SEVEN TRIBAL MAFIAS WITH AN ARMY STRYKER BRIGADE Iraq, Autumn 2005
Whether I was with the American military in the African desert, the Pacific Ocean, or the Himalayan foothills, Iraq cast a shadow over it all. In the spring of 2004, I had traveled to Iraq with the 1st Battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment, moving overland from Kuwait to the Sunni Triangle, observing weeks of security and stability operations, and then the First Battle of Fallujah.[87] Now, eighteen months later, I decided to embed with the regular Army farther north in the country, in Mosul, the capital of Nineveh Province, near where the mountains of Kurdistan reared up against the Mesopotamian desert. This was the area of responsibility (AOR) of the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, the same “Arctic Wolves” brigade that I had visited the previous autumn at Fort Richardson and Fort Wainwright in Alaska.
Getting to Mosul was the usual hurry-up-and-wait hassle. I gave up a hotel room in Kuwait City at midnight to shiver all night outside a Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) shipping container at a Kuwaiti air base, waiting for a C-130 flight to Baghdad that did not leave until daylight. My passport was handed back to me at the last moment by a taking-his-sweet-time KBR employee who told me with delight, “Don’t it suck when you can’t get a meal [at the all-night dining facility] because you only just got your ID back?” Exiting the C-130 into the suffocating, mud-filled air of central Mesopotamia, fiddling with my body armor and backpack, I learned that there was no room on the helicopter to take me from BIAP (Baghdad International Airport) to the IZ (International Zone, or Green Zone, the nerve center of the American military occupation), where I had to go to get press credentials. This was something I had not had to do in Iraq in 2004, because then I had come in overland with the Marines.
That meant waiting for sixteen hours at the “stables” for the “rhino” (a prison wagon retrofitted with heavy armor) that sped people in the dead of night from the airport to the Green Zone. Security was perceived to be that bad, the U.S. military and State Department that paranoiac. My fellow passengers were sleepy, grizzled contractors of several nationalities, including Filipinos and Kosovars. Some of their jobs might have gone to Iraqis, but because of the security situation American contractors felt more comfortable with non-Arabs. I thought of decades before when American oilmen began hiring Filipinos and other non-Arabs in Saudi Arabia, and when Israelis did the same to replace Palestinian workers. In both instances, it had led to worsening relations with the locals.
To stop the rash of attacks in the territory between the airport and the Green Zone, a virtual tunnel-like corridor of massive concrete, bomb-blast Alaska barriers had been erected. Once inside the Green Zone, the landscape was so dominated by mazes of these tall concrete barriers that they now overshadowed the Stalinist-cum-Babylonian architecture of Saddam Hussein. As with any gated community besieged by some form of crime, the Green Zone had been secured by turning the area surrounding the U.S. Embassy into a fortress, rather than by making inroads into the insurgency. Just bring in enough poured concrete and private security guards and you might buy the appearance of progress.
Returning to the airport for the flight to Mosul, I was able to catch a ride on a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter, which along with the rhino operated as a shuttle of sorts between the two safe havens. Careening a few hundred feet above the ground at high speed in the Black Hawk, two machine gunners at the ready, I had a glance at America’s latest version of Mogadishu-like hell: a ratty cinder-block jigsaw of streets interspersed with dust-bleached palms and crummy old cars and market stalls.
I had a third shivering all-nighter in order to make an early morning C-130 flight north to Mosul. Mosul was a different country than Baghdad. The air was cold and clear following the first rainstorm of the season, revealing a hardened plateau of aching, sculptural distances. Though the altitude was only a few hundred feet above sea level, it was a relief from the choking mud vapors of the Mesopotamian desert. Studded with pine, fir, and cypress trees, the landscape communicated the closeness of Anatolia. I noticed kebab stands and all kinds of Turkish products, from generators to fruit juices. Near the airfield was a roadblock manned by Massoud Barzani’s Kurdish Pesh Merga.
Mosul, like Aleppo in Syria, was an age-old caravan city whose history defied the concept of the twentieth-century nation-state—the very nation-state that the U.S. military occupation of Iraq was trying to hold together and keep from descending into full-scale civil war. Historic trade routes linked Mosul to cities in Syria, Turkey, and Iran. The Arabic language in Mosul was influenced by Kurdish and Syriac. There was a large community of Chaldaeans—Christians who had been converted from Nestorianism to Catholicism.[88] For a long time this city of 2.1 million had been a seat of Catholic missionary activity. Seljuk Turks held Mosul in the Middle Ages and Ottoman Turks in the modern era, with a Persian occupation in between. Mosul’s degenerating old quarter, with its beetling Ottoman walls and elegantly stuccoed twelfth-century Seljuk minaret, was testimony to this cosmopolitan lineage. The incorporation of the oil-rich Turkish vilayet of Mosul into the new Iraq in 1926 meant that the Arab polity of Sunnis and Shiites would henceforth be a place where a quarter of the population was non-Arab Kurds, Turcomans, and Assyrians. Mosul symbolized the ethnic and sectarian divisions that had made Iraq so untenable, helping it to fall victim to the most suffocating of dictatorships.
Straddling the banks of the Tigris, Mosul occupied the site of ancient Nineveh, now a barren, sandpaper emptiness of crumbly hills and vegetable plots across the river from the city center. The Assyrian capital had been the mortal enemy of the biblical nation of Israel. It was the Assyrian tyrant Sennacherib who had destroyed Babylon and laid siege to Jerusalem in the early seventh century B.C., prompting the prophet Isaiah to counsel the Hebrew king Hezekiah to pray for deliverance. Eventually Sennacherib’s forces withdrew from Jerusalem. Nineveh also conjured up the Hebrew prophet Jonah (Nebi Yunus in Arabic), who, as the story goes, after being vomited up by the whale on dry land, made his way here and beseeched the population to dress in sackcloth and ashes, in repentance for its sins.
Assyria met its end at the hands of the Medes in 612 B.C. The collapse of Assyria as a great military power was “one of the completest yet known to history,” according to historian Arnold Toynbee. The Assyrian war machine, one of history’s most terrifying, had dominated the Near East for centuries. Yet, when the Greek general Xenophon passed through here only two hundred years following Assyria’s demise, even the name of Assyria was unknown to him. Assyria, top-heavy with military might, was, in Toynbee’s words, “a corpse in armour,”a phrase that conjured up such overly militarized, centrally controlled states as Syria and Pakistan, and, until 2003, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.[89] If the past in this part of the Near East had a theme, it was the impermanence of states and the malleability of their borders.
I came to Mosul after one set of national elections, and would leave just before another: the former had elected an assembly to draft a constitution, the latter would select political parties for parliament. The former had seen a voter turnout of more than 80 percent in the Mosul region, representing the largest increase in voter participation in Iraq since another election ten months before in January 2005. Mosul was a success story, albeit relative, partial, and extremely tenuous, the credit for which belonged to the Stryker Brigade Combat Team that had recently departed: the 1st Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division based out of Fort Lewis, Washington.
When the 1-25 “Lancers” had arrived in Mosul in September 2004, the city and surrounding area was a violent no-go zone, having seen several thousand insurgent attacks, not to mention over a thousand explosions from improvised explosive devices. The local police had largely deserted, dropping from a force of 10,000 to 300. But by the time 1-25 left a year later, mortar attacks alone had fallen from 300 a month to less than 10. It was a figure that carried significance since among my most vivid memories of Iraq in the spring of 2004 were the constant mortar explosions.1 Other forms of insurgent activity had dropped to the point where international journalists no longer considered Mosul part of the Iraq story, evinced by their absence here in recent months.
The local police force was now back up to 9,000, with the number of police stations having expanded from 5 to 24. More importantly, the number of intelligence tips called in by the local population had risen from near zero to 400 per month.
The sort of chaos that 1-25 had alleviated was an abiding interest of mine. It had been nearly twelve years since I had published an article in The Atlantic Monthly, “The Coming Anarchy,” about the institutional failure of third-world countries stemming from ethnic and sectarian rivalries, demographic and environmental stresses, and the growing interrelationship between war and crime.[90] The Mosul region, of all places, might offer some way of coping with parts of that thesis, I thought.
The 1-25 Lancers’ shaky success bore credit to the brigade-level transformation of the United States Army: Big Army or Mother Army, as the Green Berets of Special Forces derided it. And they were right. Big Army was still too much of a vertical, dinosauric industrial-age organization. Yet it was changing, partly because of the new emphasis on brigades. A brigade was only a third or a half the size of a division, to say nothing of a corps. Thus, its headquarters element was less bureaucratic and top-heavy with colonels. The very size of a brigade could be custom-fit to the situation. Putting brigades first represented an organizational means for dealing with a more chaotic, unconventional world. It was the kind of reform that the military was embracing faster than the State Department. The credit for the emphasis on brigades belonged to succeeding Army chiefs of staff, particularly Eric Shinseki and, to a lesser extent, Pete Schoomaker.
