Among the many skills of the U.S. Air Force is its ability to amass statistics that measure effort accurately, if not destruction. The air war of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was no exception, and there is little doubt, by Iraqi testimony, that air attacks seriously limited Iraqi movement and destroyed units. There was virtually no effective Iraqi air defense. The Iraqis fired antiaircraft gun batteries 1,224 times and launched 1,660 antiair missiles. They downed six helicopters and one aircraft. Thirteen more aircraft fell to operational accidents. Sorting through all the statistics, the CFACC counters decided their 1,800 aircraft had flown 41,000 combat sorties. Half of the aircraft came from the Air Force, about half from naval aviation. The British, Canadian, and Australian air forces contributed 138 aircraft that flew 3,000 sorties. The CFACC flew 25,000 sorties against enemy targets (moving or stationary) and dropped almost 30,000 munitions, two-thirds of them precision-guided. The coalition air forces, commanded by Lieutenant General. T. Michael Moseley, USAF, made it easier to win with fewer American casualties—and to justify Rumsfeld’s passion for limiting the ground forces.
A bold plan, COBRA II depended on the surrender, dissolution, and poor fighting of the regular Iraqi armed forces, including the Republican Guard. With rapid maneuver and focused, massive air and artillery strikes, the ground forces could defeat any intact Iraqi units in detail. When the Turkish government prohibited the 4th Infantry Division attack, the division went by sea to Kuwait. The 173rd Airborne Brigade stationed in Italy assumed the Kurdistan mission. The plan worked. In five days, with negligible losses, CFLCC crossed almost three hundred miles of Iraq and prepared for the final offensive on Baghdad. Iraqi resistance proved haphazard, ill organized, and more of a nuisance than an operational challenge.
Two days into COBRA II, the leading Army and Marine armored and mechanized task forces, however, faced a type of resistance they did not anticipate: ambushes and sudden assaults by non-uniformed Iraqis fighting from homes and shielded by helpless civilians. Vans, pickup trucks, and cars carrying men armed with RPGs, demolitions, and automatic weapons appeared from nowhere on suicide missions. The Saddam Fedayeen had joined the battle, however futile. They had been reinforced by 35,000 convicts released from Iraq’s prisons and armed by Baath leaders. Engagements spread all along the highways used by American columns and choked with service vehicles in the hundreds; bridges and crossroads became likely battlegrounds. Mosques served as ambush sites. One Bradley team killed at least 500 Iraqis in one brief fight on March 23. The march to Baghdad became memorable for obscure towns where the Fedayeen mounted last stands: as Samawah, an Najaf, an Nasiriyah, Karbala, al Hillah, al Amarah, and al Kut. Closer to Baghdad, Republican Guard units joined the fray. The race to Baghdad also ran into the Mother of All Sandstorms (March 25–27), which halted the lead elements of the 3rd Infantry Division and 1st Marine Division, advancing abreast into the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. The Republican Guard also sent a cautionary message when one brigade stopped a major attack by the Apache helicopter gunships of the 11th Army Helicopter Regiment; twenty-nine of thirty Apaches were so damaged by ground fire that the attacking battalion was out of the war for a week.
The logistical challenges that faced the COBRA II forces demanded a heroic transportation effort. The CFLCC consumed 54 million gallons of gas and oil, consumption greater than the Allies for all of World War I. The march to Baghdad required 5,000 tons of munitions and 1.7 million gallons of water. Sand and wind damaged vehicles and electronics. So did Fedayeen attacks, which plagued the convoys well behind the 3d Infantry Division’s leading brigade. General McKiernan had to assign units of the 82d Airborne and 101st Air Assault Divisions and the 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment to protect his supply lines. Moreover, as the Army and Marine columns entered the Baghdad area, they left the desert and entered a land of canals, marshes, tributaries of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and sprawling villages that made the Americans even more roadbound and dependent on scarce engineer and vehicle service units. Only motorcraft and bridging companies could ensure passage over water obstacles. Much to Franks’s and Rumsfeld’s dismay, McKiernan ordered a pause to ensure one unbroken attack on Baghdad from five directions. In the meantime, the British had the Basra area in hand, and Joint Special Operations Task Force North (the 10th Special Forces Group and Kurdish pesh merga) had watched the Iraqi regular army fade away or surrender and then destroyed those isolated Republican Guard units that stood and fought. The 173d Airborne Brigade arrived to secure the victory.
