While McChrystal was reorganizing JSOC, the White House and Pentagon were demanding results in Iraq. By late 2003, the war the United States had already declared won was just beginning. The neocons’ vision for Iraq and their ill-conceived policies were fueling a nascent insurgency from both Sunnis and Shiites alike. The ground was laid during the year that L. Paul Bremer was running Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority.
BREMER WAS A CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC CONVERT who had cut his teeth in government working for Republican administrations and was respected by right-wing evangelicals and neoconservatives alike. Forty-eight hours after 9/11, Bremer wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Our retribution must move beyond the limp-wristed attacks of the past decade, actions that seemed designed to ‘signal’ our seriousness to the terrorists without inflicting real damage. Naturally, their feebleness demonstrated the opposite. This time the terrorists and their supporters must be crushed. This will mean war with one or more countries. And it will be a long war, not one of the ‘Made for TV’ variety.” Bremer concluded, “We must avoid a mindless search for an international ‘consensus’ for our actions. Today, many nations are expressing support and understanding for America’s wounds. Tomorrow, we will know who our true friends are.”
In mid-April 2003, “Scooter” Libby and Paul Wolfowitz contacted Bremer about taking “the job of running the occupation of Iraq.” By mid-May, Bremer was in Baghdad, leading the Coalition Provisional Authority.
During his year in Iraq, Bremer was a highly confrontational viceroy who traveled the country in a Brooks Brothers suit coat and Timberland boots. He described himself as “the only paramount authority figure—other than dictator Saddam Hussein—that most Iraqis had ever known.” Bremer’s first official initiative, reportedly the brainchild of Rumsfeld and his neoconservative deputy, Douglas Feith, was dissolving the Iraqi military and initiating a process of “de-Baathification,” which in Iraq meant a banishment of some of the country’s finest minds from the reconstruction and political process because party membership had been a requirement for many jobs in Saddam-era Iraq. Bremer’s “Order 1” resulted in the firing of thousands of schoolteachers, doctors, nurses and other state workers, while sparking a major increase in rage and disillusionment. Iraqis saw Bremer picking up Saddam’s governing style and political witch-hunt tactics. In practical terms, Bremer’s moves sent a message to many Iraqis that they would have little say in their future, a future that increasingly looked bleak and familiar. Bremer’s “Order 2”—disbanding the Iraqi military—meant that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers were forced out of work and left without a pension. “That was the week we made 450,000 enemies on the ground in Iraq,” one US official told the New York Times Magazine.
Within a month of Bremer’s arrival, talk of a national uprising had begun. As the bloody impact of his decision to dissolve the military spread, Bremer amped up his inflammatory rhetoric. “We are going to fight them and impose our will on them and we will capture or, if necessary, kill them until we have imposed law and order upon this country,” he declared.
On May 1, President Bush, wearing a bomber jacket, stood on the USS Abraham Lincoln before a large “Mission Accomplished” banner. “My fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” he declared. “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” It was a fairy tale. The Saddam regime may have been deposed and Saddam’s days were numbered (not long after Bush’s speech, on July 23, 2003, Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed in a JSOC raid), but a guerrilla war—one with multiple warring forces—was just beginning.
Rumsfeld rejected claims that the United States was facing a “guerrilla” insurgency. “I guess the reason I don’t use the phrase ‘guerrilla war,’” he quipped, “is because there isn’t one.” But Rumsfeld’s newly appointed CENTCOM chief, who was technically the on-the-ground commander of the Iraq War, disagreed. General John Abizaid said at a July 2003 press conference at the Pentagon that the United States was now facing a “classical guerrilla-type war” in Iraq. Abizaid knew another front of resistance was opening, and it was not being run by Saddam’s “henchmen.” By mid-August 2003, three months after Bremer arrived in Baghdad, resistance attacks against US forces and Iraqi “collaborators” were a daily occurrence. New militias were forming, with both Sunni and Shiite groups attacking American troops. Rumsfeld and Bush both downplayed the extent of the uprisings in Iraq, saying they were being driven by fallen regime “dead-enders,” “criminals,” “looters,” “terrorists,” “anti-Iraqi forces” and “those influenced by Iran.” But there was one fact they couldn’t deny: The number of Americans returning home in tin coffins was exploding as attacks against US forces increased by the day. “We believe we have a significant terrorist threat in the country, which is new,” Bremer finally acknowledged on August 12. “We take this very seriously.”
