The Gamble_ General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq Part 8

After four years of failure in Iraq, the U.S. military began to find effectiveness-at least tactically-as its leaders finally became resigned to the reality that the way to success was conducting slow, ambiguous operations that were built not around technology but around human interactions. "Be deliberate," Odierno would order his subordinates. Show "tactical patience," advised a brigade commander. It became common to hear American commanders counsel their frustrated soldiers to take it "Shwia, shwia" "Shwia, shwia"-Arabic for "slowly, slowly." As the new counterinsurgency manual said, they needed to be prepared to take years to succeed. The key to this mode of warfare was slowly seeking accommodation, pulling the population over to one's side, even if that sometimes meant cutting deals with people who had killed American troops. As Emma Sky said one day, "We are dealing with guys with blood on their hands."

Sky, who had advised the U.S. military for a year in 2003-4, saw the commanders as having an entirely new mind-set in 2007. "In '03, the guys were Christian crusaders seeking revenge for 9/11. Today they are advising Iraqis in a way they couldn't back then. They have completely transformed the way they work with Iraqis. It is a tremendous change. It's not just the Sunnis or the Shiites who have changed. We all have changed."

The entire approach was distinctly alien to the rapid, decisive, mechanistic, and sometimes Manichean mind-set that had been taught to a generation or two of American commanders. It had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with dealing with some of the oldest of human traits-eye-to-eye contact and heeding the values and ways of tribes and their leaders. What was going on in Iraq in 2007, as Kilcullen put it, was "a counterrevolution in military affairs, led to a certain extent by David Petraeus."

The pre-Iraq, triumphalist U.S. military also was fond of talking about "information dominance." What this tended to mean in reality was ama.s.sing data rather than understanding. For most of the time the U.S. military has been in Iraq, it actually has tended to be information poor. As Warren Buffett, the wise billionaire, once observed, if you've been playing poker for half an hour and you don't know who the patsy at the table is, then you're the patsy. Too often, U.S. troops, cut off both linguistically and physically from the Iraqi populace, operating in a harsh climate amid an alien culture, had been made patsies. This was not their fault but that of their leaders who didn't understand the task at hand of conducting a counterinsurgency campaign.

Looking back, Maj. Mark Gillespie, a military adviser in Iraq, recalled that in early 2006, he was "reaching terminal velocity and pulling my hair out and trying to figure out why people just don't get it. Well, it wasn't them who weren't getting it, it was me who wasn't getting it."

American soldiers would really only start getting the requisite amount of information after they moved out into the population in 2007. In retrospect, this seems like common sense. After all, Clausewitz, often seen incorrectly as the most conventional of war theorists, notes that the people are the greatest single source of information available. "We refer not so much to the single outstandingly significant report, but to the countless minor contacts brought about by the daily activities of our army," he explained.

The new humility of American commanders amounted to the starting point for the new strategy. After trying it their way for years, they now were going to try it the Iraqi way. So, for example, rather than try to build on their own individualistic core values of freedom and "one-man, one-vote" democracy, they began to rely on Iraq's more communitarian values, which often revolve around showing and receiving respect. "They felt disrespected, dispossessed, and disgusted," Petraeus said one day. "All they wanted was"-he began singing the letters in the old Aretha Franklin hit-"R-E-S-P-E-C-T." (Indeed, one of the new Iraqi political parties that would form called itself "Dignity.") With humility came its twin, candor. "There's a more open environment now," Capt. McNally said. "People used to maybe think [negative] things, but they didn't say them."

This new sobriety was the intellectual context for the reduction in the goals of the war. This is a controversial point, because that shrinkage has never really been announced or even acknowledged. But it was put into practice every day as a smaller, narrower set of aims. The goal was no longer the grandiose one that somewhat murkily grew out of the 9/11 attacks and was meant to transform Iraq and the Middle East-what the old Wolfowitzian Iraq hawks had called "draining the swamp" in which terrorism grew. Instead, the quietly restated U.S. goal was to achieve a modic.u.m of stability, to keep Iraq together, and to prevent the war from metastasizing into a regional bloodbath. That meant finding what one official called "a tolerable level of violence" and learning to live with it.

"Not rhetorically, but in practice we have" limited the goals of the U.S. effort, Mansoor said one day early in 2008. Trying out a phrase Petraeus would use publicly four months later, he said, "We are willing to accept less than a Jeffersonian democracy. . . . The rhetoric of our national leadership is still about freedom, but on the ground, there's a realization there is going to have to be Iraqis figuring this out." (In April 2008, Petraeus would tell the House Foreign Affairs Committee: "In terms of what it is that we are trying to achieve, I think simply it is a country that is at peace with itself and its neighbors. It is a country that can defend itself, that has a government that is reasonably representative and broadly responsive to its citizens, and a country that is involved in, engaged in, again, the global economy. Amba.s.sador Crocker and I, for what it's worth, have typically seen ourselves as minimalists. We're not after the holy grail on Iraq; we're not after Jeffersonian democracy. We're after conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage.") Petraeus began keeping an eagle eye on the president's speeches, using their weekly video teleconferences to convey caution against inflating the rhetoric. He usually succeeded but not always.

There was good reason for this quiet ratcheting down. As Steven Metz, an astute strategic a.n.a.lyst, put it, encouraging democracy was at odds with the larger goal of stability: "Our current strategy is based on the delusion that we can have stable, or modulated democratization," he said. "Few things are more destabilizing and p.r.o.ne to chaos than democratization. I think we can have either democratization or stabilization. The issue is whether we can tolerate several decades of often-violent instability while democratization takes root."

THE HARDEST STEP.

The surge really began even before the first of the surge brigades arrived. That may sound paradoxical but isn't, because the surge was more about how to use troops than it was about the number of them. The first new brigade wouldn't fully arrive until February, but as the bombings increased in January, the 1st Cavalry Division, which already was in the country, escalated its efforts to protect the population, seeking new ways to protect markets, neighborhoods, main roads, and bridges, said Col. Tobin Green, the division's chief of operations, and a friend and former student of Eliot Cohen. "I believe that was a turning point," Green said, "a visible sign of commitment to protecting the Iraqi people."

