Dirty Wars (22 page)

Actually, McChrystal was not the first JSOC commander to be called “the Pope.” It was a reference dating back to the Clinton administration, when then-Attorney General
Janet Reno
complained that prying information from JSOC was like attempting to access the secret vaults of the Vatican. But, more than any commander before or after, to the JSOC community McChrystal was “the Pope.” Although he thought the Iraq War was a bit of a fool's errand, McChrystal also saw it as an opportunity to revolutionize JSOC and push it to a more powerful position than ever before. “Stan was the
epitome of a warrior
. Stan is a man that, when he's given a directive from the commander in chief, he moves out smartly and executes an order,” a former member of McChrystal's team told me. “What Stan came to realize is that with the proper political backing in the White House he would be able to accomplish things with his force that had never been done before.”

Stanley “
McChrystal is stubborn
,” observed Fury, who served as a staff officer under him, “and no one can argue that he isn't a man of extraordinary stamina, advanced intellect, and uncompromising dedication to his warriors, the American people, and our way of life. Personally, I don't know a man with more stamina and stomach for the fight than...McChrystal. He sets an incredible pace, expects excellence, demands results, but most importantly he listens to the men on the ground.”

Once he took over at JSOC, McChrystal's Ranger roots provided the inspiration for him to Ranger-ize the command. When he had run the 75th Rangers, “Terms like ‘kit', often used by Delta and Seal Team 6 operators to collectively describe the gear, weapons, and equipment an assaulter carries was banned from the Ranger lexicon,” said Fury. “The term ‘assaulter' or ‘operator' was also verboten speak within the Regiment. The men wearing the red, black, and white scroll were Rangers, not assaulters and not operators. They also didn't carry kit. They carried standard military issue equipment.” When he took command of JSOC, McChrystal believed that the various entities that made up the command should operate as a fluid team, with a “cross fertilization plan of skill sets and team building,” rather than reserving the most sensitive operations to Delta and SEAL Team 6, the Special Mission Units. “From the very beginning” of his time as JSOC Commander, “McChrystal tried to shake up the status quo of the Tier I outfits. He now owned those assaulters and snipers from the Army
and Navy, and even though he completely supported creative risk taking and out of the box thinking, he quickly moved to fit their actions into an easily managed color coded box. It didn't always work the way the General wanted though.” McChrystal believed that the Delta and Team 6 guys should work in tandem, but Fury said McChrystal quickly understood that it might not be the best approach. “It took a little while, but the General eventually recognized that the two units were apples and oranges and squaring them in that color coded box resulted in a fruit salad of conflicting skill sets, SOPs [standard operating procedures], and even mindset.” This ability to adapt became part of the McChrystal legend while he presided over the premier US counterterrorism units as the fight was increasingly going global.

But nearly invisible in the breathless media narrative of the warrior-leader's ascent is another McChrystal—a man who in reality had seen very little action before ascending to the post of JSOC commander after the Iraq invasion. This McChrystal was a climber who had cozied up to the right people politically, whether Democrats or Republicans, as well as key figures within the military bureaucracy. In essence, he was one of the chosen few. “
A third generation soldier
, [McChrystal] missed the end of Vietnam while attending West Point. Graduating in 1976, he entered an Army hollowed out after the unpopular conflict in Southeast Asia,” asserted Carl Prine, the veteran military reporter. “With few wars to fight for nearly two decades, he advanced in a largely uncompetitive world, it all made perhaps even easier for him because his father—retired major general Herbert McChrystal—had been the Pentagon's director of planning before his son took a commission.”

