The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Two thorough reviews conducted in subsequent years found overwhelming evidence that Franks and his staff devoted almost all of their energies to the mission of removing a weak regime and almost none to the more difficult task of replacing it. This omission on his part became disastrous, because no one above him in the Bush Administration was focusing on the problem, either. In 2004, an official Pentagon review led by two former defense secretaries, James Schlesinger and Harold Brown, unambiguously concluded, “The October 2002 Centcom war plan presupposed that relatively benign stability and security operations would precede a handover to Iraq’s authorities.” The following year, the head of the RAND Corporation, hardly a hostile observer, would send a memorandum to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld stating that after extensive review of internal documents, his researchers had found that “post conflict stabilization and reconstruction were addressed only very generally, largely because of the prevailing view that the task would not be difficult.”

  At times, Franks’s account of his wars was just stunning. “There’s never been a combat operation as successful as Iraqi Freedom,” he asserted. In August 2004, as the American war in Iraq was just settling into a long, hard grind, he pushed back against interviewers’ questions, responding, “I just think it’s interesting that while we are concerned with what many would describe as the failures of Phase Four operations in Iraq we actually have so many just tremendous successes.” This was the optimism of the Marshall template degraded into low-grade boosterism.

  But the mistakes made in Afghanistan and Iraq were hardly the fault of one general. Nor were they simply military mistakes. Franks was operating in a military and civilian system that was not working well. Led by Rumsfeld, top civilian leaders focused not on the big questions but on the picayune.

  Nor was there much relationship between an officer’s battlefield performance and his subsequent promotions. As an American civilian official then based in Afghanistan put it, “The guys who did well didn’t get treated well, and the guys who did badly didn’t get treated badly.”

  Coda: The sole relief of the 2003 invasion

  One chilly night in Afghanistan late in 2001, Nathaniel Fick, a young Marine officer, was checking on the sentries in his outposts when, after midnight, he spotted three heads in a fighting hole when there should have been just two. He slid down into the hole to find that the third man was Brig. Gen. James Mattis, leaning against some sandbags, talking with a sergeant and a lance corporal. “This was real leadership,” Fick later reflected. “No one would have questioned Mattis if he’d slept eight hours each night in a private room, to be woken each morning by an aide who ironed his uniforms and heated his MREs. But there he was, in the middle of a freezing night, out on the lines with his Marines.”

  It is no accident that, two years later, this general who cared about his men in Afghanistan would carry out the only high-profile relief that occurred during the American invasion of Iraq. The officer removed was not a general but a colonel. At the time, relief was so unusual that even this firing—of Col. Joe D. Dowdy, a regimental commander—made page-one news. Mattis has never publicly spoken about the relief, and in fact, in an oral history interview with an official Marine Corps historian, he declined to discuss it. However, in an interview on strategic issues, he did say in an aside that the practice of relief remains alive in his service: “We’re doing it in the Marines. Even Jesus of Nazareth had one out of twelve turn to mud on him.”

  It is worth looking at the incident to understand what relief of generals might look like in our own era’s wars had the tradition not been lost. Col. Dowdy, in his oral history interview with a Marine Corps historian, blamed the situation largely on Mattis’s assistant division commander, Brig. Gen. John Kelly, who he said had nagged him about not moving fast enough, especially after Dowdy’s regiment had stopped for twenty-four hours outside the city of Nasiriyah, about 190 miles southeast of Baghdad, where both the Army and the Marines had run into stiffer resistance than they had expected. “Are you attacking?” Kelly said to him in a radio exchange during the invasion, according to Dowdy. Yes, Dowdy said, but “we’re still shaping”—meaning that he was in the initial stage of an attack, using artillery fire and maneuvering of units before directly engaging the enemy.

  “Why don’t you drive through al-Kut?” Kelly said, pushing him again. Dowdy, who originally had been told to bypass that city via a roundabout route, asked why that was necessarily the best way to go, especially because he had reports of Iraqi minefields along the more direct route. He did not want to run another gauntlet like Nasiriyah, where an Army convoy had gotten lost, resulting in the deaths of eleven Army soldiers and the capture of several others, including two women, Pvt. Jessica Lynch and Spec. Shoshana Johnson. His view was that he was the commander in place and thus the officer best equipped to decide how and when to attack.

  Not satisfied, Gen. Kelly called him again at one or two o’clock the following morning. “What’s wrong with you?” Kelly asked.

  “There’s nothing wrong,” Dowdy replied.

  Kelly said he did not want to hear excuses.

  “They’re not excuses,” Dowdy responded. “I’m the commander on the ground.”

  Kelly told him that he was tired of the 1st Regiment “sitting on its ass” and planned to recommend that Mattis relieve Dowdy. “Maybe General Mattis won’t do it. Maybe he’ll decide he can get along with a regiment that isn’t worth a shit. But that’s what I’m going to recommend.”

  Dowdy bypassed al-Kut and by morning had seized the bridges beyond the city that were his next objective. He felt “euphoric,” explaining that “we’d done what we needed to do, despite . . . the threat of being relieved.” He sensed that his unit was maturing and getting stronger, which he believed made it ready for the big fight he expected in Baghdad.