There was, too, the phenomenon of how new hardware, in this case the Stryker combat vehicle, was facilitating a change in relationships between captains in the field and majors and lieutenant colonels back at battalion headquarters. The Stryker, with its added safety features that drastically cut down on casualties from IEDs and suicide bombs, its ability to travel great distances without refueling, and its FBCB2 computer system that gave captains and noncoms situational awareness and the latest intelligence for many miles around, had helped liberate field units from dependence on their headquarters, making them more autonomous.[91] Rather than compete or bicker with Special Forces, the ground-level reality was the co-option of the Special Forces model by the regular Army. This would put pressure on SF to innovate further.
Such autonomy was further encouraged by the Stryker brigades’ flat intelligence architecture, another reform that was happening to a lesser extent throughout the Army. Information now came to captains less and less down the vertical chain of command from their own battalion headquarters, and more and more horizontally, from other junior officers in other battalions via informal e-mail networks, as well as directly from Iraqi units. The lieutenant colonel who commanded an infantry battalion and the major who was his executive officer did not always have to be consulted.
One evening the previous March, a tip from an Iraqi source had led a captain—without seeking permission from any vertical command chain—to carry out six raids in Mosul over the next few hours that netted the capture of fourteen out of twenty members of an insurgent cell, plus the confiscation of large numbers of weapons and several vehicles. A second night, a tip that insurgent leader Abu Zubayr (Mohammed Sultan Saleh) was planning to assassinate a local police chief led a company captain to develop a plan to trap the insurgent by using the tipster as bait. The captain had Abu Zubayr’s movements tracked with an unmanned surveillance plane. Abu Zubayr was killed along with two other key area insurgents.
Such successes did not indicate that overall things were going well in Iraq. What they did indicate was that in the midst of bad situations, individual innovations were possible that steepened the military’s learning curve.
And they showed that in the early stages at least, ending anarchy was, well, about ending anarchy. States both democratic and not had to monopolize the use of force. Here that meant killing particular people and apprehending others. “You’re dealing with a gang mentality,” explained Capt. Phillip Mann of Antioch, California, a thirty-two-yearold intelligence officer and graduate of Fresno State University. “There is a pool of young men in Mosul without jobs who sell drugs and do kidnappings. With a high inflation rate and little economy, being an insurgent pays. You’ve got to make the insurgency a very unattractive profession to people who are not motivated by religious ideology.” Indeed, pornography was a common item found by the battalion whenever it overran insurgent hideouts. “So we adopted a gang-tackle approach,” Capt. Mann went on. “If we get shot at like in Palestine [a retirement community of former regime generals in southeast Mosul that had supported the insurgents], we surround the area and go house to house, every time. We keep doing this till people get tired and start helping us. Our message: ‘We don’t give in—we’re not going away, so work with us.’
“It’s a matter of suppression. You do kinetic ops until you find that magical balance—an acceptable level of violence that allows you to shift resources to nation-rebuilding. Don’t overdo the killing of bad guys. Ending the violence completely is a foolish goal without development.”
And in a large unconventional battlefield with relatively few combatants on it—a battlefield where killing the enemy was easy but finding him difficult—that meant pushing power out to junior officers and noncoms, by giving them immediate access to vital intelligence and the authority to act on it. Capt. Mann was getting instant reports from the highest levels of the military bureaucracy, but also generating intelligence himself upward through the command chain.
For years at the Army intelligence “schoolhouse” in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, young intelligence officers were taught how to receive and collate reports from various parts of the battlefield and build a narrative from them. That system worked when the battlefield featured masses of men and machines in an organized fight. Now, as Capt. Mann explained, “I’ve got my own urban battlespace in a part of Mosul populated by 450,000 people, and I’m trying to find a hundred insurgents who can slip in and out of that battlespace. Rather than satellites and other strategic assets feeding information down to division, to brigade, to battalion, and finally to me, I’m under pressure to get the stuff first by being a detective who pieces together crimes.”
The very military that had caused the anarchy in Iraq was now worth studying as a way to end it, both here and elsewhere in the third world. Keep in mind that the conventional infantry invasion of Iraq was a policy decision made by civilians, even as the restoration of some semblance of order was being driven by young officers who were learning lessons as they went along.
The real change I experienced upon arrival in Mosul was with the soldiers themselves. It never failed: the closer you got to a frontline infantry unit, the greater the pride and intelligence, and the more erect the bearing of the individual troop. Rather than the nasty, young female enlistee at Baghdad International Airport who had grumpily lifted her eyes from a paperback to tell me that she didn’t know the flight times to Mosul, though knowing such information was the sole purpose of her being in Iraq, I now found myself in a TOC (tactical operations center) staffed with noncoms, and junior and middle-level officers, whose whole identity seemed to be their jobs, as revealed through the game-on clarity of their expressions.
Some of these soldiers had high-and-tight buzz cuts like marines. The shaved Mohawk-style heads were less a Marine thing than a combat infantry thing. The Marine Corps was a small elite organization; the Army diverse. Soldiers could make the worst impression on you or the best, depending upon the unit. Even in frontline Army units, privates and noncoms in support positions, more so than their marine equivalents, often appeared to be marking time, sleepwalking through their jobs. This was testimony to the Army’s stratified society in which clerical staff were given different training, used different acronyms, and could be made to feel like dirt by infantrymen. But as for Army officers and noncoms who went outside the base perimeter on daily missions, the differences between them and the Marines and Green Berets were subtle rather than basic.
A further similarity with the Marine Corps was the pixilated camouflage uniforms these soldiers had recently been issued to replace the Army’s old desert fatigues. Again, like the Marines, the uniforms were emptier, as soldiers had stopped wearing their skill badges near their collars.[92] These were more small steps toward the convergence of the armed services and the replacement of a specific soldier or marine identity with—at least among frontline infantrymen—a generic warrior one. Because all marines, cooks and clerical workers included, had always thought of themselves as warriors, this slow-but-sure identity change was having a greater effect on the Army. Soldiers now wore an extra dog tag around their necks with the “warrior ethos” inscribed: “I will always place the mission first, I will never accept defeat, I will never quit…”
And as I kept hearing, “Every soldier’s now a rifleman.” Well, that had long been the Marine motto. It was the old story: you win not by being praised, but by being copied.
The tactical operations center, decorated with pin-ups of San Diego Charger cheerleaders, belonged to the 4th Battalion of the 23rd Infantry Regiment, based out of Fort Richardson outside Anchorage, Alaska. The 4-23 “Tomahawks” were among the 172nd Stryker Brigade’s four fighting battalions. The Tomahawks, in turn, were built around three rifle companies, referred to as “Apache,” “Black Hawk,” and “Comanche.” Because of the Cavalry’s storied nineteenth-century history, Army units more so than Marine ones consciously maintained the legacy of the Indian Wars. The 4-23 battalion coin mentioned the “Indian Wars” along with the Philippine Insurrection, World War II, Vietnam, and other conflicts in which 4-23 was proud to have fought. The motto of the Stryker brigade’s support battalion was “Opahey,” Cherokee for “It’s a good day to die.”
The commander of 4-23 was Lt. Col. John G. Norris of Louisville, Kentucky, a short and stocky former Marine noncom who had sold lemonade at the Kentucky Derby as a kid. He transferred to the Army early in his career, doing ROTC at the University of Louisville. Arriving on the heels of 1-25’s success in late summer, his battalion had so far sustained only twelve wounded in action and no deaths. The fighting that had occurred was mainly in the run-up to the election the previous October.
Since then, Lt. Col. Norris told me, “We’ve done twenty-three patrols or so, mounted and dismounted, every day, and have never been attacked. They’re not passive presence patrols either. We scout for trouble. We’re always acting on intel tips and consequently bringing people in. There’s just not much fighting here. It’s become a political and development challenge.”
My first days in Mosul I spent alongside Lt. Col. Norris, watching him facilitate relationships between local rulers who had once been hostile to one another. Historically, this had been an unconventional Special Forces job. But as combat gave way to politics in Mosul, regular Army officers found themselves dealing increasingly with situations familiar to the attendees of the Special Forces Q Course at Fort Bragg. These were also situations that would have been familiar to officials of the British and French nineteenth-century colonial services.
The days began with a meeting of the notables of Hamman-al-Alil, south of Mosul. First we drove east across the Tigris to pick up journalists from a reopened Iraqi television station who would cover the event. Sitting in the roomy interior of the Stryker, I saw the Tigris through the thermal imagery, while smelling the freshness of the river through the air hatch. Then came the smell of raw sewage as we entered a wilderness of automobile chop shops that had months back been a haven for insurgents. Kids waved and ran after the Strykers with “gimme-a-soccer-ball” pleas. The television station had a brand-new five-hundred-foot tower. A second one was going up, paid for with coalition funds. Recrossing the river in the other direction, I saw the mosque holding Jonah’s tomb on a hill above Mosul’s vast clutter of stone and cement.
We drove down a road that had been paved originally by the 101st Airborne Division, only to be “IEDed to shit by insurgents,” then repaved by Iraqi contractors hired by the American military. That was another tool against chaos: be relentless, particularly in the face of bad trends. If foreign aid to Africa could be justified, as well as inspire idealism, despite decades of failure and corruption, how could it be otherwise for civil affairs projects in Iraq in the face of a few years of difficulties?
