The 9/11 Wars (48 page)

Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, returning to Iraq for the first time in over two years, was stunned by how badly the situation had deteriorated. ‘Corpses were being found in trash heaps and along Baghdad’s side streets by the day,’ he recalled. Saddam Hussein, whose trial had been supposed to be a expiatory healing exercise for a brutalized country, had been handed over to Iraqi custody and was eventually hanged, days after Odierno’s arrival in Baghdad, to the sound of triumphant shouts of ‘Muqtadr, Muqtadr’ from Shia officials at the execution. Images of this brutal and chaotic travesty of judicial process captured on a mobile phone were posted on the internet and widely circulated. Chaos apparently reigned.

An unusual soldier, Odierno’s sheer physical size and billiard-ball bald scalp belied an acute intelligence. His first tour in Iraq as commander of the 4th Infantry Division had been tarnished by allegations of brutality by his troops – which he denied. However, it was Odierno too who had laid the basis for the capture of Saddam Hussein through charting the Iraqi tribal and kinship networks around the former dictator.
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Given the unenviable task of breaking the apparently downward spiral in Iraq by his direct superior General George Casey, Odierno rapidly became convinced that the only way to do so was in fact to reverse the strategy of handing over to the incapable Iraqi security forces and instead to deploy further American troops to ‘secure’ the population.

Though Odierno’s credentials were impeccable, his new thinking would have gone nowhere just a few months earlier. However, the November 2006 mid-term elections in America had seen, in the words of the president, a ‘thumping’ for the Republicans as the Democrats took both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Days after the polls, Bush had replaced Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was stubbornly committed to the policy of drawing down troops from Iraq, with Robert Gates, a methodical and calm former career intelligence officer with a reputation for pragmatism. Rumsfeld had already told the president that he felt that ‘fresh eyes’ might be needed, and his departure completed an overhaul of senior Pentagon appointments that had already seen many of the most ideological members of the Bush administration sidelined.
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Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary and one of the keenest and most optimistic advocates of the original invasion of Iraq, had been moved sideways to the World Bank eighteen months earlier. Douglas Feith, the controversial under-secretary at the Pentagon blamed by many for circumventing normal procedures to ‘stovepipe’ raw and erroneous intelligence on Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction or links with al-Qaeda to senior decision-makers, had long since left the administration for academe. A new, colder and more realistic wind was blowing in Washington. Once the mid-term elections were over a franker debate within the White House and among Republicans about what was actually going on in Iraq became possible. The news from returning experts and fact-finding missions had been uniformly grim. A series of official internal reviews within the army, at least one well-known and respected former general and a range of Washington civilian defence experts were recommending similar changes to those sought by Odierno.

Rapidly, the new thinking in Washington began to crystallize around the general’s demand for the despatch of up to 30,000 – or five brigades – of reinforcements who would move out into neighbourhoods in and around Baghdad, where 80 per cent of the violence in Iraq was taking place. Despite the vast effort involved, the peak troop strength would only be achieved for a short period between April and September 2007.
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If only regular troops were deployed – and no one wanted to even contemplate a major mobilization of reservists – the surge was not sustainable beyond that date. Nor did anyone expect that the influx of new troops would resolve all Iraq’s problems by itself. The aim was more modest. The new offensive would buy time to allow the Iraqi forces to finally become strong enough to start taking responsibility for their nation’s security. It would also allow political actors a moment of relative calm in which they could make progress towards some kind of national reconciliation. The most important element was to break the vicious cycle that seemed to be leading Iraq towards greater and greater chaos and America towards a crushing strategic defeat. Critical to that was the implementation of all the new thinking that had gone into the new field manual produced by Petraeus at Leavenworth. American troops would live, sleep and fight among the people. They would try to bring security to communities, physically interposing themselves between the Shia death squads and Sunnis, between al-Qaeda and the Shias. Sensitive to the culture of both, they would go out of their way to do things ‘the Iraqi way’, however counterintuitive that might be for them. This would necessarily imply an initial spike in casualties, but, if the strategy worked, the number of dead and wounded would drop rapidly.