According to career military officers who knew McChrystal going back to West Point, he had been groomed for years to rise through the army ranks. “
I like Stan
very much, as a person,” said Colonel Macgregor, who was McChrystal's roommate at West Point. But Macgregor charged that after 9/11, McChrystal had ingratiated himself with the neoconservatives, particularly Rumsfeld and Cheney. “He was someone that had made his reputation, in the Pentagon with Rumsfeld. He was someone who saw this ‘global' Caliphate as a tremendous enemy, and kept beating the drum for that. And that endeared him to all of the key people.” The military, Macgregor said, is run under a “system that rests ultimately on a foundation that is cronyism. In other words, are you one of the boys? If they judge you to be culturally reliable, amenable, then you're considered someone that should be advanced to the senior ranks. It's a kind of brotherhood selection: ‘Is this man going to stay the course with us? Is he going to say whatever we tell him to say, do whatever we tell him to do?'” McChrystal, he told
me, realized early on “that if he is going to advance, he's going to have to ingratiate himself. And he does this in the Pentagon.”

Despite his stated concern about the way US military policy was alienating Muslims, McChrystal shared the political view that the United States was indeed in a war against Islam, according to a retired military officer who had known him from the beginning of his military career and went through Ranger training with him. “Boykin and Cambone and McChrystal were fellow travelers in the
great crusade against Islam
,” the officer told me. “They ran what was for all practical purposes an assassination program.” Macgregor said that when McChrystal was named JSOC commander, he was “given a mission under Mr. Cambone, who is Rumsfeld's intelligence director, and General Boykin, who was Cambone's right-hand man, to essentially go after the ‘terrorists.' And of course we're defining terrorist very, very broadly.” McChrystal, he said, “presided over this black world where any actions were justified against Muslims because you were fighting against the Caliphate.”

While McChrystal was reorganizing JSOC, the White House and Pentagon were demanding results in Iraq. By late 2003, the war the United States had already declared won was just beginning. The neocons' vision for Iraq and their ill-conceived policies were fueling a nascent insurgency from both Sunnis and Shiites alike. The ground was laid during the year that L. Paul Bremer was running Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority.

BREMER WAS A CONSERVATIVE
CATHOLIC CONVERT
who had cut his teeth in government working for Republican administrations and was respected by right-wing evangelicals and neoconservatives alike. Forty-eight hours after 9/11, Bremer wrote in the
Wall Street Journal,
“
Our retribution
must move beyond the limp-wristed attacks of the past decade, actions that seemed designed to ‘signal' our seriousness to the terrorists without inflicting real damage. Naturally, their feebleness demonstrated the opposite. This time the terrorists and their supporters must be crushed. This will mean war with one or more countries. And it will be a long war, not one of the ‘Made for TV' variety.” Bremer concluded, “We must avoid a mindless search for an international ‘consensus' for our actions. Today, many nations are expressing support and understanding for America's wounds. Tomorrow, we will know who our true friends are.”

In mid-April 2003, “Scooter” Libby and Paul Wolfowitz contacted Bremer about taking “the job of
running the occupation
of Iraq.” By mid-May, Bremer was in Baghdad, leading the Coalition Provisional Authority.

During his year in Iraq, Bremer was a highly confrontational viceroy who traveled the country in a Brooks Brothers suit coat and Timberland boots. He described himself as “the only
paramount authority figure
—other than dictator Saddam Hussein—that most Iraqis had ever known.” Bremer's first official initiative, reportedly the
brainchild
of Rumsfeld and his neoconservative deputy, Douglas Feith, was dissolving the Iraqi military and initiating a process of “de-Baathification,” which in Iraq meant a banishment of some of the country's finest minds from the reconstruction and political process because party membership had been a requirement for many jobs in Saddam-era Iraq. Bremer's “
Order 1
” resulted in the firing of thousands of schoolteachers, doctors, nurses and other state workers, while sparking a major increase in rage and disillusionment. Iraqis saw Bremer picking up Saddam's governing style and political witch-hunt tactics. In practical terms, Bremer's moves sent a message to many Iraqis that they would have little say in their future, a future that increasingly looked bleak and familiar. Bremer's “Order 2”—disbanding the Iraqi military—meant that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers were forced out of work and left without a pension. “That was the week we made
450,000 enemies
on the ground in Iraq,” one US official told the
New York Times Magazine.

