The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq
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As the postwar chaos spread, Bremer increasingly distrusted the frail Iraqi Interim Authority and the provincial Iraqi Leadership Council. By the time the more permanent Iraqi Governing Council was established in July 2003, Bremer’s Coalition Provincial Authority had managed to dissipate most notions of the Americans as liberators rather than foreign colonial occupiers. Iranian and Gulf oil money, respectively, fueled warring Shiite and Sunni insurgents, sometimes in league with former Baathist officers, sometimes under the guidance of transnational terrorists—and sometimes simply fighting each other as much as the Americans. Chaos of any kind weakened the impression of U.S. resolve and undercut America’s evolving mission not just to remove Saddam Hussein, but also to leave a constitutional government in his place as a model for broader Middle East reform.
At home, American analysts were divided over the proper responses to escalating violence. Some argued for an influx of additional troops to restore order; others were convinced that the problem was instead too much of an already high American profile that had needlessly provoked Iraqi sensibilities. If many liberals had never wanted to go into Iraq, many conservatives had wished to bomb it and leave. Most felt that the Bush administration had underestimated tribal factionalism and had been more interested in moving on to remove other terrorist-sponsoring regimes than in staying on to nation-build in Iraq—a Wilsonianism once rejected by mainstream conservatives and Bush himself during the 2000 presidential campaign.16
Conditions on the ground were getting worse. Already by summer 2003, the American occupiers, even as they increased the number of their patrols, were beginning to play defense in a psychological sense, careful not to restart a full-scale war by sending in more troops and thereby jeopardize their brilliant original three-week victory. While it was understandable that American commanders would move their headquarters into Saddam’s easily defended and empty palaces, the compounds soon proved to be easily caricatured by critics—especially the most ostentatious, the Al Faw resort in the suburbs of Baghdad. The impression grew that the Americans had removed one authoritarian only to install themselves as replacements in his monstrous residences. The initial American reputation of overwhelming power insidiously eroded. Looting of Iraq’s infrastructure went on unchecked until June 2003, when rules of engagement were finally altered to allow for the use of deadly force in guarding critical facilities. Improvised explosive devices began shredding thin-skinned American Humvees—a vehicle designed for behind-the-lines transport, not for frontline battlefield patrolling. On May 23, Paul Bremer had ordered the disbanding of the Iraq army and the expulsion of prominent former Baathists from the Civil Service.
Ideological cleansing might have seemed a wise move to ensure the long-term loyalty of a new army and bureaucracy. Yet the expulsions were proving disastrous in the short term. Unemployed, poor, and armed young Iraqis wandered the streets, fueling new rifts between Sunni supporters of Saddam Hussein and now ascendant Shiite nationalists. Indeed, some 385,000 Iraqi troops, and another 335,000 members of various Iraqi police and security forces, were cashiered without chance of quick reenlistment—despite a belated American attempt to issue back pay in July 2003.17
Tens of thousands of these unemployed former Baathists with military skills found work as insurgents and terrorists. Soon Iraq’s 26 million citizens were no longer sure whether the outnumbered Americans and their allies could stabilize the country, and many began to offer concessions to the apparently ascendant terrorists. The American authorities also did not appreciate that just because hundreds of newly hired Iraqi bureaucrats and officers had no prior ties with Saddam Hussein, that did not necessarily ensure that they were competent, or that they had been driven out of government service only on ideological grounds rather than malfeasance and incompetence. Was it worse to reemploy experienced Baathist bureaucrats or to hire thousands of inexperienced opponents of the Hussein regime? No one seemed to know.
Soon al-Qaeda sensed an opening and pronounced Iraq the central theater in the jihadists’ war against the West. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri both urged terrorists throughout the Middle East to flock to Anbar and Ninewa Provinces to drive out the infidel occupiers. As violence increased in Iraq, once-silenced antiwar critics at home rebounded to argue that the war—supposedly sold fraudulently at its inception—was clearly lost. The occupation and reconstruction were proving as ineptly planned—and thirty times more costly—as the initial three-week war was inspired. Yet there was good news among the chaos: In July, the two murderous sons of Saddam Hussein, Uday and Qusay, were hunted down and killed in Mosul, and the Iraqi Governing Council began functioning as a precursor of the upcoming democratically elected government.