  Then he got a message telling him to fly to the division’s forward headquarters. After he landed in a farm field and was walking to the tents where the division headquarters was set up, a dog leaped out and attacked him, “which you know kind of seemed symbolic.” Next he encountered Gen. Kelly, who told him that he had lost the trust of his superiors. Dowdy reeled at this, feeling that his twenty-four years of service in the Marines were going down the drain.

  He walked inside the command post and saw the division chief of staff. “You’re doing great,” the officer said.

  “I think I’m being relieved,” Dowdy responded.

  “Nah, that’s bullshit,” the officer said.

  Dowdy went in to see Gen. Mattis, a quiet but intense officer with a reputation for favoring fiercely aggressive tactics. They were so near the front that artillery shells were passing overhead and tanks were rolling by the tent, creating what Dowdy heard as a whirlwind of noise. Mattis began asking questions that indicated to Dowdy that he would be removed on the grounds of fatigue. Dowdy had not slept for two days and felt that Kelly had just crushed his spirit. “I didn’t give a very good account of myself,” he told the Marine historian when he recounted his relief.

  “What’s wrong?” Mattis gently and repeatedly asked him. “Why aren’t you pressing in the cities more?”

  Dowdy, fatigued and confused, said that he was attacking but that “I love my Marines, and I don’t want to waste their lives.” By his own account, he then babbled a bit about his “lack of self-esteem” when he was younger. Even he recognized that such talk was a fatal misstep. At that point, he said, “I knew I was screwed.”

  Mattis asked him about his combat experience. “We’ll do better,” Dowdy responded.

  “No, no, no,” Mattis said. He stepped out of the tent, clearly wanting to think over his decision. Then he came back in and told Dowdy that he was being relieved and would be replaced by Col. John Toolan, who by chance had been Dowdy’s neighbor at one point. Dowdy first asked him to reconsider, citing the effect on him and his family. Mattis declined to do so. Dowdy t
hen accepted the judgment and asked if he could work as a watch officer on the division staff, but Mattis told him that he “needed to go away.”

  Dowdy left the tent and helicoptered south to a Marine C-130 aircraft, which then took him to a rear base in Kuwait. He took a shower and called his wife. “She already knew,” he recalled. He had become the only senior officer to be relieved in the entire invasion.

  His conclusion about the affair was that relief should never be taken lightly. “It has such an adverse impact on someone, it’s very difficult to describe. But the whole world that you’ve built comes crumbling down. . . . And then to end it, to be subject to international humiliation. . . . To be the only commander in the whole war to be relieved, it’s very difficult to deal with that.” He left the Marines the following year and eventually went to work for NASA.

  Mattis, by contrast, would rise swiftly through the military hierarchy, eventually succeeding David Petraeus as head of Central Command, a four-star post. He remains one of the most clear-thinking of American generals today, with a pungency in his speech that sometimes gets him into trouble but always seems to make an impression on young soldiers and Marines. “If we are to keep this great big experiment called America alive—and that’s all it is, an experiment—we need cocky, macho, unselfish, and morally very straight young men and women to lead our forces against the enemy,” he said to a group of midshipmen at the Naval Academy eighteen months after he fired Dowdy. He continued:

  Okay, it’s not a perfect world, but America is worth fighting for on its worst day. So, if you have got the guts to step across that line, as each of you have, then just go out and enjoy the brawl. Just have a damn good time. Train your men well. Go beat the crap out of people who deserve it, and when they throw down their gun, then you have won.

  CHAPTER 28

  Ricardo Sanchez

  Over his head

  M any Americans now remember the Iraq war simply as a string of mistakes by the Bush Administration—from overestimating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein to underestimating the difficulty of occupying the country.

  While that is correct, it hardly tells the entire story. Less remembered are the errors committed by the military. One dissent to this narrative of solely civilian fault has come from Philip Zelikow, who became the State Department’s counselor as the war in Iraq descended into chaos. “I think the situation is worse than people realize, and the problems are primarily with the military,” he said. Discussing American generalship in Iraq over the course of the war, he added: “I don’t think people realized how bad this was. . . . The American people believe the problem is the civilians didn’t listen to the generals. This is very unhealthy for the Army.” In fact, he argued, the civilians were wrong, but so was the Army, because neither group was thinking clearly about Iraq. The U.S. Army in Iraq, Zelikow added, reminded him of the French army before World War I. “The military is venerated. It is the inheritor of Napoleon. The general is decorated with gold braid—but there’s no ‘there’ there. There is an aversion to deep thinking.”

  American generalship in Iraq in 2003 and the following years is too often a tale of ineptitude exacerbated by a wholesale failure of accountability. The war began badly, with Tommy R. Franks failing to understand the war he was fighting. Why did Franks appear to be strategically illiterate, and why was he allowed to guide the initial stages of two wars, each time with large strategic costs? Franks retired not long after the fall of Baghdad and took off to enjoy the American version of a Roman triumph, going on the road to make speeches for large sums and issuing a quick memoir.

