The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Following the example of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tall Afar, MacFarland began to establish small bases in the city. In the past, U.S. units had operated from a large FOB, or forward operating base, outside it. “They exited the FOB, drove to an objective or patrolled, were attacked, exchanged fire, and returned to base,” he wrote later.

  The first step under the new approach was to send Special Operations sniper teams to sneak into the building he wanted to occupy. Then he would have a “route clearance” team work its way through the roadside bombs to the building, followed immediately by a company of Army troops or Marines to occupy the building. Upon arrival they would begin building a new combat outpost. The snipers would move out to the surrounding area to disrupt counterattacks. Overnight, the outpost would appear, with living spaces and walls and barriers to limit the damage from car bombs. They even figured out how to use a crane to immediately deposit a steel “crow’s nest” on top of a building, so they could begin with a well-protected observation post without having to divert troops into filling and carrying sandbags to the roof. (Learning that filling sandbags between patrols was wearing out the troops in the outposts, MacFarland instituted a new policy on his base. Everyone had to fill two sandbags before every meal. “No work, no food,” he said. “We could generate ten thousand to twelve thousand sandbags a day on Camp Ramadi and push them out to the combat outposts.”) Quick steps to establish combat readiness in the outposts were necessary because new outposts were almost always assaulted within two or three days.

  Four benefits, much of them unexpected, flowed from the redisposition of troops into the small new bases, which eventually would total 18. In the most successful ones, Americans and Iraqi soldiers lived and ate side by side. This meant Iraqis and Americans could learn from each other—about Iraqi culture, about weapons maintenance, about leadership. Also, Iraqi soldiers living on American rations began to show more energy. “You’d be surprised at how much work you can get out of an Iraqi if he has had enough calories to eat,” he said. Another immediate benefit of this redeployment, he found, was that his soldiers became less predictable. No longer could Iraqi fighters simply watch the front gates of an American base to know when a patrol was coming. “Because we now maintained a constant presence in disputed neighborhoods, the insurgents could no longer accurately trace and predict our actions.”

  Most important was the political effect of the new outposts. MacFarland laid down a rule that once one was established, they wouldn’t let themselves be driven from it. “You never give it up,” he said. “More than anything else, that was what persuaded the sheikhs we were there to stay.” In the past, he said, American commanders had said, “Don’t worry, we’re leaving.” He decided to say the opposite: “We’re staying until we win this fight.” It helped that once he had an outlying base, he would begin spending reconstruction funds in the surrounding neighborhood. All told, he estimated, he would dispense more than $2 million in 2006 and early 2007.

  He sought to keep up the pressure, so that the enemy, once knocked off balance, couldn’t regain the initiative. “What can I do to make life miserable for al Qaeda today?” he would ask himself. “We tried to have an operation every few days. Can I put up another combat outpost? Should I start an adult literacy class? Can I throw in the kitchen sink?” Figuring that the local al Qaeda fighters might move to the outskirts, he set up Iraqi police stations in the rural tribal areas. Police were always recruited locally, which gave them extra incentive to stand up to the terrorists, he noted. “The IPs [Iraqi police] refused to be intimidated because they were defending their own homes,” he said.

  By the end of July 2006, he was beginning to sense that the new approach was working, even though it brought new risks. The commander of the Marine battalion attached to MacFarland’s Army brigade told him that west Ramadi was quieting down. Top Marine commanders began to be convinced that what was happening in Ramadi was different from previous sheikh-led pushes against al Qaeda. Even so, there were days when MacFarland had his doubts, especially as the enemy launched a counteroffensive. At the end of the first week of August, he thought to himself, “My God, I’ve lost ten guys.” Two weeks later, on August 21, Sheikh Jassim, his first ally in the tribes, was assassinated. “I couldn’t have protected him if I wanted to,” MacFarland said. The sheikh’s killers hid his body for four days, a pointed violation of the Muslim custom of quick burial. On the same day, a new Iraqi police station, in the Jazeera neighborhood, and manned mainly by members of Sheikh Jassim’s tribe, was bombed. All told, MacFarland lost two dozen vehicles—a few tanks, but mainly trucks—as he moved into the city.

