American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (46 page)

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld belittled journalists who called the anti-American attacks in Iraq an insurgency. There were no “insurgents” or “guerrillas,” Rumsfeld insisted, only “terrorists” or “regime remnants” or “dead-enders.” When asked if there was an exit strategy for Iraq he said: “The goal is not to reduce the number of U.S. forces in Iraq. It is not to develop an exit strategy. Our exit strategy is success.” When asked if the Iraq War was turning into a quagmire with no end in sight, he echoed Tommy Franks, “
I don’t do quagmires
.” He might just as well have said, “I don’t do Vietnams.”

However, it did not take long for the forbidden words to appear again. As the insurgency intensified, the administration could no longer deny it away. And evidence of progress was so scarce Bush eventually
fell back on body counts
to demonstrate military success. Near the end of 2006, the president told reporters: “Offensive operations by Iraq and coalition forces against terrorists and insurgents and death squad leaders have yielded positive results. In the months of October, November, and the first week of December, we have killed or captured nearly 5,900 of the enemy.”

But body counts were no more a sign of progress in Iraq than they were in Vietnam. With no end in sight, the Bush administration stopped talking about bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq. It was finally time to think of an exit strategy, a way to establish just enough stability to allow the United States to withdraw without appearing to be defeated. In 2007, Bush announced a new approach, an increase in U.S. troops to provide more security and training until Iraqi forces could do the job themselves. Once again avoiding a Vietnam coded term—“escalation”—the buildup was called a “surge,” a word sounding more muscular and temporary. Along with that came a much-hyped approach to the war called “counterinsurgency
.”
Here, finally, was a Vietnam word that had been dusted off and reintroduced without embarrassment or denial.

In fact, counterinsurgency was suddenly celebrated as if it were a brand-new military philosophy, a novel strategy with its own acronym: COIN. The most famous apostle of COIN was General David Petraeus. He soon became a media sensation, especially among the hard-core supporters of the Iraq War. In 2008, the
Weekly Standard
described Petraeus as a divine blessing: “
God has apparently seen fit
to give the U.S. Army a great general in this time of need.”

As Petraeus well knew, counterinsurgency was not a new idea. The United States had fought insurgencies throughout much of its history, most obviously in Vietnam. And in the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration said it had a sophisticated understanding of counterinsurgency that would defeat the Viet Cong guerrillas of South Vietnam, not just by killing them on the battlefield but by winning the hearts and minds of the entire population. It was an utter failure. The vast majority of South Vietnamese never came to trust either the Americans or the U.S.-backed government in Saigon.

Counterinsurgency was so discredited by defeat in Vietnam that the military establishment did everything possible to expunge its memory. Post-Vietnam military training focused almost entirely on conventional, big-unit operations, with American troops preparing for major tank battles against the Soviet Union in places like the Fulda Gap, in Germany. Ambitious officers in the 1980s and ’90s generally viewed
counterinsurgency as a career killer
.

But not David Petraeus. He believed COIN would be resurrected as an effective combat strategy, and he hitched his very large ambition to that faith. A 1974 graduate of West Point, Petraeus came of age as the Vietnam War was winding down. He never served there. For him, Vietnam was not a harrowing personal experience, but a fascinating case study to be mined for lessons. It became the subject of his 1987 Princeton PhD dissertation. The Vietnam War, he argued, led the military to conclude that neither the public nor civilian officials could tolerate long wars. No matter how well the military executed its mission—and Petraeus had only minor criticisms of the military’s performance in Vietnam—the home front could not be trusted to support a long “dirty” war. Accordingly, Petraeus worried, the military came to doubt its ability “to conduct a successful large-scale counterinsurgency.” Vietnam had a “
chastening effect
” on the military’s “can-do” attitude and left it with too much “caution,” “uncertainty,” and “restraint.” Though he couched his criticism politely, Petraeus believed the “frustrating experience of Vietnam” had been “traumatic” enough to “exercise unwarranted tyranny over the minds of decision-makers.” As a result, there had been no fresh thinking about counterinsurgency.

