In order to maintain a force for Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, the Defense Department had to mobilize National Guard and Organized Reserve Units—primarily Army and Marine Corps ground troops—for service in the war zone. The process began in 2003 for the invasion, but unlike the DESERT STORM mobilization, the activations continued. Only unit rotation could keep the Iraq “boots on the ground” troop levels at 150,000. Activated Guard and reserve units in 2004–2005 provided almost 40 percent of Army personnel and 15 percent of the Marines. Air Force and Navy reservists served in smaller proportions of the total force and often outside Iraq proper. The composition of III Corps, the U.S. Army combatant command in Iraq, 2004–2005, reflected the reserve’s contribution to the war. The corps troops included four National Guard battalions. The 1st Infantry Division included thirteen National Guard battalions. The 1st Cavalry Division included two National Guard brigades (nine battalions) and a Marine Reserve infantry battalion. Two National Guard brigades contributed eight battalions to the theater base security forces. Of the sixty-one maneuver battalions in the III Corps, twenty were Guardsmen or reservists from nine different states. The snipers and IEDs did not discriminate, so reservists died too. Between 2003 and 2009, 488 Army Guardsmen, two Air Guard members, and 319 Ready Reserve members of all the services died, about one-fifth of all military deaths in Iraq.
With all of Iraq a war zone, the Bush administration reluctantly concluded that its critics, a growing chorus of informed dissent from all sides of the political spectrum, had been right in 2004. Iraq was a mess, in part because of the American failure to execute an intelligent, well-funded temporary occupation under clear international sanction. Even Ambassador Bremer admitted that his CPA was an “ineffective occupier.” George W. Bush now sought wiser counsel among his father’s inner circle. Once past his reelection in November 2004, the president steeled himself for the creation of a realistic political-military strategy for Iraq. Part of his challenge was reshaping his own administration. When Colin Powell resigned in frustration as secretary of state, Bush appointed a far wiser and more aggressive Condoleezza Rice to his post and made her able deputy Stephen Hadley his national security adviser. Backed by the CIA and State Department professionals, the Rice-Hadley team became a more effective counterweight to the Cheney-Rumsfeld neoconservatives. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card also helped Bush deal with the war’s realities. The president even listened to advice from former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and listened less to Vice President Cheney.
The military command in Iraq underwent two important changes when General George W. Casey Jr., Army vice-chief of staff, became the field commander in Iraq and Lieutenant General David H. Petraeus became chief adviser to the new Iraqi armed forces. Although they differed on the war’s wisdom and future course, the two generals did agree that a campaign demanded protecting the Iraqi people from many enemies. The essential security mission should be transferred to armed Iraqis. Casey thought in terms of an Iraqi national army and police. Petraeus was not sure that this notional force would be large enough and good enough or be formed soon enough for the mission, especially when he saw Sunni and Shi’a radicals infiltrating these forces. The Sunni and Shi’a militias regarded the Iraqi armed forces and police as inept and vulnerable and made them principal targets for attack. In the first two weeks of January 2005, the distribution of violent deaths showed a persistent pattern: ninety dead in the Iraqi army and police, sixty-nine Iraqi civilians, and twenty-five American service personnel. No members of the other international forces died in combat, although eight died in accidents. George Casey knew the statistics. In order to fight an extended counterinsurgency campaign with limited American participation, he would have to enlarge and improve the Iraqi security forces and bring down American casualties. General Abizaid wanted American patrols off the streets and into well-defended operating bases.