The Stryker convoy passed through ashen brown, dome-shaped hills along the Tigris, bordered by fields of melons and sunflowers. The water was divided and redivided by islands and sandbars of massive reeds. The sharp contours gave every feature of the landscape an iconic quality. I saw brick hovels with new satellite dishes on the roofs—a signature detail of post-Saddam Iraq.
Insurgents had made Hamman-al-Alil, a town of twenty thousand, another no-go zone, destroying the council officers and killing the mayor’s nephew, then cutting off his head and delivering it to the mayor at his office. The mayor and the town council went to ground. Continuous raids by the Americans and the newly stood-up Iraqi Army and police, trained and equipped by the Americans, gradually put an end to that. A clinic, a new police station, and new city offices were now nearing completion, and the same mayor was back: Khalif Khader Mohammed Hussein al-Jabouri. Lt. Col. Norris planned to build a badly needed bridge across the Tigris here.
Not that the town looked good; it was a dismal pageant of muddy, garbage-strewn streets awaiting the first meager fruits of a very problematic new stability. The council members adorned in their traditional keffiyehs and gold-braided regalia pleaded with Norris for more projects. The town didn’t just look awful through my eyes, but through theirs, too. Their offer was blunt: “We’ll provide twenty-four-hour security and workers if you’ll pay for the projects.” The claim of safety was backed up with the muscle of the dominant Jabouri tribe, which had decided to go with the Americans against the insurgents—after the American military had demonstrated its resolve for month after month after month. The fact that the new police chief, Khaled Hussein al Hamdani, was a Hamdani tribesman—related to the same Hamdani tribesmen who had been bodyguards for Uday and Qusay Hussein—made for a coalition in the town.
This was easier done in a town than in a city. In the rural areas everyone knew one another, and therefore the tribes—a tangible form of authority you could get your hands around, unlike the new democratic governing bodies—were a potential counter to the insurgents.
Mayor Khalif walked in. His expression was at once tired and indefatigable. He looked the epitome of the rumpled, preoccupied politician, with roughed-up hair, who went through a checklist of points. “There had been a bridge here in antiquity, but not under Saddam. The bridge would confirm the American commitment” and so forth, he droned.
Norris said that help was coming in the form of PRTs (civilian-military provincial reconstruction teams). “The American military will continue, we will facilitate. We will not leave prematurely.” “Inshallah [God willing],” they all replied.
Throughout the meeting I sat between two council members: Mohamed Najim Shakara had had three brothers killed by the insurgents; Khamis Mohamed Jassim had been attacked twice and pulled up his robe to show me, in LBJ style, the bullet wounds on his hip and lower abdomen.
“Some love us. Some hate us because we’ve accidentally killed their relatives,” explained the lieutenant colonel from Kentucky in a quiet and reflective manner after the meeting. “Others would rather we just leave. But whenever we kill a terror hideout and return an area to some semblance of normalcy, people come out and say thank-you. A big problem is the daily low-level kidnappings of professionals, like doctors and lawyers, that don’t make news but help provide a cash flow for the insurgents.”
He and other American officers felt that a car bomb a day that killed a few dozen people in a country of twenty-six million was, while awful for the individuals and their families, easily sustainable. It was the flight of the middle class and the random crime that worried them more. “But if we can pull off the third nationwide election here without a major offensive by the insurgents, then we’ve won, though it will take the outside world quite a while to realize it,” Norris believed.
Of course, the third nationwide election did go well, from an organizational point of view. But because the voters chose candidates completely along sectarian lines, it would be months before a unity government was formed, and thus Iraq would slide backward toward chaos. Norris could not have known that, however. His belief in the election reflected an optimism without which he would have been ineffective in his job. Indeed, the very chaos that democracy would later engender in Iraq would lead to the battalion’s redeployment from Mosul to Baghdad the following summer, in order to deal with the upsurge of violence in the capital.
Inside the Stryker en route back to the TOC, I had a conversation with Maj. Doug Merritt of Venango, Pennsylvania, the battalion’s assistant operations officer. He had grown up in a rural part of the state near the Ohio and New York borders, doing horse farming and construction work. He eventually joined the Army Reserves to afford college. Merritt now lived in Alaska and absolutely adored the hunting and hiking. “Every corner there’s another awe-inspiring view,” he told me. “The blues and the grays…I never take pictures because I’d lose it if I did. I’d lose the meditation, I mean. I have all these private memories of beautiful landscapes. Pictures would only make me forget.”
One day Merritt had been hiking in Alaska with his company and collapsed. It turned out that he had an unstable angina with 90 percent blockage in his heart arteries, though he was only in his mid-thirties. He had four stents inserted and recovered completely, competing in the Anchorage marathon. “I was terrified that I would not get the opportunity to serve in Iraq. Now that I’m here, I carry with me my buddy’s KA-BAR knife from Vietnam,” he told me.
I never thought of these stories as corny. Nearly everyone I met in frontline infantry units, soldiers or marines, had the same commitment. If the stories sometimes appear to be repetitious, I mean them that way. You often can know or experience a fact only through repetition.
The next morning Lt. Col. Norris traveled east of the river to the region of Nimrud, to put in place another piece of a political reality in the micro-region under his command.
While Hamman-al-Alil had relative peace and development projects, Nimrud had only relative peace. That was because its relative peace was brand-new—a result not just of the relentless aggression of the U.S. military and new Iraqi Army, but of a political deal that Hamman-al-Alil Mayor Khalif had brokered for Nimrud with the support of Lt. Col. Norris. The deal involved an informal power-sharing agreement between the Nimrud mayor, Ahmed Obeed Isa, an ethnic Kurd, and the district police chief, Salim Salih Mishal Needa. Not that relations were good between the two men—they hated each other. Mayor Isa seemed to be a transparent, modern fledgling democrat. Chief Salim had the reputation of a thug. But reestablishing order in Nimrud following the high-water mark of the insurgency in 2004 meant allowing Chief Salim to be the real power in the area. Only recently had Lt. Col. Norris begun nudging him aside to allow Mayor Isa to truly govern.
This was classic political science theory. Sudden transitions are generally bad. Russia went cold turkey from communist authoritarianism to Western parliamentary democracy and got chaos as a result. Iberia, on the other hand, had gone from iron-fisted authoritarianism to succeedingly milder versions of it in the later Franco, Salazar, and Caetano periods, so when democracy did arrive in Spain and Portugal it did so competently. Harvard professor Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies has been judged one of the great political science books of the twentieth century because, among other things, it lays out the principle that the real difference in political systems is not between those that are democratic and those that aren’t, but between those that have strong institutions and those that have weak ones.2
Lt. Col. Norris had not read Huntington’s four-decade-old book, nor had he been following discussions in Washington about the imposition of democracy. He was simply being commonsensical. He had figured out on his own that Chief Salim might have been a bad guy, but one who for the moment served a useful purpose. Salim was a less lethal thug than the ones in control prior to the American-led invasion of 2003. Thus, he constituted a transition figure, one who could set the stage for the emergence of the lawyerly Mayor Isa. The invasion of Iraq, while arguably necessary, was at the same time cataclysmic for the country’s politics down to the village level. Stabilizing the country meant reversing directions before you could move forward. It was what the Marines had learned in 2004 in the Sunni Triangle, when I saw them going behind the backs of new democratic governing councils to make deals with the tribal sheikhs.
Too, it was a matter of personalities and local situations, in which no guidance from books or from generalized policy discussions could help. Lt. Col. Norris and others in the 172nd Stryker Brigade had made the call to temporarily favor Chief Salim based primarily on a reading of his character—thuggish but capable and trustworthy. It was a reading backed up by Hamman-al-Alil Mayor Khalif. This had nothing to do with giving too much power to middle-level officers. Rather, it was about trusting the experts on the ground: something Foreign Service officers had been recommending for decades. The same principle applied to the military.
Here was Lt. Col. Norris: “Nimrud eventually requires a politician like Mayor Isa because of the mix of Arabs, Turcomans, Kurds, and Christians there. Mayor Khalif can afford to be more of a tough guy in Hamman-al-Alil because that town is ethnically more monolithic.”
Mayors Khalif and Isa, Chief Salim, and others convened at a regional security meeting in Nimrud, held at a fifth-century Syrian Catholic monastery that, with its pagan Greek stucco work, Aramaic calligraphy, and bas-reliefs of early church fathers reminiscent of Assyrian and Hittite statuary, was testimony to the birth of Christianity and to the eclectic cultural stew of northern Iraq, which, after all, was central to the governing challenge.
Lt. Col. Norris, wearing pixilated camouflage with his Mohawk-style buzz cut, sat on a boxy red sofa between the two mayors and opened the meeting. He spoke for a minute or two about how honored he was to do this, how he believed in a free and democratic Iraq, and how the United States wanted nothing more than to help the Iraqi people achieve this. Power and authority flowed from him not merely because of his uniform, but because he appeared to simply believe the things he said, without nuance or embarrassment, or a sense of irony. Don’t agonize, don’t be complex in your spoken arguments. Believe and act starkly on your beliefs. Simple belief can be a dangerous thing, but you cannot wield dynamic power without it. Reducing anarchy was later on about root causes. Initially, it was about the reassertion of authority.