Moving American soldiers from big isolated bases and into new posts of 35 men (if platoon-sized) to around 100 (if manned by a company) located in vacant schoolhouses, factories, and apartment buildings in Baghdad's neighborhoods was the hardest step. Essentially, U.S. forces were sallying out to launch a counteroffensive to retake the city.

Seeking to translate the strategy into operational and tactical sense, Odierno was looking downward, monitoring the adjustments of subordinates from division commanders to platoon leaders. "That's especially difficult with units that were already there," recalled Keane, his mentor. "He was transitioning those forces from a very defensive strategy to an offensive strategy." On top of that, having only the minimum amount of troops that he and Keane thought he needed, Odierno began to move them around in order to maximize their effectiveness. "He took risks," Keane said. "The easy thing would have been to put all the surge brigades into the city." Instead, following the "What would Saddam do?" approach, Odierno put much of his combat power outside the capital. This was the biggest difference between Odierno's plan and the one Keane and Kagan had pulled together at the American Enterprise Inst.i.tute. Eventually, he would split his total available combat power evenly between the city and its surroundings, with six brigades in each.

In February, the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division, the first official surge brigade, was sent into eastern Baghdad. Over the next several weeks, 19 new outposts were established across Baghdad. "Get out of your Humvees, get out of your tanks, your Brads, and walk around," Army Maj. Joseph Halloran, an artillery officer, later summarized. "Stop commuting to war. . . . The concept of a super FOB [forward operating base] is more damaging to the war effort than any Abu Ghraib or Haditha incident could ever be."

The first days were surprisingly violent, with an average of almost 180 attacks a day on U.S. forces. "That was the battle of Baghdad," Petraeus said looking back 18 months later. "It was just very very difficult, very very hard." During February 2007, Baghdad suffered an average of more than one car bomb attack a day. Between late January and late February, at least eight U.S. helicopters were shot down.

In March, the second surge unit, the 4th Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division, began operations in western Baghdad. One skeptical soldier from the Big Red One told a reporter that he didn't expect the new approach to work. "It's getting worse and worse," he explained to the Washington Post' Washington Post's Joshua Partlow. "They don't even respect us anymore. They spit at us, they throw rocks at us. It wasn't like that before." In some Shiite neighborhoods, units were greeted by stacked loudspeakers blaring the chants of the Jaysh al-Mahdi, Moqtada al-Sadr's militia. In Sunni neighborhoods that had been ethnically cleansed, patrolling soldiers often found piles of executed bodies and vacant houses with blood smeared on the walls.

This is how the operations officer for a battalion operating in southwest Baghdad recalled that time to a researcher for the official Center for Army Lessons Learned: When we first moved into the AO [area of operations], it was house-to-house clearing, and fighting most of the way. It took months before we could drive more than halfway north through the mulhullas mulhullas without hitting multiple IEDs and taking fire. It got so bad that we twice had to turn over part of our battles.p.a.ce to Strykers [wheeled armored vehicles]. We focused on establishing a foothold by clearing house by house and holding with a 24x7 presence. Then we began establishing our HUMINT [human intelligence] sources, pulling out bad guys, and building relationships with the people. We also focused on splitting the insurgency. It was composed of two main groups. First were the local mujahadin, who were truly concerned about protecting the neighborhood from the Shiite Militias, particularly Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM). They were generally actually concerned with the people. The second element was Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). The people were getting tired of all the violence in the neighborhoods, of things blowing up and getting innocents killed. Every time something happened, we'd say "AQI did this too you. Why do you allow it?" When we lost people, we'd stay restrained and not seek vengeance. without hitting multiple IEDs and taking fire. It got so bad that we twice had to turn over part of our battles.p.a.ce to Strykers [wheeled armored vehicles]. We focused on establishing a foothold by clearing house by house and holding with a 24x7 presence. Then we began establishing our HUMINT [human intelligence] sources, pulling out bad guys, and building relationships with the people. We also focused on splitting the insurgency. It was composed of two main groups. First were the local mujahadin, who were truly concerned about protecting the neighborhood from the Shiite Militias, particularly Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM). They were generally actually concerned with the people. The second element was Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). The people were getting tired of all the violence in the neighborhoods, of things blowing up and getting innocents killed. Every time something happened, we'd say "AQI did this too you. Why do you allow it?" When we lost people, we'd stay restrained and not seek vengeance.

The first task was simply surviving. "Our first two weeks were tough," Lt. Jacob Carlisle, a platoon leader, later said. "We had to clear every day, and we got hit every day." Indeed, in June, he would be shot in the thigh and hit by shrapnel in the face and arm.

Not all soldiers liked the shift into the population. "My platoon sergeant came to Iraq with the idea that we were going to hide for fifteen months and all come back alive," recalled Lt. Schuyler Williamson of the 1st Cavalry Division. "When I told him that we were not going to do that, he said I was going to get my soldiers killed." The balky sergeant eventually was rea.s.signed, Williamson added.

Lt. Col. Crider led his cavalry squadron into the Doura neighborhood in southern Baghdad and lost three soldiers in one week. "We did not know who was responsible for these attacks, and no one would tell us anything," he recalled. "Our partnered National Police unit was no help as the residents of Doura, our predominantly Sunni neighborhood, hated them." In fact, he remembered, the locals referred to the police as "the militia." Bringing them into the neighborhood was seen as a hostile act.

"Doura was a meatgrinder," recalled Command Sgt. Maj. Marvin Hill.

When Baker Company, a unit in the 2nd Infantry Division, moved into there, it was greeted with "constant enemy small-arms fire, IED, RPG, and grenade attacks, often surprisingly coordinated," recalled Lt. Tim Gross, a platoon leader. Baker began by spending three nights using shovels, screwdrivers, and tire irons to remove 18 "deep-buried" bombs in its area. The soldiers lied to the locals that they knew where all the bombs were because they had so many local sources of information. "We don't need any more information because we had hundreds of people cooperating," was the bluff, as Capt. Jim Keirsey, Baker's commander, recalled it. In fact, they began with almost no information from the people of the area, who had felt abused by Iraqi police operating in the area. Indeed, Baker later would ban the most abusive of the police, the militia-infested National Police, from entering the neighborhood.

