The Longest War (52 page)

There were also shifting dynamics on the ground in Iraq that would make the additional combat brigades of the surge a force multiplier rather than simply more cannon fodder for Iraq’s insurgents. Those changes included not only al-Qaeda’s weakening grip and the rise of the Awakening movements but previous sectarian cleansing that had forced more than four million Iraqis to flee their homes, and which made it harder for the death squads to find their victims. In Baghdad by the end of 2006,
half the Sunni population
had fled the city. Around the same time
efforts to register
all military-age Iraqi males using biometrics created a useful database of that population. And walls built around vulnerable neighborhoods kept insurgents out. Petraeus recalls that “we literally created
gated communities
all over Baghdad. And in some cases, we created gated cities like Fallujah. There was a period where we didn’t allow vehicles into Fallujah. There were massive parking lots outside the city of several hundred thousand people.”

The better integration of human intelligence from the former insurgents on the American payroll and information from the vastly increased
number of hours flown by unmanned aerial vehicles
over Iraq—hours flown by UAVs in Iraq jumped from nearly 165,000 flight hours in 2006 to more than 258,000 in 2007—supplemented by
signals intelligence
and cell phone chain analysis, combined with the efforts of U.S. and Iraqi special forces, all integrated together, put the insurgents on the run in provinces across Iraq. Senior U.S. intelligence official David Gordon recalls, “By 2008, Special Forces were going on
two rounds a night
! They were going on an attack, getting new information; they were
destroying
the enemy … and that’s part of what happens when all of this works, is that you get this huge flow of intelligence that enables us.”

Better bomb detection devices, such as drones equipped to spot subtle anomalies in roads indicating the presence of bombs; the increasing deployment of hulking armored vehicles with V-shaped hulls known as MRAPs, which are largely immune from roadside bombs; and an aggressive effort to map and target the networks of Iraq’s bomb makers all led to a decline in the number of deaths caused by the leading killer of U.S. soldiers—the improvised explosive device. The number of
IED attacks
in Iraq dropped from almost 5,000 in 2006 to around 3,000 two years later. Petraeus recalls that all of these factors were mutually reinforcing. “
So you reverse
a death spiral, basically. It wasn’t just a downward spiral.… And one aspect reinforces another,
which makes something else possible, which reinforces another and then promotes better security which means, you just keep going up.”

By 2008 the Sunni insurgent organizations in Iraq were largely defeated, but that was only one, albeit critically important, aspect of the problem that faced American commanders, because al-Qaeda had something of a Shia analogue, the Jaish al-Mahdi (the “Army of the Prophet”), known by its initials as JAM. Operating at the behest of the sullen young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, JAM fought
pitched battles
in 2004 with American forces in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf. Two years later JAM had grown to a force of some
sixty thousand men
, far larger than any of the Sunni insurgent groups.

But as AQI gradually faded in importance, so too did JAM’s role as the protector of the Shia against the Sunni terrorists, and increasingly JAM began to be seen by the Shia population as just another predatory militia. The best predictor of future ethnic strife is acts of revenge for previous ethnic violence, and so as AQI and JAM declined in strength a reinforcing positive feedback loop began to take hold, and the numbers of
Iraqi civilians
dying in
sectarian violence
began a sharp decline from a high of around ninety
every day
in December 2006 to single digits two years later.

The PowerPoint briefing slides so beloved of the U.S. military showed the violence in Iraq peaking in almost every category in the first months of 2007 and steadily dropping after that. That decline was true across the board, including attacks by insurgents, civilian deaths, U.S. soldiers killed, Iraq security forces killed, car-bomb attacks, and IED explosions. In December 2006, the U.S. military map of “ethno-sectarian” violence in Baghdad was colored mostly yellow, orange, and red, indicating medium to intense violence. The same map two years later was mostly colored green, indicating that the sectarian violence in Baghadad had largely subsided.