To turn the war over to the Iraqis required a government. Bremer’s first expedient, the Iraqi Governing Council, was not successful because it gave the Chalabi group and other exiles too much license for revenge. The Kurds were cooperative but feared by the Iraqi Arabs. After much negotiation throughout 2004, the CPA and the U.S. Embassy organized three major elections to create a representative Iraqi government. The American forces regarded the elections as a necessary political act of indeterminate effect. As one bit of GI graffiti put it: “We came, we saw, we conquered, we wasted a year, but now we’ve made the fuckers vote!” Not everyone voted. The Sunni politicians boycotted the election for a national constitutional assembly, boycotted the referendum on the new constitution, and then largely boycotted the election to form a new parliamentary government, which would elect a prime minister and approve his cabinet. The three major Shi’a factions claimed 140 out of 275 seats. A Kurdish coalition elected seventy-five members. The Shi’a-Kurd majority then divided the cabinet with a moderate Shi’a civilian, Kamil Mohammed Hasan Nouri al-Maliki, as prime minister. Condemned to death by Saddam Hussein for conspiracy, Nouri al-Maliki in exile had become head of the Islamic Dawa Party. However promising some of the developments of 2005, peace was not at hand. During the year 897 American service personnel died, down slightly from 2004.
The central operational objective was still to pacify the Sunni Triangle, which began with the Second Battle of Fallujah in November 2004. After a careful logistical buildup and repeated warnings for civilians to leave or seek shelter, a task force of 8,000 Marines and soldiers and 2,000 Iraqis took ten days to kill 1,000–2,000 very tough Sunni partisans, reinforced by the mujahideen of al-Qaeda Iraq. Senior officers likened the house-to-house fighting to the battle for Hue city in 1968. The fight was truly a joint operation, since the Air Force provided precise close air support and the U.S. Navy committed medical service personnel, engineers, and aviation controllers. Tanks and artillery pounded insurgent strongholds; by one Marine estimate 2,000 buildings were destroyed, 10,000 damaged. The battle cost the Americans fifty-four dead and 425 wounded, many by rocket ambushes and booby traps. For General Casey, the battle proved that the insurgents could not hold city enclaves. For General Petraeus, the battle showed that the Iraqi national army and police still shunned combat. And the war went on, with Marine forces fighting to the top of the Sunni Triangle at Ramadi and beyond, past Haditha Dam and along the Euphrates to the Syrian border. The 2nd Marine Division sent mechanized task forces to chase after Iraqi and mujahideen fighters who had escaped Fallujah before its siege ended and tried to roll up the network of caches and strongholds the insurgents used to bring weapons and other Arab fighters into al-Anbar province. The campaign exacted a price. Company L, 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, a reserve unit from central Ohio, lost ten Marines killed in an amphibian tractor explosion in August 2005. The same company had lost six Marines in a firefight and amtrac explosion in May. The company’s losses were the highest of any Marine reserve unit in the war.
Elsewhere American forces found death but not many insurgents. The biggest killers were IEDs set off by electronic remote-control devices like radios and mobile phones. By 2006 hidden bombs were exploding somewhere in Iraq about once every fifteen minutes. Electronic warfare specialists deployed jammers that confounded remote detonations. Eventually they forced the bombers to return to using wire-detonating systems, in theory easier to detect by sight. Bombs were especially deadly in Baghdad, with its traffic jams, mass population, and millions of hiding sites. The bombers had decades of experience upon which to draw. They primarily used the bountiful supply of unexploded bombs and shells. All the services contributed to Task Force Troy, a force of thousands of explosive ordnance detection and disposal experts to combat the IED threat. The only way to stop bombers was to track them down and kill them; special sniper units eventually became skilled enough to kill about fifty emplacers a week by 2007. In the meantime, military vehicles in Iraq became more armored or designed to survive bomb blasts. Bombs declined as troop-killers, but Iraqi civilians continued to be the victims of IED explosions.