Despite being attacked constantly, Baker Company, with roughly 125 men, began conducting patrols around the clock. It tried to be precise in the use of force. "Shooting the right guy teaches the enemy and population that evil has consequences," Keirsey wrote. "The corollary is that a poor shot-one that hits an innocent person or leads to collateral damage-is worse than not shooting at all."

Gross, the platoon leader, called this mind-set "protect the innocent, punish the deserving." He said it especially impressed the locals when one of his platoon's patrols, while amid civilians, was ambushed. After a girl was. .h.i.t, his platoon sergeant picked her up and rushed her to medical care. "An informant reported the incident as a large turning point towards winning the people of our neighborhood," Gross said.

There was a new savviness to the way American forces were operating. Baker Company's most effective tactic didn't involve firepower but instead walking and talking. Its soldiers conducted a thorough census that mapped the 3,500 households in its area of operations, photographing all male inhabitants and collecting their grievances. Dubbed "Operation Close Encounters," it was done slowly and carefully, with some interviews lasting an hour. Keirsey ordered that the soldier doing the talking should sit down, take off his helmet and sungla.s.ses, accept any drink offered, and speak respectfully. The other members of the patrol should stay in uniform and quietly focus outward on security, rather than join the conversation. In this way, they learned about suspected bomb planters and about Iraqi police abuses. As a result of ethnic cleansing, there were many empty houses. Rather than let them be used by militias, the American troops padlocked their doors and gates.

They also were told that while the area was controlled by insurgents, U.S. funds had helped finance the enemy, because the insurgents got kickbacks from contractors. "People are getting rich working with Americans in Iraq," said Keirsey. "Make sure they are the right people." It was an important lesson, but not one that many American officials had heeded in earlier years.

Visiting Iraq, Keane saw not only Petraeus and Odierno but their division and brigade commanders. He would push them. "How many of your platoons are outside the FOB and on the street twenty-four/seven?-that was always a huge dimension for me. And some of those guys would be hedging-they would have one-third of them out there. I said, 'No guys, you would have to have two-thirds, for sure. And if you could, get them all out there and be protecting yourself back in the FOB using someone else,'" such as support units or contractors.

By May 2007, the 1st Cavalry Division, which was the core unit for Baghdad, at any given point had 75 percent of combat forces off its headquarters post, said Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil Jr., the division commander. The typical cycle for a unit was five and a half days out, followed by one and a half back on post to rest, refit, check e-mail, and clean up. Having troops live where the action was added enormously to their effectiveness, not only in increased awareness but also simply in response time. "You're not driving and hour and a half to do a ninety-minute patrol," Fil said.

The 1st Cav's 1st Brigade, stationed north and northwest of Baghdad, set out to eliminate al Qaeda's safe havens and crack down on the networks sending car bombs and roadside bombs into the capital. But at first it didn't feel it had enough troops for those tasks. "I was frustrated because the only thing we were doing was terrain denial-we were so strung out securing the LOCs," or lines of communication, said Maj. Patrick Michaelis, the brigade's S-3, or chief of operations. With the troops he had, he explained, trying to keep major roads clear of ambushes and bombs was "all we could do." Dozens of soldiers were killed. The unit didn't begin to feel the effects of the surge until mid-May, after it was given an additional battalion from another division, he recalled. Thus reinforced, its operations against al Qaeda would become a model that Petraeus would cite, as the brigade pushed into the areas where al Qaeda fighters and their allies had found sanctuary. "We fought our way in," he recalled. The enemy was ready, having deeply buried bombs on the roads in the area. One had a full 1,200 feet of copper wire leading to the trigger-far further than U.S. forces were trained to look for the triggerman.

At almost every new outpost established, a series of fights and terrorist actions would ensue. Sentries found it difficult to stop truck and car bombs barreling toward them with mere rifle fire, so were issued bazooka-like anti-tank weapons. Frequently, al Qaeda would overreact to the new patrol bases, said Maj. Luke Calhoun, the brigade's intelligence officer: "They'd kidnap children, kill women, threaten tribal leaders." But that counteroffensive usually backfired, he said, because the population was driven into the arms of U.S. forces, who now were available to them 24 hours a day in the new outposts.

One of the hardest hit areas was the town of Sab al-Bor, which had a population of about 60,000. In August 2006, five months before the surge got under way, al Qaeda had begun sh.e.l.ling the town, located on the northwest fringe of greater Baghdad, with big 120-millimeter mortars, aiming at the primarily Shiite northwest corner of the town. But that was the only major security problem with the town, and U.S. forces were facing bigger issues elsewhere as the small civil war grew. In late September 2006, the town was turned over to Iraqi police, "so I could pull B Troop and the IA [Iraqi army] out of the town and move them to other, hotter areas," recalled Col. James Pasquarette, who commanded the U.S. Army brigade based nearby. But on October 3, soon after that move, the mortar attacks escalated. Shiites in the town retaliated by shooting up Sunni neighborhoods. Thousands fled the town, including the Iraqi police. Soon only about 5,000 inhabitants remained. The young male Shiites who were displaced became willing recruits for Shiite militias, which intensified the cycle of violence.

The turnaround for the 1st Cav brigade, commanded by Col. Paul Funk, began in 2007 after a Marine unit moved to the west side of the brigade's sector, cutting off al Qaeda's roads south to Fallujah and north to Tamariyah, Samarra, and Tikrit. Almost instantly the mortar sh.e.l.ling of Sab al-Bor ended. U.S. Army engineers purposely weakened a major bridge so that pedestrians could cross but not vehicles, and the car bombings stopped. By October 2007, Michaelis said, al Qaeda seemed to make a strategic decision to retreat northward to Mosul.

The improvement in security provided multiple benefits. During that period, more and more local militias came over to the American side. Turning over checkpoints and outposts to them freed up the 1st Cav units for other missions. Also, the locals began providing precise intelligence. "The info we were getting from the CLCs [Concerned Local Citizens] was phenomenal," recalled Michaelis. If they said there were six bombs in a road, and American explosives experts only detected five, the local fighters would insist that they had missed one-and would be proven right. In October, representatives of local Sunni and Shiite militias that had turned also met jointly with representatives of the Iraqi government in what the 1st Cav labeled "The Northwest Baghdad Regional Security Summit." Michaelis remembers thinking that day, "That's what 'right' looks like." Finally, elements of local governments began to surface. "We started seeing guys pop up. 'I'm the water official for the district.' 'Well, where the h.e.l.l have you been for the last fifteen months?' 'There's no way I was gonna stick my head up when al Qaeda was gonna kill me.' "

By the end of the unit's tour that winter, in late 2007, Michaelis said, "We'd start seeing video shops, Internet shops, cigar shops. These are not things you buy when you are at the low end of Maslow's hierarchy of needs." And the population of Sab al-Bor was back up to 21,000. The brigade's transformative experience would be replicated in a dozen other areas in and around the capital in 2007.

