Oppose Any Foe

by Mark Moyar

  Blaber combined other Delta operators with an armored unit to form what he called Team Tank. Borrowing from the playbook of General Erwin Rommel, Nazi Germany’s crafty Desert Fox, Team Tank shuffled its ten Abrams tanks from place to place in such a way as to fool unwary observers into believing that it had a much larger number of vehicles. If the Iraqis came to believe that hundreds of American tanks were stampeding into Iraq’s western desert from Jordan, they would maintain forces in the west that could otherwise be used to defend Baghdad. Keeping up the charade became harder by the day as the number of tanks declined, owing to maintenance problems and a thirty-five-foot ditch that swallowed up one of the tanks.

  Team Tank ultimately succeeded in convincing Saddam Hussein to guard the western desert with an army division, one previously earmarked for reinforcement of the Karbala Gap. That gap, a twenty-mile band between the Razzaza Lake and the Euphrates swamp flats in south-central Iraq, constituted one of the last obstacles between US forces and Baghdad. The gap’s diluted defenses soon broke under the pressure of US infantry and armor, collapsing so quickly as to unhinge the final defense of the Iraqi capital.

  Baghdad fell on April 9. Two days later, Team Tank reached Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, which was still under the control of regime loyalists. The tanks, by this time numbering just five, navigated through the outskirts of Tikrit in yet another effort to conjure an illusion of overwhelming strength. An unexpectedly potent enemy force showed up, approximately five hundred men in all, brandishing vehicle-mounted antitank weapons.

  On Blaber’s command, the American tanks opened fire. While one of the tanks was maneuvering, its treads became entangled in telephone wire, which was akin to binding a man’s legs with rope. The other tanks moved toward their debilitated comrade to provide protection while two Delta operators dismounted and tried to remove the wire. The senior tank officer recommended withdrawing once they had freed the stranded tank, and Blaber concurred.

  Dailey, who had been monitoring the radio communications from another country, interrupted the discussion. “Negative, negative, negative!” he roared at Blaber. “You are not to pull out of that city. I want you to keep moving forward into the city and destroy the enemy.”

  Blaber suspected that Dailey wanted Team Tank to replicate the glory of the “thunder runs,” in which long US armored columns had torn through Baghdad one day earlier. Blaber objected that the US armored divisions in Baghdad had possessed more than three hundred tanks each, and twice that number of support vehicles, whereas Team Tank had only five tanks left, one of which was barely functional, and no support vehicles. With few infantrymen accompanying them, they would be unlikely to remain alive for long inside a city crawling with antitank weapons. Dailey, for his part, believed that Team Tank needed to continue in order to facilitate a snatch operation that was taking place nearby. Neither man would budge.

  Rather than confront Blaber directly, Dailey had his deputy contact Blaber via satellite phone. The deputy, whom Blaber considered “a genuinely nice guy,” was plainly not cut out for issuing threats he knew in his heart to be wrongheaded.

  “Hey, uh, Pete, listen,” the deputy muttered. “I think you should, uh, send your guys into the city. If you don’t, uh, move through that city, your, uh, future as a commander could be affected.”

  Blaber ignored the threat. Back on the radio, he instructed his tank crews to pull back from the city.

  Dailey, continuing to monitor the radio net, butted into the conversation. “What did you say?” he barked at Blaber. “You listen to me, I told you to—” The line went dead. Evidently someone on Dailey’s staff had decided to disconnect the radio before more acid could cross the airwaves.

  WHEN GEORGE W. Bush came into office, special operations forces did not rank high on his agenda. Nor were they a priority for his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, to whom the hands-off Bush had delegated broad powers over the defense establishment. But the 9/11 cataclysm and the peculiar circumstances in Afghanistan turned the special operators into indispensable instruments of regime change. In 2003, Rumsfeld sent special operations forces to Iraq in numbers exceeding those of any previous conflict to help take down Saddam Hussein’s regime.