On August 19, a Kamaz flatbed truck pulled up to the United Nations headquarters at Baghdad’s Canal Hotel and parked just below the office window of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations special representative in Iraq. Inside the building, a press conference was under way. Moments later, a massive explosion rocked the building. The truck had been driven by a suicide bomber and was filled with explosives, including a five-hundred-pound bomb from the former Iraqi military’s reserves. In all, twenty-two people were killed, including de Mello. More than one hundred were injured. The United States and the United Nations alleged that the bomber had been sent by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born militant who headed up the group Jama’at al Tawhid wa’al Jihad. A few days after the bombing, Rumsfeld delivered a speech at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention. “We still face determined adversaries, as we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, the dead-enders are still with us, those remnants of the defeated regimes who’ll go on fighting long after their cause is lost,” Rumsfeld declared. “There are some today who are surprised that there are still pockets of resistance in Iraq, and they suggest that this represents some sort of failure on the part of the Coalition. But this is not the case. Indeed I suspect that some of you in this hall today, especially those who served in Germany during World War II or in the period immediately after the war were not surprised that some Ba’athists have kept on fighting. You will recall that some dead-enders fought on during and after the defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany.”
Rumsfeld tried to cling to the idea that the main resistance in Iraq was coming from such quarters, but the reality was, the most lethal forces rising in Iraq were responding to the invasion and occupation. While the United States was fighting multiple Sunni insurgent groups, Shiite leader Moqtada al Sadr was waging an uprising against the United States, along with a “hearts and minds” campaign to provide basic services to Iraqi neighborhoods. Because Sadr had brokered a tenuous alliance with some Sunni resistance groups, the United States was facing the possibility of a popular nationalist rebellion.
After the August bombing, the United Nations withdrew most of its six hundred international personnel from Iraq. In September 2003, the UN complex was bombed a second time, spurring the United Nations to withdraw all remaining non-Iraqi employees from the country. It was a powerful symbol of how far from accomplished the US mission in Iraq actually was.
That month, McChrystal became JSOC commander, tasked with crushing the insurgency that had been sparked by his bosses’ own policies, about which he had harbored doubts. Next to Saddam and his henchmen, the Jordanian terrorist Zarqawi, who had come to Iraq to fight against the US occupation, would become target number one of McChrystal’s task force.
Zarqawi had traveled to Afghanistan to fight with the US-backed mujahedeen against the Soviet occupation. In early 2000, he had been indicted in absentia in a Jordanian court for plotting to attack American and Israeli tourists. The Bush administration had tried to use Zarqawi to prove an al Qaeda tie to Iraq, after Zarqawi allegedly received medical treatment in Baghdad in 2002. When Bush made his case in a natio
nally televised address on October 7, 2002, that Saddam’s regime posed a “grave threat,” he cited “high-level contacts” between Saddam’s government and al Qaeda, charging that “some al-Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al-Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks.” In his UN speech, Colin Powell called Zarqawi the leader of a “deadly terrorist network” that had been given safe haven by Saddam’s government. But the charge that Zarqawi was in Baghdad with the consent of the Iraqi government was a dubious one. Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda were rivals. Nonetheless, after the invasion, Zarqawi would eventually have a $25 million bounty on his head and JSOC hunting him in Iraq.