THE ENEMY COUNTERATTACK.

But anyone still alive to fight the Americans in Iraq in 2007 had learned a lot in the preceding years. In the spring and summer the American surge was met with a counteroffensive involving new tactics and more lethal weapons. This was arguably the toughest period of the war, as the Americans took their last and best shot only to see casualties increase without many signs of security improving. At the very least, it was the hardest part of Petraeus's time in command in Iraq. At the time he put a positive spin on it while speaking in public, calling himself a "qualified optimist." But much later he would admit, "There were days that were about the hardest that I have ever experienced." The U.S. military had committed its reserve. It was taking more risks and losing more people. As the war entered its fifth year in March 2007, there were few signs that the gamble of the surge was paying off, either tactically or strategically.

In north Baghdad, Company C of the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, spent most of its tour of duty-11 months out of 15-in the heavily contested Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiyah. On May 14, 2007, a bomb blew one of its Humvees into the air. "I never thought I was going to see my buddies running around on fire," said Staff Sgt. Octavio Nunez, one of two soldiers who would receive the Silver Star for valor that day.

The bombs grew more powerful: In June a Bradley Fighting Vehicle in the same company was. .h.i.t by a huge explosion, flipping the 25-ton armored vehicle and killing 5 soldiers. The bomb had been placed not far from an Iraqi army checkpoint, a point not lost on the American soldiers. The gunner, Spec. Daniel Agami, was pinned beneath the vehicle. His comrades could hear him scream as he burned to death. Another member of the battalion, Pfc. Ross McGinnis, would posthumously receive the Medal of Honor for jumping on a grenade that lodged inside a Humvee. All told, the battalion lost 31 men during its tour, nearly half of them from Charlie Company.

Col. Galloucis, commander of the MPs in Baghdad, shook his head as he remembered the violent spring of 2007. "We started seeing the introduction of EFPs into Baghdad," he said, referring to a particularly lethal kind of roadside bomb, the "explosively formed penetrator," that can lift off the ground heavy vehicles such as the tanklike Bradley Fighting Vehicle. If the entire Iraq war was characterized by roadside bombs, as the spirit of World War I was captured by trench warfare and machine guns, then the spring of 2007 was the campaign of the EFP. These armor-piercing bombs were only the size of a coffee can, and so could be placed very quickly, unlike the big bombs that required much digging. They were used almost exclusively by Shiite militias. The bombs were manufactured in Iran, with the number radically increasing late in 2006, said U.S. officials. "They are harder to make than you think," said one American bomb expert. Designed to fire a spearlike slug of melting metal at extremely high speed, the bombs didn't work if milled imprecisely, which causes the metal to fragment prematurely and so diminish in lethality.

Galloucis's troops were also facing a sniper threat, and that "was having a real psychological impact," as well as a physical one, because some of the shooters were using armor-piercing rounds that would penetrate American body armor. He remembered moments of despair-"You had a sense that things weren't working, that whatever we'd do, they'd counter."

Crider, the cavalry squadron commander in southern Baghdad, soon realized that the time-honored tactic of simply cordoning off an area and searching it not only antagonized the very people whose support they needed but also turned up few signs of the enemy. "Insurgents have learned over five years not to hide things in their homes," he commented.

U.S. military intelligence officers began to see a.s.saults on Americans-rather than on Iraqis-as a positive sign. "If the attacks are against us, and not against Iraqi Security Forces or the people, then we're winning," said one. It was small consolation for those being shot at.

One day Kilcullen was riding with an Iraqi battalion commander who was about to move his unit into northwestern Baghdad for a 90-day tour. They were driving behind the outgoing Iraqi commander, whose Humvee blew up in front of them, turning the old commander into a shimmering cloud of hot pink mist. Kilcullen glanced over to look at the incoming Iraqi commander. "His eyes were like dinner plates," he recalled. A few days later, a message from the insurgents arrived at the new commander's headquarters, he said: "Sorry about last week. But you know, it doesn't have to be that way. You're only here for ninety days. Can't we live and let live?" The battalion commander's reaction, Kilcullen recalled, was "Sign me up." After that, it became difficult to get that commander to do anything. For the next 90 days, his battalion was ineffective, and the sector effectively was in enemy hands.

Sadr's Jaysh al-Mahdi was extraordinarily effective in infiltrating Iraqi forces, Kilcullen said. "We did a counterintelligence a.s.sessment of an Iraqi army battalion in central Baghdad and found that every senior commander and staff were either JAM, doing criminal activity with JAM, or intimidated by JAM."

a.n.a.lYZING THE PATTERNS of Iraqi violence, Kilcullen concluded that al Qaeda attacked during the day, using car bombs to attack people around Shiite markets and mosques, while Shiite militias retaliated at night, sending death squads into neighborhoods where Sunnis slept. These different pathways of violence required different responses, he argued. The way to deter the al Qaeda attacks was to establish checkpoints at the entryways to markets, mosques, and other public places-and then to count it as a victory if a bomb exploded at a checkpoint and killed two Iraqi soldiers rather than detonating at its target and killing dozens of civilians. Likewise, the answer to Shiite revenge attacks was to protect a dozen of the remaining Sunni neighborhoods, creating "gated communities" surrounded by big cement walls. The new Joint Security Stations would emphasize helping the market checkpoints during the day and backing up the neighborhood checkpoints by night, as well as patrol through their areas.

