The Longest War (29 page)

And because the overwhelming priority was to find Saddam’s supposed stockpiles of WMD, as the insurgency gathered steam in the summer of 2003 American policy makers had little understanding of who exactly the insurgents were. CPA official Clayton McManaway remembers that “the
imbalance was staggering
between the intelligence analysts working on weapons of mass destruction and those working on the insurgency.”

So the insurgency was born in a perfect storm of American errors—not establishing order; not providing the semblance of any government; confirming
to the Sunnis who had once lorded it over Iraq’s Shia majority that they were officially the underdogs, and throwing hundreds of thousands of soldiers onto the streets in an economy where the jobless rate was around 50 percent, while simultaneously ensuring that there was an unlimited supply of weaponry at hand for those angry young men.

Ali Allawi, the minister of defense in the Iraqi government that replaced the CPA, explains that “
the searching of homes
without the presence of a male head of household, body searches of women, the use of sniffer dogs, degrading treatment of prisoners, public humiliation of the elderly and notables, all contributed to the view that the Americans had only disdain and contempt for Iraq’s traditions.” When the pictures of naked prisoners at Abu Ghraib, tethered on dog leashes and stacked like cordwood in human pyramids, were broadcast around the world, they served as further confirmation of the supposed contempt Americans had for Arabs.

Instead of working with Iraq’s powerful Sunni tribes to reel in the insurgency, the CPA rejected such efforts, according to General Sanchez, who remembers that he met repeatedly with Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA, urging him “to work with us in the process of tribal engagement and reconciliation. But he adamantly refused to do so. The reason I believe was
more philosophical than practical
. The Bush administration’s—and therefore CPA’s—grand vision for Iraq was to create a democratic state where tribes had minimum to no influence in running the government.” And CIA director George Tenet also remembered
the CPA’s hostility
to engaging with the tribes. (Three years later, of course, American engagement with the Sunni tribes would help to dramatically tamp down the violence in Iraq.)

By November 2003, as U.S. military fatalities in the conflict
drifted over the four hundred mark
, the CIA station chief in Baghdad was seriously worried and wrote a long formal assessment back to Washington that, for reasons which are obscure, is known at the Agency as an AARDWOLF. The AARD-WOLF, titled “
the Expanding Insurgency in Iraq
,” concluded that the insurgents were largely Sunnis who saw themselves as being excluded from Iraq’s emerging new political order but “believe they will ultimately succeed in returning to power as they have in the past.” As a result of the intensifying insurgency, the CIA station chief predicted that U.S. military deaths
would rise to two thousand
. His prediction would of course turn out to be optimistic.

On November 11, 2003, Tenet and a number of the Agency’s top Iraq analysts gathered in the White House Situation Room to brief the president,
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, and Bremer about the gathering insurgency. One of the analysts explained that Iraq was
just one of a long series of jihads
that al-Qaeda had exploited in the past, such as the Afghan war against the Soviets, and this one had come along “at exactly the right time for al-Qaeda,” allowing it to tap into a whole new generation of supporters, including Iraqis.

Robert Grenier, the CIA’s Iraq mission manager, remembers the several-hour meeting: “We were trying to convey that this was a full-blown insurgency. I kept saying that it was sort of the functional equivalent of civil war.” Grenier says the mood of the meeting was “heavily colored by the presence of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who interrupted one of the analysts who had first used the term
insurgency
to ask him why he had used that word, explaining, ‘This is not a term that we should use publicly because it conveys legitimacy on them that we obviously don’t want to convey.’” The analyst countered that what was happening in Iraq conformed to the Pentagon’s own definition of an insurgency. Grenier recalls that Bush then said, “
We’re not calling it an insurgency
. So fine, within the room, we can call it what we want. But just so you all understand, we are not going to go out of here and call it an insurgency.”

