Armed Humanitarians (10 page)

That description would prove entirely accurate. Georgia would not use U.S. military aid to reconquer lost territory—in the nearest future.

The Georgia Train and Equip program was ambitious, but it was a sideshow compared with the regime-change mission the Bush administration was preparing to launch in Iraq. Within months, Waltemeyer and his Special Forces soldiers would be in northern Iraq, helping organize Kurdish and Arab militias to topple Saddam Hussein. The Georgia Train and Equip Program continued for the next several years, with little public interest or scrutiny in the United States. Within a few short months, events in Georgia were overshadowed completely by events in the Middle East.

On the eve of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Barnett, who had become a star on the military speaking circuit, wrote an essay in
Esquire
magazine outlining his support for the invasion of Iraq. He did not justify his support in terms of unearthing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which at that point was providing the main justification for going to war. This new campaign, he suggested, would not end with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. The true rationale was provided by his now-famous briefing, dubbed “the Pentagon's new map.”

Overthrowing Saddam Hussein was “not only necessary and inevitable, but good,” Barnett argued. “When the United States finally goes to war again in the Persian Gulf, it will not constitute a settling of old scores, or just an enforced disarmament of illegal weapons, or a distraction in the war on terror. Our next war in the Gulf will mark a historical tipping point—the moment when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization.”

The real reason the United States was going to war, he argued, was a long-term civilizing mission—in contemporary terms, integrating a “gap” state into the global economy. It was a nation-building argument, not a regime-change one. “The reason I support going to war in Iraq is not simply that Saddam is a cutthroat Stalinist willing to kill anyone to stay in power, nor because that regime has clearly supported terrorist networks over the years,” he wrote. “The real reason I support a war like this is that the resulting long-term military commitment will finally force America to deal with the entire Gap as a strategic threat environment.”
9

Accomplishing that mission, however, would not prove as easy as overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

*
Barnett also seemed to draw inspiration from the pop-globalization writings of Thomas Friedman, who once postulated the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,” according to which no two nations with McDonald's franchises—nations that are part of the global economy—had ever gone to war. Friedman's observation would be undermined by the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Serbia.

*
The defense analyst D. Robert Worley outlined precisely this point in a publication funded by the U.S. Army War College, “Waging Ancient War: Limits on Preemptive Force” (Carlisle, Pa., 2003). He called for developing a “
guerra
strategy” that he argued would be more appropriate for dealing with terrorists and other nonstate actors in poorly governed regions of the world.
Guerra
would be a nation-building campaign that demanded minimal, not overwhelming, use of force. And more important,
guerra
would require a new kind of hybrid force. “Humanitarian interventions in failed and failing states require expeditionary forces designed for peace operations that may evolve into nation-building,” he wrote (p. xi).

*
Hugh Rodham, the brother of First Lady Hillary Clinton, dabbled in a deal to grow and export hazelnuts from Georgia. The arrangement fell through when it came to light that Rodham's local partner was Aslan Abashidze, a rival of Shevardnadze.

†
Paul Devlin, an independent filmmaker, shot a brilliant documentary about AES Telasi, entitled
Power Trip
. As he concluded work on the film, AES was forced to put the money-losing company up for sale. The enterprise was acquired by Russia's United Energy Systems.

CHAPTER  3

“Beat 'em Up and Go Home”

As the UH-60 Black Hawk skimmed low over the desert of southern Iraq, I noticed the “fun-o-meter” patch the pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Ryan Newman, had fixed to back of his flight helmet:
ARE WE HAVING FUN YET OR WHAT?

It was late March 2003 when I flew into Iraq in the passenger compartment of Newman's helicopter, perched on a carton of field rations. I was one of several hundred journalists the U.S. Defense Department had invited to cover Operation Iraqi Freedom, the military campaign to oust Saddam Hussein and hunt for weapons of mass destruction. It was a master stroke of public relations. My embed assignment was with the Sixth Battalion, 101st Aviation, part of the 101st Airborne Division. Six Bat was a “general support” aviation unit: basically, a battlefield taxi service. This aircraft was delivering Meals-Ready-to-Eat and water destined for a Pathfinder infantry unit. I was a piece of spare cargo, and things were off to a rough start. The night before the battalion crossed north into Iraq, its staging base in Camp Udairi, Kuwait, saw a real missile attack. Startled from their cots by a deafening crack, soldiers donned gas masks and climbed back in their sleeping bags. The all-clear sounded soon after over the camp loudspeakers.

