The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  In the fall of 2002, Rand Beers was working at the White House as one of Bush’s top counterterrorism advisors. Beers, who had fought in Vietnam as a Marine officer and had served in administrations going back to Nixon, found the Bush administration’s unilateral rush to war in Iraq quite alarming, as he believed it was both distracting from the unfinished conflict in Afghanistan and would simply confirm bin Laden’s master narrative about America’s negative role in the Muslim world. He had noticed during the winter of 2002 that the number of White House meetings held on Afghanistan had dropped to around one a week, while those held about Iraq were now averaging around five a week.

  In December 2002, Beers attended a meeting at the White House that crystallized his gathering concern about the looming Iraq War. At a cabinet meeting that included the president, the issue was tabled about how best to delegitimize bin Laden. Beers remembered that CIA director George Tenet raised the issue first. Then the Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, generally seen as a hawk, said, “We need to think really hard about this.” Beers remembers that then “the president says, ‘Stop! Victory will take care of that issue! Victory in Iraq will take care of that issue!’” Beers was taken aback, thinking, “He doesn’t get it. He somehow thinks that the use of power in so effective a fashion will … show how powerful we are and then we didn’t have to think about that issue—of delegitimizing bin Laden—because our power would be so clearly visible and dominant.”

  While it is difficult to decipher precisely why Bush was so convinced that Iraq needed to be attacked—by any rational standard, the country did not pose a real threat to the United States—what Bush said at this cabinet meeting shows that he believed that there would be a “demonstration effect” in destroying Saddam’s regime that would deter groups like al-Qaeda or indeed anyone else who might be inclined to attack America. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith confirmed this when he explained the thinking of senior Bush administration officials: “What we did after 9/11 was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States might come. And we did not focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11. Our main goal was preventing the next attack.”

  Five days before the invasion of Iraq, Beers quietly tendered his resignation, something almost unheard-of for a senior member of the National Security Council staff in a time of war. Beers recalls his thinking at the time: “We were taking our eye off bin Laden and we were going to pay for it, both with respect to the capture, kill, dismantle, neutralize effort against al-Qaeda and equally, or more important, our longer-term effort to delegitimize him and his movement.”

  Just as bin Laden made a large strategic error in attacking the United States on 9/11, so too President Bush—having presided over the campaign in Afghanistan that came close to destroying al-Qaeda—would make his own deeply flawed decision to attack Iraq, which breathed new life into bin Laden’s holy war.

  On March 19, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, President Bush issued the order for war: “For the peace of the world and the benefit and freedom of the Iraqi people, I hereby give the order to execute Operation Iraqi Freedom. May God bless the troops.” The next day the American-led invasion of Iraq began. Within three weeks U.S. forces controlled Baghdad and the famous images of the massive statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled from its plinth were broadcast around the world. After a stunning military victory the United States quickly lost the ensuing peace. First, the American military stood by as the country’s government buildings were looted, which implied—rightly, as it turned out—that chaos would replace Saddam’s iron fist. Second, instead of handing the baton of control to an Iraqi interim administration, as had happened in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, the country was subjected to a full-blown American occupation under the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).

  The CPA would prove to be one of the more inept imperial administrations in modern history, preoccupied by fantasies such as turning Iraq’s sclerotic socialist economy into a free-market paradise by privatizing state industries, ending fuel and food subsidies, and introducing a flat tax.

  CPA order number 1, on May 16, 2003, mandated the removal of some thirty thousand members of Saddam’s Baath party from whatever positions they had once held. In one stroke the CPA had swept the board of Iraq’s most experienced administrators in government ministries, universities, hospitals, and state-run industries, many of whom had joined the Baath party for personal gain or simple survival, a common story in totalitarian states. But a much more serious error was CPA order number 2, which dissolved all of the Iraqi military, including the army, intelligence service, Republican Guard units, and their respective ministries. At least four hundred thousand men lost their jobs, many of them Sunnis.