It was the first time I met Chief Salim. He had a fixed stare that never changed, no matter who was speaking, and thus gave little away, except for a sort of mournful intelligence about human affairs that could not be measured by standardized tests. In the first round of speeches everyone praised everyone else. The meeting was covered by the reopened local television network. American military officers had told me that the presence of the media might mean less candor, but it would serve the larger purpose of committing these officials to what they said.
In the second round, everyone attacked a recent release of insurgents from the Abu Ghraib prison that had been meant as a goodwill gesture. They argued that it could only worsen the security situation here. Then came demands on the Americans for more development projects. One notable said that if the Americans promised more aid, then people would be happy to vote on December 15. When the 101st Airborne Division had left this part of Iraq in 2004 and was replaced by a Stryker brigade, a significant amount of the development money went away with it. This, in turn, was part of a bigger story: the lack of continuity in assistance when one Army unit replaced another, and when a Marine unit replaced an Army one. For the Department of Defense, the occupation of Iraq was a grand conception never properly worked out in nitty-gritty detail—unlike the original invasion.
In the third round, one official attacked another for pocketing development money, which he said was the real problem. Local television put it on the record. So much for the lack of candor. There was another dispute about a missing $10,000. Here Lt. Col. Norris interjected, “I observe three people with three different understandings of what happened to the money. We will put them in a room to achieve one understanding. We will work this out, and then we will move on.” Steel smile.
Back at the TOC, there was a BUB (battle update brief). An Iraqi Army unit had fired all its AK-47s in the air to celebrate alongside a wedding party. “At least they didn’t fire at the wedding party, that’s progress,” one officer remarked. Washington categories mattered less here. It was less of an issue if the new army or police had uniforms, or even if they had fired their guns in celebration. As long as they acted professionally when doing searches, as long as they were not acting like thugs who jumped the line at gas stations, and were increasingly trusted by the population, Norris and his staff didn’t complain. But the problem was, as I began to learn, that even by these ground-level standards the performance of the new Iraqi security forces was mixed.
It was Thanksgiving Day, but the main meal at the dining facility was over by the time we had returned from Nimrud and completed the BUB. Nobody complained. Norris’s sergeant major for the battalion, Dennis Zavodsky of Mapleton, Oregon, got over to the gym in time to speak at an evening evangelical service. I went to observe. Lt. Col. Norris, Capt. Mann, and others were in attendance.
The audience at the service was strikingly multiracial. It began with evangelical country music songs like George Bennard’s “The Old Rugged Cross,” reminiscent of the music of Roy Acuff’s Great Smoky Mountain Boys from the 1930s, and sung by prisoners of war at the so-called Hanoi Hilton POW camp during the Vietnam War. People sang and shouted. A Hebrew psalm was read. Soldiers began to testify about what they were grateful for. One gave thanks for the lowest casualty rate in any American ground war (excepting Desert Storm). Another thanked “the Lord for giving us a moral purpose in Iraq.” A third was grateful for e-mail connections with families back home, “which our fathers did not have in Vietnam.”
Sgt. Maj. Zavodsky got up to speak. He gave several factoids about Thanksgiving, including the information that ninety-one Indians had been at the first Thanksgiving, which “was a good thing,” and that the Indians were later massacred, which “was a bad thing.” Then he told the audience that the Pilgrims during the first winter in the New World suffered a 54 percent casualty rate from disease and cold. “That’s a casualty rate that would render any of our units combat ineffective. But did the Pilgrims sail back to England? Did they give up?” he went on. “No. This country isn’t a quitter. It doesn’t withdraw. It doesn’t give in.”
Building on the conference in Nimrud was the first-ever regional “targeting meeting,” held the following day at the TOC. Under 4-23’s supervision, Iraqi Army and police detectives from throughout the area were brought together to exchange the latest information on particular suspects. Decisions were made about whom to ignore and whom to apprehend or kill. Facilitating were storyboards: spot visual reports aided by satellite imagery that created a narrative of each suspect’s activities that went right up the chain of command on secret websites to Gen. John Abizaid, the combatant commander of Central Command in Tampa, Florida. Two of the translators working for the Americans wore masks because they didn’t trust some of the Iraqi officials present.
There was talk of “Elvis sightings”—that is, local sightings of the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (AMZ in military lingo). The term caught on because people had gotten tired of hearing false or dated reports concerning Zarqawi’s whereabouts. An intriguing thing about some of the reports, though, was that Zarqawi, the master of disguise, was not always in disguise. He still had the same clipped beard, and was at times viewed easily inside a vehicle. He was brazen, confident, suicidal perhaps, or simply disdainful of the Americans’ ability to catch him. Sighting him was less the challenge than enabling informants to communicate the information in real time and react fast enough to the intelligence. Of course, U.S. forces would find and kill him the following June.
In a number of the cases discussed, the insurgency was a family business: a father, son, and uncle formed the core of a cell that also had a record of small-time criminal activity. The most interesting new suspect was a female suicide bomber about to act if she wasn’t apprehended first. She was the young, stylish second wife of Abu Zubayr, the insurgent leader killed by the previous Stryker brigade. She was known to have many Syrian connections and financed her own cell. Because the police chief of Hamman-al-Alil had provided some of the intelligence that had led to Abu Zubayr’s death, it was thought that Hamman-al-Alil would be the target. “I’ll have a photo of her in a few days,” one of the Iraqi detectives promised.
This particular detective was very aggressive and always coming up with tips that panned out. Later, he would meet privately with members of the battalion to provide more detailed information about what had been discussed more generally during the meeting. Lt. Col. Norris wanted to encourage cooperation among the Iraqis, but he wasn’t a fool. He simply didn’t trust a bad apple or two in the room. Moving forward in a straight line was not progress but foolishness.
Another obvious lesson of the meeting was that when you squashed a network you rarely killed it; elements of it dispersed and were able to regroup from a lower level of activity. Progress rarely meant victory but moderate suppression. To wit, in Colombia, as the American military succeeded in weakening concentrations of narco-terrorists there, the terrorists were escaping in smaller numbers to adjacent Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. But very few American troops I met around the world got discouraged about such developments. Again, it was a matter of the simple virtues—dogged persistence, what soldiers shared with relief workers.
The next morning I went out on a seven-hour patrol with a three-vehicle platoon from A (Apache) Company. Except for getting shot at by someone with an automatic weapon and catching someone else selling bootleg gasoline that might or might not have been used to help finance the insurgency, nothing happened. The rifle shots did constitute a short-lived morale boost, though. Said one sergeant: “This deployment’s bullshit. It’s not like the last time in Iraq when we were always fighting.” A long line of cars waiting to be searched at the eastern entrance to the city was an indication that the Iraqi Army was doing its job. “Outstanding,” said the lieutenant. Inside the Stryker a specialist read a Louis D’Amour novel. The dullness of the day pointed toward the appearance of progress.
To wit, the platoon did a dismounted, or foot, patrol with an Iraqi Army counterpart. You could not help being impressed with these Iraqi troops. Their TOC was as neat and well organized as 4-23’s, with flowcharts on the walls and satellite maps under table glass. They seemed to have strong noncoms with game faces who flooded out of their white pickups, and covered corners and fields of fire almost as well as the Americans. When one Iraqi soldier was about to mount the stairs to search the second floor of a suspicious house, his fellow noncom told him, “Don’t go alone, take a battle buddy.” That was the correct procedure.
There was only one problem—these troops were all ethnic Kurds, who in their TOC had pictures of the Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani. Would this unit stay loyal to Iraq in the event of a weakening of the state following an American drawdown of forces? Or were the Americans merely helping along the possibility of what some called “creeping Kurdistan,” in which the Kurds would extend their de facto line of control to the Tigris River, lopping off the eastern side of Mosul? Was the possibility of a creeping Kurdistan actually a means of pressuring Sunni Arabs to participate constructively in the political process?
I was surprised to learn that this Iraqi Army platoon was rated next to the bottom by American military training teams (MTTs) in terms of its fighting capability. When I asked for an explanation, I was told that the unit was bureaucratically underdeveloped at the battalion level. Though fighting well at the platoon level was more important than “battalion ops,” because counterinsurgency was about small-unit warfare and developing snitches, any nationwide unity of military effort was impossible without organized battalions and divisions. If this was a bad unit, then the Iraqi Army—at least in terms of professional development—was doing better than many supposed, or so I thought. Later, I heard of another platoon that stole from the places they searched and, as one American captain told me, “shit in the side rooms.”
One Sunni Arab shopkeeper told me: “When American troops patrol the streets with the Iraqi Army it is so awful and humiliating for us, because we know those Iraqi soldiers are really Kurds, not Arabs. Your occupation has strengthened our enemies.” This young shopkeeper, the son of a former general in Saddam’s army, engaged me in conversation for more than half an hour. He was uncannily objective in his own way. He had just come back from Syria, which he heaped praise on. “Syria now is so much better than Iraq,” he told me. “It is under tight control, so people there feel safe and can go about their lives with dignity. You Americans think you have brought freedom; you have just allowed the thugs from the villages to kill and rob from the educated people whom Saddam had protected.”