The National Security Council and Vice President Dick Cheney became rapidly convinced of the merits of the new plan, however militarily and politically risky it might be.
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Bush too was persuaded that it needed to be tried and agreed to the proposals. There were to be no half-measures, no brigades dripped in over a period of months. American officials in Iraq had, through intercepted communications, learned that media reporting in the USA of the potential size and deployment of the new troops was already having a direct effect on the morale and strategic thinking of local insurgents and set about stoking the speculation among journalists further with selected leaks.
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The final decision came fast. Odierno would get almost all the extra forces he had asked for. Petraeus would replace Casey as his immediate superior. It was, even many of his detractors admitted, a brave call for the president to make.
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In January 2007 Bush explained to the American nation that mistakes had been made in Iraq over previous years, that the situation there was ‘unacceptable’ and that a change of strategy was called for. The first new troops of what had been dubbed ‘the Surge’ started arriving within weeks. Even before they had arrived, US troops were moving out of their big bases and establishing combat outposts and ‘joint security stations’ with Iraqi forces in areas that were being contested by Shia militia and al-Qaeda-affiliated or other Sunni insurgent groups. Too few to cover a city of between 5 and 7 million inhabitants, they had been concentrated on the areas where sectarian violence had been worst.
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A string of offensive operations were mounted against al-Qaeda and insurgent strongholds in Baghdad, in the vital villages and towns in the countryside around the capital and in cities to the north and south.
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Petraeus arrived in Baghdad as commander of the war in Iraq and announced one of the new tactics he was planning to implement: walling off any vulnerable neighbourhoods with long rows of concrete blast walls.
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THE SURGE WORKS

The ‘Surge’ was a success, at least in the sense that, by the end of 2007, after six months during which the new American troops had been deployed in and around Baghdad and had implemented the strategy developed by Petraeus and Odierno, violence in Iraq was falling. At Congressional hearings in September 2007 Petraeus was able to show slides of statistics showing a steep drop in attacks on American troops. Though casualty figures in the summer had spiked to the highest levels since the two battles for Falluja three years before, by the onset of winter fewer US soldiers were being killed than at any other time since the invasion of 2003. In May and June 2007, 227 had died; only 23 were killed in December. Civilian deaths too were much lower. From nearly 3,000 killed in December 2006, the total had dropped to under 1,000 twelve months later. Areas of Baghdad which had been almost devoid of life were now beginning to show signs of some economic activity.
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There was even a trickle of refugees coming back from overseas. ‘After spending more than a year in Syria, one day my father called me saying: “You can now return, and do not worry. Everything is fine now,” ’ said Mohammed Hussain, an office administrator from a mixed Baghdad middle-class neigbourhood. ‘I reached [home] at 6 a.m.’
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All things were relative, however, and the more triumphant commentaries on the Surge of 2007 failed to mention that it had succeeded only in reducing violence to the levels of 2005.
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Petraeus himself stuck to describing progress as ‘fragile’ or ‘tenuous’. ‘Nobody is saying anything about turning a corner, seeing lights at the end of tunnels, any of those phrases,’ he told reporters at the end of the year. ‘There’s nobody in uniform who is doing victory dances in the end zone.’
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What had happened? How had the Surge worked? Most recent accounts often give the overall impression of a battered American army snatching victory from the jaws of defeat with an audacious and brave last-minute strategic gamble. One reason for the successes seen over 2007 was undoubtedly the courage and competence of American soldiers, who fought long and hard in difficult conditions on the ground in gritty Baghdad neighbourhoods like al-Doura, Khazamiyah, Sadr City and elsewhere. But the Americans were only part of the broader picture. In mid 2006, US planners had distinguished nine ‘different fights’ in the country, ranging from skirmishes prompted by Kurdish expansionism in the north to ‘Shia on Shia’ violence provoked by political manoeuvring between increasingly fragmented Islamist groups in the south.
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By 2007, the situation was even more complicated. One element stood out, however: only a minority of these ‘different fights’ actually directly involved Westerners. What determined the success or failure of the Surge was the particular conjunction of these various ongoing sub-conflicts at a given time. If the Surge had been tried six months earlier, it probably would not have worked. Four main factors, all largely beyond the control of even Petraeus and President Bush, meant that it did.