As the violence accelerated, those in charge of the war compounded the problem by acting as if nothing untoward was happening. Bush administration officials seemed to have internalized the Orwellian idea that if you could successfully frame the language that was used to describe the rising violence, then you could snow the public about its underlying reality. As the insurgency picked up steam, Rumsfeld referred to it as “
pockets of dead enders
” during a Pentagon briefing, while President Bush explained at an Oval Office press conference that “the more progress we make on the ground … the more desperate these killers become.” Ascribing the rising violence to the supposed increasing desperation of the insurgents would become a standard rhetorical device of the administration.

On June 23, 2004, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz went on MSNBC to assure viewers that “it’s
not an insurgency
.” Almost exactly a year later, Cheney didn’t quibble about the term
insurgency
when he was speaking with Larry King on CNN but instead told viewers that it was in its “last throes.” And three years into the war, Cheney told CBS that the insurgents were in a state of “desperation” and denied that Iraq was in the middle of a civil war.

All of those blithe assessments were quite at odds with the bloodbath that Iraq had become following the invasion. Taking the most conservative figures of Iraqi civilian dead from Iraq Body Count, which relied on morgue data and media accounts, and therefore almost certainly undercounted the total numbers of victims,
at least ninety thousand Iraqis
had died in the war by the time Bush left office. Another measure of how intense the Iraq civil war became was the numbers of Iraqis who fled their homes or left the country;
4.7 million Iraqis
, around a sixth of the population, fled the conflict, about half to other countries and half displaced internally. This was the largest single movement of refugees in the history of the Middle East, and the majority were displaced after 2006, as the war intensified.

As Iraq spiraled out of control, the Bush administration and its supporters resorted to blaming the media, which was supposedly ignoring the “good news” in Iraq. Curiously, this charge did not accompany the glowing coverage of the rapid overthrow of Saddam, but only came into play after Iraq’s descent into chaos. In 2004 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lamented that positive news stories “apparently aren’t as newsworthy, and they
seem not to make the press
,” bizarrely citing Iraq’s fielding of an Olympic team as evidence of progress at a time when Iraq was already one of the most dangerous places on the planet.

Dexter Filkins, a correspondent for the
New York Times,
recounted what it was actually like to be in Baghdad as the war accelerated: “There was no law anymore, no courts, nothing—there was nothing at all. They kidnapped children now; they killed them and dumped them in the street. The kidnapping gangs bought and sold people; it was like its own
terrible ecosystem
.” And Filkins recalled that the good news, what little of it existed, was almost impossible to cover: “One of the favorite targets of the suicide bombers were American ribbon-cuttings—a pump station, for instance, or a new school, because of the crowds they brought. It got so bad that the Americans sometimes kept the unveilings of new projects a secret.”

What was especially cynical about the charge that the media was ignoring the “good news” was that the Iraq War was the most dangerous war the press had covered since World War II.
Some 130 journalists
were killed in the Iraqi conflict,
more than double
the number that had died in Vietnam. Indicative of how dangerous it became were the physical changes that took place over the course of the war at the Baghdad bureau of the
New York Times,
which gradually
morphed into a fortress
festooned with searchlights and machine
gun emplacements on its roof, surrounded by concrete blast walls, a foot thick and twenty feet high, protected by forty armed guards.

Demands that the U.S. media cover more of the good news in Iraq were strange given that over the course of the war seven American journalists were kidnapped and two were killed, and simply surviving the mayhem of what was one of the world’s most lethal wars became a daily chore for the press. Just to cover the story in Baghdad journalists had first to survive the five-mile trip between Baghdad International Airport and the capital, a road known as “Route Irish,” which was a gantlet of suicide bombers and rocket attacks during the first two years of the war. In one three-month period alone between September and November 2004, Route Irish was the scene of eighteen suicide bombings.

At the height of the Iraqi conflict, which like many civil wars combined aspects of an insurgency with those of a sectarian conflict,
one hundred civilians were dying every day
, some in the most unspeakable manner, killed by having their skulls drilled in. By October 2006, more than three thousand civilians were dying a month.

