question we have faced some challenges and we've got some ahead of us, we have really achieved numerous successes and expect the situation to continue to improve," said Myers, always one to accentuate the positive.

Rumsfeld even hinted at troop drawdowns, saying that his message to Congress at this time was that he needed supplemental funds to "finish the job in Iraq and Afghanistan, so that we're able to bring the U.S. forces back."

A few days later, President Bush offered a similarly upbeat a.s.sessment. "Listen, we're making good progress in Iraq. Sometimes it's hard to tell it when you listen to the filter," he said at a news conference. "The situation is improving on a daily basis inside Iraq. People are freer, the security situation is getting better."

During this same period, Sanchez's public statements were decidedly darker than those of Bush, Rumsfeld, and Myers. "The enemy has evolved," he said at his own October 2 press conference. "It is a little bit more lethal, little bit more complex, little bit more sophisticated, and, in some cases, a little bit more tenacious." And, he added, "as long as we are here, the coalition needs to be prepared to take casualties." He also said that it would be "a few years" before the security situation in Iraq stabilized sufficiently to permit a major drawdown of U.S. troops.

Such statements reflected a fundamental disagreement over communications strategy. "The military guys said that their key audience was Iraq, and emanating out from there," said a public affairs officer at the CPA. "The CPA view was that the center of gravity was the U.S. public."

The CPA public affairs operation also underwhelmed some colleagues. At one meeting, "I was awestruck by the superficiality of the insights that they brought to the table, absolutely awestruck," recalled Larry Crandall, a CPA official involved in reconstruction financing.

The military's discord with the CPA even reached down to the small unit level. "My relationship with the CPA as an infantry commander has been tenuous at best," one company commander in the 101st Airborne wrote in his response to an official Army survey. "First, their guidance has been contradictory at times with the military and definitely not well coordinated." Also, he said, the civilian administrators violated the basic principle of unity of effort. "CPA officials arrived in our AO [area of operations] and conducted meetings in conferences, made promises to local officials that were contradictory to past military-to-local official meetings and/or agreements."

With the pa.s.sage of time, the CPA and the U.S. military acted less like partners and more like adversaries. "Soldiers ... blamed civilians for not rebuilding the country quickly enough to pacify the country, while civilians ... blamed the military for not providing enough security to enable the rebuilding," the Washington Post's Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran would later write in summarizing this unhappy relationship. Rajiv Chandrasekaran would later write in summarizing this unhappy relationship.

Much later, a study issued in May 2004 by the Center for Army Lessons Learned a.n.a.lyzed the problem. It amounted to an obituary for the failure of the U.S. occupation effort in Iraq-albeit from a distinctly military point of view.

The common perception throughout the theater is that a roadmap for the rebuilding of Iraq does not exist. There is not a plan that outlines priorities with short, medium and long-term objectives. If such a national plan exists with the CPA, it has not been communicated adequately to Coalition forces. Task force staffs at all levels of command have reiterated that there is no clear guidance coming from Baghdad. The inability to develop or articulate a plan contributes to a lack of unityof effort between the Coalition and CPA Coalition commanders and staff viewthe CPA as understaffed, sluggish, hesitant to make a decision, and often detached from the true situation on the ground. With CPA officials on 90-day rotations, much time is required for replacements to become knowledgeable with the specific issues and players they are facing. Nine months after the declared end to major military action, CPA staffs in the center portions of the country are estimated at 20% strength. Whether rooted in the lack of staffing or to security concerns, there appears to be an inability of CPA Headquarters (Baghdad) to get the needed "eyes on" what is happening. Subsequently, CPA directives appear to be out of synch with the current situation.

THE CPA: "CAN'T PRODUCE ANYTHING".

213.