  Colonel Derek J. Harvey, a cerebral, Arabic-speaking intelligence officer serving as the head of the U.S. military cell examining the resulting insurgency, concluded after talking with a number of insurgent leaders that those decisions were pivotal to fueling the insurgency. The Iraqi military and Baath party were dominated by Sunni Iraqis who largely ran the country under Saddam, and the CPA dismissal of them had “flipped the social, economic and political order on its head,” creating a large group of disenfranchised men willing to take up arms against the new rulers of Iraq.

  Simultaneously, the U.S. military did not secure the massive weapons caches that the Iraqi army had stashed around the country, estimated to amount to one million tons. Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the commanding general in Iraq, remembers that there were hundreds of weapons stashes in Baghdad alone and thousands of other ammunition dumps around the country, some of which “covered areas that were measured in kilometers.” There were not enough American soldiers on the ground to secure and destroy the weapons and ammunition sites, a task estimated by the U.S. military to take three to five years to complete. Sanchez recalls that by May 2003 “the Iraqis began holding open-air bazaars that sold everything from small handguns to rocket-propelled grenades.”

  And because the overwhelming priority was to find Saddam’s supposed stockpiles of WMD, as the insurgency gathered steam in the summer of 2003 American policy makers had little understanding of who exactly the insurgents were. CPA official Clayton McManaway remembers that “the imbalance was staggering between the intelligence analysts working on weapons of mass destruction and those working on the insurgency.”

  So the insurgency was born in a perfect storm of American errors—not establishing order; not providing the semblance of any government; confirming to the Sunnis who had once lorded it over Iraq’s Shia majority that they were officially the underdogs, and throwing hundreds of thousands of soldiers onto the streets in an economy where the jobless rate was around 50 percent, while simultaneously ensuring that there was an unlimited supply of weaponry at hand for those angry young men.

  Ali Allawi, the minister of defense in the Iraqi government that replaced the CPA, explains that “the searching of homes without the presence of a male head of household, body searches of women, the use of sniffer dogs, degrading treatment of prisoners, public humiliation of the elderly and notables, all contributed to the view that the Americans had only disdain and contempt for Iraq’s traditions.” When the pictures of naked prisoners at Abu Ghraib, tethered on dog leashes and stacked like cordwood in human pyramids, were broadcast around the world, they served as further confirmation of the supposed contempt Americans had for Arabs.

  Instead of working with Iraq’s powerful Sunni tribes to reel in the insurgency, the CPA rejected such efforts, according to General Sanchez, who remembers that he met repeatedly with Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA, urging him “to work with us in the process of tribal engagement and reconciliation. But he adamantly refused to do so. The reason I believe was more philosophical than practical. The Bush administration’s—and therefore CPA’s—grand vision for Iraq was to create a democratic state where tribes had minimum to no influence in runnin
g the government.” And CIA director George Tenet also remembered the CPA’s hostility to engaging with the tribes. (Three years later, of course, American engagement with the Sunni tribes would help to dramatically tamp down the violence in Iraq.)

  By November 2003, as U.S. military fatalities in the conflict drifted over the four hundred mark, the CIA station chief in Baghdad was seriously worried and wrote a long formal assessment back to Washington that, for reasons which are obscure, is known at the Agency as an AARDWOLF. The AARD-WOLF, titled “the Expanding Insurgency in Iraq,” concluded that the insurgents were largely Sunnis who saw themselves as being excluded from Iraq’s emerging new political order but “believe they will ultimately succeed in returning to power as they have in the past.” As a result of the intensifying insurgency, the CIA station chief predicted that U.S. military deaths would rise to two thousand. His prediction would of course turn out to be optimistic.