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With virtually all indicators of economic improvement and public security now plunging in 2005 and 2006, the Sunni insurgents broadened the war by attacking the Shi’a population and the government they supported. It was not a new war, but it was more desperate and deadly. It was fed by two extremist groups, al-Qaeda Iraq and al-Qaeda Mesopotamia, an offshoot group that rejected al-Zarqawi’s leadership. In February 2006, agents for al-Qaeda Mesopotamia (AQM) blew up the al-Askari mosque in Samarra, a holy Shi’a shrine, and followed with attacks by car bombs and suicide bombers throughout Baghdad. Violence between Iraqis soared to new levels of horror, with bombings and mass murders averaging 1,500–1,800 deaths a month. Sunni civilians took the brunt of the Shi’a revenge campaign, mounted by Muqtada al-Sadr’s JAM private army of 50,000. Members of the Badr Brigade, the military arm of the Shi’a Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, supported JAM from their positions in the ministries of the interior and transportation. JAM routinely captured as many as sixty Sunni men a night, tortured them, murdered them, and dumped them back in their neighborhoods. The Shi’a had adopted sectarian cleansing for Baghdad. Sunni families fled whole neighborhoods to escape the 2006 bloodbath, the greatest cause of the 35,000 Iraqis deaths that year. Many of the refugees headed for al-Anbar province or another country. The Shi’a vendetta, which killed Americans too, became so mindless that Muqtada al-Sadr actually tried to curb the excesses of his militia. Shi’a politics became even more chaotic in Basra when JAM, the Badr Brigade, a local warlord, and criminal gangs fought each other over the profits of the oil business. With parliament and the important ministries under their control, the collective Shi’a leadership sought to check the vendetta, but only if someone else did the dirty work of pacification the army and police would not.
The local Sunni sheikhs and some public officials in al-Anbar province looked for help to stop the flood of refugees, the advancing Shi’a, and the suicidal foreigners of al-Qaeda who, like mercenaries of old, decided they liked living among the cowed Sunnis. The al-Anbar Sunnis, however, now wanted American help, not American lives, and started negotiations with Marine and Army commanders and civil affairs officers for arms for their own Salvation Council militia, eventually called the Sons of Iraq. They did not get weapons, but were welcomed into the police and army. They were heartened by the death by bombing of the head of AQI, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in June 2006. Despite reservations by General Casey and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the police soon bulged with Sunni ex-soldiers and ex-partisans. The Americans embraced the Sunni Awakening and helped the new allies kill or drive away the two al-Qaeda factions. Casey, however, tried to keep his troops out of the way and urged the Pentagon to reduce his force, concentrated in large, defended bases around Baghdad but inevitably caught in the crossfires and still taking casualties.
The Sunni Awakening caught Washington by surprise, but it helped push Bush toward a new, high-risk strategy for Iraq. Formally called the Baghdad Security Plan or Fardh al-Aanoon (“imposing the law”), the plan reflected Bush and Nouri al-Maliki’s desperation. The idea of “the Surge” had many fathers. One group of advocates rallied around General John M. Keane, a retired Army vice-chief of wide respect, who had examined the Iraq morass under the sponsorship of Rice and Hadley. Bush made Keane’s advocacy easier by forcing Rumsfeld to resign (December 2006) and replacing him with Robert M. Gates, a pragmatist of long Washington service. Keane rallied retired Army and Marine generals steeped in population-centric counterinsurgency. He had no trouble recruiting David Petraeus, who had returned home from his second Iraq tour as a media favorite and a very persuasive champion of counterinsurgency. Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, USA, whose 4th Infantry Division had been a heavy-handed occupier in 2003–2004, believed in the Surge and directed it for Petraeus as commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq.
Other powerful military and political voices in Washington sought to convince Bush to change strategy. The elite press, fed with leaks of the plan, endorsed the Surge. Bush could also read the report of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan group of Washington’s most canny and respected leaders under the chairmanship of former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and retired Congressman Lee H. Hamilton, a lifelong internationalist. At the heart of its recommendations was the suggestion that the United States might have to increase its troop strength in Iraq in the short term in order to come home with victory in the long term. The American forces would have to join and train the Iraqi forces and interpose themselves between all the warring parties until the rebels came to terms with the Nouri al-Maliki government. Many of the concepts came from the commission’s military advisory panel, which included John Keane.
