Old oil barrels filled with junk stood at the corners of some alleys, and when the tanks rolled by, the insurgents loosed volleys of RPG rockets, using the barrels as their reference markers. The rocket-propelled grenades had no effect on the tanks, which kept rolling despite taking repeated hits. The tanks were knocking down small palm trees and power lines, and the Marines kept a wary eye out for hot wires as they jogged along.
Two blocks to the east, Maj Farnum, the ops officer for 1/5, stood on a roof with the forward air controller, who directed two Air Force F-15s—call sign RO-MO—to make repeated gun runs several blocks to the west. As Glover radioed back the coordinates of his lead trace, Farnum relayed the data to the FAC, who adjusted the next gun run.
It took Glover twenty minutes to reach the intersection where the amtrac was blazing. Sagredo’s Marines, down to two magazines per man, waved them forward, and Glover distributed boxes of ammunition. Sagredo was furious about the repeated RPG hits on the burning trac. Glover called up the tanks, deploying them in a wagon wheel at the intersection. Most of the RPG shots were coming from a gray stone house on the far side of the intersection. Floor by floor, room by room, the main guns of the tanks demolished the house.
After the first dozen tank rounds, the battlefield quieted as the insurgents dispersed. The wounded were placed in the Humvees, and the Marines walked slowly back to their lines, a tank towing the smoldering amtrac and the body of Kevin T. Kolm, a third-generation corporal of Marines.
_____
As if to confirm that the offensive was about to resume, that night the special operations forces showed up at the regimental ops center, buoying the Marines’ hopes. The spec ops could roam where they wished in country, so when they came to visit, it meant they had heard something was about to break.
Computers had replaced the banks of radios in ops centers, greatly reducing the squawking and hissing noises that gave ulcers to past generations of staff officers. Major Dave Bellon, the intelligence officer for Regimental Combat Team 1, was hunched over his computer screen squinting when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up at a tall soldier in a gray jumpsuit, flanked by a stocky younger man.
“My name is Jamie, and this is Will,” the soldier said politely, with a southern drawl. “The way we see it, there’s going to be a lot of killing soon in that city. We’d like to help organize that.”
Bellon knew “Jamie” was a lieutenant colonel and “Will” was a captain who had played on the West Point football team—they were the leaders of the “Z Squad” that had hunted down Saddam. Now they were after fresh prey, the terrorist Zarqawi. Will inserted his flash stick into the computer and showed Bellon pictures of a street near city hall, then zoomed in on a house with a walled patio and proceeded to walk Bellon through the front door, down a hallway, and into a large room with banks of electrical panels on the walls. There, Will said, is where we need to insert “certain” devices.
“We can’t install your gizmos, Colonel,” Bellon said. “That requires too much finesse. Marines think a hammer is high tech. We’ll electrocute ourselves.”
“Okay, we’ll install them. Just get us in there.”
“I can lay on a diversion and insert you,” Bellon said. “But l have to check with Colonel Toolan about getting you out.”
“Why?”
“Because it’ll take three battalions,” Bellon said.
Bellon didn’t like sounding negative in front of such professionals, but hundreds of armed young Iraqi men would rush forward to engage any raid force. The insurgents had taken casualties but not enough to dampen their enthusiasm for a common cause tinged with adventure and danger. Whatever the fissures among the foreign terrorists, the Wahhabi clerics, the Baathist politicians, and the former generals and colonels, they were all determined to resist the Americans. Fallujah was as unified as Berlin in 1944 and Hanoi in 1968. Sending in the Z Squad meant alerting the entire regiment to stand by for a donnybrook.
“We’ll never get permission from higher, sir,” Bellon said. “Once you’re in, we’d have to take the city to get you out.”
“Well, we’re here with our people,” Jamie said. “Mind if we give you a hand?”
Bellon readily agreed. The Z Squad was the military equivalent of the NFL pro-bowl team. Bellon gave Jamie a seat next to him to work out how the Task Force 6-26 snipers, breachers, and assault teams would be spread among the Marine companies.
“We’ll support whatever raid you want,” Bellon assured Jamie, “as soon as the cease-fire is lifted.”