“Your father liked Saddam?” I probed.
“My father hated Saddam,” he replied. “He spit on him, in the home, that is. As long as you obeyed the rules by not criticizing the regime outside of your home, you were fine. With Saddam there were clear rules; now there are none. Now we are caught between the Americans and the insurgents. Everybody hates terrorism, but we’re more vulnerable than you.”
“Should the Americans leave?” I asked.
“No, that would only make things worse,” he responded. He told me that he was impressed with the American military, as long as it was alone and not with the Iraqi Army. But he admitted that the Iraqi police had improved, and that Mosul was no longer a battle zone like the year before. “Your soldiers are disciplined. They don’t scare people by shooting their guns in the air like ours,” he said.
“But that discipline,” I argued, “is an indirect effect of a free society that allows the military to constantly criticize itself.”
“No, no,” he said. “What good is voting if the Shiites and Kurds will vote, too? Elections are useless without water, sewage, electricity, and safety.”
“So you won’t vote on December 15?”
“Maybe I will vote. What else is there to do?”
He was a mass of understandable contradictions. More confusing was that another shopkeeper recommended the opposite: that U.S. soldiers should always patrol with the Iraqi Army. If you applied every recommendation you got talking to Iraqis on just one street, you’d wind up doing exactly what you were doing before. When an infantryman encountered Iraqis on patrol, the best that he could do was take off his sunglasses and his helmet too, if possible, look people directly in the eye, give them a lot of deference (especially if they were older), ask them for advice, here and there interject an opinion so as to actively engage them, and plead his case without trying to lecture. That was the only way to build trust among a population that had been taught for decades and centuries how to be subjects rather than citizens.
The method did build sympathy. Another Iraqi told me: “I like your soldiers. They are poor, simple people. The Army was the only opportunity they had. I can tell that by looking at them. In a way, they are in the same boat as us. They mean well, but what can they do?”
On a different patrol, a Sunni Arab, this one a school principal, would tell me regarding Syria: “Sure, the people there don’t like the regime. But the last thing they want is the kind of freedom you Americans have brought to Iraq.” In truth, these supposedly poor, simple soldiers always made it a point to introduce me to the Iraqis who they knew were the most critical of the occupation. “We want you to get the full flavor of how people feel,” one captain said. No matter how hurtful the message of these conversations, the soldiers always thanked the locals for their opinions before delivering their own upbeat message.
It was simply impossible for the soldiers to be wholly liked. There was no nice way to barge into people’s houses bristling with weaponry, stomping your dusty boots on their Oriental carpets, and expect it to be a pleasant experience for them, even if you handed out candy to their kids and replaced a lock you had to break with a new one. On most of the occasions there was only a woman and her children present. The soldiers would find an assault weapon that had recently been fired and half a magazine of 7.62mm bullets empty: very suspicious. Did the woman know anything about it? No, she would tell the Americans, staring past them at the wall, her eyes peering out below her kerchief. She might have been completely unknowing. She might have known a lot and was lying. She might have been hiding cellphones and identification cards of wanted criminals on her person. Only a female soldier was allowed to search her, and one usually wasn’t present.
Such numerous, seemingly ineffectual searches did work to the extent that they kept terrorists on the run and at the very least inconvenienced them, as the insurgents now had to hide their guns and bomb-making paraphernalia outside the home. While this was reflected in the temporarily improved security climate, it was an inefficient way to make progress, and it bred hostility. If this kept up, I thought, the Americans would end up being as hated in Iraq as the Israelis were in the West Bank. But it would be worse for the Americans, because they would be hated even as they were not feared.
By that time, morale among the American military in Iraq would have deteriorated. Yet as long as there was sustained combat, morale was high and anyone who spoke of withdrawal was considered a defeatist. But if the current situation existed indefinitely, one of little combat and little rebuilding, then the warriors might start bitching.
In the midst of one search, I asked the Sunni Arab woman of the house about the Americans. She told me: “They do this from time to time. Some have clean tongues, some dirty tongues. But they can’t stop the criminal gangs from occasionally putting a bullet in my kitchen window.” She showed me the shattered window.
Under Saddam such things had not happened. The violence occurred behind closed doors, had a specific purpose, and was absolutely hideous, with people dragged away in the middle of the night, so everyone not mistreated was utterly terrified of breaking the law. Saddam’s system, albeit efficient, begot obedience, not a social contract.
For its part, the U.S. military was plugging a dike of potential unrest following a hard-won remission in combat, but with still no large-scale public works projects on the horizon to soak up the crime. Only such public works projects could make Sunni Arabs—politically weaker than ever in Iraq—see the tangible benefits of democracy. Indeed, for three weeks I went out on at least one patrol a day, and the typical scenery riding air guard, my upper body sticking out of the top of the Stryker, was of a shot-to-hell cityscape of bullet-marked and half-finished buildings, gray-and rust-colored, in which every object—sign, streetlight, telephone pole—was bent or broken, and garbage filled every open lot. The only bustling commerce I saw was in the markets near the old city, which was of the subsistence kind that did not create employment.
Here and there we were attacked by small-arms fire, though rarely seriously. One local police chief told me that there were now Iraqi police and soldiers on streets where six months before there had been none, and murders and kidnappings had been reduced substantially. Security was as good as it was going to get without a major jobs program, I thought.
“That’s why I like Iraq, it’s always a challenge,” said 1st Lt. John Turner of Indianapolis. Lt. Turner was a massive, fair-complexioned soldier with blond hair that his buzz cut made barely discernible. He looked like a simple farm boy until you heard him talk to Iraqis: about the promise of America, and about how he and his sister had grandparents who hadn’t finished high school, and yet she had graduated from the Air Force Academy and he from Purdue.
“Sir, I am willing to die for a country that is not my own [Iraq],” he told a former mukhtar (local leader) of a section of Mosul. “So will you resume your position as mukhtar? Brave men must stand forward. Iraq’s wealth is not oil but its civilization. Trust me by the projects I bring, not by my words. Will you stand with me against the insurgents?” softly pleaded the thirty-one-year-old lieutenant. “The men who threatened you are just sixteen-year-old boys with guns but no jobs. These projects will bring jobs to your streets.”
The former mukhtar seemed to like the American lieutenant, as we continued to sit on his machine-made carpets, lean against undressed cinder blocks, and drink tea in his home. But he said no. “I cannot resume my role as mukhtar. They will kill me. The contractor down the street was threatened if he continued to repair the neighborhood. If you are so serious about security, why,” he went on, “did you Americans release prisoners from Abu Ghraib?”
Lt. Turner said that the decision to release prisoners from Abu Ghraib was one made by Iraq’s own new government. The former mukhtar wasn’t convinced. Because many of the detainees at Abu Ghraib were known to be hardened criminals from the Mosul area, the release had undermined the credibility of American troops here. Abu Ghraib had a different connotation for Iraqis meeting with Americans in Mosul than it had back in the United States. Here the words meant American weakness and lack of resolve, not human rights violations.
I thought of a conversation I had had the previous summer in Algeria with one of the Algerian special forces officers. I had asked him how his government had put down its Islamic insurgency: a military success that was rewarded by the country fading out of the news without explanation. The Algerian insurgents were arguably more brutal than those in Iraq, beheading bus passengers at roadblocks on a regular desultory basis, making Algeria in the 1990s among the unsafest places in the world. What’s more, the sprawling, mountainous country constituted a geography that during the best of times was a challenge to govern. The Algerian officer told me it had been simple. Government forces, with the full support of a population devastated from constant terrorism—the psychological equivalent of a 9/11 every week—had killed many people (a portion of them innocent, I suspected) without journalists present. This was followed by internationally sanctioned elections and a steady, ongoing trickle of European investors back to Algiers. The country was impressively back on its feet. The United States, though it desired the same end-state in Iraq, could not and would not apply the same means. In Iraq the same sort of success would have to be accomplished with the most restrictive of half measures.
The former mukhtar said the visit had endangered his life and told Lt. Turner not to return. In the countryside the tribe could protect him, not in the city. Lt. Turner pleaded further, probing what specific security and political actions could get the former mukhtar to change his mind. Finally, the old sheikh said, “If the elections go well, everything will be better afterwards. We will see then.”
Lt. Turner departed, saying, “I will be back. I will not quit.” It hadn’t been an altogether wasted afternoon. It had taken three months of pleading before anyone in the surrounding area would even tell the platoon where the former mukhtar lived, and after several false leads that day the soldiers had found him.
“I was a D student in high school,” Turner told me. “I didn’t show up to class much. I straightened out as an enlisted man in the Coast Guard, and then switched to the Army and did ROTC at Purdue. My dad was military.” The corporal with Lt. Turner, Cody Thomas Faust of Morro Bay, California, also had a dad in the military and an uncle who had fought in Vietnam. Cpl. Faust could have played strong safety at Fresno State or the University of Oregon, but had enlisted instead. Before this deployment he had fought on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. “All I ever heard growing up was ‘airborne,’ ” he told me. It was the same with almost everybody else in this Stryker: sons of veterans.