No matter—even former loud supporters of the war argued that the failing postwar occupation justified their reversal of position into even more prominent antiwar critics. The Iraq War was becoming almost as divisive as Vietnam had been. In response, on July 3, 2003, a defiant President Bush said of the insurgents, “bring ’em on.” They did. By August, terrorists had bombed the Jordanian embassy, and soon the United Nations headquarters, killing the popular UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.18
Far worse was still to come in spring 2004, when the good news of the capture of Saddam Hussein (December 2003) had worn off and the Jaish al-Mahdi rebellion, inspired by the Shiite radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, began to spread across south central Iraq. Now the Americans were dealing with both Sunni—Saddam Hussein loyalists as well as al-Qaeda supporters—and Shiite insurgencies. Mass bombings struck the Italian barracks as the terrorists began targeting particular foreign contingents in hopes of shattering the coalition’s unity and sending these smaller deployments in disgrace back to Europe. American helicopters were occasionally shot down, and insurgent missiles were fired at incoming transport jets, imperiling resupply efforts. The impending American presidential elections of 2004 ensured that the increasingly violent war in Iraq became a polarizing wedge issue.
Widespread revelations of undeniable prisoner abuse at the coalition-controlled Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad in late April 2004 tainted American professions of idealism and dovetailed with ongoing criticisms of the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Yet if Abu Ghraib enraged many Americans, the seemingly directionless course of the war infuriated even more. Impotence seemed the order of the day: Iranian sailors with impunity captured a small British contingent; suicide bombers struck at foreign contract workers; and terrorists began to capture and execute foreigners in macabre video beheadings. There was a growing consensus across ideological lines that the war was waged halfheartedly and yet immorally all at once.19
Just prior to the first Abu Ghraib disclosures, al-Qaeda-affiliated Sunni terrorists murdered four U.S. security contractors in Fallujah. Soon videos of their burned and strung-up corpses were flashed across the world. That atrocity prompted a Bush administration vow to retake the troublesome city. The formal siege of Fallujah began on April 4. The assault quickly made good progress, until Paul Bremer, under pressure from the Iraqi interim government, recommended a series of pauses and ceasefires before calling off the engagement altogether on May 1—with terrorists still in de facto control of the city. The Americans had, it seemed, ceded Fallujah to insurgents and killers as a safe haven—and would very soon have to spend more blood and treasure in retaking it after the November election.20
In fact, Americans did just that, reentering the city on November 9, 2004, in Operation Phantom Fury. They recaptured Fallujah by the fifteenth, in the bloodiest single U.S. military urban battle (106 coalition forces killed, over 600 wounded) since the siege of Hue City during the Tet offensive of winter 1968 in Vietnam. The second battle for Fallujah was a decisive American victory and wrought havoc on ex-Baathists and al-Qaeda, but it brought no reassurance to the public—given that the city should have been pacified in April. Like the battles of the Tet offensive, Fallujah was an American victory that somehow led to enemy propaganda advantage. Lives on all sides had been n
eedlessly spent in taking a city that had subsequently been given up—with the foreknowledge that it would have to be retaken when the political climate made such a vital operation more feasible.21
At the heart of public discontent and political opposition to the conflict—as in every war—was always rising U.S. casualties. The so-called peace had seen a steady increase in U.S. losses following the conclusion of the “war”—from 486 dead in 2003 to well over eight hundred fatalities in each subsequent year (2004: 849; 2005: 846; 2006: 822). While the number of Americans killed monthly in action had in fact spiked in 2005 (it would rise only on one occasion again, during the first year of the surge), the rising toll steadily eroded public support. By the midterm elections of 2006, nearly three thousand Americans had been lost—a figure small in comparison to the killed and missing even in some single battles in history such as Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, and Chosun, but felt now to be enormous in times of a supposed postbellum reconstruction.22
From late 2003 through 2006, the U.S. effort found itself in a race against time at home and abroad. Could the heralded Iraqi nationwide elections in January 2005, a growing non-Baathist and reformed Iraqi army, and a rapidly adapting American military quell the insurgencies and foster a new democratic Iraq—before Baathist renegades, al-Qaeda terrorists, Iranian-sponsored Shiite militias, and Kurdish nationalists tore apart the country, or American public support for the war collapsed altogether at the news of rising casualties? What exactly, critics asked, was the United States trying to do in Iraq?