The final attack on Baghdad on March 30 began with limited-objective attacks all along the city’s outer limits in order to eliminate a few Republican Guard units and secure bases for raids (“thunder runs”) into the central city. On April 3 the 3rd Infantry Division took Baghdad airport, news Saddam Hussein denied as false reporting. Three Republican Guard brigades defended the airport, but they proved no match for one American armored brigade and Air Force fighter-bombers. On April 6 the tank-infantry task forces massed astride the freeways leading to downtown Baghdad. Three days later an Army column met a Marine column in massive al Firdos Square in the city center. There was no Iraqi official to make a formal surrender agreement. The GIs and Marines watched hysterical mobs and clever gangs enter government buildings and leave with all the loot they could carry. The Iraqis did not know that the White House and Rumsfeld’s warriors expected a grateful victory parade.
The Pacification of Iraq, 2003–2011
The non-Arab world thrilled as it watched a mob and a U.S. tank recovery vehicle pull down the statue of Saddam Hussein onto the pavement of al-Firdos Square. The remnants of Saddam Hussein’s government and security forces faded into the general population and headed for countryside hideouts. Although there was no plan to resist the Americans with urban guerrilla warfare, all the ingredients for a protracted unconventional war against the hated foreign invaders already existed. Muhammad Yunis al-Ahmed, chief of security for the Baath Party, had the best claim as father of the insurgency. Escaping Baghdad with Saddam Hussein, Yunis left his boss at a safe house near Tikrit and drove into Syria, where he collected money and began to recruit partisans. His goal was to turn the Sunnis into active resistors, not passive victims.
Like the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the end of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship unleashed communal hatreds that reached back centuries. Saddam Hussein had created a Sunni secular tyranny in which power had become concentrated in the hands of the al-Tikriti clan and its allies. Other Sunnis could survive only if they served the government, its captive industries, and the Baath Party. Much of the Sunni professional and commercial class had gone into exile during and after the Iran-Iraq and Gulf wars. The regime had little use for Islamic fundamentalists, even Sunnis. The regime had also stripped power from the traditional clan sheikhs. The Shi’a, the most numerous Iraqi group and known derisively as “marsh Arabs,” were tolerated only because they provided an underclass for the oil industry, urban service industries, construction, and anything that required cheap labor. The Kurds of northern Iraq were Muslims but not Arabs. They had been loyal supporters of the Ottoman Empire and allies of anyone who held the Sunnis in check, like the Hashemite kings who ruled Iraq after World War I with British support. Mix in personal megalomania, family feuds, and economic privileges (including office-holding) and the social chemistry was as explosive as a roadside bomb. American Arabists in the CIA and State Department knew all these tensions and made dire predictions. The White House and Pentagon did not respect this informed pessimism and brought peace to Iraq as if it were World War II Austria.
The CFLCC may have moved into Phase IV stability operations but many Iraqis had not stopped fighting just because Saddam Hussein and his army had disappeared. The country was awash with weapons, and many of them were in the hands of Sunni resistors. For the moment, the Kurds and Shi’a, truly liberated this time, helped root out Baathist officials and secret police. Ominously, varied Shi’a groups formed community militia forces, well armed and commanded by army vete
rans from the war with Iran. The Shi’a also drew support from their Persian co-religionists, who assumed that a Shi’a-dominated Iraq would become a de facto ally. The Kurds already had an army, and they used it to evict any leftover soldiers and officials from the Saddam Hussein regime. The Kurds, internally divided into two factions, would remain part of Iraq instead of creating a real Kurdistan, provided they got the lion’s share of the profits of the northern oil fields. The Kurds were the only Iraqis the Americans could really trust. The Sunni insurgents, however, were thick near Mosul in Kurdistan.
In Washington, Bush and Rumsfeld did not realize the enormity of the challenges faced by their Iraqi expeditionary force. Since they didn’t regard Iraqi deaths, purposeful or accidental, as a problem, they were comforted by the low U.S. casualties as of May 31, 2003: 214 deaths from enemy action in Iraq and Afghanistan. British deaths for all of 2003 were fifty-three; for other allies, forty-one. There was still fighting in Iraq, especially around Baghdad. The shooters were occasional warriors, just like the looters, said Rumsfeld. They were just too overcome with freedom. The looting, in fact, had destroyed the Iraqi bureaucratic infrastructure and much of its industrial potential—while American troops watched. The general feeling in American units was that the war was over. There were two bits of unfinished business. One was finding Saddam Hussein, his sons, and his most criminal associates and bringing them to justice. The other mission was to find all the WMD caches that the Iraqis surely had. The CIA, Iraqi agents, Delta Force, Special Forces, the 101st Airborne, and the 4th Infantry Division ran the Hussein family to ground. The sons died in a firefight in July 2003, and the father climbed out of a hide-hole in Tikrit in December. Convicted by Iraqis for crimes beyond counting, Saddam Hussein dangled from a rope in December 2006.