  But, he said, the local reaction to the August attacks indicated that al Qaeda might have overplayed its hand: They drove some fence-sitters into the American camp. One sheikh, Sittar albu-Risha, was particularly angry. “Sittar has lost enough family members that he was ready to throw away caution.” This sheikh, a minor tribal leader who had a reputation for running a thriving cross-border smuggling business, called a meeting for September 9. More than 50 sheikhs and other notables showed up. They created what they proposed calling “The Awakening Council.” They had a platform with 11 planks. “Ten of them I would have written for them almost exactly the same way they wrote them,” MacFarland recalled. The last one was problematic, in that it implied they might have to kill the governor of al Anbar Province. He suggested they modify it.

  As MacFarland parleyed with sheikhs, the energetic Capt. Patriquin worked the other people in the room. “He was very extroverted and friendly and was very popular among the tribes because he was the officer who identified little things we could do for them, like attention for a sick child.” Sheikh Sittar eventually gave the captain the honorary tribal name Neshan Abu Risha, which some Iraqis say means “a warrior of the Albu Risha,” the sheikh’s tribe.

  That day was a turning point for MacFarland—and as it would develop, for al Anbar Province and Iraq. “To me, it was the first real clear vindication of the strategy we were pursuing, that we were beginning to turn the tide.” The meeting encouraged more sheikhs to come in and work with the Americans, and with them came a “snowball effect” on recruiting of local police and other tasks, MacFarland said. “Whenever a tribe flipped and joined the Awakening, all the attacks on coalition forces in that area would stop, and all the caches of ammunition would come up out of the ground. If there was ever an attack on us, the sheikh would basically take responsibility for it and find whoever was responsible, and this happened time and again. So it was incredibly effective and they were as good as their word.”

  MacFarland had come to terms with the fact that some of those newly forthcoming sheikhs had participated in attacks on Americans. “I’m a product of Catholic schools,” he said, “and I was taught that every saint has a past and every sinner can have a future.” Sittar reported that he had several thousand volunteers who didn’t qualify for the police, because they were illiterate, underage, or overweight, so he was allowed to create three “emergency battalions” to employ them. MacFarland armed them with captured weapons and had his SEAL teams give them a one-week training course. The prevailing American theory for years had been that improvements in security would lead to progress in politics. This was the opposite—political change leading to improvements in security.

  That decision also took the United States into the dangerous and complex new territory of supporting an armed group that was opposed to the government in Baghdad that the United States also supported. As Carter Malkasian, the counterinsurgency adviser to the Marine Corps in al Anbar, put it, “For all intents and purposes, the government was permitting Sittar and his movement to have their own militia.” But, as Petraeus and Odierno would do the following year, MacFarland had decided it was time to take some risks, especially given that the alternative appeared to be failure.

  The Shiite-dominated Iraqi government, in the midst of a small civil war in Baghdad between Shiites and Sunnis, wasn’t happy with what it
was hearing out of Ramadi about the Americans cutting local cease-fire deals with Sunni sheikhs. Here again, MacFarland found that American experience on the ground in Iraq helped. His deputy commander, Lt. Col. James Lechner, had spent time as an adviser to the Iraqi military and “knew how to work the system to get guys paid.” Among other things, MacFarland noted, “That built up my wasta with the sheikhs.”

  Faced with skepticism from his superiors, and from journalists who were being told by Iraqi officials in Baghdad that he was arming Iraqis to fight the Iraqi army and police, MacFarland had Patriquin create a briefing to explain what he was trying to do. Far from the usual razzle-dazzle of U.S. military PowerPoints, the briefing was written breezily, almost in the style of a children’s book, with stick figures. It was titled “How to Win the War in Al Anbar, By CPT Trav.”

  Capt. Travis Patriquin’s briefing was both perhaps the most informal one given by the U.S. military in Iraq and the most important one. “This is an American Soldier,” it began. “We’ll call him Joe. Joe wants to win in Al Anbar. But sometimes it seems like other people don’t share that idea.” This made Joe sad. Then the briefing posed the key question: “How can Joe win in Al Anbar? By fighting the insurgents?” The briefing didn’t say so, but the answer the U.S. military had given for three years had been: Well, of course, yes.