  Franks passed command of the Iraq war to another Texan, Ricardo Sanchez, the newest lieutenant general in the Army, who resembled Franks but understood the conflict perhaps even less. “I came away from my first meeting with him saying this guy doesn’t get it,” said Richard Armitage, who was the deputy secretary of state at the time. Sanchez was a tragic figure, a mediocre officer placed in an impossible situation. Iraq was boiling over, the Pentagon and the Bush Administration were in denial, and he was trying to deal with this while operating in a confused command structure that generated constant friction between him and L. Paul Bremer III, the top American civilian in Iraq. Sanchez held the manpower, money, and machines, but Bremer believed he outranked him. Relations between the two deteriorated to the point that, in the spring of 2004, when Bremer asked Sanchez to tell him about the American plan to attack Shiite militias in Najaf, Sanchez refused. In his memoir, Sanchez appears proud of this:

  “I’m not going to do it,” I said. “I guarantee you that we have a tactical plan. I am comfortable with it and have reviewed it with the division commander. I know he can execute the orders he’s been assigned.

  “Well, we need to know . . . ”

  “Stop right there, sir. I am not going to give you the details of our tactical plan.”

  Sanchez did not explain why he would so refuse to brief the senior American official in Iraq.

  This exchange was more than just an indication of personal enmity. It was a flashing warning sign that civil-military discourse over the conduct of the war had broken down. At this point, one of the two should have stepped aside or demanded that the other do so. Another officer might have risen to the occasion. Sanchez, an inveterate micromanager, instead sank into the details, correcting subordinates constantly but failing to provide overarching guidance. Like the worst generals of the Vietnam era, he tended to descend into the weeds, where he was comfortable, ignoring the larger situation—which, after all, was his job. Like many micromanagers, Sanchez also tended to criticize harshly in public. “He would rip generals apart on the tacsat”—the military’s tactical, satellite-based communications network—“with everybody in the country listening,” recalled an officer who served on his staff.

  To be sure, the primary errors in Iraq should not be laid at Sanchez’s feet, because they were made well above his level. The original sin was President Bush’s decision to go to war preemptively on information that would prove false. The second major mistake was the failure of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to point out the fundamental contradiction between the civilian view of the mission in Iraq and the military’s view. The mission was never defined—a sin of omission committed by both the military and the civilians. The Bush Administration wanted to transform Iraq into a beacon of free-market democracy for the Middle East. The American military never said so publicly, but in its actions it rejected that revolutionary mission and instead stated that its goal was to stabilize Iraq—which was almost the opposite of the president’s intent. That was the root cause of much of the friction between civil and military authority in the first three years of the American occupation of Iraq.

  Because this basic contradiction was left unexamined, Sanchez really had no strategy to implement. That lack manifested itself in the radically different approaches taken by different Army divisions in the war. Observers moving from one part of Iraq to another often were struck by how each division was fighting its own war, with its own assessment of the threat, its own solutions, and its own rules of engagement. It was as if there were four separate wars under way. In western Iraq’s Anbar Province, the 82nd Airborne and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment got tough fast. The 4th Infantry Division, based in Tikrit, in north-central Iraq, operated even more harshly, rounding up thousands of “military age males” and probably turning many of them into insurgents in the process. Baghdad was its own separate situation, exceedingly complex and changing from block to block. Meanwhile, in far northern Iraq, Maj. Gen. David Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division made a separate peace, to the extent of ignoring many of the anti-Baathist rules coming out of Baghdad and conducting negotiations with the government of Syria to provide energy to Mosul. One reason for such distinctly diverse approaches was that conditions were very different in each of these areas. But another reason was that each division commander more or less went his own way, with littl
e guidance from Sanchez. Jeffrey White, a veteran analyst of Middle Eastern affairs for the Defense Intelligence Agency, wrote early in 2004, “Some observers feel that the various U.S. divisions in Iraq have thus far waged more or less independent campaigns.”

  Yet Sanchez compounded the problem through smallness of mind and inflexibility in approach. He did not seem willing to learn and adapt. Some commanders at the tactical level took effective approaches, but these were ignored or even discouraged by Sanchez. For example, a Florida National Guard battalion stationed in Ramadi in 2003 was more adept at police work than most military units, having many members of the Miami-Dade police force in its ranks. It emphasized local policing, setting up an academy and an Iraqi force, and also helped cooperative sheikhs win contracts for reconstruction projects, remembered an Army intelligence officer who served in Iraq. But, he noted, “The efforts of 1-124 [the Guard unit] were consistently undermined at the theater level by military leadership that lacked a campaign plan,” as well as by the failings of the Civilian Provisional Authority and other civilians. When Gen. John Abizaid, who had replaced Franks as chief of Central Command, visited Ramadi, he was so impressed with operations there that he told Sanchez to go there and get the same briefing. Sanchez did so, apparently rather unhappily. “Sanchez came in pissed off that he’d been ordered to get a clue from O-6s and below in the hinterland and was in full attack mode,” the officer recalled. “He lit up the staff, told us we didn’t know what we were doing, and went back to Baghdad having learned nothing.”