JAM compounded its problems when in late August 2007 it started fighting another Shia militia, the Badr Corps, around the shrine of the holy city of Karbala, in southern Iraq, during pilgrimage season, clashes that killed scores. It was as if two mafia families had waged pitched gun battles in the vicinity of the Vatican in the middle of Easter, and it horrified most Shia. As a result Moqtada al-Sadr ordered JAM to stand down in a
six-month truce
that he later renewed.

In the spring of 2008, JAM overreached yet again when it unleashed barrages of mortar and rocket attacks on the hitherto largely safe Green Zone in
Baghdad, attacks that had landed close to the prime minister’s own house. By the last week of March, Maliki decided to launch an assault
on the city of Basra
, the key to the southern province that is the source of some
70 percent
of Iraq’s oil wealth, which had been largely taken over by JAM.

Maliki’s attack plan reflected his mounting frustration about the Shia gangs running rampant in Basra.
He barely gave
American commanders any warning about what he was doing. Petraeus recalls that this was a make-or-break moment for Maliki: “We saw it as a game-changer if he didn’t win. I remember the president saying, ‘This is a decisive moment,’ and I was telling Ryan [Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq], ‘Boy, I hope it’s decisive in the way I think he means,’ because it was such a rapid, such a sudden, frankly,
arguably impulsive
decision.”

Senior U.S. intelligence official David Gordon recalls, “
There were all
of these questions being raised about Maliki, and President Bush said, ‘You know, we don’t have the luxury of choosing who our partners are.’ And I give President Bush … really, very high grades for his personal management of the relationship with Maliki.” National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley was in the Oval Office as Bush heard the news about Maliki’s impulsive move into Basra and recalls the president saying, “
If he succeeds
on this, it will transform him as a leader. He will become the leader of this country, and he will become a nonsectarian leader of his country. That’s what I’ve been looking for ever since we toppled Saddam Hussein. So, not only are we gonna support Maliki in this, but the Pentagon and the military better get some people down there and help get control of this operation, and make it a success.” American advisers and air support soon arrived in Basra and the Shia
militias were decimated
.

Maliki followed up
the Basra operation with a similar American-supported drive by the Iraqi military into the vast Shia slums of Sadr City in Baghdad, from which many of the rocket and mortar attacks into the Green Zone were being launched. Maliki’s operations against JAM, however, were not just simple acts of single-minded patriotism, since they had the side benefit for the prime minister of neutralizing a major competing power center in the world of Shia politics.

The Basra and Sadr City operations sent an important signal to the Sunni population that the Shia-dominated government would act against Shiite militias. It is hard to imagine a more anti-Shia and anti-Iranian group than the
Sunni sheikhs
of the Anbar Awakening, but after the Basra operation a group
of four of them all took turns to say variations of “We are pleased with Maliki. The rest of the government other than the prime minister is Shia.” Before the Basra operation, their praise for Maliki, who had spent decades living in Iran and came to power because of his onetime alliance with Sadr, would have been inconceivable.

And the operations in Sadr City and other parts of the country underlined the importance of another “surge,” the significance of which was largely missed in the United States: the Iraqi security services were now quite substantial and somewhat effective. By 2009 there were
some six hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers and policemen
, four times more than was then the case in Afghanistan, which is a much larger country with a larger population and is harder to control because of its mountainous topography.

For years the Iraqi police had been seen by Sunnis, with ample justification, as just another ethnic-cleansing Shia militia. But in 2008 the new head of the police force, Major General Hussein al-Awadi,
fired eighteen
of the more sectarian of his twenty-seven battalion commanders and the force became much better balanced ethnically. Similarly, the Iraqi army was increasingly able to operate as a genuinely national force. For instance, the 1st Brigade of the 1st Division had no problem operating in the 2008 Basra operation despite the fact that it was
a mixed force
of 60 percent Sunni and 40 percent Shia.

