The 9/11 Wars (117 page)

  59
.
‘Meeting with the Representatives of Science: Lecture of the Holy Father’, Regensburg, Germany, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, September 12, 2006.

  60
.
West,
The Strongest Tribe
, p. 175.

  61
.
Mushriq Abbas, ‘Mutual political and tribal interests coincided with his struggle with al-Qa’ida and al-Maliki: a short and murky journey led Abu Risha to … his death’,
al-Hayat
, September 16, 2007, cited by Mohammed M. Hafez, ‘Al-Qa’ida Losing Ground in Iraq’,
CTC Sentinel
, vol. 1, no. 1 (December 2007), p. 7.

  62
.
West,
The Strongest Tribe
, pp. 209, 213–14, 223.

  63
.
US Department of Defense,
Quadrennial Defense Review Report
, February 6, 2006, preface, p. v.

  64
.
Bradley Graham and Josh White, ‘Abizaid credited with popularizing the term “long war” ’,
Washington Post
, February 3, 2006. See also RAND Corporation (Christopher G. Pernin, Brian Nichiporuk, Dale Stahl, Justin Beck, Ricky Radaelli-Sanchez),
Unfolding the Future of the Long War
, 2008, p. 5.

  65
.
Julian E. Barnes, ‘National security watch: retiring top soldier warns of “The Long War” ’,
US News and World Report
, September 29, 2005.

  66
.
William Kristol, ‘The Long War: the radical Islamists are on the offensive. Will we defeat them?’,
Weekly Standard
, vol. 11, no. 24, June 3, 2006. See also Norman Podhoretz,
World War
IV: The Long Struggle against Islamofascism
, Doubleday, 2007.

  67
.
This argument is advanced in an extremely sophisticated form by law professor and historian Philip Bobbitt. See Philip Bobbitt, ‘Get ready for the next long war’,
Time
, September 1, 2002. See also, in a very much less intellectually refined form, Tony Blankley, ‘An Islamist threat like the Nazis’,
Washington Times
, September 12, 2005.

  68
.
‘President discusses global war on terrorism’, September 5, 2006. White House press release. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, September 2006, pp. 5, 11.

  69
.
Bush had said that ‘al-Qaeda followed in the path of Fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism’, the ‘murderous ideologies of the twentieth century’.

  70
.
Kristol, ‘The Long War’.

  71
.
Quadrennial Defense Review
, pp. 9, 21, 22, 36. ‘Operational end-states defined in terms of “winning decisively” may be less useful’, the review said coyly.

  72
.
Quadrennial Defense Review
, pp. 10, 11.

CHAPTER 11: THE TURNING

    1
.
There is now a series of detailed and voluminous studies of American operations in Iraq during 2007 and the genesis of the shifts in strategy and tactics they entailed. Two useful accounts of the meeting at Leavenworth can be found in Ricks,
The Gamble
, and Linda Robinson,
Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq
, Public Affairs, 2008. Another useful work is Kimberly Kagan,
The Surge: A Military History
, Encounter Books, 2008.

    2
.
See also Kilcullen,
The Accidental Guerrilla
, p. 119. Author telephone interview with Kilcullen, March 2009.

    3
.
Robinson,
Tell Me How This Ends
, p. 68. Ricks,
The Gamble
, p. 128.

    4
.
Author telephone interview with David Kilcullen, March 2009. Kilcullen proved one of the most original and perceptive analysts despite a relative lack of experience of many of the major theatres of conflict, arguing that the spaces through which contemporary insurgencies were conducted were compound and plural, a complex matrix of the local, the regional and the transnational. He also contributed useful insights such as pointing out how militants tailored their violence to what they wanted to communicate – the message defined the mission – whereas American forces did the opposite, and pointed out too that the term ‘foreign fighters’, applied to international jihadis, could and should apply to coalition troops as well. To fight insurgencies composed of accidental guerrillas, soldiers should be behaving differently. ‘Your role is to provide protection, identify needs, facilitate civil affairs and use improvements in social conditions as leverage to build networks and mobilize the population,’ Kilcullen wrote in a widely circulated paper. David Kilcullen, ‘Twenty-eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency’,
Military Review
, March 1, 2006.

    5
.
Richard Norton-Taylor and Jamie Wilson, ‘US army in Iraq institutionally racist, claims British officer’,
Guardian
, January 12, 2006.

    6
.
Nigel Aylwin-Foster, ‘Changing the Army for Counter-Insurgency Operations’,
Military Review
, December 2005, p. 5.

    7
.
US officers sourly but fairly pointed out that the fact that Aylwin-Foster had been invited to Leavenworth to speak in person was an indication of an open-mindedness that did not necessarily characterize the British military.

