The Assassins' Gate (46 page)

When the meeting ended, Prior stood and said with a touch of ceremony, “I leave here knowing that the job is not finished. There will always be a hole in my heart because I couldn't see it through to the end. But I leave knowing that Baghdad and Zafaraniya are in good hands, because they're in yours.” He presented the council members a certificate of appreciation. “I hope to come back someday with my family to see my friends here,” he said, “and I promise not to wear tan or green.”

A councilman said, “We give you thanks, and apologies for any mistakes we might have made.”

“No apologies necessary. If anything, we are guests in your nation and we should be apologizing for our flaws.”

Prior left Iraq for Germany, then went home on leave to see his fiancée. In early April, violence exploded all across Iraq. The two precipitating events behind the uprisings had come in the last days of March: the closing of
al-Hawza
by the CPA on March 28, and the killing of four American private security contractors by insurgents in Falluja on March 31, their bodies subsequently charred, hacked to pieces, and strung up from a bridge over the Euphrates by a delirious mob. The Falluja incident was a gruesome but predictable ratcheting up of the war in the west. The newspaper shutdown was a self-inflicted American wound. But the origins of the crisis that followed lay further back and deeper down than the two events at the end of March. The decisions surrounding both of them showed how precarious American control in Iraq had grown during the year of the occupation, how badly all the gears were meshing—between Americans and Iraqis, between military and civilian, between Baghdad and Washington.

*   *   *

THE GUERRILLA WAR
that followed the invasion of Iraq caught the U.S. military by surprise. It shouldn't have. The CIA issued several secret prewar intelligence reports warning of the possibility of an insurgency. During the sprint from Kuwait to Baghdad, the Fedayeen Saddam, the paramilitary forces led by Saddam's younger son Qusay, harassed the invaders' supply lines with hit-and-run attacks and intimidated Iraqi civilians by publicly and brutally murdering those who welcomed the Americans. Lieutenant General William Wallace, the commander of V Corps, observed, “The enemy we're fighting is a bit different from the one we war-gamed against.” The first suicide bombings hit American checkpoints around the time Baghdad fell; a few weeks after that, what the military called improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, began blowing up convoys in the capital. General Franks's achievement of toppling the regime in just three weeks, hailed at the time as a brilliant new form of warfare, allowed thousands of Iraqis to melt away into the population or go into hiding and fight another day. Franks and the administration's civilian leaders would later describe the chaos and insurgency that followed the fall of the regime as the inadvertent consequences of their war plan's “catastrophic success.” As it turned out, there was nothing inadvertent about it.

When the chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, released the final report of the Iraq Survey Group in late 2004, there were no weapons of mass destruction to be described. Saddam had never rebuilt his programs after they were destroyed by inspections, sanctions, and bombings in the 1990s; in the madhouse logic of his late rule, he had pretended to possess the weapons in order to deter an Iranian attack, in some cases fooling his top officers, in other cases being fooled by his top scientists. The American military's greatest concern in Iraq had been a phantom. But the report also found that guerrilla war had been the enemy's plan all along. “Saddam believed that the Iraqi people would not stand to be occupied or conquered by the United States and would resist—leading to an insurgency,” Duelfer wrote, basing his conclusions on CIA interrogations of the top members of the regime, including the number one himself. “Saddam said he expected the war to evolve from traditional warfare to insurgency.”

Before the war, Iraqi intelligence had trained foreign fighters in explosives and marksmanship at a camp southeast of Baghdad, in Salman Pak. (Douglas Feith's off-the-books intelligence shop and its friends in the Iraqi National Congress had described this operation as a terrorist training center, proof of the link between Saddam and al-Qaeda; instead, it was a training camp for the guerrilla war that the Pentagon had been unable to imagine.) Between August 2002 and January 2003, Iraqi commanders had removed weapons and equipment from bases and hidden them in farms and houses all over the countryside. On the eve of the invasion, Saddam had told his top ministers and commanders to hold out for eight days—“and after that I will take over.” American intelligence officials later came to believe that Saddam and his top generals were studying Vietnamese manuals on guerrilla tactics. Knowing that he had no unconventional weapons, the Iraqi dictator was getting ready for a different kind of war, one at least as old as the Romans. The American war planners assumed that they would encounter the kind of resistance they could most easily defeat. They didn't want to fight a guerrilla war—after Vietnam it had ceased to be an option. In planning for the wrong adversary, they failed to follow the ancient military dictum to “know your enemy.” It was another failure of imagination.