There is no doubt that Zarqawi was a savage character, but he was also a convenient villain for the United States. Washington was facing a mounting resistance in Iraq, and by inflating Zarqawi’s importance, it could place the fight in Iraq within the context of the broader war on terror. Zarqawi played his role perfectly. A year after the UN bombing, Zarqawi and his group would pledge allegiance to Osama bin Laden and form al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, also known as al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Despite his declaration of loyalty, Zarqawi would ultimately prove problematic for al Qaeda. His ruthless attacks on Muslims—in both Iraq and Jordan—would eventually play into the hands of the US occupation and Washington’s propaganda campaign against the Iraqi resistance.
IRAQ WOULD SERVE AS A laboratory for creating a new kill/capture machine, centered on JSOC, run by McChrystal and accountable to no one but a small group of White House and Pentagon insiders. Within months, the targeted kill/capture program would begin to resemble the CIA’s Phoenix Program from the Vietnam War, in which the Agency, supported by US Special Operations Forces and indigenous militias, carried out a vicious campaign to “neutralize” the Vietcong and its support networks. In plain terms, the Phoenix Program was effectively a well-organized death squad. “They killed huge numbers, thousands and thousands, of suspected Vietcong operatives,” said Gareth Porter, an independent historian who has written extensively about the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, as well as the history of JSOC. “Phoenix was in fact the grandfather of [the JSOC] approach to a war.”
Dealing with the Iraq insurgency would become an almost totally consuming task for the bulk of America’s most elite forces, though Rumsfeld and Cheney had global aspirations for JSOC’s expanded use. Rumsfeld signed an executive order on September 16, 2003—the same month that Holland retired as SOCOM commander, and General Bryan “Doug” Brown took over—establishing JSOC as the principal counterterrorism (CT) force of the United States. It contained preauthorized lists of fifteen countries where CT action might be taken and specified which actions could be carried out. Brown, a SOF vet and founding member of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, told the Senate that “the nexus of the Department of Defense’s global war on terrorism is at USSOCOM.” SOCOM, a newly established, free-standing command, would be “the lead combatant commander for planning, synchronizing, and as directed, executing global operations against terrorist networks in coordination with other combatant commanders.” A month later, Rumsfeld was demanding answers from his senior advisers. “Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against them?” Rumsfeld wrote in a memo to Wolfowitz, Feith and Myers.
It was an interesting question and one many were debating in the counterterrorism community. But, as al Qaeda’s leadership fled to countries throughout the Horn of Africa and Arabian Peninsula and into Pakistan, the premier US counterterrorism force would be given orders to focus entirely on a nation that had no al Qaeda presence before the US tanks rolled in a year earlier. The Pentagon had distributed decks of playing cards to troops in Iraq, assessing a value to various leaders of the former Baath regime. Saddam was the ace of spades. The tradition dated back to the US Civil War. But this time around, the cards were produced not just for the military but as a consumer product sold to the public. The Bush administration seemed to believe its own propaganda about how easy victory would be in Iraq, reasoning that by destroying the Baath Party and killing or capturing its leaders, the war could be won swiftly.
When McChrystal hit the ground in Iraq in October 2003, his Task Force 20, renamed Task Force 121, would lead the hunt. Its members included JSOC forces, British SAS commandos and some local Iraqi teams. Their job was to plow through the deck of cards. “The mission of the direct action, special operations task force was really to focus on the old regime leadership,” recalled Andrew Exum, who led a platoon of Rangers in Iraq as part of McChrystal’s task force. “The deck of cards—you know, the most wanted folks. I think that was based largely on the idea that the insurgency in Iraq, the fighting, kind of goes away if a lot of these guys go away.” That theory would prove to be fatally flawed.
Whatever the strategic value of the effort, however, it had some success in its immediate goals—taking out selected individual targets. At McChrystal’s right hand as the forward commander of JSOC’s High Value Targeting task force was William McRaven, a Navy SEAL renowned for his scholarly ambition. Although McChrystal would receive much of the credit for building up JSOC’s capabilities and overseeing its greatest hits, people in the Special Ops community knew that many of the key achievements of the HVT Task Force were largely McRaven’s doing.