The administration waited until November 2005 to publish, in Matthew Ridgway fashion, a formal declaration of its strategic aims (“The National Strategy for Victory in Iraq”). The manifesto was mostly a plan of “clear, hold, and build,” but one designed to turn over the country as fast as possible to the Iraqis without resulting in chaos.23
Yet the fourth year of the occupation, 2006, seemed even bleaker as U.S. casualties climbed to their highest levels yet. President Bush later called the summer of 2006 “the worst period of my presidency.” More than a thousand roadside bombs were being detonated per week. Counteracting the nightmarish IED became an understandable American obsession. New Shiite and Sunni death squads terrorized civilians, when they were not busy blowing up Americans, and carved out entire urban centers that became no-go zones for Americans.24
Finally, back in Washington there was a Revolt of the Generals. Prominent critics—retired Major General Paul Eaton, retired Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold, Major General John Riggs, Major General Charles Swannack, retired General Anthony Zinni, and retired Major General John Batiste, among several others with long experience and distinguished service in the Middle East—derided not just operations in Iraq but the entire idea of going to war there in the first place. All gave military credence, whether by intent or not, to the antiwar movement’s contention that an ill-conceived war was unwinnable and should be ended.
The generals had gone public—in the New York Times, in Time magazine, and on television—with scathing denunciations of the situation in Iraq, and they were largely canonized by the media. While their critiques were diverse, all seemed to focus upon a shortage of troops, an atmosphere of denial of reality in Washington, and the micromanaging of the war by Secretary Rumsfeld, whom they blamed for the rising violence and called upon to resign. Yet their critique was not uniform or always consistent: Were these high-ranking officers and retired generals calling for new tactics and greater commitment to save Iraq, or simply concluding that the American experience in Iraq was a mistake from the beginning, with ill effects on the military, and that Iraq was no longer worth saving?25
In the second national referendum on the conflict after the presidential election of 2004, Republicans paid the political price for their adherence to the war, losing both houses of Congress in the November 2006 midterm elections. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who had planned to leave if Republicans lost the midterm elections, resigned, seemingly under pressure, even as a radical shake-up of the military leadership in Iraq went ahead. That Rumsfeld left after the elections rather than before seemed to characterize the Bush administration chaos. Republicans in Congress lamented that they had received no pre-election boost from his departure—a commentary on how dismal their confidence in a political comeback had become.
CENTCOM commander General John Abizaid and the theater forces commander in Iraq, General George Casey, either retired or were kicked upstairs. Abizaid was replaced by Admiral William J. Fallon in March 2007. Casey was followed by General David Petraeus in February 2007. It was the consensus that almost all high American civilian and military officials in Iraq from 2003 to 2006—Generals Abizaid, Casey, Franks, and Sanchez, as well as Paul Bremer and Jay Garner—had failed to grasp the nature and dimensions of the Iraq resistance movements.