As thousands of cement barriers were erected-the one separating Adhamiyah from a Shiite area was twelve feet high and three miles long-they were roundly criticized as an imitation of Israeli tactics. That was the most incendiary charge possible in the Middle East. Steve Niva, a Middle East specialist at the Evergreen State College in Washington, charged that they were "dividing neighbor from neighbor and choking off normal commerce and communications." What they actually were doing was dividing Iraqis from people trying to kill them and choking off the normal movements of death squads. In Adhamiyah, civilian deaths declined by about two-thirds after the wall was erected in April 2007, Kilcullen said. One sign of the value of the walls was that al Qaeda in Iraq vigorously resisted them, noted Lt. Col. Dale Kuehl, commander of a battalion in northwest Baghdad. "We were engaged in a running battle with AQI as they tried to establish holes in the barriers while we tried to keep them intact," he said.

Taking similar measures in al Anbar Province, the Marines found that the steps to limit the mobility of insurgents produced some unexpected side benefits. "The insurgency is like a shark," a Marine intelligence report stated, "it has to move to survive. Cut off its freedom of movement and its loses its effectiveness." As the fighters and death squads shifted to new locations, they were forced to communicate, and signals interception enabled the U.S. military to find them, or to eavesdrop on their reports and planning sessions. Trying to escape the new constraints, some insurgents moved out of the cities and into the desert. This in turn made it easier for the Marines to locate them and then order up air strikes. "Population control measures and the subsequent movement of the insurgency into more remote areas has a secondary positive effect on our operations," the Marine report continued. "More and more often we found ourselves engaging the enemy on terrain that maximizes kinetic effects." Also, in the emptiness of the desert, "collateral damage"-that is, killing bystanders-became far easier to avoid.

ONE OF THE SAD realizations brought by the new campaign was how disillusioned Iraqis had become with the Americans after five years. As Col. MacFarland had seen in Ramadi, the locals no longer had much faith in what American officers told them.

"The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa," an essay written by two Army captains, Michael Burganoyne and Albert Markwardt, and based on The Defense of Duffer's Drift, The Defense of Duffer's Drift, the 1905 British military cla.s.sic about small unit tactics in guerrilla war, vividly ill.u.s.trates the education of Americans in Iraq-and shows why Iraqis were losing faith. One of the lessons that unfortunately appears more than once is about the failure of American officers to be able to fulfill the promises they make to local Iraqi leaders, or even to keep them alive against insurgent retaliation. "You Americans have been here for years now," the mayor of a small Iraqi riverside town says in the essay to a newly arrived lieutenant. "It's promise after promise. . . . Let us just eat so you will not have to lie to me with promises." the 1905 British military cla.s.sic about small unit tactics in guerrilla war, vividly ill.u.s.trates the education of Americans in Iraq-and shows why Iraqis were losing faith. One of the lessons that unfortunately appears more than once is about the failure of American officers to be able to fulfill the promises they make to local Iraqi leaders, or even to keep them alive against insurgent retaliation. "You Americans have been here for years now," the mayor of a small Iraqi riverside town says in the essay to a newly arrived lieutenant. "It's promise after promise. . . . Let us just eat so you will not have to lie to me with promises."

Later, after the fictional lieutenant patiently wins the confidence of the mayor, who tells him where the local insurgents are based, the American unit is ordered to move elsewhere. "I met with the mayor and let him know we were leaving. His face seemed like it lost its color and he almost looked through me." A few days later, the lieutenant is back on his air-conditioned Forward Operating Base, watching cable news over his breakfast of Lucky Charms cereal, only to see footage of the mayor being executed. "I saw the mayor and all the locals we have developed as informants, their hands and feet tied behind their backs, on the street in front of his house, with two masked men standing behind them. Everyone who had helped us defeat the insurgents was lined up."

Thus, after getting into the neighborhoods, the new American units of the surge were taking over an operation that was in the red. Before they could do good they had to make up for the mistakes of their predecessors. They had to restore American credibility by delivering on their promises, and demonstrating that they wouldn't make friends and then abandon them.

"We were wondering if our approach was going to work," said Lt. Jacob Carlisle. "But when we got hit, we didn't overreact." He had studied Petraeus's counterinsurgency manual and constantly sought to build bridges to local residents. For example, he said, "When we went into houses around the contact, we didn't point weapons at them and yell and swear like we used to-'You know what the f.u.c.k just happened! Tell me! You know who did this! Tell me!' Now we went in and asked first if they were okay. Were there bad people who did this around that were threatening them? Why didn't you tell us there were people digging in explosives in front of your house. . . . Call us next time."

Carlisle, from Durand, Wisconsin, also found that years of frustrated American reconstruction programs had made Iraqis skeptical. A woman complained to him about raw sewage in the street, and he replied he would fix it. "All American make promises, but nothing ever happens," she responded. Determined to show that times had changed, he made sure the problem was addressed. "Word gets out," he said. "The people say, 'This unit, they tell you something and it happens.' "

Even detainees were treated differently, the young infantry officer said. "When people are released, we bring them back to the family. We don't just dump them out the gate." During Ramadan, he gave money to widows and children, and to the family of a man he had detained. "All this stuff makes a difference."

To deepen their awareness, his soldiers were a.s.signed shifts in their neighborhoods. His platoon patrolled during the morning, and the company's other two platoons the afternoon and evening. "We know what is normal on the streets, and see the same people in the same places every day. We know if something is out of place." As the days pa.s.sed, familiarity led to more ease in communication, and even a smidgen of trust. "Now that we were in the neighborhood every day, they believed us that we would keep them safe. More and more started calling us."

There were three steps of cooperation, said Lt. Col. Stephen Michael, commander of a battalion of the 25th Infantry Division, also posted on the south side of Baghdad. "First people weren't working with us, then they would work with us covertly, and now most work with us openly."

It took time-sometimes two or three months-before the Americans and the Iraqis began to grow accustomed to each other. "When we first came over and started planting ourselves in, you wouldn't see too many people because they didn't know if we'd be here, they didn't know to trust us, and basically the extremists were still intimidating and the people were reconning us," said Col. Wayne Grigsby of the 3rd Infantry Division, commander of the third of the surge brigades, which deployed to the tough area to the southeast of Baghdad. But after about two months, in late spring, people began talking to the American soldiers. Iraqis would begin telling them things, he said, like "Hey, that guy over there has never been in this town before. He drove in with two big trucks," their cargoes covered with tarps. "I don't think it's right, and we don't want him in here if he's going to bring trouble. Can you go take care of that problem?"