  On November 11, 2003, Tenet and a number of the Agency’s top Iraq analysts gathered in the White House Situation Room to brief the president, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, and Bremer about the gathering insurgency. One of the analysts explained that Iraq was just one of a long series of jihads that al-Qaeda had exploited in the past, such as the Afghan war against the Soviets, and this one had come along “at exactly the right time for al-Qaeda,” allowing it to tap into a whole new generation of supporters, including Iraqis.

  Robert Grenier, the CIA’s Iraq mission manager, remembers the several-hour meeting: “We were trying to convey that this was a full-blown insurgency. I kept saying that it was sort of the functional equivalent of civil war.” Grenier says the mood of the meeting was “heavily colored by the presence of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who interrupted one of the analysts who had first used the term insurgency to ask him why he had used that word, explaining, ‘This is not a term that we should use publicly because it conveys legitimacy on them that we obviously don’t want to convey.’” The analyst countered that what was happening in Iraq conformed to the Pentagon’s own definition of an insurgency. Grenier recalls that Bush then said, “We’re not calling it an insurgency. So fine, within the room, we can call it what we want. But just so you all understand, we are not going to go out of here and call it an insurgency.”

  As the violence accelerated, those in charge of the war compounded the problem by acting as if nothing untoward was happening. Bush administration officials seemed to have internalized the Orwellian idea that if you could successfully frame the language that was used to describe the rising violence, then you could snow the public about its underlying reality. As the insurgency picked up steam, Rumsfeld referred to it as “pockets of dead enders” during a Pentagon briefing, while President Bush explained at an Oval Office press conference that “the more progress we make on the ground … the more desperate these killers become.” Ascribing the rising violence to the supposed increasing desperation of the insurgents would become a standard rhetorical device of the administration.

  On June 23, 2004, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz went on MSNBC to assure viewers that “it’s not an insurgency.” Almost exactly a year later, Cheney didn’t quibble about the term insurgency when he was speaking with Larry King on CNN but instead told viewers that it was in its “last throes.” And three years into the war, Cheney told CBS that the insurgents were in a state of “desperation” and denied that Iraq was in the middle of a civil war.

  All of those blithe assessments were quite at odds with the bloodbath that Iraq had become following the invasion. Taking the most conservative figures of Iraqi civilian dead from Iraq Body Count, which relied on morgue data and media accounts, and therefore almost certainly undercounted the total numbers of victims, at least ninety thousand Iraqis had died in the war by the time Bush left office. Another measure of how intense the Iraq civil war became was the numbers of Iraqis who fled their homes or left the country; 4.7 million Iraqis, around a sixth of the population, fled the conflict, about half to other countries and half displaced internally. This was the largest single movement of refugees in the history of the Middle East, and the majority were displaced after 2006, as the war intensified.

  As Iraq spiraled out of control, the Bush administration and its supporters resorted to blaming the media, which was supposedly ignoring the “good news” in Iraq. Curiously, this charge did not accompany the glowing coverage of the rapid overthrow of Saddam, but only came into play after Iraq’s descent into chaos. In 2004 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lamented that positive news stories “apparently aren’t as newsworthy, and they seem not to make the press,” bizarrely citing Iraq’s fielding of an Olympic team as evidence of progress at a time when Iraq was already one of the most dangerous places on the planet.

  Dexter Filkins, a correspondent for the New York Times, recounted what it was actually like to be in Baghdad as the war accelerated: “There was no law anymore, no courts, nothing—there was nothing at all. They kidnapped children now; they killed them and dumped them in the street. The kidnapping gangs bought and sold people; it was like its own terrible ecosystem.” And Filkins recalled that the good news, what little of it existed, was almost impossible to cover: “One of the favorite targets of the suicide bombers were American ribbon-cuttings—a pump station, for instance, or a new school, because of the crowds they brought. It got so bad that the Americans sometimes kept the unveilings of new projects a secret.”