It was friendly fire. As it turned out, we had heard the impact of a U.S. Patriot missile smacking into a Royal Air Force GR4A Tornado fighter. The missile battery failed to pick up the aircraft's IFF (identification friend or foe) beacon, an electronic signal that is supposed to prevent fratricide.
1
Both crew members were killed. Word of the incident spread quickly, but although it occurred within earshot, I did not learn the full details until I heard about it from the BBC (a young company commander, better prepared than I, had remembered to pack a shortwave radio). My pessimism deepened when I learned of a grenade attack the previous night in neighboring Camp Pennsylvania. A U.S. soldier, Sergeant Hasan Akbar, had lobbed some grenades in a 101st Airborne command tent. The attack claimed the lives of two officers, and several others were injured.
*
To me, at least, it didn't seem an auspicious day to be going into a combat zone.

Captain Dana Bult, a signals officer, was designated as my escort. I had been bounced from several helicopter flight manifests like a piece of excess baggage; the night before we were to leave, Bult informed me that she had a spot for me on board her aircraft. I reported to her tent about an hour before the next wave of helicopters was scheduled to take off. She was talking distractedly on a field telephone; I waited outside. As it happened, her husband had been staying in the tent where the grenade attack took place. By sheer luck, he had been in the shower at the time of the attack. A military operator had connected her with her in-laws so she could tell them he was all right. After hanging up the handset, she grabbed her rucksack and hauled it to a waiting Humvee. She was perfectly collected. We headed to the flight line.

Bult's attitude—businesslike, intent, focused on the task at hand—was reassuring. In the weeks I had spent in Kuwait, waiting for the war to begin, most of the soldiers in the battalion had been preoccupied with military chores: assembling their equipment, spray-painting helicopter blades to protect them from erosion, practicing “dust landings” in the desert sands of the Udairi range. There was little time for introspection. To unwind at night, soldiers passed around DVDs to watch on portable video players.
Black Hawk Down
was a particular favorite.

Shortly after Six Bat's arrival in Kuwait, the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Fields, had given the soldiers a short pep talk. Fields had fought in the first Gulf War; he was with the “ready brigade” that airlifted helicopters to Saudi Arabia in August 1990, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, as part of a quick-reaction force assembled to defend the kingdom's oilfields from Saddam Hussein. “We're ten times more prepared than we were last time,” he said.

The buildup in Kuwait had been under way for months, and Fields was confident of a successful reprise of Desert Storm. Chief Warrant Officer Shawn Mertens, another Black Hawk pilot, summarized the confidence in what was supposed to be a conventional military mission to defeat the Iraqi army and unseat Saddam Hussein. “We're supposed to beat 'em up and go home,” he told me.

Mertens neatly described the operating assumption at the time. The United States was going to war in Iraq for a host of reasons: intelligence speculation about the regime's ties to terrorists, a desire to upend the regional political order, unfinished business from the 1990–91 Gulf War. The campaign was largely billed as a hunt for weapons of mass destruction, although Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, perhaps inadvertently, let slip in a May 2003 magazine interview that the case for war was built around that selling point “for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy.”
2

But as much as Saddam was an odious tyrant, he presided over a functioning state. The ruling Ba'athist Party—a thugocracy, really—held power through an ugly combination of patronage, repression, and political murder. Saddam's malignant cult of personality was the state's official ideology. The economy was a wreck: The state was the largest employer, and the country's infrastructure had suffered through years of neglect, underinvestment, and sanctions. The disastrous UN-backed Oil-for-Food program had only created more opportunities for those with ties to the corrupt regime to enrich themselves. The U.S. invasion would destroy the regime, but a new system would have to be rebuilt from scratch.