Source: U.S. Army Center of Military History, Bosnia-Herzegovina: The U.S. Army’s Role in Peace Enforcement Operations, 1995–2004
Other searchers roamed throughout Iraq searching for WMD. The Pentagon sent out a task force of 1,200 WMD engineers and scientists, led by UNSCOM veteran David Kay. This Iraq Survey Group continued the searches of the extemporized 75th Exploitation Task Force (XTF). The mission of the 75th XTF was to seize known WMD sites, search for unknown sites, and then conduct tests for evidence of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons or the research and manufacturing facilities necessary to make them. Since the Iraqis had launched twenty forbidden ballistic missiles at CFLCC targets during the 2003 war, the 75th XTF units had the highest priority and often appeared among the attacking advance forces. Special Forces actually raided and captured an uninspected research facility in northern Iraq. As the sand settled in the spring of 2003, UN inspectors also returned to Iraq for more inspections and consultation with the Iraqi Survey Group. Both WMD groups found Iraq in violation of the UN resolutions on aiding inspections, reporting WMD destruction, accounting for WMD, halting all missile and WMD development, and renouncing any future interest in WMD. An IAEA assessment of June 16–19, 2003, found that Iraq had 1.8 tons of uranium “yellowcake,” which was too little from which to extract even enough enriched uranium for research, let alone weapons.
The spinmasters in Washington moved into high gear to discredit Bush’s critics and to reinterpret the pre-2003 evidence to show that the administration had been misled, not duplicitous. The momentary embarrassment of the neocons did not translate into more sensible management of Iraqi affairs by the State Department. Instead, Secretary Rumsfeld scrapped the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, unappreciated and underfunded, and replaced it with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), essentially an occupation government headed by Ambassador L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer III, who had headed the State Department’s counterterrorism office twenty years earlier but was not an Arabist. Without blinking, he executed Rumsfeld’s most influential directive: Dissolve the Iraqi government, the top four levels of Baath Party leadership, and all military forces. The order was simply stupid. All three pillars of Saddam Hussein’s government had dissolved themselves. The Bremer interdict made it more difficult to screen past Iraqi officeholders for political crimes and, if cleared, hire them for a new government. The key to most successful occupations and counterinsurgency campaigns is to find work for rebels and potential rebels, even at larcenous rates. No matter how expensive, an amnesty-employment program saves time, money, and lives.
A strange mix of true reformers, opportunists, Bush loyalists, and marginal Washington bureaucrats, the CPA presided over a chain of security disasters that in three years brought the rebirth of Iraq to the brink of disaster. Civilians in the CPA, protected by the security of the “Green Zone,” a seven-square-mile piece of America inside Baghdad, did little to help the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps deal with an Iraqi effort to force a Somalia-like retreat on a grander scale. The direct attacks on American bases, convoys, and patrols mounted in the summer of 2003. The tactics of urban warfare all produced casualties: sniping, small ambushes, truck bombs, and the ubiquitous improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that killed and maimed with horrific anonymity. The annual death toll of American men and women remained high for four years: 849 (2004), 846 (2005), 822 (2006), and 904 (2007). A series of incidents simply enflamed the anti-American resistance. One was a chain of violent events staged by the Sunnis that turned Baghdad’s Shi’a against the occupation. Another was the bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed the head of mission, Sergio Vieira de Mello, a dedicated humanitarian. On August 29, 2003, two car bombs killed 124 Shi’a worshippers, including a prominent, moderate ayatollah. The bomb also wounded 140 other Shi’a as they left the Najaf mosque. Bremer reported the bad news: If the United States wanted Iraq to be peaceful, stable, and prosperous, it would take years of nation-building and hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars. Bush did not welcome this report. The new CENTCOM commander, General John Abizaid, an officer of Lebanese descent who spoke Arabic, agreed with Bremer’s assessment.