  What was especially cynical about the charge that the media was ignoring the “good news” was that the Iraq War was the most dangerous war the press had covered since World War II. Some 130 journalists were killed in the Iraqi conflict, more than double the number that had died in Vietnam. Indicative of how dangerous it became were the physical changes that took place over the course of the war at the Baghdad bureau of the New York Times, which gradually morphed into a fortress festooned with searchlights and machine gun emplacements on its roof, surrounded by concrete blast walls, a foot thick and twenty feet high, protected by forty armed guards.

  Demands that the U.S. media cover more of the good news in Iraq were strange given that over the course of the war seven American journalists were kidnapped and two were killed, and simply surviving the mayhem of what was one of the world’s most lethal wars became a daily chore for the press. Just to cover the story in Baghdad journalists had first to survive the five-mile trip between Baghdad International Airport and the capital, a road known as “Route Irish,” which was a gantlet of suicide bombers and rocket attacks during the first two years of the war. In one three-month period alone between September and November 2004, Route Irish was the scene of eighteen suicide bombings.

  At the height of the Iraqi conflict, which like many civil wars combined aspects of an insurgency with those of a sectarian conflict, one hundred civilians were dying every day, some in the most unspeakable manner, killed by having their skulls drilled in. By October 2006, more than three thousand civilians were dying a month.

  No one person was more responsible for all this chaos than a Jordanian gangster turned religious zealot known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi would rise to become the pathologically brutal leader of the group known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq by a circuitous route that would take him from a Jordanian prison cell to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and finally to Iraq. Zarqawi embraced a particularly virulent form of militant Islam while in prison in Jordan during the 1990s, an experience that would sharpen his zeal, as it had for al-Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri. But there the resemblance ended, for while Zawahiri is the scion of a family of ambassadors, lawyers, and clerics and is himself a surgeon, Zarqawi, one of a family of ten born into an impoverished Bedouin family, came up from the mean streets of the city of Zarqa, a charmless conglomeration of concrete block houses and trash-strewn streets just north of Amman, the Jordanian capital. Zarqawi whiled away his youth in Zarqa (hence his nom de jihad), dropping out of high school, running with gangs, and boozing, a vice discouraged by Islam. Zarqawi opened a v
ideo rental store, which failed. Even his mother conceded to a journalist, “He wasn’t that smart.”

  Zarqawi acquired his first taste for warfare during the jihad against the communists in Afghanistan. Fellow Jordanian Hutaifa Azzam met Zarqawi on Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan in 1990 while the mujahideen were besieging the town of Khost. Azzam remembers that Zarqawi, then in his mid twenties, was a “street guy” with a long rap sheet, a brawler quick with a knife and a propensity for drink, who had come to fight in the holy war because he had “finally decided to return to Allah.” Azzam also remembers that the blood ran cold in Zarqawi’s veins. “He doesn’t know what is the meaning of frightened or to be afraid. He can fight an army alone.”

  After the fall of the communist regime in Afghanistan, Zarqawi returned to Jordan in 1993, by now a militant with some serious jihad cred. Zarqawi began conspiring to overthrow the Jordanian government and a year later he was jailed. In prison Zarqawi worked out manically, learned the Koran by heart, and gradually rose to become a jailhouse capo whom other inmates learned to fear and to obey without question. Zarqawi had now completed his transformation from a hoodlum to a steely Islamist warrior, so devoid of the normal range of human emotions that even those close to him referred to him as Al Ghraib, “the Stranger,” the name he would use to sign his letters to family members.

  In March 1999, the newly crowned king of Jordan, Abdullah II, gave an amnesty to thousands of political prisoners, among them Zarqawi, who quickly made his way back to Afghanistan. Letting Zarqawi go free was a decision that the Jordanians would have good reason to regret in the coming years. Around the time of the new millennium, Zarqawi’s group in Jordan plotted to blow up a Radisson hotel in Amman and other sites frequented by Western tourists. This plot was broken up by Jordanian intelligence but the group did succeed in killing Laurence Foley, an American diplomat, who was assassinated at his home in the Jordanian capital on October 28, 2002.