A growing gap between Iraqis and Americans The backdrop to that tension in Iraq was a larger, strategic disconnect that was even more troubling. The Bush administration had extraordinary ambitions for Iraq, and indeed for the entire Mideast, but it declined for months to provide the resources needed to fulfill that vision-partly because Wolfowitz and others had said that Iraqi reconstruction would be largely self-financing. By the end of the summer, it was clear that the reconstruction effort was stalling and that restarting it would take far more money than had been contemplated by the U.S. government. On Bremer's desk was a sign that n.o.bly stated, success has a thousand fathers success has a thousand fathers. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the veteran diplomat who was Bremer's top British aide, later commented that he should have replaced it with the message, "security and jobs, stupid "security and jobs, stupid." The Bush administration would come to agree with that sentiment in private, and asked Congress for a huge supplemental spending bill-$87 billion-to get the effort going. But even then, the wheels of the CPA bureaucracy turned so slowly that it took months to get basic equipment such as flak jackets to Iraqi security forces being trained by the U.S. government.

The c.u.mulative result of this incompetence was that by the late fall of 2003, the U.S. occupation of Iraq began to lose its claim on the lukewarm middle of Iraqi public opinion. In a poll of 1,167 Iraqis conducted for the CPA in five cities in November and December 2003,62 percent said that security was the most urgent issue facing them. "U.S. has Credibility Problem" reported one slide on the survey, because 59 percent of those polled said the United States would leave Iraq "only when forced to." The United States hadn't yet lost Iraq, but the trends were heading that way.

GETTING TOUGH.

SUMMER AND FALL 2003.

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[image]-Z.even reasonable, coming in response to the increased attacks on U.S. forces and a series of suicide bombing attacks. But it also appears to have undercut the long-term strategy of the U.S. government. "What you are seeing here is an unconventional war fought conventionally," a Special Forces lieutenant colonel remarked gloomily one day in Baghdad as the violence intensified. Asked later what he meant by that, this officer said that having the U.S. military out in patrols- that is, the presence mission-wasn't in and of itself necessarily stabilizing the situation. And the tactics that the regular troops used, he added, sometimes subverted American strategy.

In other words, U.S. forces were fighting hard, and might even be able eventually to claw their way to victory, but they were working far harder and less productively than necessary. They were following their training, performing according to doctrine, and busting their hearts to do the right thing-and frequently were sweating and bleeding in ways that didn't help them move toward their strategic goal. They were pounding the square peg of the U.S. Army into the round hole of Iraq, a difficult situation that was hardly their fault. Civilian leaders and top mil itary commanders had failed to define what kind of war was being fought, and publicly had insisted that it was something other than what it was. Seen in this light, the abuses that occurred later in 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison weren't an anomalous incident but rather the logical and predictable outcome of a series of panicky decisions made by senior commanders, which in turn had resulted from the divided, troop-poor approach devised months earlier by Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Franks.

The insurgency erupts After months of maneuvering, the real war in Iraq-the one to determine the future of the country-began on August 7,2003, when a car bomb exploded outside the Jordanian emba.s.sy, killing eleven and wounding more than fifty. The next day, with remarkable timing, the CPA released a public relations doc.u.ment that touted one hundred indicators of how well things were going in Iraq. "Most of Iraq is calm and progress on the road to democracy and freedom not experienced in decades continues," the doc.u.ment, posted on the White House's Web site, blithely a.s.serted in a section t.i.tled "10 Signs of Better Security." "Only in isolated areas are there still attacks." In fact, the insurgency was emerging into deadly bloom. While U.S. civilian and military leaders had dithered, letting their policy and posture drift, the enemy had been busy.