Down in south Baghdad, Lt. Col. Crider found the same effect. "The days of large cordon-and-sweep operations and hoping to find something . . . were over," he said. Instead, he sent his soldiers into Iraqi homes to learn who lived in the neighborhood to converse, drink tea, take photographs and census data, and learn about local concerns. "The American soldiers was no longer a mysterious authority figure speeding by in a HMMWV behind two-inch gla.s.s who occasionally rifled through their home. . . . After repeated encounters, our soldiers began to learn who was related, which families did not get along, who provided useful insight, and many other intimate details." They found that in their neighborhood lived an international basketball referee who had worked on the side for Iraqi intelligence. They met a famous Iraqi comedian, as well as a cardiologist fluent in English and eager to help. As they began to know and see more, attacks on them and on Iraqi civilians began to taper off. "AQI could no longer threaten individuals with violence after we left, because we never did," he observed. Also, locals began to report the emplacement of roadside bombs, which forced insurgents to switch to grenades and automatic weapons, which were riskier to use.

After a detainee was released-legitimately-into the neighborhood, Crider was pleased to receive 11 tips from local citizens about his presence. U.S. soldiers were sent to visit him and talk to him "about how things had changed. . . . He never caused any problems."

In keeping with the new, more neutral stance of the U.S. military as the arbiter of events, rather than an ally of one side, Crider also reined in the National Police, which at times was indistinguishable from a Shiite militia. "Denying the National Police the ability to unilaterally operate in the neighborhoods greatly increased our credibility," he said. Commanders also learned to keep a wary eye on those allies, especially as they tried to capitalize on U.S. operations for their own ends. "Once we cleared AQI from an area, Shia extremists would try to follow and claim it as their own, essentially replacing a cleared area with a new threat," stated an after-action review conducted by Odierno's headquarters.

The fight was growing more complex. One day in May, Kilcullen noted that, in Baghdad's Hurriyah neighborhood, there were four factions of Jaysh al-Mahdi, Sadr's extremist Shiite militia, fighting each other-n.o.ble JAM, Golden JAM, "criminal JAM," and "ordinary JAM." U.S. officials sent a message to "JAM Central" in Najaf. "We want these guys out of there." In response, he said, the JAM headquarters in Najaf sent a hit team to Baghdad to sort out the problem. "Because we treated them as the authority, they cleaned it up." There also was murky unconfirmed talk that a deal was reached under which the U.S. military would aid Golden JAM in attacking other parts of the militia deemed to have gone rogue. Petraeus stated flatly that no such agreement existed and suggested that it grew out of rumors collected from Iraqis by U.S. intelligence or deals made by local American commanders.

The trends in Shiite southern Iraq also were worrisome. "The British have basically been defeated in the south," said a senior U.S. intelligence official in Baghdad. They were abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where an official visitor from London had described them as "surrounded like cowboys and Indians" by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. emba.s.sy office and Britain's remaining 5,500 troops were barricaded behind building-high sandbags, was being hit by rockets or mortars an average of 150 times a month. Was Basra this year a foretaste of Baghdad the next?

ON JULY 4, 2007, Lt. James Freeze, leader of a 2nd Infantry Division reconnaissance platoon based north of Baghdad, celebrated Independence Day by having a gla.s.s of sparkling cider and a cigar with his old friend Austin Wilson, another lieutenant and West Pointer who had been the best man at his wedding. They discussed what one word would best characterize the Iraq they knew. They settled on "hopeless."

By coincidence, Fred Kagan, in many ways the guiding spirit behind the surge, was in the tough south Baghdad neighborhood of Doura a few weeks earlier, visiting one of his former West Point cadets who was now a company commander. "It was a complete combat zone," he said. "There was no one in the streets. It was a ghost town." The American brigade commander declined to take him out on patrol because of the danger.

Generals tend to be optimistic by nature, said Gen. Fastabend, Petraeus's strategic adviser. "The pessimists quit as captains," he cracked.

But five months into the new strategy, even some of the optimists were feeling gloomy. The Army's new counterinsurgency strategy required soldiers to be among the people, where they would form new relationships-but it also exposed them to h.e.l.lacious new levels of violence. "We had some extreme challenges, in May, June, July," recalled Brig. Gen. Anderson, Odierno's chief of staff. "We were hedging our bets that the surge would work." When Iraqi forces were sent into a cleared area to help out, he said, the chances were "fifty-fifty" they were up to the job.

"It kept getting worse," Rapp recalled. "May had very high casualties. I thought, 'Holy cow, what is going on here?"' There was good reason to fret: The possibility was growing that the situation was about to get much worse, with the Americans played out and all the ingredients of a ma.s.sive civil war coming together-there was oil to fight over, plenty of weapons available, and plenty of Iraqis as well as people in neighboring states who possessed the experience and skills to intensify the fighting.

It wasn't just Baghdad, either. In May, Gen. Odierno and Emma Sky helicoptered to Baqubah, about 35 miles northwest of the capital, a city both knew from their previous tours. "I knew it wasn't right," Odierno said. "It had a black cloud." As the surge had pushed some fighters out of the capital, they had moved into Baqubah and other parts of Diyala Province.

"We were gobsmacked," added Sky, using British slang for being stunned into speechlessness.

It was tough having to face the soldiers bearing the brunt of the new strategy. "There was a brief moment of What have we got ourselves into?" What have we got ourselves into?" recalled Command Sgt. Maj. Hill, the veteran infantryman who had been selected by Petraeus to become the senior enlisted soldier in Iraq. Looking at the casualty reports every night that spring, he said, "would just suck the energy out of you." His days began to seem like a soul-lashing round of visiting the wounded and then attending memorial services for the dead. He learned to say a prayer under his breath before walking into the military hospitals: "G.o.d, give me strength to deal with what I'm about to see." He kept his calendar open every day from 5 to 6 P.M., on the a.s.sumption that at least one service for a dead soldier would be held. recalled Command Sgt. Maj. Hill, the veteran infantryman who had been selected by Petraeus to become the senior enlisted soldier in Iraq. Looking at the casualty reports every night that spring, he said, "would just suck the energy out of you." His days began to seem like a soul-lashing round of visiting the wounded and then attending memorial services for the dead. He learned to say a prayer under his breath before walking into the military hospitals: "G.o.d, give me strength to deal with what I'm about to see." He kept his calendar open every day from 5 to 6 P.M., on the a.s.sumption that at least one service for a dead soldier would be held.