Raised in San Antonio, Texas, McRaven grew up with an appreciation for the military—his father flew Spitfire fighter planes in World War II. The young Bill McRaven was a big fan of James Bond films—he was particularly enthralled by Sean Connery’s underwater exploits in Thunderball, according to his sister. “That was his favorite!” Nan McRaven told Time magazine. “I said to him, ‘You can grow up to be 007.’ I guess he did.”
McRaven graduated from the University of Texas in 1977 with a degree in journalism. He enrolled in Navy ROTC on campus, and right after graduating with an ensign’s commission, he entered SEAL training. After finishing his training he was deployed to the Philippines. When Richard Marcinko created the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, SEAL Team 6, in 1982, he asked McRaven to lead one of the constituent SEAL teams. Marcinko’s freewheeling leadership soon put him at loggerheads with his young lieutenant. Marcinko bought his SEALS expensive cars and financed debauched parties on navy property that included prostitutes. “The SEALS were happy, I was happy, and nobody was getting in trouble except Bill McRaven,” Marcinko told Time magazine, remembering McRaven as a killjoy. “He was a bright guy, but he didn’t like my rude and crude way. If I was a loose cannon, he was too rigid. He took the special out of special warfare.” McRaven saw it differently. “I was not some white knight on a horse going with my lance against the windmill,” McRaven countered. Marcinko “was the boss, I was a very young lieutenant. There were some things I didn’t think were exactly right...and he relieved me” of duty. According to a former Special Forces commander, Marcinko asked McRaven to carry out “some questionable activities,” adding that McRaven refused and “would not back down.” Other officers in SEAL Team 6 reportedly found McRaven’s integrity heroic, but after his run-in with Marcinko, “thought it was the end of his career.”
Actually, it was Marcinko whose career in black ops was coming to an abrupt end—while McRaven’s was just getting started. In March 1990, Marcinko was sentenced to twenty-one months in prison on charges he defrauded the US government in a weapons sale. McRaven was soon given command of a platoon in SEAL Team 4, focusing on South and Central America. Very few details are publicly available about McRaven’s combat history, though he was a “task unit” leader in the Persian Gulf War, according to his official biography. In 1991, he headed to the Naval Postgraduate School, and graduated in 1993. He helped to establish the Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict program and was its first graduate. He received a dual degree, in SO/LIC and national security a
ffairs. His graduate thesis, “The Theory of Special Operations,” was published in book form and would become widely read and taught. The book analyzed several key Special Ops battles from World War II to Vietnam, presenting lessons that could be learned for future conflicts and wars. It is considered a seminal text in the study of Special Operations warfare. “Bill is reputed to be the smartest SEAL that ever lived,” a former commander said in 2004. McRaven went on to serve as a “task group commander” in the Middle East, and he also commanded SEAL Team 3, which operates in Southwest Asia. By 2001, he was a naval captain, commodore of the SEALS Special Naval Warfare Group 1.
Shortly after 9/11, McRaven’s SEAL team deployed to Afghanistan, but its commander could not join them. Two months before 9/11, McRaven had fractured his pelvis and part of his back during a parachute jump near his base in Coronado, California. Some predicted he might never fight again, let alone walk normally. McRaven resigned his command, but his career was not over. If anything, the parachute accident was fortuitous. Although McRaven was not on the battlefield initially, he would become a major player in the strategy that was to shape US counterterrorism operations for many years to come. Wayne Downing, newly appointed the deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, asked McRaven to join his staff at the White House. McRaven ended up working for Downing for two years while he recovered from his injuries and is credited with having been the principal author of Bush’s “National Strategy for Combating Terrorism.” It was not a cushy job for a sidelined warrior. Captain McRaven would become the primary JSOC figure inside the National Security Council and coordinated the Office of Combating Terrorism. Among his jobs would be vetting and assembling lists of High Value Targets for JSOC to hunt down. He was one of the key players in militarizing US counterterror policy and building up the infrastructure for the creation of kill lists. McRaven’s time at the NSC would put him on a path to becoming one of the most powerful figures in US military history and a transformative figure in the institutionalization of assassination as a central component of US national security policy.
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