The initial focus of insurgent attacks wasn't the U.S. military but allies of the U.S. effort, such as other members of the coalition and international organizations, that were perceived as legitimizing the occupation. Beginning in midsummer, Gen. Sanchez found himself fighting a very different war from that waged by the U.S. military in the invasion months earlier. "As time went on, it became very clear by the fall, by the November timeframe ... that they had, as best we could tell, a strategy of attacking the different elements of cohesiveness within the coalition," Sanchez said in a subsequent statement in a legal proceeding. He saw four major thrusts of enemy attacks: "They were doing direct action against us. They were attacking the Iraqi security forces as they existed at the time. They were attacking politicians. They were attacking the international community, which was a strike on the Italians, the United Nations, and they were looking to split the coalition." In other words, the insurgents were systematically hitting allies of the U.S.-led effort, turning away from difficult U.S. military targets in favor of softer foreign targets, and in doing so, seeking to peel off support and isolate the U.S. occupation.

On August 19, a cement truck laden with artillery sh.e.l.ls and other explosives crashed into the outer wall of the headquarters of the United Nations in Iraq, on the Ca.n.a.l Road in eastern Baghdad. The blast was so powerful that windows in the camp of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, about half a mile way, were blown in. It destroyed a corner of the three-story UN building, killing twenty-two people and wounding another seventy. One of the dead was Brazilian diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, the chief of the UN mission, who survived the blast but was trapped inside the rubble and died before he could be freed.

The effect on the United Nations was devastating. In the attack's wake, the UN began to cut its presence, from eight hundred international staffers to fifteen. This was significant, because the UN had served as a bridge for the Americans to important Shiite leaders, such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who wouldn't meet directly with U.S. occupation officials. The act was successful in that it "convinced the organization that continuing to operate in Iraq would be too costly," Col. T. X. Hammes, the Marine expert on counterinsurgency who worked for the CPA on the training of Iraqis in the winter of 2003-4, later wrote in a.s.sessing the insurgents' strategy. Other international organizations, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the British relief agency Oxfam, began to pull out in the following weeks. After the UN was. .h.i.t again, with a smaller bomb a month later, more staffers and other agencies, such as Save the Children (UK), left Iraq. "That was a brilliant campaign," said Hammes. "They hit the UN, the Red Cross, the Jordanian emba.s.sy, and the Iraqi police. And we were calling them 'dead-enders'? Who do you think is disorganized at that point?"

Out in Anbar province, Keith Mines also felt the increasing heat. "The level of animosity toward the coalition appears to be rising in al Anbar province, as both quant.i.tatively there is an increasing rage on the streets, and qualitatively the attacks are growing more sophisticated and bolder," he wrote in his weekly report of September 24. "Only a small minority of al Anbarians are taking up arms against the coalition, but the vast middle ground does nothing to stop them and to date does not see it in their interest to help us corner them. And the trends are moving in the wrong direction." Mines also wrote to his family that he was worried about the volatile combination he saw brewing in his province: "hordes of mad young men with too much time on their hands and too many weapons readily available." Some of them were learning how to make and deliver bombs. The enemy may not have had a public face but he certainly was developing a distinctive mode of attack.

The war of the roadside bomb Each war produces its own artifacts-its distinctive phrases, garments, or technological innovations. The memorable piece of clothing from World War I was the trench coat, which captures a key aspect of that mired conflict. The cla.s.sic abbreviation of World War II was "snafu"-situation normal, all f.u.c.ked up.

More than anything else, war is about destruction, and so it is weaponry that most often captures the feel of a given conflict. The cold soul of the limited 1991 Gulf War was the precision-guided "smart bomb," which distilled to one lethal device the technological leap the U.S. military had taken since the end of the Vietnam War just sixteen years earlier.

The emblematic weapon of the new Iraq war was quite the opposite: the inexpensive, low-tech roadside bomb. The U.S. military called it the IED, for improvised explosive device. In unhappy contrast to the earlier U.S. war with Iraq, this weapon was used not by but against U.S. forces. It quickly became the single greatest threat to them: About one third of U.S. troops killed in the first year of the insurgency were victims of these bombs, as were about two thirds of those wounded severely enough to require medical evacuation out of Iraq. Support troops, such as mechanics and supply specialists, were most vulnerable, accounting for three quarters of those killed by the bombs in the summer of 2003.