Within a month of Bremer's arrival, talk of a national uprising had begun. As the bloody impact of his decision to dissolve the military spread, Bremer amped up his inflammatory rhetoric. “
We are going to fight them
and impose our will on them and we will capture or, if necessary, kill them until we have imposed law and order upon this country,” he declared.

On May 1, President Bush, wearing a bomber jacket, stood on the USS
Abraham Lincoln
before a large “Mission Accomplished” banner. “
My fellow Americans
, major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” he declared. “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” It was a fairy tale. The Saddam regime may have been deposed and Saddam's days were numbered (not long after Bush's speech, on July 23, 2003, Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay,
were killed
in a JSOC raid), but a guerrilla war—one with multiple warring forces—was just beginning.

Rumsfeld rejected claims that the United States was facing a “guerrilla” insurgency. “I guess the reason I don't use
the phrase ‘guerrilla war
,'” he quipped, “is because there isn't one.” But Rumsfeld's newly appointed CENTCOM chief, who was technically the on-the-ground commander of the Iraq War, disagreed. General John Abizaid said at a July 2003 press conference at the Pentagon that the United States was now facing a “
classical guerrilla-type war
” in Iraq. Abizaid knew another front of resistance was opening, and it was not being run by Saddam's “henchmen.” By mid-August 2003, three months after Bremer arrived in Baghdad, resistance attacks
against US forces and Iraqi “collaborators” were a daily occurrence. New militias were forming, with both Sunni and Shiite groups attacking American troops. Rumsfeld and Bush both downplayed the extent of the uprisings in Iraq, saying they were being driven by fallen regime “dead-enders,” “criminals,” “looters,” “terrorists,” “anti-Iraqi forces” and “those influenced by Iran.” But there was one fact they couldn't deny: The number of Americans returning home in tin coffins was exploding as attacks against US forces increased by the day. “We believe we have a
significant terrorist threat
in the country, which is new,” Bremer finally acknowledged on August 12. “We take this very seriously.”

On August 19, a Kamaz flatbed truck pulled up to the
United Nations headquarters
at Baghdad's Canal Hotel and parked just below the office window of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations special representative in Iraq. Inside the building, a press conference was under way. Moments later, a massive explosion rocked the building. The truck had been driven by a suicide bomber and was filled with explosives, including a five-hundred-pound bomb from the former Iraqi military's reserves. In all, twenty-two people were killed, including de Mello. More than one hundred were injured. The United States and the United Nations
alleged
that the bomber had been sent by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born militant who headed up the group Jama'at al Tawhid wa'al Jihad. A few days after the bombing, Rumsfeld delivered a speech at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention. “We still face
determined adversaries
, as we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, the dead-enders are still with us, those remnants of the defeated regimes who'll go on fighting long after their cause is lost,” Rumsfeld declared. “There are some today who are surprised that there are still pockets of resistance in Iraq, and they suggest that this represents some sort of failure on the part of the Coalition. But this is not the case. Indeed I suspect that some of you in this hall today, especially those who served in Germany during World War II or in the period immediately after the war were not surprised that some Ba'athists have kept on fighting. You will recall that some dead-enders fought on during and after the defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany.”

Rumsfeld tried to cling to the idea that the main resistance in Iraq was coming from such quarters, but the reality was, the most lethal forces rising in Iraq were responding to the invasion and occupation. While the United States was fighting multiple Sunni insurgent groups, Shiite leader Moqtada al Sadr was waging an uprising against the United States, along with a “hearts and minds” campaign to provide basic services to Iraqi neighborhoods. Because Sadr had brokered a tenuous alliance with some Sunni resistance groups, the United States was facing the possibility of a popular nationalist rebellion.

After the August bombing, the United Nations withdrew most of its six hundred international personnel from Iraq. In September 2003, the UN complex was bombed a second time, spurring the United Nations to
withdraw all remaining
non-Iraqi employees from the country. It was a powerful symbol of how far from accomplished the US mission in Iraq actually was.