  Although the 5th Group’s 2001 campaign in Afghanistan bore some resemblance to unconventional warfare, and would routinely be described as such by proponents of unconventional warfare, it differed in major respects from the unconventional warfare of the past. The Northern Alliance did not require extensive organizing or training, and it fought a war that was more conventional than guerrilla in character. The principal contribution of SOF to the Taliban’s overthrow was technical—the guidance of precision munitions by the Special Forces and their Air Force tactical air controllers in support of rebel military attacks. At Tora Bora and, especially, the Shahikot Valley, JSOC reconnaissance teams distinguished themselves by locating and targeting well-concealed enemy fighters. In Iraq, the absence of insurgents comparable to the Northern Alliance and the large size of the Iraqi armed forces demanded the use of America’s conventional forces, leaving SOF to play supporting roles.

  The overthrow of the Taliban regime was the greatest strategic victory ever achieved by American SOF operating in isolation from conventional forces. Three hundred US special operators and 110 CIA officers precipitated the collapse of the Taliban government and its 90,000 armed forces without the loss of a single American to hostile fire. The Americans and their Afghan allies were not, however, able to catch most of the fleeing Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. During the Iraq War, SOF diversionary activities in northern Iraq and the western desert achieved strategic effects by tying down Iraqi forces that could have bolstered the defenses around Baghdad. Raids on suspected Iraqi Scud missiles and weapons of mass destruction sites could have been strategically significant had they actually found what they were seeking.

  The defeat of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan resuscitated the idea, dormant since the Somalian imbroglio, that special operations forces could win wars without conventional forces. But Bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora, under the noses of local militias supported by American special operators, elicited counterarguments that conventional forces were critical to the pursuit of terrorists. The poor showing by the Afghan militiamen in Operation Anaconda further stoked criticism of local forces advised by American SOF. The Iraq War subsequently demonstrated that some populations were devoid of willing participants in armed resistance against their own government, in which case divisions of US ground forces were required to take and hold ground. As the spring of 2003 drew to a close, both special and conventional operators had cause to view their capabilities as superior and essential, ensuring that new contestation between the two groups would not be far off.

  CHAPTER 9

  COUNTERINSURGENCY AND COUNTERTERRORISM

  In the spring, summer, and fall of 2003, JSOC cast an ever-widening net for individuals linked to Saddam Hussein. JSOC’s intelligence specialists interrogated anyone and everyone who might know something about Saddam’s whereabouts, or who might know someone who might know something about his whereabouts—from close confidants and relatives to mistresses and tailors. A long string of apprehensions and interrogations brought them progressively closer until finally, on December 12, 2003, a JSOC raid in Baghdad nabbed Muhammed Ibrahim Omar al-Muslit.

  A member of Saddam’s inner circle, Muslit was one of only four people who knew where the ousted Iraqi leader had taken refuge. He initially refused to cooperate, but buckled when an interrogator told him that he and the forty other members of his family in US custody would go free if he divulged Saddam’s location. Muslit revealed that the erstwhile dictator was hiding in the town of Dawr, across the Tigris River from his hometown of Tikrit. When pressed for more specific information, Muslit identified two small farms on the east bank of the Tigris.

  The next day, a JSOC task force headed to Dawr with a droopy-eyed Muslit in tow. Suspecting that Saddam would have twenty or thirty armed guard
s wielding automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, the Americans decided to send along six hundred troops from the US Army’s 4th Infantry Division in armored vehicles. The skies above Dawr resembled a Memorial Day airshow, with a panoply of America’s finest military aircraft buzzing hither and thither. Planners named the operation Red Dawn, after the 1984 movie in which American teenagers outfought invading Soviet paratroopers in Colorado. In honor of the intrepid teen warriors, who had named their improvisational army the Wolverines after their high school’s mascot, the two farms were designated Wolverine 1 and Wolverine 2.