The patrol wasn’t over. After darkness we went house to house in another neighborhood from where mortars had been fired at a new Iraqi police station. Finally, someone in the fifth house cooperated and supplied information about the make of the car, the men inside it, and from where they had set up the mortar. The next step would be if the unit could deploy snipers there for several days running, in order to eliminate the culprits when they returned to a nearby field, which had a clear line of sight to the police station. If they could do that, the people in the other four houses might start cooperating. “I hate to say it,” said Turner, “but sometimes the best confidence-building measure is to kill certain people.”
Another thing you could do, I was told, was to pay people significantly for tips that turned out to be accurate. None of this was new, or inspiring. But these young soldiers were learning by trial and error that such tactics worked, assuming you had a lot of patience. It was like the old clichés of watching the grass grow or paint dry.
The large amount of patience required for such a small measure of success was among the many hard-to-communicate frustrations that separated these soldiers from the civilian home front, which, in turn, had the effect of bringing them closer and closer to one another. Such togetherness, if accompanied by death and loss in combat over a sustained period, created the deepest of bonds.
I remembered a Marine sergeant I had met at Quantico the year before, who told me that after each nighttime combat sortie, his men would not go to bed until the debrief was completed, and the equipment cleaned and refit for the next day. Near dawn they would wash away the blood and grime, and sleep a few hours. “Even when the lieutenant praised them after a mission, I knew they had fucked up and I chewed the hell out of them,” the sergeant told me. In a loud, deliberate voice, he then declared, “I love my men. For seven months they put up with my shit and still loved me for it.”
The late historian William Manchester writes that he and his fellow marines at the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 fought because of the “love” they felt for one another. That love was connected to pride, something sacred, that only in recent decades has been “derided as machismo.”3 Indeed, when men who had been together for months at a time in the front lines in Iraq or Afghanistan began to go their separate ways, they told me of a loss akin to losing their wives, or their children almost.
F. Scott Fitzgerald believed that such love among American soldiers and marines had been extinguished in World War I. But Fitzgerald died a year before Pearl Harbor. Manchester, writing in Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War, also believed that his generation—toughened by the Depression and “the absolute conviction” of the moral superiority of the United States—would be the last to see combat as an act of love. But that turned out not to be the case. Army Brig. Gen. James E. Shelton (Ret.) writes: “I never expect to see again in my life young men of eighteen, nineteen, or twenty years of age who understand the true meaning of the word ‘love’ as I saw it in Vietnam, in the men who cared about each other and would sacrifice for their buddies.”4 So it was, too, in Iraq.
The troops with whom I spent time spoke constantly about heroes, which the world media had shown limited interest in covering. Take Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith of Tampa, Florida, thirty-three, married with two children. He had advanced alone under withering enemy fire near Baghdad airport on April 4, 2003, so that he could man a .50-caliber machine gun atop an armored vehicle and protect his wounded comrades from being overrun. Killed in the process, he was awarded posthumously the nation’s highest, rarely bestowed decoration, the Medal of Honor, with his wife receiving the award. This first Medal of Honor in the Global War on Terrorism had drawn only 90 media mentions, though. By comparison, there had been 4,677 media mentions of the supposed Koran abuse at Guantánamo Bay, and 5,159 of the court-martialed Abu Ghraib guard Lynndie England.5 While the exposure of wrongdoing by American troops is obviously of paramount importance, less obviously it can become a tyranny of its own when taken to an extreme.
On another occasion I accompanied Lt. Col. Norris to the office of the acting Mosul police chief, Wathiq Mohammed Abdul Khader. We walked in on a heated discussion the chief was having with two Americans in polo shirts and cargo pants, and packing 9mm Berettas. The chief sat behind a massive wooden desk that faced a television showing an old black-and-white Arab movie with the sound turned off. Ashtrays overflowed. In the back of the cavernous room an aide seemed to be dozing. The Americans were private contractors who had been detectives back in the United States, probably with military backgrounds. Seventeen Iraqi policemen were suspected of involvement in a terror ring that was accused of kidnapping, beatings, and a dismemberment.
“Don’t worry, if they are immoral I will finish them,” the chief said.
“I need evidence,” explained one of the Americans, a bit exasperated. “All I’ve heard is hearsay, which I believe. But to mount a case, I need witnesses. I realize American standards don’t apply here, and we are working by your rules, but I have to live with my conscience.”
“Don’t worry, we will take care of it.”
“I need the ringleader separated from the others,” the American went on, “and I need to interrogate them all separately. I need access.”
“We will get the weakest one to confess,” the chief said.
“Without beating him,” the American advised. “When will you arrest them?” he added.
“Soon,” the chief said.
Finally the chief, who was a dramatic improvement over his predecessor, agreed to put all seventeen under house arrest immediately and to provide the Americans the access they needed. The American had pleaded for fast action but within proper standards. The chief, worried about political and tribal fallout, had been a bit less eager to take action, but was also less anxious about how the accused would be handled once they had been apprehended.
In this corrupt and rudimentary democratic system, the police would be a particular challenge. Third-world police work usually meant watching television, sipping chai, taking a nap, sipping more chai, and collecting a paycheck. In such countries, police were little more than traffic cops. For a citizen to get a policeman to do anything for him, whether in today’s Mexico or in Saddam’s Iraq, he had to bribe him. Countries with venerable political patronage systems, however corrupt and undemocratic, could survive like that, but a created-from-scratch affair like post-Saddam Iraq could not. Nonetheless, with the police, too, there were some bright spots to be exploited. Take the Hamman-al-Alil police chief, Khaled Hussein, who had been stabbed and IEDed by insurgents, and whose brother had been killed by them. He was known by 4-23 to be “committed to the fight,” and maintained a meticulous filing system of area “bad guys.” Even in a dismal environment, you could find and empower force multipliers.
The flight in a Black Hawk south to the Qayyarah-West forward operating base (FOB) took fifteen minutes and was marked by small-arms fire directed at the helicopter, which one of the side gunners responded to with a short burst. It had been little more than a nuisance. Upon landing I found myself with the 4th Battalion of the 11th Field Artillery Regiment, another part of the 172nd Stryker Brigade. The 4-11 “Arctic Thunder” was a busy battalion. Though almost all the work it did in Iraq was infantry related—shepherding the development of an Iraqi army brigade, while cat-herding twenty-one new Iraqi police stations along the Tigris River valley—it still had to work nights to renew its artillery certification on the 155mm howitzer.
The first place I traveled with the soldiers of 4-11 was to the town of Om al-Mahir, an area under the command of thirty-one-year-old Capt. Jeff Ferguson of Columbus, Mississippi, a graduate of Mississippi State University. The desert was like an unending sheet of cardboard, a dirt lot that never ended. New construction was everywhere, along with brand-new plastic café chairs and satellite dishes. Throughout the journey, crowds of kids gave the Americans the thumbs-up symbol. Streets were also cleaner than in Mosul because of a trash removal program that employed some of the area’s teenagers, started by Capt. Ferguson. Safety was helped by periodic Iraqi Army and police roadblocks. Just as in 2004, when I had last visited Iraq, the rural areas were safer than the urban ones. Of course, the rural areas mattered less in the scheme of things.
At Om al-Mahir, amid a patch of grass and faded oleanders, a large crowd of American soldiers, tribal elders, and young Iraqi men and boys sprawled over Oriental carpets for what the troops called a “goat grab,” a meal of grilled meat on a bed of unleavened bread that you ate with your hands. Iraqi Gen. Ali Attalah Malloh al-Jabouri, commander of one of the battalions under 4-11’s tutelage, spoke to the assembled. The Americans had left their helmets and body armor in their Humvees a few hundred yards away and their weapons against a wall, entrusting their safety to Iraqi soldiers.
“The hands of men who are without work will end up cooperating with the devil,” said Gen. Ali, addressing the Americans and Capt. Ferguson in particular. He followed with details of this young man and that one who were unemployed, and who had drifted north to Mosul to take part in the insurgency.
“Where is the investment money, now that our area has been safe for months?” The American soldiers essentially had no answer for Gen. Ali. They were as frustrated as the Iraqis. Even the safe areas were absent of any sign of civilian relief work or private development. The soldiers admitted that while they had the money to gravel over a particular road, they lacked the funds to pave it, even as all agreed that graveled roads were easier to conceal IEDs on.
It was surreal. The stability of Iraq would likely determine history’s judgment on President George W. Bush. Yet even in a newly secured area like this one, there appeared to be little available money for the one factor at the center of generating that stability: jobs.
Out of a landscape flattened by anarchy in 2004, the American military had constructed a flimsy house of cards by late 2005 that, in order to be fortified by wood and cement, now required a massive injection of aid—of a type and scale that even America’s increasingly unconventional, civil affairs–oriented military could not provide. But because the official statements from Washington did not match the reality that I saw firsthand, this flimsy house of cards was threatened with collapse.