The Iraqi insurgents thus had time to prepare, they had the advantage of surprise, and they adapted quickly as the battlefield changed. In the early weeks of the insurgency, attacks against coalition forces tended to be straight-on assaults with small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. These tactics got a lot of insurgents killed at the outset. In the Darwinian nature of such wars, the smarter fighters survived and made adjustments. The most lethal of these was the IED, a homemade bomb composed of an artillery shell or other military munitions (available at unguarded factories and ammo dumps throughout the country), buried in a hole on the roadside or hidden in trash, rubble, or roadkill, and detonated either by wire or remotely with a device such as a garage-door opener or mobile phone. By midsummer, IEDs and other forms of ambush were killing several soldiers a week, mainly in what had come to be known as the Sunni Triangle, the area of Iraq's center, west, and north between Baghdad, Ramadi, and Mosul.

In Washington, Donald Rumsfeld called these attacks the work of a few “dead-enders.” The phrase suggested a handful of potbellied Baathists with dyed mustaches waging a pathetic last stand on behalf of some half-remembered notion of Arab socialist glory. Later, they became FRLs (former regime loyalists), then FREs (former regime elements), and finally AIFs (anti-Iraqi forces). “Now they're just POIs—pissed-off Iraqis,” a senior CPA official said. “But there was always this desire to say that they were people that were bad guys, either diehard Saddamists or foreigners, not that they could just be regular Iraqis. It's not our fault they hate us—they're going to hate us whatever we do. There wasn't a recognition that our own tactics may be fueling the opposition.”

Facing the American role in the growth of the insurgency beyond the initial core group first required facing the insurgency itself. But in Washington there had been no plan for a guerrilla war; a guerrilla war would change all the calculations about the military presence in Iraq; and so there was no guerrilla war. On the ground in Iraq, the consequences of this willful blindness were as real and dire as the months or even years of delay in supplies of armored vehicles and body armor reaching American forces whose “operations tempo” was increasing every week. After the Army ordered more bulletproof vests, it took almost half a year for the first shipment to reach Iraq. By December 2003, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, was writing to the Pentagon that the shortage of spare parts and other equipment was so severe that “I cannot continue to support sustained combat operations with rates this low.”

T. X. Hammes, a Marine colonel who devoted his career to studying guerrilla war, told me, “I am willing to bet the captain you were with understood he was in an insurgency very early. Our leadership was absolutely unable to make that leap. Bad news was very, very slow to filter up.” When President Bush stood on the deck of the carrier
Abraham Lincoln
on May 1 in front of an enormous banner proclaiming “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” and declared the end of major combat in Iraq, Hammes said to himself, “‘Oh, shit.' It struck me that, my God, we don't have any understanding at all of how bad this can be.”

Hammes, a stocky, square-headed, blunt-spoken man, entered the Marine Corps a month after the fall of Saigon, and he spent the next three decades trying to figure out how an agricultural society of twenty million people had defeated the United States. It was not a question senior military leadership cared to explore. After Vietnam, “There was a pretty visceral reaction that we would not do this again. We stopped thinking about insurgency years ago. So even when we figured out Iraq was an insurgency, we didn't know what to do about it.” Though the Marine Corps, as Hammes reminded me, had always been a “small-wars outfit” with a tradition of intellectual independence, he spent his career as something of an outlier. During a fellowship year, he studied the classic texts and cases of insurgency over the objections of his instructors, who told him, “You're crazy, we don't do insurgency,” and urged him to study something relevant, like conventional war in Europe. Then he pursued practical knowledge in the dirty little conflicts of the late Cold War—Honduras, Angola, Somalia, Afghanistan. He picked the brains of U.S.-backed guerrilla fighters, assuming that sooner or later people like them would become America's main enemies. “I was sitting there thinking: If I'm a bad guy and I've got to fight the United States, that whole conventional thing doesn't look that good. If you want to study your profession, go to the other guy's side and look back.” After Hammes set down his years of thinking about insurgency in a book, publishers told his agent, “Interesting book, well-written, but a subject nobody's interested in because it's not going to happen.”
The Sling and the Stone
was finally accepted for publication in the spring of 2003, just as “it” started to happen.