  At 8 p.m., the infantry established a cordon around the farms to prevent anyone from escaping, and then the search parties moved in. Stepping quietly, peering through night-vision goggles, Delta operators combed through sheep pens, wheat fields, fruit orchards, palm groves, and farmhouses. They did not encounter any armed guards. They did, however, see two men bolting through an orchard, whom they chased down and took into custody. One of them was later identified as Saddam’s personal cook, the other as the cook’s brother. The Americans interrogated the two men in the presence of a sniffer dog, since Iraqis were often intimidated by these animals, but the two were far from cooperative, most of the information from their mouths turning out to be false.

  The Americans again probed Muslit for more information, and again he spilled some beans, guiding them to a mud farmhouse. Inside the structure was a bedroom with two beds, above which a pair of gray trousers and a dirty towel hung from a clothesline. The furnishings included a Noah’s Ark–themed calendar and a trunk, the latter topped with a stack of books and a can of Raid to ward off insects. The house also had a small kitchen, whose keeper had apparently hurried out, by the look of the broken eggshells and dirty dishes on the counter. Inside the kitchen’s small refrigerator, the searchers found Bounty candy bars, hot dogs, and a can of Seven-Up.

  After further cajoling from the special operators, Muslit directed their attention to a floor mat just outside the house. Pulled to the side, it unveiled a trapdoor made of thick Styrofoam block. Several Delta operators slowly lifted the door, firearms at the ready, while another prepared to throw a flash-bang grenade to stun whoever was inside.

  The trapdoor opened to a dark hole, four feet by six feet. Aiming lights and weapons into the opening, the Americans caught site of a scruffy bearded man who looked to be in his sixties. By his shabby appearance, they adjudged that he did not pose an imminent threat and thus held their fire. Through an interpreter, the D-boys asked the prisoner to identify himself.

  “I am Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq,” the man said, “and I am willing to negotiate.”

  One of the Americans replied, “President Bush sends his regards.” Then the American said to the interpreter, “Tell him to put his hands up and come out.”

  Two empty hands emerged from the hole in the universal gesture of surrender. Delta operators grabbed at the disheveled figure from every direction, pulling him by the neck, beard, hair, and clothes, as if they were hoisting a wayward dog.

  The Americans checked their catch for Saddam’s signature tattoos, which included a sunburst on the right hand and three dots on the left hand representing “God, Country, Leader.” When the captive tried to shove the soldiers away, they struck back, cutting him above the eye and in the mouth. The inspection continued without further incident. The body art was a match.

  Zip-tying Saddam’s hands and putting a sandbag over his head, the Americans loaded him aboard a Little Bird helicopter that whisked him away to a nearby US base. For public relations purposes, the US government filmed a compliant Saddam receiving an examination from an American physician. Clad in rubber gloves, the doctor checked the captive’s hair for lice, then used a tongue depressor and penlight to peer inside his mouth, a spectacle that at once proved Saddam’s capture to skeptical Iraqis and demonstrated the powerlessness of the formerly omnipotent man. US officials and America’s Iraqi friends exulted at the capture of Saddam Hussein and expressed hope that it would dissolve the unremitting gloom that had hung over Iraq for months.

  The fall of Baghdad, eight months earlier, had been full of promise, seeming to portend a bright new dawn for Iraq. On April 9, foreign news crews had filmed jubilant Iraqis cheering the arrival of American tanks and infantry in Baghdad. At Firdos Square, Marines helped Iraqis tear down a giant statue of Saddam Hussein while the world watched on live television. After unsuccessful attempts by the Iraqis to topple the monument with a sledgehammer and rope supplied by the Marines, the crew of a Marine M-88 tank recovery vehicle attached one of their cables around the neck of Saddam’s likeness and pulled it down.

  Minutes after the statue fell, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon, “The scenes of free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad are breathtaking. Watching them, one cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain.” Rumsfeld asserted that “the Iraqi people are well on their way to freedom.” Others drew parallels to the liberation of Paris from the Nazis. “Like newly freed Parisians tossing flowers at Allied tanks,” columnist William Safire wrote in the New York Times, “the newly freed Iraqis toppled the figure of their tyrant and ground their shoes into the face of Saddam Hussein.”

