The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (35 page)

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.
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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.
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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 needlessly 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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 all of Anbar Province.
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From the moment of Saddam’s fall, a wide divide had grown over how best to reconstruct Iraq.
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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.”
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Ostensibly, both top generals had reflected the views of their bosses, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the collective opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. All the top brass worried about U.S. commitments elsewhere and about overstretched assets. More important, the theory of a light footprint had seemed to work well in Afghanistan and during the first few weeks after the Iraq War. Perhaps, then, emphasis on nation building was a cause of, not the solution to, the violence? Such a “get in and get out” strategy was also better in accordance with Rumsfeld’s larger views of a light, fast, and more mobile armed forces and reflected his own skepticism about the practicality of democratization and nation building in the Middle East—doubts that had always put him at odds with grand neoconservative strategists and others in the Bush administration.
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Indeed, at first the Casey-Abizaid build-and-hold strategy had seemed to improve the situation, as American casualties declined somewhat. But in February 2006, after the attack on the iconic al-Askari Shiite mosque in Samarra, sectarian violence escalated. Shiites and Sunnis began to battle each other daily and at times combined against Americans and their allies, who were appearing impotent in efforts to reestablish security. Nonetheless, until the end of 2006, the prevailing American strategy
remained a preplanned steady drawdown from 140,000 troops to an envisioned 60,000. The killing of the terrorist Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006 and the appointment of a new effective American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, and new Iraqi cabinet officials all seemed to give the Casey-Abizaid strategy a second wind.