The Iraqi insurgency soon took on the characteristics that Hammes had written about. It was a fragmented network, which made it inefficient in some ways but also difficult to defeat because there was no central node of command; it could survive great damage. Its members learned by experience, watching their own coverage on al-Jazeera; they also coordinated their efforts through the media. They used the population, mainly by intimidation, but also by luring the Americans into violent overreactions that swung support their way. They chose soft targets. They lacked a unifying ideology—Hammes identified at least five groups in Iraq with different goals—and yet the solution to this kind of war must be political. Iraqi institutions of governance and security would have to become capable of winning the population's allegiance. Meanwhile, the United States would have to make a long-term commitment to what was bound to be a protracted struggle. The ultimate arbiter would be the Iraqi and American publics.

None of this was good news at the technology-minded Pentagon. Franks's successor as chief of Central Command, General John Abizaid, an Arab American with a better grasp of the strategic dangers in Iraq than his predecessor, acknowledged on July 16, 2003, that American forces were faced with “a classical guerrilla-type campaign.” He was directly contradicting his boss Donald Rumsfeld, who had said a couple of weeks earlier, “I guess the reason I don't use the phrase ‘guerrilla war' is because there isn't one.” The soldiers on the ground in Iraq were far ahead of the senior leadership in Washington in recognizing the seriousness of the enemy they now faced. But even the sharpest of them had no ready-made model for understanding the Iraqi insurgency. The battalion commander I met in Kirkuk, Lieutenant Colonel Dom Caraccilo, said that the American role as liberators, occupiers, and counterinsurgents in Iraq had no parallel in our military history. “It's hard to make a relevant comparison to anywhere. It's very unique.” Postwar Germany and Japan, Vietnam, French Algeria—none was an exact template. “What we're seeing here is a different face. This isn't guerrilla warfare, it's not some Maoist thing. I personally don't think there's an organizational structure like the Algerian FLN. It's a hodgepodge. They didn't have a plan—there's no plan right now.”

The Iraqi insurgency had no Mao, no Ho, no clear and popular political agenda. The killing of Uday and Qusay and the capture of Saddam had no strategic effect on it. There was little attempt to court the press (few Western journalists got anywhere close to the insurgents except by unpleasant accident or kidnapping, and even with arranged contacts they were sometimes lucky to return to their laptops). In Hammes's experience of the small wars of the eighties and nineties, modern insurgencies were likely to be composed of dispersed cells, criminal gangs, ethnic militias, and regional warlords, sometimes cooperating, sometimes not, all festering in a weak state with corrupt local officials. The absence of a manifesto and a charismatic leader didn't make them any less durable. What the Iraqi insurgency lacked in coherence it made up for in weapons, cash, and trained personnel.

The key military tool in counterinsurgency is intelligence. Because of the planning failures and the slow recovery, this was exactly what the United States lacked in Iraq. There were nowhere near enough Arabic interpreters for each battalion—the Pentagon contractor hired to provide them, Titan Corporation, was reviled all over Iraq for its sluggishness—and soldiers often went out on patrol with no way of knowing what was being said to them, let alone what was not being said. In September 2003, a staff officer in a battalion in Baghdad wrote me:

Security is not really something you can do anything about unless you have an intelligence network set up, or some sort of security force is at the right place at the right time to catch the right criminal or terrorist … There aren't enough security forces, whether coalition or native, to do the job now. As it stands, a native-intelligence apparatus is non-existent. Our information comes from open-source intelligence, which means people walking up to the front gate and saying they have information and our intelligence officer debriefing him, or Iraqis who we deal with through the NACs offering up some information, which isn't always useful. Also, sometimes the locals use us to carry out grudges against their neighbors. One translator who worked for us got our guys to raid a house he said had RPGs and contained individuals carrying out attacks on coalition forces. Nothing was in the house and the guy sleeping with his family inside told us immediately who it was that had sent us; he owed the translator money and the translator said he would sic the Americans on him. Turns out he was telling the truth. We fired and arrested our translator instead.