The basic outline of the Baghdad Security Plan announced in January 2007 was simple enough. American troops would emerge in numbers and combat-ready from their bases and, with the Iraqi army and police, crush any armed forces that opposed the Iraqi government and killed Iraqi civilians. This force would be reinforced by as many as 32,500 combat troops from the United States. The Surge might last a year or more, which meant American troop strength in Iraq would return to 160,000. Where local Baghdad communities defended themselves against al-Qaeda and Iraqi terrorists, they would be protected from seventy security posts around the city. The immediate objective was to crush AQM and JAM and stop the Shi’a pogrom. There were unstated consequences to the plan. The neighborhoods depopulated by JAM would not be restored to the Sunnis. And American soldiers and Marines were going to die in higher numbers, but at least they would not die as passive IED victims.
The battle for Baghdad and four neighboring provinces tested the efficacy of the Baghdad Plan, and the results showed some progress by the end of 2007. The casualty count was clear enough. The U.S.-Iraqi-Coalition forces lost at least 2,592 lives. The American deaths for 2007 (904) were the worst of the war. It was the last year that any other international force lost troops since “the coalition of the willing” had wilted. Six months into the campaign, some of the vital indicators of improving security and social conditions worsened and continued to look dismal into 2010. One critical sign of success, however, was the declining American death toll, which fell off sharply in 2008. Iraqi civilian deaths in 2008 fell to one-quarter of the deaths in 2006 and 2007. The Iraqi security forces almost doubled in two years (2006–2008), and their service deaths dropped by half. By 2010 the American forces left in Iraq numbered only 50,000.
Several factors explain the success of the Baghdad Security Plan. Its primary objective was to break JAM opposition to any government, and the U.S.-Iraqi army did this quickly and efficiently, at least by earlier standards. Implicated in JAM’s terrorism, Muqtada al-Sadr went into exile, which brought great relief to the senior Shi’a ayatollahs and politicians. The Badr army put on national uniforms or went home. The Kurds enjoyed legal regional autonomy, defended by the pesh merga. Despite the Iraqi government’s inefficiency and corruption, the nation’s economic woes after forty years of war and dictatorship were predictable and reversible. The United States would not press Nouri al-Maliki too hard on corruption (an estimated $4 billion a year), but it would not tolerate abuse of the Sunnis, who had helped drive out al-Qaeda and break up JAM. American commanders supported the 100,000 Sons of Iraq, a neighborhood security force. Sectarian violence would not disappear overnight, and Americans still died but not so many: 314 (2008), 149 (2009), and 60 (2010). The Iraq war, finally, was fading away.
The consequences of IRAQI FREEDOM cannot in 2012 be assessed with certainty. Whether or not it was worth the cost cannot yet be determined and depends on the course of history for Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Turkey, and Israel. Dictators seem to have a one-generation half-life, as the fall of the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, and Muammar Gaddafi suggest. Yet WMD and a three-generation succession have survived in North Korea. Saddam Hussein was a weak regional threat in 2003; he might have been a larger threat in 2013 had he survived in power. The expert consensus is that his regime wa
s bound for ruin, but tyrants have fooled experts before. The tragedy of Iraq is not the 2003 war but the eight years of violence that followed the American invasion. The accumulated cost of the war is sobering: 4,488 Americans dead, 32,223 wounded, and an added defense cost of $806 billion. For the Iraqis, the estimated death toll is a staggering 120,000. The important consequences cannot be quantified. They are held in the minds of a generation of Arab nationalist leaders and the Iranians.
The war probably did little to make terrorism in the Arab world a greater or lesser threat than it had been before 2001. A 2010 compilation of Arab terrorist groups by European experts identified by name eighty terrorist groups. Of the eighty groups, fifty existed before 2001 with roots in the anticolonial, anti-Israel struggle. Of the thirty identified as formed after 2001, only eight could be identified as part of the al-Qaeda network. No doubt there have been some rearrangements after the “Arab Spring” of 2011. Nevertheless, safe havens for al-Qaeda are less hospitable. Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Pakistan have quit ignoring or supporting al-Qaeda; and Syria and Iraq have reopened diplomatic relations, which makes it more difficult for the fugitive Baathists to be allies to al-Qaeda. Given Ayman al-Zawahri’s Egyptian roots and the chaos in Cairo, Egypt may be the next al-Qaeda homeland.
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