The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (34 page)

Nonetheless, the first few days of the Iraq War confirmed prewar confidence. Donald Rumsfeld’s successful strategy in Afghanistan of a “light footprint” was repeated once more against Saddam Hussein. Fewer than two hundred thousand American and coalition troops quickly marched into a country of 26 million from Kuwait, brushing aside most organized resistance. Saddam’s Baathist government was removed in less than three weeks (March 20–April 9) in an effective campaign that cost just 139 U.S. military personnel. “Shock and awe” pyrotechnics were supposed to have sent both the Iraqi military and civilian population into panic without causing substantial material damage that might impair postwar nation building.

Critics who had either predicted another Vietnam quagmire or argued for a half-million-man force comparable to that of Gulf War I at that initial point seemed to have been proven wrong. Numerous Iraqis appeared jubilant as they toppled Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad statue. Kurdistan was liberated amid a sea of pro-American euphoria. There were no mass disruptions on the Arab street. Nor did global Islamic terrorism spike. Iraq seemed relatively calm. Oil prices soon returned to normal levels. On May 1, 2003, George Bush gave a formal victory speech on the aircraft carrier
Abraham Lincoln,
declaring major combat operations over in Iraq—beneath an enormous banner triumphantly proclaiming MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. The commander in chief had just won two wars in the Middle East, against the region’s most violent regimes, at the cost of only 151 American fatalities.
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Three soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines (1/7), armed with M16A2 assault rifles, enter one of Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad palaces during the first weeks of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Photo by Lance Corporal Kevin C. Quihuis Jr., courtesy of the Department of Defense.

Almost immediately the initial rapture faded. The idea of “mission accomplished” proved premature and soon embarrassing. The expected large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize. That fact was especially awkward to the Bush administration because the rationale for war had not emphasized the majority of quite different congressional authorizations. Instead, enormous depots of conventional artillery shells and bombs were uncovered—and left unguarded—providing the enemy with the ingredients for thousands of future improvised explosive devices.

Saddam Hussein and his sons were nowhere to be found. Compounding the confusion, General Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM (United States
Central Command) commander in charge of the U.S. presence in the Middle East, who had overseen the invasion, abruptly announced his intention to retire on May 22, 2003. He gave the impression that he wished to leave Iraq before the unexpectedly escalating violence marred his swift victory over Saddam—and tarnished his postmilitary prospects in the private sector. By 2004, Franks had already published his memoirs. As the violence was heating up, he had written a wish list of regrets—a host of “I wish that’s”—followed by laments over the inability of the State Department and Pentagon to work together. The former general Franks in print regretted the lack of an international conference on rebuilding Iraq, the “melting away of the Iraqi army,” and so on—all without apparent recognition that his own retirement had added to the confusion amid an ongoing insurgency. More regrettably, General Franks, at a key moment when proven U.S. leadership was needed in Baghdad, had ordered the withdrawal of the Coalition Forces Land Component Commander (Lt. Gen. John Abizaid) and his headquarters from Iraq, and then compounded the error by ordering its replacement with the understaffed and poorly led Coalition Joint Task Force 7 (under the newly promoted Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez).

Meanwhile, the first American regent of Iraq, Lieutenant General (Ret.) Jay Garner, lasted in his position only a few weeks, after terrorism increased, lawlessness prevailed, and his calls for prompt Iraqi elections were determined to be unrealistic. Few later knew what to make of Garner’s brief tenure—whether he had been inept or carefully crafting plans that might have worked had he been given a fair opportunity and not undercut by infighting in the administration. What was increasingly apparent, however, was that a growing fight between Secretary of State Colin Powell’s State Department and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon over how postwar Iraq should be run would only escalate—and be played out quite publicly in the press.

By May 11, 2003, Paul Bremer was appointed the new proconsul, with vastly expanded powers. Bremer was a former managing director of Kissinger and Associates. His own background did not include Mideast expertise. His appointment and residence in the heavily guarded Green Zone enclave did little to dispel rumors of American neocolonial ambitions in the oil-rich Gulf. It was also unclear at first to whom, exactly, he reported, whether President Bush, the State Department, or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. Soon, however, it became clear that Bremer answered more or less directly to the president, and that meant that he usually
bypassed the Pentagon in his initial decisions—even though the military, rather than their civilian overseers, were still far more engaged in organizing resistance to the insurgency. That ensured a dangerous bifurcation between civilian and military efforts in Iraq. Secretary of State Colin Powell was purportedly voicing concerns about his administration’s messy war off the record, both at home and abroad. In just a few weeks the so-called reconstruction seemed as disorganized as the military campaign had been nearly flawless. As the violence increased, those in Congress and the Pentagon with prior, but largely private, doubts about the war sought more explicit redemption from the press, as if they were not responsible for the ramifications of a war that they had opposed.
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In addition to problems of a unified military and civilian command, the Turkish Parliament at the final buildup to the Iraq War had unexpectedly denied the American 4th Infantry Division transit into Iraq from the north. That rejection in hindsight did not seem to be too harmful in the first weeks after the victory over Saddam Hussein. Yet soon the initial absence of Americans in the Sunni-controlled provinces would have lasting consequences for the course of the occupation. The eventual result was that thousands of crack American troops never entered northern Iraq as part of an expected pincer movement, leaving many of the recalcitrant Sunni provinces of Iraq simply untouched when the formal shooting stopped. NATO ally Turkey soon proved at best a neutral, and at worst tried to exercise veto power over Kurdish regional autonomy—in ominous signs of an increasing estrangement from its traditionally close relationship with Washington.

Millions of Sunni Iraqis had no reason either to fear or respect relatively small numbers of postwar American occupation troops who were careful not to ignite another war. Some began to act on that increasingly obvious fact of American caution. The notion of an American military “light footprint” had seemed to be working well in “postwar” Afghanistan and again during the initial three-week Iraqi war. Yet with the official fall of the Baathist government, thousands of humiliated Iraqis began to fathom that they had given up without much of a fight. The majority still had never seen any U.S. troops—either during the three-week war or now during the occupation.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.