Another positive development was the emergence of Iraqi politics conducted by parliamentary maneuver rather than with rockets. A legitimate criticism of the security gains in Iraq was that they weren’t matched by concomitant political progress. But a
provincial election law
was finally passed in September 2008 and provincial elections followed on January 31, 2009. The election went largely peacefully and Iraqis voted for more nationalist, secular-leaning parties over the religious parties that had won in the elections of 2005.

The long-contentious Status of Forces Agreement that was finally hammered out between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government and passed by the Iraqi parliament in
late November 2008
was another sign of deepening political maturity. This agreement provided a framework for the incoming Obama administration to plan the withdrawal of all American soldiers by the end of 2011. The Bush administration did not get caveats inserted into the agreement that would have prolonged the occupation potentially indefinitely; Iraqi politicians who voted for the agreement had a date certain for a complete American withdrawal, and the Iranians who were, in effect,
another partner in the negotiations, because of the influence they wielded over Iraq’s Shia parties, secured a guarantee that Iraq would not be used by American forces for offensive operations against other countries.

Emma Sky, the political adviser to the U.S. military in Iraq, points out that the agreement had a key clause that U.S. forces had to be out of the cities by June 2009: “Now making us do that was huge, because without that clause we would have always found a reason that we couldn’t leave the cities. Violence would never be down to a good enough level to justify it.” On June 30 the last American units pulled out of Iraq’s cities. Sky remembers the “Sovereignty Day” celebrations and watching the Iraqi Security Forces march by, and thinking, “
I just never believed
we would get to this day. It was really, really huge. For them, to actually see that we had no long-term interest in occupying their country; that this was genuine.”

More than half a decade after Casey, Abizaid, and Rumsfeld had first decided that their most important goal in Iraq was to put a more Iraqi face on the American occupation, it was now finally realized with the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq’s cities. But to get there had required a wholesale change in U.S. strategy; putting at first an even more American face on the occupation by putting more GI boots on the ground in some of Iraq’s toughest neighborhoods, which helped to stanch the bloodbath that had engulfed the country.

None of these positive developments was to suggest that the Iraq War was somehow
post facto
worth the
blood and treasure
consumed—more than 4,500 American soldiers dead and thirty thousand wounded; at least one hundred thousand Iraqis killed; costs to U.S. taxpayers that will rise above a trillion dollars; and jihadist terrorist attacks that had increased around the world sevenfold in the three years following the 2003 invasion.

It bears recalling that almost none of the goals of the war as described by proponents of overthrowing Saddam were achieved.
An alliance
between Saddam and al-Qaeda wasn’t interrupted because there wasn’t one, according to any number of studies, including one by the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Pentagon’s own internal think tank. There was no democratic domino effect around the Middle East; quite the opposite: the authoritarian regimes became more firmly entrenched. Peace did not come to Israel, despite the prediction of the well-known academic Fouad Ajami, writing before the war in
Foreign Affairs
that the
road to Jerusalem
went through Baghdad. Nor did the war pay for itself, as posited by Paul Wolfowitz, who told Congress in 2003
that oil revenues “could bring between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years. We’re dealing with a country that could really
finance its own reconstruction
, and relatively soon.” Quite the reverse: Iraq was a giant money sink for the American economy. The supposed threat to the United States from Saddam wasn’t ended because
there
wasn’t one to begin with. And in his place arose a Shia-dominated Arab state, the first in modern history. Meanwhile, American prestige overseas evaporated, while the U.S. military was stretched to the breaking point.

And Al-Qaeda in Iraq might still regain a role despite its much weakened state today. In 2008 there was a sense that al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate was on the verge of defeat. The American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, said, “You are not going to hear me say that al-Qaeda is defeated, but they’ve
never been closer to defeat
than they are now.” Al-Qaeda had by then certainly lost the ability to control large swaths of the country and a good chunk of the Sunni population as it had two years earlier, but the group proved surprisingly resilient, as demonstrated by the fact that it pulled off a number of bombings in Baghdad in 2010 that killed hundreds.