  A subsequent slide identified the problem with that approach: “Poor Joe can’t tell the terrorist from the good Iraqis.” The smiling stick figures look all the same to him. The solution, the brief said, was to talk to the sheikhs about making local militiamen members of the police force. “The Iraqi Policeman can tell the difference. And the insurgent knows that. See, that’s why he’s sad.” This makes everyone else happy. “The sheikh brings more sheikhs, more sheikhs bring more men. Joe realizes that if he’d done this three years ago, maybe his wife would be happier.”

  The theory was working, but the fighting continued. On September 29, Michael Monsoor of Garden Grove, California, a twenty-five-year-old member of a Navy SEAL team, threw himself on a hand grenade while his team was being attacked, an act of valor for which he was posthumously recognized with the Medal of Honor. He already had received a Silver Star for rescuing a wounded comrade under fire four months earlier.

  On November 25, about three dozen al Qaeda men with weapons drove into Sufia, home of the Albu Soda tribe, just east of Ramadi. The small tribe, which had only about thirty men of military age in that area, had rebuffed MacFarland’s recruiting efforts, he said, because it wanted to be neutral. But as part of that effort, it had established checkpoints to keep out al Qaeda, which antagonized the terrorist group, because the tribe lived along the main corridor from Fallujah to Ramadi. After the gunmen opened fire, some tribal members escaped in boats across the Euphrates and ran to an Iraqi army base. Soldiers there called an Iraqi interpreter for an American officer, who called MacFarland’s headquarters. Capt. Patriquin and Sterling Jensen, the interpreter, began gathering information. “We’re being wiped out,” the tribe’s beleaguered sheikh told Jensen. “People are killing us.” The sheikh’s sister had been killed, and al Qaeda men were dragging the body by ropes behind a pickup truck. MacFarland postponed another operation and sent the units involved in that to the aid of the tribe, even though it had held him at arm’s length. A drone reconnaissance aircraft was sent to circle over the fight. Patriquin called the sheikh of the tribe. “Hey, look,” he said. “We can’t tell who is who. Could you have your guys wave towels over their heads so we can identify friend from foe?” That done, Marine F-18 warplanes rolled into bomb those without towels, and then arriving U.S. Army tanks began to fire on fleeing al Qaeda automobiles.

  After the fight, MacFarland went to talk to Albu Soda’s bloodied, combat-shocked leaders. “They were kind of battle-fatigued, had lost a lot of family members. At the same time, it was like a switch had been flipped. Guys who had been reluctant to talk to us were saying, ‘Would you please build a combat outpost near our home?’ and telling us where al Qaeda was in their area.” That day was the tipping point, he said. After that, he was flooded with tips and recruits. “After that tribe flipped, the kids were running around, it was like liberated France, it was like Rumsfeld imagined it would be in 2003.” Also, a major insurgent route into the city had been cut.

  One of MacFarland’s enlisted men studied street life and concluded that people in Ramadi didn’t read newspapers or even listen to the radio much, but that they did pay attention to the messages from loudspeakers on the minarets of mosques. So, beginning at one platoon-sized base, Combat Outpost Firecracker, MacFarland’s soldiers put up loudspeakers to broadcast, every day but Friday, the Muslim sabbath, sports news and weather reports—and occasionally slip in information about al Qaeda attacks. “The news was pulled from places like Al Jazeera and Al Iraqia and news sources that people would know were not ours,” he said. Some of it was just helpful tips: “The UN warehouse has a new shipment of rice.” Occasionally another message would slip in: “Last night al Qaeda killed a family of five in their home.”

  But even as late as December 6, 2006, MacFarland would be thrown for a loss. On that day, Spec. Nicholas Gibbs, a twenty-five-year-old from Stokesdale, North Carolina, was killed by small-arms fire. “Part of me died along with him,” his mother told a reporter. “I will never be the same.”

  The same day, Sgt. Yevgeniy Ryndych, a 1998 émigré from Ukraine to Brooklyn, was killed by a roadside bomb. His fiancée received her engagement ring in the mail from him the same day. “He was one of those people who not a lot of people liked because he sat home the whole day and read books,” said his brother Ivan. “He was like a genius kid.”