No one person was more responsible for all this chaos than a Jordanian gangster turned religious zealot known as
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
. Zarqawi would rise to become the pathologically brutal leader of the group known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq by a circuitous route that would take him from a Jordanian prison cell to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and finally to Iraq. Zarqawi embraced a particularly virulent form of militant Islam while in prison in Jordan during the 1990s, an experience that would sharpen his zeal, as it had for al-Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri. But there the resemblance ended, for while Zawahiri is the scion of a family of ambassadors, lawyers, and clerics and is himself a surgeon, Zarqawi, one of a family of ten born into an impoverished Bedouin family, came up from the mean streets of the city of Zarqa, a charmless conglomeration of concrete block houses and trash-strewn streets just north of Amman, the Jordanian capital. Zarqawi
whiled away his youth
in Zarqa (hence his
nom de jihad
), dropping out of high school, running with gangs, and boozing, a vice discouraged by Islam. Zarqawi opened a video rental store, which failed. Even his mother conceded to a journalist, “
He wasn
’t that smart.”

Zarqawi acquired his first taste for warfare during the jihad against the communists in Afghanistan. Fellow Jordanian Hutaifa Azzam met Zarqawi on Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan in 1990 while the mujahideen
were besieging the town of Khost. Azzam remembers that Zarqawi, then in his mid twenties, was a “street guy” with a long rap sheet, a brawler quick with a knife and a propensity for drink, who had come to fight in the holy war because he had “finally decided to return to Allah.” Azzam also remembers that the blood ran cold in Zarqawi’s veins. “He doesn’t know what is the meaning of frightened or to be afraid.
He can fight an army alone
.”

After the fall of the communist regime in Afghanistan, Zarqawi returned to Jordan in 1993, by now a militant with some serious jihad cred. Zarqawi began conspiring to overthrow the Jordanian government and a year later he was jailed. In prison Zarqawi
worked out manically
, learned the Koran by heart, and gradually rose to become a jailhouse capo whom other inmates learned to fear and to obey without question. Zarqawi had now completed his transformation from a hoodlum to a steely Islamist warrior, so devoid of the normal range of human emotions that even those close to him referred to him as Al Ghraib, “the Stranger,” the name he would use to sign his letters to family members.

In March 1999, the newly crowned king of Jordan, Abdullah II,
gave an amnesty
to thousands of political prisoners, among them Zarqawi, who quickly made his way back to Afghanistan. Letting Zarqawi go free was a decision that the Jordanians would have good reason to regret in the coming years. Around the time of the new millennium, Zarqawi’s group in Jordan
plotted to blow up a Radisson hotel
in Amman and other sites frequented by Western tourists. This plot was broken up by Jordanian intelligence but the group
did succeed in killing Laurence Foley
, an American diplomat, who was assassinated at his home in the Jordanian capital on October 28, 2002.

In Afghanistan, Zarqawi
set up a training camp
in the western part of the country near the city of Herat, by the Iranian border, a small affair for a group of his mostly Jordanian followers. Saif al-Adel, one of al-Qaeda’s Egyptian military commanders, remembers that when the al-Qaeda leadership first met with Zarqawi in Kandahar in 1999 he did not seem sophisticated: “A sturdy man who was not really very good at words. He expressed himself spontaneously and briefly.” Adel says that the al-Qaeda leadership did not seek Zarqawi’s allegiance and, for his own part, Zarqawi maintained his independence from al-Qaeda.

When the war against the Taliban began in the winter of 2001, Zarqawi rushed to defend Kandahar, where he narrowly escaped being killed in an American bombing raid, ending up with some broken ribs when a ceiling
collapsed in on him. After the fall of the Taliban, Zarqawi fled to Iran, where the Afghan warlord
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
—then living in exile there—provided fleeing al-Qaeda militants with apartments. Zarqawi and his fellow Jordanians then opted to move to Iraq, where their
complexions and accents
would enable them to integrate into Iraqi society easily and where they anticipated that there would be some kind of American invasion. Unlike the Arab volunteers who were drawn to the 1980s jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan only years after the conflict had begun, foreign fighters such as Zarqawi started to
arrive in Kurdish Iraq
in 2002, months before the American invasion.