15
____
FALLUJAH: A SYMPTOM OF SUCCESS
IN THE FIVE DAYS SINCE GENERAL Abizaid and Ambassador Bremer had declared the unilateral “cease-fire,” the battles along the lines in Fallujah had continued. The fighting had settled into a pattern of skirmishes, flare-ups, and rest periods.
The Coalition had lost the initiative in the fighting as well as in the negotiating. Each day at the Fallujah Liaison Center, two kilometers east of the city, the Iraqis and Americans crowded into a small, bare conference room and sat around a long wooden table, sipping cold bottled water and eating oranges. The Iraqis never tired of talking, issuing long litanies of complaints, making passionate promises of stability, and stoutly denying the presence of foreign fighters. The Fallujans were good people, fighting to protect their city. If the Americans would stop firing and pull out, all would be well. It was never clear, though, who spoke for the fighters. Those with the power of the guns remained shadowy figures, never mentioned by name.
Day after day different groups of negotiators met. Sometimes Ambassador Richard H. Jones represented the CPA. Other times the meetings were at a lower level between Stu Jones and the current mayor of Fallujah, Ibrahim al Juraissey. Flocked by somber sheikhs in fulsome beards and flowing robes, Juraissey, Fallujah’s third mayor in ten months, was full of assurances that all Iraqis wanted peace, and laments over the destruction done by the Marines. MajGen Weber on occasion represented the JTF at the negotiating table. LtGen Conway sometimes attended and often sent a deputy. When he did attend, he chaired the meeting.
At the same time, one hundred kilometers to the southeast, MajGen Dempsey and the 1st Armored Division had trapped the radical cleric Moqtada al Sadr and his followers inside the Shiite holy city of Najaf. Frantic negotiations were under way on that front as well. The Sunni rebels trapped in Fallujah and the Shiite rebels trapped in Najaf desperately needed negotiations to prevent their destruction.
MajGen Mattis usually didn’t attend the interminable meetings. Each day he was out with his troops, stopping here and there for a few minutes, keeping his finger on the pulse of morale and fighting conditions. He knew what the troops were saying:
Let us finish the job.
Marines were dying, and the terrorists in Fallujah had beheaded an Italian and were holding hostage five Japanese, three Turks, and an American named Nicholas Berg. The Marines were frozen in place while the insurgents consolidated their position inside the city and escalated their tactics of defiance.
On April 14 Mattis stopped by Battalion 3/4’s lines, telling McCoy to expect an order to resume the attack within a day or two. “I don’t forecast this stalemate will go on for long,” he said.
That they would be permitted to finish the fight was the prevailing belief throughout the division. The battalions, caught up in fighting and dying each day, assumed the senior leadership saw the world the way they did. If you played patty-cake with the insurgents, they would cut your hand off. Seize the city first, then talk to them when they were supplicants.
At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had grown increasingly uneasy about the “temporary” cease-fire that dragged on without a cutoff date. The longer the delay, the more the political pressures were building to call off the attack altogether. In their view, getting on with the attack was imperative.
The power of a secretary of defense resided in shaping the longer-term direction of the military, not in directing ongoing operations. In 1993, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin overrode a request for tanks submitted by the commander of U.S. forces in Somalia. Later, an American raid force was trapped in a vicious firefight without tank support and took heavy casualties. Aspin was fired for having imposed his judgment over that of the operational commander.
Concerning Fallujah, Rumsfeld urged Abizaid to take action, but issuing a direct order would be imprudent. Bremer and Abizaid were the field commanders calling the shots. As long they agreed with one another to continue the “cease-fire” and the negotiations, that would be the course pursued.
“John [Abizaid] stressed to the president the need to be firm about Fallujah. At the same time, he pointed out that seizing the city would cause turmoil. He understood both points of view,” a senior aide in the White House said. “He consistently made three points—Fallujah was a difficult situation, we were going to prevail, and the morale of the troops was terrific.”
General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had arrived unexpectedly in Baghdad on the fourteenth. He would bring back to the Pentagon a fresh perspective to supplement the reports from Gen Abizaid. The Marines hoped that Myers would be properly briefed in Baghdad. The sallies by McCoy into Karma and Red Cloud into the center of the city weren’t exceptions; the insurgents were surging forward whenever they sensed an opportunity.