A comparison of indicators for November 2003 and November 2005, compiled by The New York Times, demonstrates the escalating violence in Iraq.
NOVEMBER 2003
NOVEMBER 2005
U.S. Troop Deaths
82
96
U.S. Deaths, IEDs
20
40
Iraqi Deaths, Security Forces
65
176
Iraqi Deaths, Civilian
125
600
Deaths, Multiple, IEDs
6
41
Iraqi Security Forces
95,000
212,000
U.S. Troops
123,000
160,000
Foreign Troops
24,000
23,000
Insurgents
5,000
18,000
Iraqis who favor U.S. withdrawal soon
30%
80%
Despite the increase in security forces numbers and promising economic indicators, the war had swung to the insurgents. In the following year, 2006, Iraqi deaths numbered 16,273 by morgue count. Another Iraqi count put the dead at 60,000.
The American military response to the insurgency, once its nature was clear in the autumn of 2003, was to take the offensive in Baghdad and against cities to the north in the “Sunni Triangle,” a wedge of land between the Tigris and Euphrates, principally al-Anbar province. The western towns of Ramadi and Fallujah became centers of insurgency and destinations for foreign mujahideen, many recruited by al-Qaeda, who wanted to join the jihad. CIA and military intelligence officers identified Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a fanatical Jordanian Islamicist, as the head of al-Qaeda Iraq. Despite Rumsfeld’s fantasizing about al-Qaeda, the Sunni forces in the Triangle were principally Iraqi Baathists, members of Saddam’s army and police, tribal warriors, and unemployed youths who could earn American dollars as urban guerrillas and bombers. The money came from Syria, Iran, al-Qaeda, and much of the Muslim world. In 2004 the w
ar developed a southern front that ran from the Shi’a slums of Baghdad (Sadr City) to Basra. The additional enemy was a Shi’a militia, the Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM). A council of clerics and Muqtada al-Sadr, son of a sainted imam killed by Saddam Hussein, directed these forces. The Shi’a militia units had formed to protect their own communities, but they were perfectly willing to kill infidels and Sunnis if ordered to do so.
A series of events between 2003 and 2004 fueled the insurgency and spread it throughout Iraq. One was the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The prison population of 6,000–7,000 were detainees being held for ninety days or more for screening and interrogation. An MP’s private photographs revealed that the jailers had humiliated some prisoners with unclean acts with sexual and excretory implications. Several investigations discovered unauthorized coercion by intelligence personnel, even torture, to extract information and confessions. The Abu Ghraib scandal infuriated Muslims, Europeans, and the American antiwar movement.
Another gaffe was the First Battle of Fallujah, a Marine attack ordered from Washington to avenge the death of four contractors. In April 2004, a task force from the 1st Marine Division fought a door-to-door battle with veteran Sunni partisans until Washington ordered the operation ended—but before the city had been cleared. The units of the new Iraqi army and national police faded from the battle. American casualties (twenty-nine dead) seemed prohibitive to Bremer and even worse to Bush and Rumsfeld, who gave bold speeches but recoiled from the casualties. In addition, the Shi’a militias cowed the international units in the south and thus menaced the roads to the Kuwait logistical centers. In April 2004, the Provisional Iraqi Government, a fig-leaf council to replace the CPA, ordered one of Muqtada al-Sadr’s lieutenants arrested and the Shi’a revolt crushed. Fighting broke out again in Karbala, al Kut, an Nasiriyah, and many other towns, but the final battle took place in the holy city of Najaf in August. A task force of one Marine reinforced battalion and two Army cavalry squadrons methodically retook the city until the remaining Shi’a militiamen, sheltered in the Imam Ali mosque, surrendered. In twenty-four days of combat, the Americans lost eight dead and ninety wounded; the Iraqis, an estimated 1,000–2,000. The Americans could win battles and kill Iraqis, but the war continued with no end in sight. Insurgent attacks averaged 500 a month in June 2003, then climbed to almost 3,000 attacks by January 2005. Two-thirds of the attacks came against the foreign troops; the rest were divided almost evenly between Iraqi soldiers and civilians. By the end of 2004, the United States armed forces had lost 1,100 dead in Iraq in combat, losses the nation had not experienced since 1969 in Vietnam. The numbers of service personnel wounded in action—many permanently maimed by IEDs—ran at seven or eight times the deaths.
For the Common Defense Page 95