  The Americans had done little planning for the post-Saddam period, having presumed that Iraqis would be able to take care of themselves like the Parisians in 1944 and the East Germans in 1989. General Tommy Franks, commander of the US occupation forces, predicted that a new Iraqi government would be up and running within sixty days, and he laid plans to withdraw most of America’s 145,000 troops in six months’ time. In the haste to go home, the United States allowed Iraq to degenerate into a state of insurgency, one of such virulence as the United States had not encountered since the Viet Cong. Special operations forces were destined to be pulled back into the fray, and as in Vietnam, they would be pushed into it by the president. This time, however, they would concentrate on the narrow mission set of counterterrorism rather than the broader enterprise of counterinsurgency. The constricted focus of special operations forces would constrain their strategic impact and give rise to new conflicts with the conventional military.

  The American leadership learned all too soon that Iraqis did not think or behave like Frenchmen or Germans. Having lived under brutal dictatorship their entire lives, Iraqis had little conception of the virtues and responsibilities required of citizens in a free society. In the days and weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein, mobs of Iraqis looted shops, stole vehicles, and stripped the fixtures and wiring from public buildings. Brandishing AK-47s with a newfound abandon, they murdered old enemies, officials of Saddam’s regime being favorite targets. Members of the Shiite majority who had languished beneath the lashes of the regime’s whip now angled for power at the expense of the Sunni minority.

  Most of the US troops on the ground had not been prepared for such an outcome, and they were not ordered to intervene. The abstention of the only forces capable of restoring order permitted antisocial behavior to propagate while also eroding Iraqi respect for American power. The US official responsible for governance in post-Saddam Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, banned members of Saddam’s Baath Party from serving in the new Iraqi government, depriving that government and its newly created security forces of experienced leaders and at the same time driving the most capable Iraqis into the insurgency that erupted in the summer of 2003.

  Devastating attacks on the new Iraqi security forces and the impotence of Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority soon convinced the Bush administration to reverse the outflow of US forces from Iraq. General John Abizaid, successor to Franks as commander of Central Command, worried that putting US forces into the forefront of counterinsurgency operations would alienate Iraqis and inhibit the growth of a self-sufficient Iraqi government, so he insisted that his commanders in Iraq use their forces primarily to improve a
nd empower Iraqi forces. Supporting foreign forces in counterinsurgency operations was right up the alley of the Army Special Forces and Navy SEALs. But special operations forces were too few in number to handle the task on their own. The conventional units of the US Army and Marine Corps would be needed to train hundreds of thousands of new Iraqi soldiers and policemen and provide enough security to prevent the insurgents from devouring the fledgling Iraqi government in its nest.

  Some SOF officers wanted to carve out niches in which their units could assist Iraqi forces in counterinsurgency operations, as special operators had done with South Vietnamese forces. By leveraging their knowledge of counterinsurgency and foreign cultures, they could empower the Iraqi government to regain control over the population. Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations soldiers were indeed assigned to such niches, since their skill sets closely aligned with critical nonmilitary tasks that no other Americans were performing. In conjunction with Iraqi and American administrators and US conventional forces, they organized town councils, dug wells, funded construction of schools and health clinics, and disseminated information that reflected favorably on the American occupation and its Iraqi allies. They were often paired with conventional American units, whose commanders generally made good use of their services, although there were exceptions, like the officer who asked a psychological operations team to drive up and down a road with loudspeakers blaring, simply to draw fire that would reveal enemy positions for his troops to attack.

  For most of the special operations forces, however, the main activity in Iraq would not be assistance of Iraqis in counterinsurgency, but rather surgical strikes against insurgent leaders, an activity that in official parlance was labeled “counterterrorism,” or CT for short. The “black” special operations forces—the term that had come into use for JSOC’s units, including Delta Force and SEAL Team Six—had been preparing for this type of mission for years. Much less traveled in surgical strikes were the “white” special operations forces—the forces assigned to theater special operations commands, which included the Army Special Forces and all the Navy SEAL teams except for Team Six. But now black SOF and white SOF alike would focus on eliminating insurgent leaders.