The 101st Airborne Division had detailed terrain maps, access to up-to-the minute satellite pictures, and signal intercepts from the Iraqi military's communications systems. But its familiarity with the cultural terrain it was about to occupy was marginal. Back at Fort Campbell, the public affairs office, the division's media-relations shop, had printed up a short handbook called
A Soldier's Guide to Iraq
. It was rudimentary at best, and a section on cultural considerations was particularly comical. It depicted “the Arab” as a sort of B-movie villain: Arabs are crafty, feckless, preoccupied with honor and shame. A few excerpts:

To show politeness when asked a yes or no question, the Arab will always answer yes, whether true or not. A flat “no” is a signal that you want to end the relationship. The polite way for an Arab to say “no” is to say, “I'll see what I can do.”

Arabs, by American standards, are reluctant to accept responsibility. They will accept shared responsibility, but if responsibility is accepted and something goes wrong, the Arab is dishonored.

The Arab approach to time is much slower and relaxed. If God wills things to happen, they will, so why rush. Relationships are more important than accomplishing an act.

An Arab sees friendships with anyone outside the family as meaning, “You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.”

The handbook also offered a few pointers for dealing with the press. Some tips were practical (“Don't lie”); others encouraged spin (“Do not provide the enemy with propaganda material by complaining about things”). It had few specifics on Iraqi, as distinct from Arab, culture, although page 8 also featured a small map that crudely outlined “dissident areas” (predominately Shia and Kurdish). It gave no hint of the ethnic and sectarian conflict the invasion would inadvertently ignite.

Prior to the division's departure to Kuwait from Fort Campbell, I watched a briefing by a young Civil Affairs major on Iraq. It was embarrassingly brief. The takeaway: Iraq had three major groups, Shia and Sunni Arabs, and the Kurds up north. They didn't always get along. The Shia and the Kurds will probably be friendly, because they were oppressed by Saddam. And don't eat with your left hand; Arabs consider that unclean. He glossed over a slide on arts, monuments, and national archives (“There's a lot of stuff here,” he said), and he was stumped by a basic question on the distances between Baghdad and the borders of Syria and Turkey.

An Army lawyer also gave an overview of “ROE,” the rules of engagement on the battlefield. Soldiers received two “ROE cards”: a green one for “pre- and post-hostilities” (in preparation for the invasion and after victory, respectively) and an orange one titled “ROE during hostilities.” The orange ROE cards outlined the basic rules for engaging enemy forces and also gave instructions for dealing with civilians. Rule 1: “You may stop civilians and check their identities, search for weapons and seize any found. Detain civilians when necessary to accomplish your mission or for your own safety. Use the Four S's when dealing with civilians demonstrating some form of hostile intent.”

The Four S's were a simple formula for using “graduated force” against civilians: “1. SHOUT verbal warning to halt; 2. SHOW weapon and intent to use it; 3. SHOVE use non-lethal physical force; 4. SHOOT to eliminate the threat. Fire only aimed shots. Stop firing when the threat is neutralized.” These guidelines were to be followed whenever troops set up a roadblock or a security perimeter in Iraqi towns and cities. A series of bullet points on the back of the card outlined a few possible scenarios, like a civilian deliberately driving a vehicle at friendly forces (response: shoot to eliminate the threat) or a young civilian woman pointing out to the enemy the location where friendly troops were concealed (response: shoot to eliminate the threat).

The rules seemed to encourage the assumption that civilians were potentially hostile, not potentially friendly. At the top of both cards, in boldface type, was the prime directive:
NOTHING IN THESE RULES PROHIBITS YOU FROM EXERCISING YOUR INHERENT RIGHT TO DEFEND YOURSELF AND OTHER ALLIED FORCES
. The U.S. military's preoccupation with what it called “force protection” would have serious consequences. And the forces the invasion would unleash—sectarian conflict from within, a new front for international
jihad
—would create the conditions for a deadly internal war.