The first and most obvious factor was that the battle for the Iraqi capital was largely over by the time Odierno had arrived at the end of 2006 and begun to formulate his new strategy. The apparent climax of the sectarian violence in the late spring of 2007 was in fact a final spasm in a process of atrocious killing which had been going on for at least eighteen months. ‘I left [in December 2006] after I passed a different dead body at the same crossroads near my house five days in a row,’ Bashir al-Bassm, a Sunni taxi driver, told the author. ‘The choice was either flee or die.’
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Various dynamics had been at work, driving violence to progressively higher and higher levels. There had been the inexorable logic of revenge and sectarian vendetta set in motion deliberately by al-Zarqawi and continued by his followers after their leader’s death. Militants linked to al-Zarqawi’s networks killed dozens, on occasion hundreds, of Shia, knowing that the Shia gangs would then retaliate with their own wave of shootings and assassinations of Sunnis. Sunni communities would then form their own defence groups or rally behind the Islamic militants responsible for the original attacks as the only viable way of protecting themselves. These latter would then set out on a new killing spree, thus triggering a new cycle of violence. Repeated across Baghdad, the civil war had been inexorably ratcheted up another notch by each round of murders all through 2006. Fear became the militias’ greatest asset, driving even secular Iraqis to support or even join them. A related dynamic accelerating and intensifying the violence had nothing to do with the provocations of al-Zarqawi or his networks. From the middle of 2006, Shia politicians and militia leaders, the two often being coterminous, had set about methodically emptying Baghdad of Sunnis. Working from block to block in carefully picked neighbourhoods, death squads focused first on community leaders, clerics, merchants and businessmen but went on to kill indiscriminately, continuing the murderous violence until the refugees started flowing and the districts emptied. Gruesome methods – some, such as drilling or burning, inspired by those being employed out in Anbar province – were used to increase the level of terror and speed the exodus.
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The incentive for those initiating the violence was partly political, partly financial. There was the power that accrued to the leaders of the gangs. And then there were the assets once belonging to the Sunnis such as houses and shops, that militia members, usually the same young working-class men who had fought in Najaf, Karbala and in the slums of Sadr City in 2004, were able to seize.
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A glance at a map of Baghdad in the spring of 2007 showed how, though the Sunnis had successfully managed to take over the odd neighbourhood that had previously been mixed, it was the Shia who had effectively won the battle for the city.
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Whole swathes of what had been Sunni or mixed communities had been purged. Neighbourhoods like Amel, once home to around 20,000 Sunni families with close links to the Ba’athist regime, were now predominantly Shia. By the time the main American reinforcements began to flow in, most of the communal fighting in Baghdad was over.

The second major factor behind the success of the Surge was, paradoxically, the success of the Shia militias over the period immediately before the new strategy had been implemented. Al-Sadr, the young cleric dismissed as a ‘punk’ back in 2003, had through adept tactical manoeuvring and populist appeal become a major player in the Iraqi political scene. He had played a careful game since being militarily and politically beaten in the fighting of 2004, skilfully juggling participation in democratic politics with harder-nosed demagoguery and real and threatened violence. His representatives had done well in successive elections, partly due to their organization and partly their continuing appeal in poor urban Shia neighbourhoods. Their influence on central government was enhanced by the fact that they, in contrast to many legislators, did not spend much of their time outside Iraq.
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In Basra, al-Sadr had been able to exploit continuing British ineptitude and lack of resources to secure a hold over much of the city.
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