Even these fairly primitive devices had their own evolution. At first, during the summer of 2003, almost all were hardwired-that is, attached by the lines used to detonate them. U.S. forces learned to look for the wire and kill the person waiting at the other end. By the following winter, about half the bombs were remote-controlled, frequently set off using cellular telephones, car alarm transmitters, or toy car controllers. For charges, insurgents usually used 155 millimeter artillery sh.e.l.ls and a variety of mortar rounds, and occasionally TNT or a plastic explosive.

The bombs at first were concealed under rocks or piles of trash, which were everywhere along Baghdad streets, as social services failed to resume after the war. Others were hidden in the carca.s.ses of dead dogs, which in the humid summer heat of Iraq produced a putrid smell that would deter all but the most dedicated soldier from probing for bombs.

Early on, one favored tactic was to block the road with a truck or bus that would appear to be stalled or broken down-and then plant a series of bombs behind the vehicle in the area along the road where the U.S. convoy would be forced to stop. U.S. troops responded by driving up on the sidewalk or in the incoming lane of traffic, which got them out of the trap but inadvertently served the insurgents' secondary purpose, of angering and alienating Iraqis who had to scramble out of the way of the careening convoy.

As the insurgency was heating up in the Sunni Triangle, Lt. Col. Steve Russell, based in its northern part in the town of Tikrit, was dealing with a wave of attacks in which bombers were using the transmitters from radio-controlled toy cars. They would take the electronic guts of the cars, wrap them in C-4 plastic explosive, and attach a blasting cap, then detonate them by remote control. So Russell, who commanded an infantry battalion, mounted one of the toy-car controllers on the dashboard of his Humvee and taped down the levers. Because all the toy cars operated on the same frequency, this would detonate any similar bomb about one hundred yards before his Humvee got to the spot. This "poor man's anti-explosive device [was] risky perhaps," Russell wrote in a fiffy-eight-page summary of his unit's time in Iraq, but better than the alternative of leaving the detonation to the bombers.

The most effective counterbomb tactic turned out to be the low-tech sniper. U.S. troops learned to hide and spy on spots, such as traffic circles, where bombs were likely to be emplaced. "Anyone who comes out in the middle of the night to plant an IED dies," a senior Central Command official reported.

As U.S. troops became more sophisticated in countering the devices, the insurgents invented new tactics. Enemy fighters observed that American troops were being trained to stop about two hundred meters short when they spotted a bomb. They adapted by planting a bomb in the open in a highly visible location, and then hiding several more two hundred meters farther up the road, next to where the troops would halt.

The typical IED cell, American intelligence a.n.a.lysts concluded, usually consisted of six to eight people. It was led by a planner/financier. Next came the bomb maker, who handled the construction of the device but not its delivery. The third specialist was the emplacer, who would plant the bomb by pretending to fix a flat tire or, in some customized vehicles, would drop the bomb through a hole cut in the floor of a car. In addition, the cell had a triggerman, who would detonate the bomb, and perhaps a spotter or two to provide security for the rest of the team. Many cells had someone in an additional role: cameraman. According to U.S. intelligence, the majority of bomb attacks were videotaped by the bomb cell, in part as a learning device to improve attacks, in part for propaganda and recruiting purposes. This reliance on video cameras was one reason that U.S. troops became so antagonistic toward television news cameramen, especially those of Arab ethnicity, who the troops tended to a.s.sume were in league with the insurgents. "There is an element-and I am not saying this applies everywhere-but some of the local hires of some of the local media organizations do their agencies a disservice, because they've got links to insurgents and terrorist organizations," said Army Gen. George Casey, who took over command in mid-2004. "We have not found that rampantly, but we know it's true in a few cases."