On the fifteenth, Gen Myers held a press conference in Baghdad. He described the attacks throughout the Sunni province of Anbar and Sadr’s revolt as “a symptom of the success that we’re having here in Iraq.”
Concerning Fallujah, he issued an anodyne warning. “We have to be prepared and prepare ourselves that there may be further military action in Fallujah,” he said. “It’s a situation where you clearly have some foreign fighters, former regime element members who—again, while the cease-fire is ongoing—are attacking our Marines.”
While not a clarion call to arms, his remarks signaled that the chairman had doubts about the negotiations. Later that day Conway and Weber met at the MEF headquarters with Ambassadors Jones and Schlicher to review the situation. Colonel Coleman, the MEF chief of staff, said the time had come to attack. Irfan Siddiq, the diplomat representing the British, responded that an attack was out of the question. He urged a negotiated solution that would provide a “dignified exit” for all parties. Ambassador Jones did not take either side. Instead he pointed out that Abizaid had briefed POTUS on the fourteenth. The president had rejected both launching a full-scale attack and continuing the status quo. Jones said the president was meeting with Prime Minister Blair on the sixteenth and was not about to tell him the Marines were in the assault as they spoke.
“I want other options,” President Bush had said. While expressing confidence in the Marines, the president asked for the development of other alternatives rather than an attack through the city. E-mails immediately flew among staffs far removed from Fallujah.
“How the fuck,” said a senior American general emerging from one televideo conference, “can they make operational decisions back in Washington?”
Conway suggested that perhaps some Iraqi generals could be pulled together to take charge of the city, though that would take two to three weeks. Jensen, the foreign service officer, said that with all due respect, that was a fantasy. Baathists, Jensen said, wouldn’t fight the insurgents, most of whose leaders were also Baathists.
Conway’s suggestion wasn’t a fantasy, though. The CIA, which in Iraq was under the operational control of the JTF, was developing a new Iraqi intelligence service headed by General Muhammad Shawany. Several days earlier two CIA operatives working at the MEF had mentioned to Conway that some former Iraqi generals recommended by Shawany could help out in Fallujah. The generals could create a military unit in Fallujah comprised of former soldiers and insurgents. Conway was intrigued. After the meeting broke up, a diplomat from the CPA followed the operatives to their small house trailer.
“You don’t flip out half-baked ideas to a three-star,” the diplomat said. He stalked off, thinking he had persuaded them to drop the idea. Instead, Conway had quietly pulled together a military team to discuss terms with the Iraqi generals. Talks with the Iraqi generals were proceeding in an MEF channel not disclosed to the civilian diplomats.
On the fifteenth, the meeting at the MEF with the ambassadors from the CPA concluded with no new plan of action. After weeks of wrangling, it appeared that if four or six senior American officials discussed Fallujah, the conclusion would be four or six nuanced positions.
When Prime Minister Tony Blair visited the White House on April 16, he was under serious pressure to persuade President Bush to call off the attack in Fallujah. Robin Cook, the former British foreign secretary, urged Blair to warn Bush about “heavy-handed tactics” in Fallujah, citing “1,000 civilians dead.” Fifty-two former senior British diplomats were signing on to an open letter accusing the Marines of applying “weapons unsuited to the task . . . the number killed in Fallujah is several hundred, including many women and children.” Dana Allin of the prestigious London-based Institute for Strategic Studies described “a sense in the British Foreign Office and the British military that the U.S. tactics have been too heavy-handed.”
British diplomats and senior officers believed in an approach to the insurgency that mixed diplomacy and contracts, playing off the various tribes while coaxing them into compliance. Blair had received a memo from his Foreign Office severely criticizing the siege of Fallujah. “We need to redouble our efforts to ensure a sensible and sensitive U.S. approach to military operations,” the memo read. “The message seems to be accepted at the highest levels but not always implemented lower down the command chain.” Concerns about Iraqi civilian casualties had rippled from Iraq across the greater Middle East to London, where many officials believed they understood Iraqi politics better than did their American cousins.