The Fourth Star (19 page)

But it wasn’t really the war that troubled Abizaid. He had no doubt that U.S. troops would drive Saddam from power. What concerned him was what would come after the dictator fell. Dave Petraeus, who was leading the 101st Airborne Division through a brutal sandstorm as it drove toward Baghdad, had the same worry. Rumsfeld and Franks’s war plan assumed that a lightning assault would quickly topple Saddam’s regime. Once the dictator was gone, they expected, Iraqis and the relatively small team of civilians and retired generals that the Pentagon had assembled would handle delivery of humanitarian aid and any other problems that arose until a new government could be established.

Both Abizaid and Petraeus had heard such promises about civilians taking over the postwar reconstruction from the military in the 1990s. And both expected that, just as in the nineties, the military would have to fill the void when the civilian teams were overwhelmed by the chaos that followed combat. The 9/11 terrorist attacks demonstrated the danger that could emerge from chaotic, ungoverned places, like Afghanistan. But the Bush
administration wanted no part of nation building there or anyplace else. They hadn’t absorbed the lessons of the 1990s about the military’s unavoidable postconflict role. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, a small force made up of U.S. special operations troops invaded Afghanistan and, with precision bombing and local allies, quickly toppled the Taliban. The Bush administration left about 10,000 troops to hunt down the remnants of Al Qaeda. Then it turned its focus to Iraq, and to toppling Saddam and transforming Iraq into a model democracy for the Middle East. Ordered to prepare for an invasion of Iraq, the military was quite happy not to be saddled with rebuilding Afghanistan. The same attitude pervaded the early stages of the Iraq war, to Abizaid’s and Petraeus’s frustration. As the U.S. force pushed north, they were among the few who worried about what would happen after Baghdad fell.

Abizaid’s and Petraeus’s views on Iraq differed in other key respects, however. Petraeus had high hopes for the postinvasion period. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this place turns out to be something?” he said to a reporter a few weeks into the war. “There’s no reason why it couldn’t be. They have lots of money, unless some petty despot takes over.” Abizaid had a darker view. He knew how deep the ethnic and sectarian hatreds ran in the country and how quickly they could explode. He also recalled his time in Lebanon, when the Israelis had attempted to occupy an Arab land. Prior to the invasion, he had e-mailed his staff an academic study on the occupation. He hoped his troops would take two lessons from Israel’s failure: occupation duty is hard even for the best-trained military, and the longer you stay the harder it gets.

These were the sorts of issues that Abizaid wanted to raise with Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials during the video teleconference. The March 26 briefing began with the weather—a sandstorm blanketing much of the region had slowed the push north—and a discussion of that day’s fighting. With the ground troops stalled, Air Force jets were doing most of the fighting that day, pounding Republican Guard units on the outskirts of Baghdad. After fifteen minutes, Rumsfeld departed, signing off with a wave. “We are glad you are so focused,” he breezily announced to Abizaid, and turned the discussion over to his close aide Douglas Feith, the
Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy, who suggested they talk about the postwar period.

As the discussion meandered along, Abizaid became more and more irritated. He had been warning for months that stabilizing the country after an invasion was going to be perilously hard. “The response I got was that you don’t know what you are talking about,” he recalled. Now, with the fall of Baghdad only days away, they were stuck debating about minor issues. Abizaid punched the white button on his console and a red border formed around his screen image in the Pentagon, Qatar, and Kuwait, indicating that he had the microphone. He suggested that the group spend a few minutes talking about how to handle members of Saddam’s government.

“Senior-level Baathists with money will flee the country. They will become a problem for Interpol,” he predicted. “Senior Baathists without money will be killed or will turn themselves in to us and try to trade information for clemency. Then there are the middle and lower tiers that run the country. We want them to come back to their jobs and work with us.” It was these party members, the roughly 30,000 to 50,000 bureaucrats, teachers, police officers, and engineers, who did the day-to-day business of the government. Many had joined the Baath Party because Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had offered no alternative. Even if their loyalties were suspect, they needed to be kept in their jobs to prevent a total breakdown in authority, he argued.

From Washington, Feith cut Abizaid off. “The policy of the United States government is de-Baathification,” he said. As he spoke, Feith drew out the syllables in a way that seemed intended to shut off further discussion. Abizaid had grown to despise the word, which he thought echoed
de-Nazification
and only served to feed a fantasy that had taken hold at the highest levels of the Pentagon that the Iraq war was going to proceed like the liberation of France and Germany at the end of World War II. Occupying a Muslim country with its almost impenetrable tribal and ethnic politics and whose minority groups had a long history of killing each other was nothing like running Germany after World War II.

Abizaid pressed the white button, claiming the microphone. “You
shouldn’t even use the term
de-Baathification,”
he told Feith. His voice had grown clipped and angry. “This is not Nazi Germany and what’s needed is not de-Nazification. You have to hold this place together and if you don’t keep the government together in some form, it won’t hold.”

Feith fired back, emphasizing that the decision came from the civilian officials who gave the military its orders. “Let me repeat to you what the policy of the U.S. government is: de-Baathification.”