Most of the U.S. responses to the bomb attacks were reactive. About half the attacks during the summer of 2003 were against soft-skinned Humvees, which were lacking any armor. During the fall and winter of 2003-4, the Army emphasized adding armor to vehicles. But partly because it kept underestimating the depth and breadth of the insurgency, it struggled for over a year to get its people into better protected vehicles. It also studied the frequencies on which car alarm transmitters and other devices operated, and began to jam them with mobile electronic gear.

Despite these steps, the toll from the bombs increased with the pa.s.sage of time. During 2003 there was only one month-November, when the insurgency took off with a Ramadan offensive-in which more than twenty U.S. personnel were lost to roadside bombs and similar land mines, according to a mortality a.n.a.lysis by the office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner. But from January through November 2004, more than twenty troops were killed that way in every month but two. November 2004 was the worst of all, with more than forty soldiers lost to the bombs. What those numbers disguise is that the toll would have been higher were it not for the improvements in armor defenses, because the number of bomb attacks increased steadily in 2004. "IEDs are my number one threat," Gen. Abizaid stated in a memorandum sent in June of that year to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

But they were hardly ubiquitous. Most of the bombings occurred along major routes in a surprisingly small area-along about a total of 250 miles of roadway in Baghdad and leading from the capital city to the west, north, and northeast. Every day, hundreds of U.S. convoys traveled these main supply routes, becoming targets that were hit with surprising frequency.

For every military tactic there is a countermeasure. As one Army general noted, military operations are a giant, lethal version of the children's game of rock/paper/scissors. Adding armor to U.S. military vehicles inevitably led to new moves by the bombers. In the winter of 2004-5, they began concealing IEDs among overhanging branches and leaves-Iraq between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers is quite lush-or hanging them from light poles. The purpose of this, said one Army engineer studying the problem in Baghdad, appeared to be to move the bomb blast above the armored doors, so that the effect shattered the windshields and side windows inward, and also to hit the soldiers manning the guns mounted atop many vehicles.

Vehicle-borne IEDs, or car bombs, also became popular in the fall and winter of 2003. Troops soon were taught to be on the lookout for a new set of telltale signs, such as the jalopy so overladen that it sat low on its springs. Another was fresh tires on an old car: "This is a one-way trip, driver wants no flats," a 2004 briefing explained.

Bomb explosions frequently were experienced as overwhelming waves of light. "It just happened in a flash," recalled Sgt. 1st Cla.s.s Erick Macher, in a typical comment. "You hear it. The blast smashes everything in the vehicle."

Spec. James King, a combat lifesaver-an infantryman trained also as a kind of part-time medic-recalled being in a convoy bombed near Baghdad in late 2004. He went to the Humvee behind his, the one that was. .h.i.t. "A guy is lying on the seat, feet on the other seat, head hanging low out the door. I don't recognize him."

The soldier's head was hugely swollen, his eyes clouded. King was struck: "I realize I know this guy." He took off the soldier's helmet, but there was something coming with it-the top of the soldier's head. "I see his brain."

Another soldier stepped out of the Humvee and fell to the ground. King continued to work on the first one. "He gurgles in air and blood-he exhales blood. He gets still again. I yell his name. He gurgles in air and blood-he exhales blood. Again and again."

At one point someone suggested an intravenous injection to replace lost blood. King reached for his IV. A full-time medic who had arrived looked at King. "No," the medic ordered. "He's dead."

King picked up his machine gun and his medical kit, then walked back to his own Humvee. "No anger. No remorse. Just sudden clarity and emptiness," he wrote.

"Are you OK to drive?" someone asked him."I'm fine," he responded. It was not true, he noted later.

As they treated bomb injuries Army doctors began to notice a new pattern of problems in soldiers that resulted from brains being rattled around in the skull by the blasts. In 2003 and 2004, hundreds of soldiers were diagnosed as suffering some form of damage from such incidents. Even seasoned surgeons were surprised by the extent of it. Army Reserve Maj. Donald Robinson was a trauma specialist in inner-city Camden, New Jersey, before deploying to Iraq, but he was surprised by what he found in the war. "When I got there I was taken aback," he said. "This was penetrating trauma to the nth degree. It was ma.s.sive. The tissue destruction was like nothing I'd ever seen before Imagine shards of metal go- ing everywhere.... Add the percussion from the blast. Then put someone inside a Bradley fighting vehicle and add fire to it and burning flesh. A person inhales and [suffers] inhalation injury."