    8
.
Montgomery McFate, ‘The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture’,
Joint Forces Quarterly
, 38, July 2005, pp. 43, 44.

    9
.
US Army Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency
(December 2006), p. 164.

  10
.
‘Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq’,
Military Review
, January–February 2006.

  11
.
US Army Field Manual 3-24
.

  12
.
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America
, September 2002, Introduction, p. 1.

  13
.
See Dodge, ‘The Ideological Roots of Failure’.

  14
.
US Army Field Manual 3-24,
p. 2.

  15
.
David Galula,
Counter-insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice
, Frederick Praeger, 2006, p. 20. The work was originally published in 1964.

  16
.
Porter,
Military Orientalism
, p. 6.

  17
.
Iraqi society was invariably described, as it has been along with many others in this book, as ‘complex’, as if Western societies with their equal number of codes, hierarchies, obligations, norms, laws and values, tribes and castes, were not.

  18
.
The description is from the late Professor Fred Halliday of the London School of Economics.
100 Myths about the Middle East
, Saqi Books, 2005, p. 147. T. E. Lawrence had been read by American soldiers in Iraq since the first days of the intervention. More problematically, the manual and surrounding debate tended to underplay the agency of both individuals and communities, underestimating the dynamism of identity and culture particularly in a conflict situation. Porter,
Military Orientalism
, p. 55.
US Army Field Manual 3-24
, p. 7: ‘Lawrence’s experiences in the Arab Revolt made him a hero and also provide some insights for today.’ Lawrence also once described the Arabs as ‘a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellect lay fallow in incurious resignation’.

  19
.
See Derek Gregory, ‘The Rush to the Intimate: Counterinsurgency and the Cultural Turn in Late Modern War’,
Radical Philosophy
, July/August 2008.

  20
.
Brookings report by Michael E. O’Hanlon and Ian Livingston,
Iraq Index: Tracking Variables of Reconstruction and Security in Post-Saddam Iraq
, December 30, 2010, p. 4.

  21
.
Author email exchange, December 2007.

  22
.
Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, ‘The Surge in Iraq: One Year Later’, Heritage lectures, March 13, 2008. Having understood that such relationships were the key to finding the fugitive dictator, Odierno had ordered the construction of a vast map depicting key figures with their interrelationships, social status and last-known locations. Saddam was placed at the centre, not at the top of any hierarchical organogramme. Eventually, patterns had emerged showing that in fact it was not the Ba’ath Party structure that was important but the extensive tribal and family ties between the six main tribes of the Sunni triangle – the Husseins, al-Douris, Hadouthis, Musslits, Hassans and Harimyths – and in particular those between a group of families which had all been linked to Saddam in various unofficial capacities since his youngest days. Tracing key figures in these eventually enabled Saddam to be located. Chris Wilson, ‘Searching for Saddam’,
Slate
, February 22, 2010. Farnaz Fassihi, ‘Charting the capture of Saddam’,
Wall Street Journal
, December 23, 2003. Vernon Loeb, ‘Clan, family ties called key to army’s capture of Hussein’,
Washington Post
, December 16, 2003.

  23
.
Bush,
Decision Points
, p. 93.

  24
.
See Congressional Research Service (Amy Belasco),
Report for Congress: Troop Levels in the Afghan and Iraq Wars, FY2001–FY2012: Cost and Other Potential Issues
, July 2, 2009, pp. 9, 39.

  25
.
Michael Duffy, ‘The Surge at year one’,
Time
, January 31, 2008. The conclusions of the Iraq Study Group led by Jim Baker, secretary of state during the 1991 Gulf War, were radically different.

  26
.
Author interview with a senior American civilian official attached to US military in Baghdad, end 2006, spring 2007. Interview conducted in Afghanistan, March 2009.

  27
.
Including from the veteran members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

  28
.
The exact population at the time was for obvious reasons uncertain. It was 6,554,126 in 2004 before the major sectarian violence according to Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy and Les Roberts, ‘Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-sectional Cluster Sample Survey’,
Lancet
, vol. 368, no. 9,545, October 21, 2006, and 7,145,470 in 2009 according to
The Geographical Location of Baghdad Province
, the Baghdad Governorate, December 13, 2009.

  29
.
Duffy, ‘The Surge at year one’.

  30
.
Michael Evans, ‘Gated communities will add to Baghdad security’,
The Times
, February 10, 2007.

  31
.
John Lee Anderson, ‘Inside the Surge’,
New Yorker
, November 19, 2007. Bing West,
The Strongest Tribe
, Random House, 2009, p. 300. Kilcullen,
The Accidental Guerrilla
, p. 169.

  32
.
Mohammed Hussein, ‘Back from Syria’,
New York Times
, May 5, 2008.