Major General David Petraeus couldn’t afford to think about what was going to happen after Saddam fell. For the first time in his thirty-year career he was leading troops in combat. After crossing the Kuwait border and moving north hundreds of miles in only a few days, the leading edge of Petraeus’s 101st Airborne Division was hunkered down outside Najaf, a city of more than 500,000 people about 160 miles south of Baghdad. Because of the whipping sandstorm, mud and sand coated Petraeus’s face and reddened his blue eyes as he considered the division’s next move. His orders called for stopping the Fedayeen fighters in white pickups who were mounting suicidal assaults on U.S. tanks and supply trucks. Intelligence reports estimated that there could be more than 1,000 fighters inside Najaf. Petraeus told Colonel Ben Hodges, whose brigade was awaiting orders to attack, that there was no reason to rush headlong into a potential ambush. “We’re in a long war here. I want to keep our guys from getting killed in large numbers,” he said.

Tanks might be able to charge into a city, but a light infantry unit like the 101st was far more vulnerable. At the moment Petraeus’s division was strung out all the way to the Kuwaiti border. Supplies were running short. His helicopters were grounded. All were reasons to postpone the assault into Najaf until his division had time to consolidate its position. He told Hodges to dig in and defend the highway that skirted Najaf, which the Army needed to move supplies north. It was Petraeus’s first combat experience,
but he wasn’t going to charge into the city when his orders were to move north fast.

It had been more than a decade since Petraeus had been shot in the chest in the Fort Campbell training accident. In 1999, he had broken his pelvis while skydiving during his free time near Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Although the painful accident required months of therapy, he liked to tell colleagues that it made him faster. He had his scores on the Army’s physical fitness test to prove it. The fifty-year-old general, at five foot nine and 150 pounds, was still in better shape than the vast majority of his much younger soldiers. Few could match his toughness or his drive.

Still, he had his doubters. The long stretches Petraeus had spent at the elbow of senior generals had caused him to miss all of the nation’s previous wars, big and small, over his thirty-year career—Grenada, Panama, the Gulf War, and Afghanistan. Some of his subordinates thought his lack of combat experience had made him too cautious. They wanted to charge into Najaf.

Brigadier General Benjamin Freakley, one of his two assistant division commanders, held an impromptu meeting in the command post with two other senior officers: Brigadier General E. J. Sinclair and Colonel Thomas Schoenbeck. Freakley, a Gulf War veteran, dominated the gathering, leaning in close as he spoke. The best way to protect the highway was to attack into the city, he maintained. If Fedayeen troops were fighting for their lives, they wouldn’t be able to attack convoys. The other U.S. units involved in the invasion were already driving toward Baghdad. If the 101st didn’t move fast, it would get left behind, he worried. The officers agreed to present a united front. Of the three, Colonel Schoenbeck, an easygoing officer who years before had played wide receiver for the University of Florida, was closest to Petraeus. “Tom, you need to convince the boss it is going to be okay,” Freakley told him. “First Brigade can take this fight by itself.” Schoenbeck promised to deliver the message.

In the days that followed, two brigades from the 101st edged toward Najaf. When the enemy fighters showed themselves in the city, the Americans hit them with rockets, artillery, and machine guns. It wasn’t the headlong rush that Freakley wanted but a slow, deliberate attack. “We were all
trying to understand, ‘Who is it that’s fighting?’” Petraeus recalled. Were the forces in the city Fedayeen, foreign fighters, Republican Guard or a mix of all three? Would they fight block by block or fall back? After a few days Petraeus and Hodges began getting reports that Iraqi defenses in Najaf were disintegrating. Instead of a thousand fighters, Iraqi sources were saying there were at best a few hundred left. Hodges ordered seven of his tanks to race a mile into the city and then dash back. The resistance had vanished. The siege that Petraeus had worried might take weeks had ended in a few days.

“The good news is that we now own Najaf,” he told Hodges later that day. “And the bad news is that we now own Najaf.” He asked for planes full of food and water for the locals, but the disorganized humanitarian relief effort in Kuwait couldn’t produce them. Most of the 101st, meanwhile, pushed north toward Baghdad behind other Army and Marine units.

On April 11, the last of the resistance collapsed, setting off days of looting throughout the country. Abizaid, back in Qatar, began receiving reports that Kurdish fighters who had fought with the United States during the invasion were streaming into the northern city of Mosul. A few days later, a contingent of ninety Marines at the Mosul city hall opened fire on a crowd protesting the lack of electricity. The outnumbered Marines retreated to the airport on the edge of the city of 2 million residents and hunkered down. “You’ve got to get a force in here and give them some tanks,” the Marine commander told Abizaid. “They’ve got to see we’re serious about this.”

Abzaid knew from his time in northern Iraq in 1991 that the pent-up hostility between Arabs and Kurds could turn explosive. He needed to lock down the city before things got worse. The best bet was the 101st Airborne Division, which had taken up a position in southern Baghdad. On April 18, Petraeus got orders to move his 20,000 soldiers to Mosul as quickly as possible. His division had performed respectably but had been only a secondary player in the invasion. Mosul was going to be different.

The Black Hawk helicopter made a couple of lazy circles around the walled city. From the air Petraeus could see that, except for a few checkpoints manned by ragged fighters, the streets were empty. Plumes of oily smoke from blazing ammunition dumps spiraled skyward. He ordered his pilot to land at the airport and went into the main terminal building. A layer of chalky dust coated the floors and the smell of urine hung in the air. Soldiers and Marines were trying to grab a few hours of sleep on one of the baggage carousels.