Gen. Ali, seconded by one of the mukhtars, next spoke about the need for vigilance against a return to the terrorism that had recently plagued the area. It was a terrorism he had largely stamped out by a combination of theological arguments to the mukhtars, the hunting down and killing of insurgents so that the inhabitants would fear his men more than the terrorists, and calculated displays of bravery like not wearing body armor.
He gave a stack of money to a little boy who had noticed two men stop by a road with a motorbike and dig a hole, to plant what turned out to be an IED. “See this money,” the general said as he held out the stack to a group of young men. “It could be yours if you catch a terrorist in the act or shoot him in the face. Why not?” Like Lt. Turner, nobody here quarreled with the need to kill certain people.
That night I accompanied 4-11’s battalion commander, Lt. Col. Scott Wuestner of Philadelphia—a former tight end on the West Point football team—to the home of another sheikh. The town that this sheikh controlled had recently become unfriendly, with fewer cheers from the kids and an increasing number of “stink stares” from the grown-ups whenever American soldiers passed. The sheikh had prepared an extravagant dinner for us. He denied with smiles that anyone he knew had become unfriendly. Then he excused himself for a moment, and one of his subordinates casually mentioned to Lt. Col. Wuestner that people were becoming impatient. They wanted loans for a cotton gin, chicken farms, and so forth, yet nothing was happening. Wuestner wrote it all down in one of those field books covered with green cloth that American soldiers and marines carried, but it was unclear if he could find the funds. The newly released “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” was merely a document; the difficulty in finding money at ground level when a battalion commander needed it was real.
“We can race around the battlefield and fix little problems, but where is the State Department and USAID [United States Agency for International Development] to solve the big problems?” one Army major complained to me. President Bush’s list of projects under way and accomplished in the Mosul area—communicated in his December 7, 2005, speech to the nation—was accurate. Yet such individual projects simply disappeared into the immensity of Mosul’s cityscape and its environs.
Meanwhile, these battalion commanders had no choice but to encourage Iraqis to seek help from their own, barely functioning ministries. The Americans sought genuinely to transfer power and responsibility to the Iraqis. But for the Iraqis themselves, history had taught them to think of power not in any formal or legalistic sense but crudely, in terms of who actually wielded the authority to help, and to punish severely.
Yet the military might still do more, I thought. For example, I hadn’t noticed the Army holding MEDCAPS (medical civil action programs) for the local population as I had seen it do in Mongolia, the Philippines, Kenya, Djibouti, and other places. No activity developed relationships (and hence intelligence assets) like treating people for disease and illness.
As long as the U.S. military was still, to all intents and purposes, trying to save Iraq by itself, staving off anarchy meant essentially drinking a lot of chai—that is, think of any excuse you could to get out of the base in order to meet and jawbone with the locals. To wit, Wuestner, a conventional artillery officer, told me of a meal he had eaten with thirteen mukhtars. “When everyone lined up to wash their hands, I gave them the towel [a mark of extreme politeness in Iraqi culture]. I’ve learned that gestures like that count for more than a lot of the raids we do.” As necessary as killing insurgents was, establishing relationships was more important still. “Ninety-nine percent of my time is on the go, outside the FOB,” one major would tell me. “I don’t bother to write down convoy numbers, to get written approval, I just leave the base whenever I can to meet locals.”
Truly, the regular Army in Iraq had been forced into a classic unconventional mode, even as the Green Berets themselves were still stuck, to too large an extent, in the macho culture of direct action. The rank structure of the Stryker battalions was also becoming more like that of the noncom-oriented Green Berets, for as the Stryker battalions remained intact, promotions within the battalions made them top-heavy with sergeants, much like the SF A-teams with which I had been embedded.
It was near midnight when I returned to 4-11’s TOC with Lt. Col. Wuestner. He was not discouraged, though he had to write officer evaluation reports that would keep him up into the wee hours before another grueling day of visits with Iraqi commanders and sheikhs. Wuestner, who was so gregarious that I simply couldn’t imagine him discouraged or unhappy, told me, “We can win this thing even if it takes ten years.” It might have been Bush’s war, it might have been a gargantuan mistake, but none of that mattered to him. “The media wants to feel sorry for us. But I don’t want to be safe. Has anyone noticed that we now have a volunteer army? I’m a warrior. It’s my job to fight. How can quitting in Iraq be in my interest or that of any other American soldier’s?”
I thought of a conversation I had eighteen months earlier with Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, the commander of the 1st Battalion of the 5th Marines, who had told me the same things. That earlier conversation had occurred before the First Battle of Fallujah, before the Abu Ghraib scandal, and before a lot of other deeply discouraging news about Iraq. Yet the dogged determination of these officers persisted. They could win if only the home front would let them. After all, look at the progress they had made since 2004. The fact that such progress was modest and ephemeral did not mean that it wasn’t real to them.
My next visit was to Forward Operating Base Crazy Horse, named thus by the 101st Airborne Division, which had previously occupied the site. FOB Crazy Horse, east across the desert from Qayyarah-West, was within sight of the front range of the Kurdish mountains and not far from Gaugamela, where in 331 B.C. Alexander the Great had defeated the Persians under Darius III. The ancient battlefield was just another tract of desert, without anything to mark it. The FOB was occupied by the first Iraqi Army battalion in northern Iraq that would assume command of its own battlespace. It had only a handful of American officers and trainers embedded with it, though, once again, the complicating factor was that the battalion was ethnically Kurdish, with Kurdish flags and pictures of the Kurdish leader Barzani in evidence.
Nevertheless, the battalion’s area of responsibility had a population evenly split between Kurds and Sunni Arabs, and under the leadership of its Kurdish commander, Lt. Col. Hogar Salahidin Abdul, it had drastically reduced the level of violence in the region. Whenever Lt. Col. Hogar went to a village, large numbers of Sunni Arab sheikhs came out to greet him, praise him, and bluntly complain to him—the mark of an honest and healthy relationship.
I went with Lt. Cols. Hogar and Wuestner to the village of Tal Ashir, in the Tigris River valley, to meet with the area sheikhs. This visit, more than the previous ones, summed up for me the immensity of the challenge facing the American military in Iraq.
Upon arrival, the Americans left their helmets and body armor in their vehicles. Lt. Col. Wuestner held hands with the leading sheikh, another sign of respect and friendship. Two long lines of aging men wearing white-and-red-checkered keffiyahs lined up to greet us. Nearby were tables with greasy lamb and chicken on flat bread.
Then the hand-holding was followed by hugs, followed in turn by the words of the leading sheikh: “We say thanks up to God for your visit. We are pleased that you care about us. But with all due respect, we have no electricity. And though we live along the river, we have no water. All we ask is that you restore services in this village to the levels they were under the former regime.”
In fact, there had been electricity in Tel Ashir until a few days before. The power line, according to the villagers, had been cut by soldiers from another Iraqi Army battalion, the one of Gen Ali. Lt. Col. Wuestner said that this was ridiculous. The villagers continued with more theories and accusations: one was that the power line could not bear the load of new villages that had been added to it, and that those other villages should have their electricity cut for the sake of Tal Ashir. “The sub-district manager is useless because he can’t impose his will on the Jabouri tribe,” warned one old man. Tal Ashir, it happened, was populated by the rival Sabawi tribe. “Please don’t escalate this into a tribal dispute,” the Kurd, Lt. Col. Hogar of the Iraqi Army, pleaded. According to another suspicion, a local radical leader, Sheikh Hussein Abdel-Azziz Hamed Naif, whose party was contesting the upcoming elections with an anti-American platform, and who had gotten control of a local television station, was also involved.
The simple matter of an electricity cut, which might have had the most mundane of technical causes, aggravated by the very extension of electric power to nearby villages, had ignited a groundswell of divisive suspicions, for which the villagers of Tal Ashir, it was clear, expected the American officer more than the Iraqi ethnic-Kurdish one to fix. The situation in Tal Ashir, more than any particular election process, was the daily reality of post-Saddam Iraq in a part of the country that was a relative success story at the time.
In every place we went and took off our body armor, we did so under the assurance that this sub-tribe or that sheikh had guaranteed our security. It was a classic mafia system, the kind that for centuries, in many parts of the world, had constituted an efficient contrivance against anarchy. Iraq under the old regime had been built on succeeding, compacted tiers of these tribal mafias that culminated at the top with Saddam and Sons. The cost was high: the violent death, direct or indirect, of several times more people than the number killed by the former Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milošević. But now the place was functionally ours, whoever happened to win the elections.
The Bush administration had confused elections with authority. Elections were a day-long procedural event, while authority was a legitimate system of control that could take an exceptionally long time to build. For years, fearful of anarchy, I had warned in print about our over-zealousness in promoting Western democracy abroad. Yet I had also supported the invasion of Iraq, as the old regime here was so awful (as bad as Stalin during the worst of the 1930s) that it went far beyond the bounds of normal dictatorship, and thus itself constituted a form of anarchy masquerading as tyranny. The arguments of those who felt that the toppling of Saddam was a blunder destined to go wrong had to be taken seriously, given what had transpired. On the other hand, to say that the outcome would have been just as bad no matter how the occupation was handled—that it would have failed abjectly even if there had been many more American troops on the ground, and even if we had done a lot of other things differently, too—was an extreme form of determinism with which I could never agree. Nothing was destined. But the bigger the risk being taken, the more meticulous and self-critical the planning had to be at every stage. And while small, light-footprint deployments worked in most places as a means to avoid full-scale invasions, once such an invasion was thought to be necessary, the larger the footprint the better.