And for all the challenges of waging counterinsurgencies, Petraeus argued, the United States had to be prepared to fight them. In fact, it already was. Whatever reluctance the military establishment might have about fighting “nasty little wars,” the United States was directly or indirectly involved in a dozen of them in the 1980s.

Starting in the late ’80s, Petraeus cultivated a group of protégés who shared his faith in COIN and promoted it with such enthusiasm they began calling themselves COINdinistas, as if they were themselves insurgents within the American military command. The vast majority of their peers were skeptical or disdainful of COIN because it required so much. In addition to fighting, soldiers were expected to train foreign troops, provide basic services, cultivate political relationships, and carry out a variety of other activities dubbed “military operations other than war” (MOOTW). Many old-school hard-chargers spat out the acronym like a swearword: “
moot
-wah.” “
Real men don’t do
moot
-wah
!” one general was said to have claimed.

Petraeus was determined to prove that COIN could be cool, manly, and effective. Anyone who doubted it was welcome to join him for a blistering seven-mile run. In 2003, he had an opportunity to put his ideas into practice during his first tour in Iraq. As commander of the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul he quickly realized that neither the Pentagon nor the Bush administration had a plan to secure or rebuild Iraq in the wake of the rapid defeat of Saddam Hussein and his army. As a result, Petraeus had complete latitude to implement his own. He turned his command into an exercise in nation building, hanging posters around his base reading “
What Have You Done
to Win Iraqi Hearts and Minds Today?”

In Mosul, the Petraeus legend soared. He was his own best promoter. Journalists were cultivated and visiting congressmen were treated to slick PowerPoint briefings showing the great achievements—roads constructed, electricity restored, police trained, insurgents pacified. Petraeus was held up as an innovator and intellectual, a thinking man’s general, a man who could step into the most complex and volatile landscapes and work wonders. While the rest of Iraq descended into chaos, Petraeus seemed to be creating an oasis of security and hope.

That was the tenor of his positive press. A closer examination of the facts suggests a gloomier reality. Where Petraeus claimed to have replaced aggressive cordon and search operations with friendlier door knocking, as his yearlong tour continued he significantly escalated the number of violent raids and roundups of suspects. And far from pacifying Mosul,
the number of insurgent attacks climbed
steeply from 45 in June 2003, to 72 in August, to 121 in December.

And whatever he achieved soon came undone. In November 2004, the Mosul police force that Petraeus had trained and extolled quickly collapsed in response to an insurgent assault. Thirty-two hundred out of the city’s four thousand policemen abandoned their posts in an act of mass, simultaneous desertion. The police chief was among the deserters. Insurgents captured hundreds of weapons, uniforms, and police cars. But because Petraeus was no longer in Mosul when the disaster hit, his reputation was undamaged.

In fact, it continued to grow, aided by an improbable literary success. Petraeus oversaw the 2007 publication of
The U.S.
Army and Marine
Counterinsurgency Field Manual
. It represented the first time in a generation that the two services had revised their counterinsurgency doctrine. When it was first posted online, it was downloaded more than two million times in two months. A paperback edition was soon published.

Given all that attention, you might expect the
Manual
to offer a ringing endorsement of counterinsurgency and specific new techniques for how to make it work. In fact, it offers neither. It is not a manual so much as a set of general principles served up with a basketful of caveats. COIN, we learn, is an “extremely complex form of warfare” that requires “
unity of effort
” at “every echelon,” along with “patience,” “mutual trust,” and “public support.” You have to understand the language, culture, and history of the “host” nation. You have to convince the people to support the government. You have to provide security and basic services. You have to keep the insurgents away from the people. You have to get reliable intelligence. You have to avoid killing civilians. And even if you do all of this and more, the result may not look anything like “victory.” The best that might be achieved is an improved level of order and stability.