  And Marine Cpl. Dustin Libby, from Presque Isle, Maine, was manning a machine gun on a roof in Ramadi when he was shot.

  Three other soldiers died that day when their Humvee was hit by a bomb. The first, Spec. Vincent Pomante, was from Westerville, Ohio. The second, Marine Maj. Megan McClung, became the highest-ranking female to die in combat in Iraq. A triathelete, McClung had organized a marathon for troops in Iraq. A journalist in North Carolina remembered that when a police officer pulled over McClung, she proved she was sober by doing a backflip on the side of the road. A graduate of the Naval Academy, McClung had left the Marine Corps but went back on active duty in order to serve in Iraq. Her name would become the first woman’s to be added to the marble tablet at the academy that memorializes graduates killed in action. “Please don’t portray this as a tragedy,” her mother requested of a reporter. “It is for us, but Megan died doing what she believed in.”

  The sixth loss that day perhaps hit MacFarland hardest: Capt. Patriquin, the soldier who had reached out to the tribes, had been sitting next to McClung.

  The next morning MacFarland found his staff and commanders downcast. “Everybody was kind of looking at their feet.” He told them about how Gen. Ulysses S. Grant handled that first terrible day at Shiloh in April 1862. The Confederates had pushed the Union troops back to the Tennessee River, where thousands huddled terrified below the bank. Thousands more lay dead and wounded on the battlefield above them. That night Grant met with his commanders next to a log house being used as a hospital, reviewing the day’s losses as men under the surgeon’s knife screamed and died nearby—probably not the best place to locate a command post. At midnight, Grant went out to smoke a cigar, taking refuge from the driving rain under a tree. There, MacFarland told his soldiers, Gen. William T. Sherman found him. “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Sherman said to his dripping friend.

  MacFarland reminded them of Grant’s laconic response: “Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”

  The stoic, taciturn Grant was an inspiration to MacFarland throughout the year. “I felt I was fighting my way through the Wilderness Campaign,” he said, referring to Grant’s running battle through rough ground in northern Virginia against Robert E. Lee in May 1864. “I was taking a lot of casualties.” MacFarland was hardly alone. In recent years
, as the Army has come to grips with Iraq, Grant seems to be enjoying a resurgence in popularity with today’s officers, probably because he is its patron saint of the long, hard slog.

  By the onset of winter it was becoming clear that something fundamental had changed in Ramadi. “In the latter half of December, it was like the fever broke,” MacFarland said. “Up until then, when we threw a punch, they threw a punch.” The death rate for U.S. forces began to decline after that incident. By the end of that month, 12 of the tribes in the area were deemed cooperative, and 6 neutral, leaving just 3 classified as “uncooperative.” By mid-2007 it wasn’t uncommon for a month to go by with no U.S. losses. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, was reeling. As David Kilcullen, Petraeus’s counterinsurgency adviser, later put it, “In Anbar, we’ve got the tribal vengeance structure working in our favor.” That is, where Armericans once had been the target of Iraqis seeking revenge, now they were helping direct that impulse against al Qaeda and its allies in the insurgency.

  Not only were the roadside bombs less numerous, they were becoming less sophisticated. “They went away from the remote-controlled IEDs to subsurface command wires to just hastily throwing out IEDs with pressure plates because that was all they could do,” MacFarland said. “Because we were keeping such pressure on them, they just weren’t able to get the big IEDs and get them all set up. So, we knew we had them on the run when we started to see those kinds of things evolve and their attacks became smaller and smaller and less and less effective.”

  The attacks would continue, though. All told, MacFarland lost 83 soldiers in Iraq—but he had something to show for it. In February 2007, Gen. Petraeus, newly arrived in Iraq, would come to see him and ask some questions about his methods and metrics. “Sean had obviously done something extraordinarily important,” Petraeus said later. “What you had there was the first really significant example of the concept of reconcilables and irreconcilables.” Petraeus already knew that he wanted his troops to go out and protect the population. In Ramadi, he learned that “a key way of implementing that is not just living with them, it is also . . . literally separating them, protecting the population from the irreconcilables. That means you have to know who the reconcilables are and who the bad guys are, and then of course try to achieve some separation and protect the one from the other.”