As the casualties continued to mount, Odierno said later, "I was a little nervous." Col. J. T. Thomson, the career artilleryman who was Odierno's executive officer, would later recall those dark days as the hardest part of his tour. "May-I mean, the whole month of May," he said much later. "The wondering-is it going to get any better?"

According to unreleased statistics in the U.S. military database, there were 6,037 "significant acts" of violence in Iraq during May 2007, the highest recorded total since November 2004. "This is a period in which it gets harder before it gets easier," Petraeus said one day in May as he sipped iced tea in his office, a giant map of the city of Baghdad behind him. He was expecting a long, hard summer of violence, followed by a trek to Capitol Hill to tell Congress how much progress he was making. He was pushing all the American chips on the table, going "all-in," he said, with the surge. Whatever happened, he was going to ride this thing through to the end. "There's no combat forces left, at least, I'm aware of," he said. That is, the United States military simply didn't have replacement troops available for those he was fielding. "You can't ask for a brigade that isn't there."

Petraeus later would describe this period as "excruciating." He said he believed that the new approach would work, but "what started to develop as the question in my mind was, when will it start to show demonstrable effects?"

United States' combat deaths climbed inexorably: 70 in February, 71 in March, 96 in April, and 120 in May, which became the deadliest month for U.S. troops in two years. The additional casualties had been expected as the price to be paid in the short term for moving from big, safe bases to smaller outposts among the population. But they came even as a series of horrific killings of Iraqi civilians occurred. In February, a ton of explosives detonated in a market in a predominantly Shiite area of Baghdad, killing at least 125 and wounding 300 more. It was the single deadliest terrorist bombing ever in the capital. "They were carrying bodies like sheep," said one Iraqi witness, Abu Lubna.

The insurgents also were introducing worrisome new tactics. In February and March, they forayed into chemical warfare, detonating three trucks carrying toxic chlorine gas in Baghdad, Fallujah, and Ramadi, killing 11 people and sickening hundreds. Col. MacFarland may have found the tipping point in Ramadi the previous year, but there was plenty of fighting left in the city, as his successor unit, the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, led by Col. John Charlton, found in a series of battles in February and March 2007, and then again in June, when a U.S. patrol stumbled across an al Qaeda counterattack as it was forming, resulting in an all-night firefight that was called "the battle of Donkey Island." It left two Americans dead and more than 30 insurgents, and blunted what likely was a new al Qaeda offensive.

Another horrific new approach appeared in Baghdad. The driver of a car bomb managed to get through a U.S. military checkpoint and into a marketplace because he had two children in the backseat of the vehicle. Troops had been taught that cars with children were no threat. Three Iraqis were killed in the subsequent blast.

Enemy tactics were also more sophisticated, with false IEDs being strewn along with real ones, the better to slow down American troops and set them up for ambushes. "These guys are real smart," said 1st Lt. Anthony Von Plinsky. "The Iraqi insurgent as a whole has adapted well to our tactics." By this point in the war, soldiers were fond of saying, all the stupid insurgents were dead. The Americans had come and gone on tours of duty, but many of their enemies had fought nonstop for several years, and those who had survived were fit and adaptive.

The biggest threat to the success of the U.S. mission was the al Qaeda car bomb attacks against Iraqi civilians, which made it seem to many Iraqis as if the Americans couldn't provide security and that the militias was the only hope. But the biggest threat to the soldiers carrying out that mission was the roadside bombs, especially the highly lethal explosively formed penetrators, or "EFP"s. Also, an increasing number of convoys were being attacked, and American officials worried that enemy fighters were receiving Iranian training in the new tactics used in those attacks.

There seemed no limit to the forms of violence. American troops operating a new outpost in Diyala Province befriended a donkey that hung around, giving it food and water. Then "the insurgents a.s.sa.s.sinated him," said Spec. Josiah Hollopeter. "That really irritated me."

THE BATTLE OF TARMIYAH.

As the new American outposts proliferated, they did appear to draw some of al Qaeda's firepower away from civilians. The more remote stations were especially enticing. For example, according to Col. David Sutherland, as sectarian killings and kidnappings declined in the late winter and spring of 2007 by about 70 percent in Diyala Province, northeast of Baghdad, attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops increased by the same amount.

One of the most spectacular attacks was launched against 38 soldiers manning an isolated American outpost in the town of Tarmiyah, just north of Baghdad. The town of about 40,000 actually had been relatively calm until the summer of 2006, when it was destabilized by ethnic cleansing in the capital that sent thousands of Sunnis fleeing there. Al Qaeda's power in the town grew, and in December it ordered the Iraqi police there to leave-which they promptly did. The 1st Cavalry Division then established an outpost in the abandoned police station. In mid-February it was being manned by members of D Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division. It was the northernmost position in the division, poking into an area that had been a relative safe haven for Sunni insurgents.

At precisely 7 A.M. a rocket-propelled grenade detonated on the corner of the small outpost, followed by some AK-47 fire. Lt. Shawn Jokinen, who had gone to sleep two hours earlier, jolted awake in his cot. Staff Sgt. Jesus Colon, the sergeant of the guard, shouted that they were under attack. Jokinen ran to the front door of his barracks with his M-4 carbine and saw a small white "bongo" truck crash through the sliding blue front gate and roar straight toward him. He emptied the M-4's magazine into the windshield, causing the truck to swerve slightly away from the entrance, but before the driver died he detonated about 1,500 pounds of Ukrainian-made military-grade explosives, sending bits of concrete and gla.s.s sailing through the compound. "The explosion threw me against a wall and I got covered with debris," Jokinen remembered. The blast dug a crater twenty feet wide and six feet deep, shattered every window in the compound and the surrounding area, and dropped the front wall of the compound.