In February 2006, Sunni terrorists had blown up the golden-tiled dome of the thousand-year-old Shiite al-Askari mosque in Samarra. That spectacular operation set off even more sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite factions—and drew in more money and support from their respective foreign patrons. The bombing also had disrupted the Casey-Abizaid plans to continue troop withdrawals, and it seemed to call into question the entire strategy of American scheduled departures. True, Saddam Hussein had been finally captured (December 13, 2003), tried and convicted (November 5, 2006), and executed (December 30, 2006), but in such a grotesque and humiliating manner that his demise only seemed to polarize Iraqi factions and discredit the idea of democratic justice.26
The more a beleaguered President Bush talked of freedom as a universal value that would resonate in the Middle East, the more Americans and Iraqis alike saw the result only as chaos and mayhem. By late 2006 George Bush’s calls for “freedom” and “democracy” in Iraq were seen as naïve and wishful at home, and yet as colonialist, Machiavellian, and conspiratorial in the Arab world. Liberals saw no political advantage in supporting a conservative’s idealistic calls for supporting democracy in the Middle East; conservatives felt that one of their own was sounding too much like a naïve Wilsonian internationalist rather than a realistic statesman.
The president had once emphasized the positive ripples of Iraq in the surrender of weapons of mass destruction by a worried Muammar Gaddafi regime in Libya, the house arrest of Dr. A. Q. Khan in Pakistan and the dismantling of his nuclear export franchise, the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, and protests for human rights in many Middle East countries, but by the end of 2006 his critics bitterly countered with the Hamas election in Gaza, the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Israeli-Lebanese war of July 2006 as negative fallout from the war. Neither proponents of democratization nor antiwar pessimists seemed to grasp that American policy, whatever its general contours, was more likely to be effective when the United States won wars and seemed preeminent, and more likely to falter when it appeared to be losing conflicts and rendered militarily impotent.
In December 2006, the bipartisan, presidentially appointed Iraq Study Group released its ambivalent findings. The group urged the United States to secure the country, and yet argued for a plan for a foreseeable end to American occupation that was not predicated on calming the country—reflecting the reality that no one really agreed how many U.S. troops were needed in Iraq and for how long. Each side of the war debate championed those elements of the commission’s deliberately ambiguous conclusions that confirmed their own views. The antiwar movement was no longer confined to just the hard left, but encompassed mainstream Democrats—and a growing number of Republicans angry that the war had already lost them both the Senate and the House in the 2006 midterm elections and would soon perhaps lose them the presidency as well in 2008.
Most books and articles on Iraq that appeared between 2005 and 2006 forecast an American defeat characterized by an unending civil war, a wider regional conflict, Somalia-like chaos, or the emergence of an anti-American Iraqi autocrat. By fall 2006, classified intelligence estimates had concluded that al-Qaeda controlled virtually a
ll of Anbar Province.27
The Origins and Implementation of the Surge (2006)
From the moment of Saddam’s fall, a wide divide had grown over how best to reconstruct Iraq.28 The most influential strategy eventually came to be identified with General John Abizaid, the chief of Central Command, and General George Casey, the senior ground commander in Iraq. The latter, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal of April 2004, had replaced Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez in June. Sanchez had seemed unable to prevent such lapses and was often unaware of the public relations disaster that Abu Ghraib had become. Despite being the most junior three-star general in the entire U.S. Army, Sanchez had been appointed to command all ground forces since mid-2003—apparently on the theory that such an untried officer could easily conduct mop-up operations in a calm postwar environment. Yet, in less than a year, it was clear that Sanchez had been overwhelmed by the task.
Casey and Abizaid had concluded that a continued large U.S. presence provoked insurgencies and ensured Iraqi dependency. Instead, the better way to achieve peace in Iraq and foster U.S. interests would be to begin steadily withdrawing American troops. At each scheduled reduction in American forces, the Iraqis would be required to step up to replace them. The pace of transformation would not always be contingent on actual events on the ground, but rather become a catalyst for them. After all, violence was always endemic to Iraq, and American soldiers would be seen as the problem rather than the solution. If the American training wheels did not come off the Iraqi experiment, they argued, the new democracy would never learn to ride on its own. But by late 2005 one U.S. military consultant in Iraq summed up the situation about as bleakly as imaginable: “Those who remain behind to fight over the rotting carcass of the Iraqi state will be the survivors of a process of political Darwinism: ruthless, merciless, and not averse to engaging in ethnic cleansing of the Other.”29