The emphasis on complexity may explain some of the
Manual
’s appeal. Many saw it as a sophisticated approach to the vexing challenges of insurgency and nation building. Surely officers this smart would not make the same mistakes made in Vietnam. Oddly, however, the
Manual
mentions the Vietnam War only in passing. The most extended reference (two pages) praises that war’s “most successful” COIN operation, a program called Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS), which was “generally led, planned, and executed well.” It offers only the mildest historical criticism. For example, “
the body count
only communicated a small part of the information commanders needed to assess their operations. It was therefore misleading.”

Nor does the
Manual
provide detailed instructions on how to implement COIN best practices. It is full of vague, redundant platitudes like this: “
Genuine compassion and empathy
for the populace provide an effective weapon against insurgents.” But how do you train soldiers in, say, Helmand Province to be compassionate toward a populace that includes many people who regard Americans as hostile invaders and want to kill them? And how can soldiers effectively win hearts and minds where they are also conducting “kill or capture” raids?

The
Manual
does not answer those questions. But it does insist that the military must produce positive stories about its mission. After all, counterinsurgency is largely a “
war of perceptions
.” Commanders need to be “proactive” with the media in order to “ensure proper coverage.” They must “help the media tell the story.” It is crucial, for example, to keep “transmitting the repetitive themes of H[ost] N[ation] government accomplishments and insurgent violence against the populace.” Whatever the reality, “proper coverage” stresses American success and insurgent evil. In the modern military’s obsession with news management you can hear the echo of Bush’s aide:
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality
.

Petraeus got the coverage he sought in Mosul despite the mounting insurgency. He was even more heralded once he took command of the entire war in June 2007. Within days of arriving, he gathered his top generals and urged them to cultivate reporters. “
Sixty percent of this thing is information
.” But with the “surge” of 35,000 more troops, Petraeus was under great pressure to demonstrate actual progress.

With sectarian killing still rife in Baghdad, Petraeus directed attention to the “stunning reversal” in Anbar Province. It was true—there had been a substantial decline in violence there, but much of it happened before Petraeus took command and before the U.S. surge. The main cause was the so-called
Sunni Awakening
—a movement filled with former anti-American insurgents who had lost so many lives to Shia militias and U.S. forces they were ready to cut a deal. In return for bags of cash handed out by the U.S. military, the Sunnis effectively policed the province and eventually other parts of Iraq. It was an old-fashioned payoff to former enemies.

The eventual decline in violence in Baghdad also had little to do with Petraeus or a new American strategy. Rather, the Shia militias had engaged in such effective ethnic cleansing that they controlled most of the city. The Sunnis (who had once controlled Baghdad) had been killed or pushed into their own sectarian enclaves. That produced at least a temporary lull in violence.

Despite the major media’s coronation of “King David” Petraeus and his surge, the American people did not embrace the war. In fact, antiwar opinion increased. By 2009, a poll showed that
only 24 percent of Americans
believed the war was “worth the loss of American life and other costs of attacking Iraq.” Yet many who turned against the war also turned away from it. It was easy to ignore, since the media had long since relegated Iraq to the back pages.

When the United States finally withdrew in 2011, President Obama claimed that we had left behind a “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq.” In fact, the U.S.
departed a catastrophe
it had created. Iraq remained a shattered nation. There was still no peace, no national reconciliation, no real democracy, and no significant rebuilding. The infrastructure was far worse than it was prior to the U.S. invasion. More than two million people had fled the nation, including a large number of the most skilled. The Iraqi government ranked as one of the three most corrupt in the world. Women had fewer rights and opportunities than before the war. There was more ethnic segregation. Nearly 200,000 Iraqis have died as a direct result of the violence initiated by the U.S. invasion, the majority of them civilians. Even more have died from war-related diseases and deprivations. The American losses were by far the greatest since Vietnam—4,489 service members and at least 1,500 civilian contractors. The economic cost was staggering—now projected to be $2–3 trillion. Before the invasion, al-Qaeda had no presence in Iraq. Shortly after U.S. withdrawal al-Qaeda was conducting forty mass-casualty attacks per month. In July 2013 an al-Qaeda raid on Abu Ghraib prison freed nearly a thousand inmates, including many al-Qaeda members.