But in an insurgency, it is the political result that is always paramount. Though devastating physically, the most significant effect of roadside bombs was that they made U.S. troops wary of operating among the people. The fact that insurgents were able to place so many bombs, often repeatedly along the same stretches of road, also made a political statement, because it meant that the locals weren't reporting on them. "Coalition forces are forced to interact with the Iraqi populace from a defensive posture, effectively driving a psychological wedge between the people and their protectors," Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who commanded the 1st Cavalry Division in Iraq in 2004, observed. That sort of insight, built on an understanding of the nature of conducting a counterinsurgency campaign, had been rare among Army commanders in Iraq during the summer of 2003.

The U.S. Army cracks down The Army's original plan was to conduct a force withdrawal beginning in midsummer 2003, bringing its presence down to about 30,000 troops by late summer. Instead, late summer was when the situation in Iraq really began to feel like a war for many of the 130,000 American soldiers in the country.

August 29 brought the third major car bombing of the month, as insurgents. .h.i.t another ally of the U.S. effort, Shiite political leader Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir Hakim. The leader of SCIRI-the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq-Hakim had been one of the most important political figures in Iraq, and the most influential religious figure to have openly supported the U.S. occupation. The car bomb that killed him soon after Friday prayers in the holy city of Najaf also murdered more than ninety others. The message was that the United States, for all its firepower, couldn't protect its Iraqi allies.

During late July and August, Generals Abizaid and Sanchez discussed with their division commanders and other top officers three possible responses to the insurgency, recalled Maj. Gen. Renuart. One was tactical withdrawal from trouble spots. "Take a city like Ramadi or Fallujah, and tell them to police it and run it themselves," he said. "The second was, use small elements, like SF [Special Forces] teams, to do raids in a surgical application of power. The third was, you are present in cities, and you are intimidating enough to create security by presence." Ultimately, "we decided all three had a place." One reason for that was that Abizaid didn't want to limit the choices available to the division commanders. "If you need to use a scalpel, here's a scalpel," was the thinking, Renuart said. "If you need to use a mallet, I don't want to take that away from you."

But there were many more sledgehammers than scalpels in the U.S. Army inventory, both physically and mentally. The war in Iraq isn't the Vietnam War. There are more differences than similarities between the two. Yet in one respect, the initial response of the Army, they were eerily alike. Lt. Col. John Nagl's account of how the Army approached Vietnam was echoed in Iraq.

The American Army's involvement in the Second Indochina War from 1950 to 1972 demonstrates the triumph of the inst.i.tutional culture of an organization over attempts at doctrinal innovation and the diminution of the effectiveness of the organization at accomplishing national objectives. The United States Army had become reliant on firepower and technological superiority in its history of an- nihilating enemy forces The concept that success in counterinsurgency con- sisted of separating the insurgents from popular support never took hold. The U.S.

Army proceeded with its historical role of destroying the enemy army-even if it had a hard time finding it. The United States Army entered the Vietnam War with a doctrine well suited to fighting conventional war in Europe, but worse than use- less for the counterinsurgency it was about to combat.

Even the short-term successes of the U.S. Army in Iraq seem to have long-term costs that went unrecognized at the time. The story of how intelligence operations were revamped in the fall of 2003 ill.u.s.trates this sad pattern. All summer long, commanders had fretted about the poor quality of their intelligence. Several months into the war, they had no idea who the enemy really was. Nor did they know much about what Iraqis thought of them-especially the views of those beyond the narrow world of Iraqis, such as interpreters, who were on the U.S. payroll.