While soldiers could hope only to stabilize such a country by getting outside the base perimeter, it was doubtful that more than one out of ten did so. Of the 150,000 or so American troops in Iraq, only a very small fraction dealt with Iraqis in any substantial way. Back in Mosul with the 4-23 Tomahawks at FOB Marez, I had lunch in the massive chow hall with Capt. Brad Velotta of Alexandria, Louisiana, a graduate of the New Mexico Military Academy in Roswell. He and I figured out that with all the support troops and private contractors who kept the base running, the total population of the FOB was roughly three thousand, whereas no more than two hundred or so troops and civilian operatives ventured into Mosul on any given day. The result of this support was amenities like heating and the Internet, as well as crab, lobster, steak, and ice cream in the chow hall. Capt. Velotta commanded one of the battalion’s three rifle companies. His whole purpose in Iraq was to be constantly outside the wire, where he could get shot or IEDed. He spoke about the Marine detachments sent to fight near the Syrian border. They slept in the dirt and their force protection, rather than guard posts as at the FOB (which sucked yet more manpower from the fighting units), was just themselves, fanning out into a 360-degree formation at night. Zero support tail, in other words. No ice cream, no Internet, no nothing except sleeping bags and MREs.
Now that wasn’t a wholly fair assessment, he quickly admitted, since the Marines relied on fuel, ammunition, equipment, and MREs that, in turn, required the support of large bases like this one. But it did capture a truth—that there might be some leeway to reduce the American presence in Iraq without proportionally undermining the war effort. The need for lobster, steaks, and ice cream was part of an occupation mentality, as in West Germany during the Cold War, even as Iraq still required a fighting mentality. Sparer bases meant more people outside the perimeter, because the very comforts inside the base subtly lessened the incentive of commanders to take troops outside for too long. There was an undeniable contradiction between the high living standard the Army felt it had to provide for the sake of soldiers’ morale and the new warrior ethos it was trying to promote. Staying with the Marines in the Sunni Triangle and in sub-Saharan Africa in the spring and summer of 2004, living substantially on MREs, I had learned that often the worse the conditions, the better the mood of the troops, at least in the short term. In the field, troops lived for the moment; at the base, eating good chow, they counted the days.
The Army thought differently, though. It planned to reduce troop strength by consolidating FOBs into super-FOBs, so that there would be less duplication of support services, even as the same high living standards could be maintained. In an atmospheric sense, then, these enlarged FOBs were about to become like the vast, little-America Burger King bases in Europe and Turkey. At the same time, by turning over the commands of various regions to Iraqi forces, the Army planned to reduce the American footprint and wean the Iraqis off dependence on the Americans.
In one sense the Army was right. There weren’t any great logistical efficiencies out there. You couldn’t substantially reduce the total number of American troops in Iraq without also reducing the number who went outside the base perimeters. While you could save on support troops here and there with enlarged FOBs, in fact most of the logistical element of the occupation was already being handled by civilian contractors. The American face in Iraq in the early twenty-first century was as much the rough-and-tumble KBR employee as the American soldier. It was KBR that provided items like lobster and ice cream, not some long and imagined support tail of men and women in camouflage. Because so much had already been outsourced, it was hard to reduce the support tail without also undermining fighting elements like the Stryker brigade.
Thus, as my days in Iraq multiplied in late 2005, I had become increasingly leery of any but the most cautious and calibrated of draw-downs.
Whereas the colonels I met were confident that the Iraqi Army and police were capable of bearing the burden of a reduction of American forces, the staff sergeants and other noncoms who worked on a daily basis with the new Iraqi security elements were less so. “Trust me, sir,” one staff sergeant confided about an Iraqi Army unit with which his platoon had just completed a three-hour patrol, “if we leave, they won’t show up again in this neighborhood. They’ll never leave their base.” On another occasion, while surveying a school slated to be a polling station, the local Iraqi Army commander kept insisting that his men be able to camp out at the school overnight. The American captain kept telling him no. One of the noncoms remarked quietly, “It’s the same old story, all they want to do is hunker down and play defense, but they will not be able to hold off this insurgency unless they play offense.” As for the Iraqi police, once again, there was even less confidence. The most generous quote I got was from a junior officer, who said: “Some IP [Iraqi police] units are good, others are as crooked as New York City cops around 1850.”
The best scenario I could then anticipate was a colonial-like situation years down the road that would never be referred to by name, in which there might be ten thousand American troops left in Iraq, embedded in various ministries and throughout the military and police, propping up the security structure behind the scenes. It would be much like in the Philippines in the early twentieth century, following the American invasion and our protracted counterinsurgency campaign there. If you were now to visit any number of places in the Balkans or the Caucasus, you would find quite a few American military officers or private contractors working in this and that defense ministry, and in this and that army unit, all very low-key, so it never became a political issue.
But the United States wasn’t even remotely close to that point in Iraq.
Iraq’s other legacy might be on the future of American leadership itself. One afternoon I observed a group of junior officers and a few noncoms plan the upcoming elections in the part of Mosul under the battalion’s command: the ballot convoys, the sniffer dogs for the polling stations, the security for the ballots up until the moment Iraqi officials counted them. Essentially, they were managing a process behind the scenes for which the Iraqi Army and police were to take public credit. If you wanted to locate America’s future elected leaders, I thought, it might be here in this room and all over Iraq.
When Col. Michael Shields of Kennebunk, Maine, the commander of the 172nd Stryker Brigade, went over a map of Mosul with me, he referred to each area not according to the lieutenant colonel in his forties whose battalion it was, but according to each captain in his late twenties or early thirties whose company it was—each of whom he knew personally, and each of whom he referred to as a “soldier-statesman,” for that’s what they were.
What other group of young people, I asked myself, could possibly compete with these officers as future leaders? These young men not only had military experience like the veterans of World War II and Vietnam, but they also had acquired hands-on knowledge of governance and civil affairs of a sort somewhat rare in American military history. Being a veteran had always carried a terrific advantage for political candidacy in America. But it would be more so in coming decades, given that future veterans from the Global War on Terrorism would boast a résumé of lessons learned applicable to the practice and development of democracy itself.
There were quite a few of them, to the extent that the young captain who was a de facto mayor of an Iraqi town or village had become almost a commonplace for a time in newspaper feature articles. Voters loved stories and anecdotes, and these young soldiers, as well as the veterans of Bosnia and Kosovo and Afghanistan, would have the best stump pitches about combining the frontier ethos of practicality and idealism in the service of the national interest. Nation-building, well, they had done it—or at least tried it—through a tightly organized operational planning process in which failure was not (according to their value system) ever an option.
Given their own experience on the ground, as future leaders they would be extremely skeptical of forcibly implanting democracy in a place with no experience of it. Yet they might be just as hostile toward those who advocated a surrender strategy in the face of adversity, before all the facts were in. They had learned in the field to be internationalists rather than isolationists, but internationalists of a very pragmatic sort. Not for them the beauty of ideas, unless those ideas survived testing. Their specific tendency would be to pull both political parties toward the center, and thus they bore the hope of a renewal of American politics.
A final impression of Iraq: one day I had gone with a group of American soldiers to the sprawling ruins of Hatra, a city founded upon the fall of Nineveh at the end of the seventh century B.C., and which reached its peak in the second and third centuries A.D. Hatra lay in the midst of the desert southwest of Mosul, empty of other visitors, without even a guardrail or derelict ticket stand, as though awaiting rediscovery by some Victorian-era explorers. Indeed, the only sign of the twentieth century was the initials of Saddam carved into bricks throughout the complex, which now appeared like the marks of just another tyrant from antiquity.
Hatra had flourished as a Silk Road nexus of trade and ideas, reflected in its mix of Assyrian, Hellenistic, Parthian, and Roman styles, which set the stage for early Islamic architecture. The ruins encouraged the notion that Iraq’s best available future was as a similar East-West crossroads, in a Middle East of weaker, decentralized states, states that would succeed the tyrannical perversions of the modern nation-state system still in the process of crumbling. In decades ahead, cities like Mosul and Aleppo would be oriented (as they had been in the past) as much toward each other and toward cities in Turkey and Iran as toward their respective capitals of Baghdad and Damascus. Obviously, borders would matter less, as old caravan routes flourished in different form. Something comparable had already begun in the Balkans, a more developed part of the Ottoman Empire than Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia, this transition would be longer, costlier, and messier. We were in for a very long haul. Excepting the collapse of Turkey’s empire, the creation of the State of Israel, and the Iranian Revolution, neither anything nor anybody in a century had so jolted the Middle East as had George W. Bush.
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