The battle that followed resembled the movie Zulu, Zulu, in which a small detachment of British soldiers fends off thousands of African warriors. At first the dust was so thick that no one could see or breathe. "Everything was black, then brown," said Staff Sgt. James Copeland. He took a knee until he could get some air. Several soldiers were covered in rubble. Those not covered pulled their buddies out, then grabbed their weapons, helmets, and body armor, and ran upstairs to the roof. Some would fight for hours in their boxer shorts. Two medics began treating those with life-threatening wounds. "The rest of us wrapped up each other," Jokinen said. Copeland told the injured they were needed to shoot if they could, then grabbed a wounded soldier's M-249 light machine gun and ran to the roof, where he realized that his gear was buried and that he didn't have a helmet. in which a small detachment of British soldiers fends off thousands of African warriors. At first the dust was so thick that no one could see or breathe. "Everything was black, then brown," said Staff Sgt. James Copeland. He took a knee until he could get some air. Several soldiers were covered in rubble. Those not covered pulled their buddies out, then grabbed their weapons, helmets, and body armor, and ran upstairs to the roof. Some would fight for hours in their boxer shorts. Two medics began treating those with life-threatening wounds. "The rest of us wrapped up each other," Jokinen said. Copeland told the injured they were needed to shoot if they could, then grabbed a wounded soldier's M-249 light machine gun and ran to the roof, where he realized that his gear was buried and that he didn't have a helmet.

Lt. Cory Wallace, D Company's executive officer, had been walking out of the compound's command post, where he had been processing six members of an alleged al Qaeda sniper cell nabbed in an overnight raid, when the blast hurled him into a wall. The compound's 500-gallon fuel tank exploded into a fireball, knocking him out and killing Sgt. Colon. He regained consciousness and scurried back into the command post, where he saw Pfc. Pao Vang trying to stop blood squirting from a laceration on his neck. Wallace looked outside. "I noticed the front half of our barracks were destroyed. Several soldiers were staggering out of their patrol base. They were covered with dust and blood. I was still a little dazed from the blast so it took me awhile to notice that the enemy was throwing hand grenades and improvised mortar rounds over the walls." Black smoke joined the dust and grenades in the air.

Wallace shouted to Pfc. James Byington, who had picked himself up from the ground, to call the battalion headquarters for help. "Byington informed me that the radios were not working," the XO recalled. It turned out that the compound's generator had been knocked out. Wallace told Vang, who had a shard of gla.s.s protruding from the side of his head, to fix the generator. Vang tried to do it while under direct fire from a nearby building but couldn't, so said he would find batteries for the radio. They were buried under some rubble, so Vang dug with one hand to find them, the other pressed against his neck wound, which was spraying blood every time he moved.

At some point-Wallace remembers it was 90 minutes, but battalion records say far sooner-Wallace was able to transmit a situation report to his headquarters. "Once the radios were functional, I called battalion and informed them that our patrol base was under heavy attack and that our company had multiple wounded with one KIA," he said.

One of the soldiers on the roof yelled down to him, "Sir, don't let battalion pull us out, we're going to hold this motherf.u.c.ker!" There was no fear of running out of ammunition, because the platoon sergeants wisely had insisted that the unit keep on hand about three times the daily requirement. On top of that, soldiers had themselves prepared "Armageddon Boxes"-extra ammunition and some water for unexpected emergencies-and kept them in their Humvees. "The only problem was our ammo holding area was located on the second floor of the barracks," Wallace said. "Soldiers kept sprinting down an exposed staircase, filling up sleeping bags with extra ammo, and running back up to their fighting position on the roof." Copeland ran from soldier to soldier on the roof, distributing ammunition and a.s.signing sectors of fire.

The radio was in the command post, so Wallace couldn't see outside to guide the AH-64 Apache attack helicopters appearing overhead toward their targets. He had Vang a.s.semble a portable Harris PRC-117 radio and take it to the roof, where Staff Sgt. Freddie Housey, a veteran of the capture of Baghdad in 2003, directed the air counterattack. One of the Apaches was. .h.i.t and pulled away with one of its pilots wounded and his flight suit on fire. Other helicopters conducted devastating strafing runs with their 30-millimeter cannons.

Lt. Col. Scott Efflandt, the battalion commander, had been eating breakfast 12 miles away at his headquarters at Taji when he felt the concussion of the explosion and then, moments later, heard the boom. He checked with his tactical operations center, or TOC, but was told there was nothing to report, so a.s.sumed it was artillery fire involving another unit. He didn't know then that soldiers from his D Company were fighting for their lives.

Wallace reported in a few minutes later. Efflandt raced to his TOC. As he arrived, he recalled, "the streaming video from the UAV [drone reconnaissance aircraft] came online and our hearts skipped a beat." He called Wallace, found him "in charge and unflappable," and told him help was on the way.

At around 8 A.M., a unit of Stryker armored vehicles from the 2nd Infantry Division came to the rescue. One of the Strykers backed up to a hole the blast had made in the compound wall, dropped its ramp, and loaded the six most severely wounded D Company soldiers. Another unit arrived and secured a landing zone, or LZ, for medical evacuation helicopters. Wallace realized his compound wouldn't be overrun, and he would survive the day. "With our litter-urgent soldiers medevac'd and armored vehicles occupying a perimeter around the patrol base, I knew the enemy was beaten," he said.

But the battle wasn't over. "As we headed to the LZ I still heard small-arms fire, friendly and enemy," said Copeland. "The LZ was hot with the Stryker and air a.s.sets still firing as we were moved to the bird and continued as we flew away."

Efflandt, a working-cla.s.s son of Rock Island, Illinois, who had gone on to teach at West Point, got to Tarmiyah later in the morning. "When we entered the town, I was stunned. It was as if we were in the wrong place, as everything looked different-battle-damaged buildings, debris everywhere downtown, no people out and about. Arriving at the patrol base I was aghast."

The outpost was destroyed. It may have been defendable but it was uninhabitable. Efflandt decided to stay and fight it out, requesting immediate delivery of a big logistics package, including thousands of tons of concrete barriers. He issued orders to take over a school building 200 meters north of the destroyed outpost and get a new patrol base up and running by sundown. "It sent a message to the insurgents that we would not be defeated and we weren't going anywhere," recalled Maj. Robert Rodriguez, the battalion's executive officer. "It was a tactical decision with strategic implications." Leading from the front, Efflandt spent the next 24 hours in the new post commanding the operation to retake the town. He had in mind Odierno's dictum that any land taken would not be given up.