“My civilian masters in Baghdad believe I’m a dumb, bloodthirsty grunt,” Mattis said. “But I know what l have to do, and l sleep well at night.”
Openly dismissive of the credentials of the negotiators, Rumsfeld was urging Abizaid to resume the attack. On April 21 a frustrated Conway told the press that an attack was “days, not weeks, away.” MEF staff officers added that they “desperately wanted to avoid a bloody urban siege.” After speaking with Abizaid on April 21, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz believed the attack was scheduled to commence in a few days. Abizaid had pushed back hard, though, arguing with Rumsfeld on several occasions that massive force at this late juncture would inflame the Sunni region and should be considered only as a last resort.
On April 23, Bremer warned that “if these [insurgent] bands do not surrender their military weapons and instead continue to use them against Iraqi and Coalition forces, major hostilities could resume on short notice.” That afternoon, as JTF commander, Sanchez sent the MEF a warning order to be prepared to resume offensive operations.
At the same time, all parties were aware that the president wanted options, not a full-scale attack. So they agreed to meet at the MEF on the twenty-fourth to discuss the situation.
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The twenty-fourth was a typically hot April day, moderated by a steady wind. On the street outside the walled compound of the MEF, parking was crowded as diplomats, generals, and Iraqis from the Governing Council convened to discuss the next steps.
When Bremer came to the meeting, he was managing two crises: Sadr in the south and Fallujah in the west. The 1st Armored Division had trapped Sadr in Najaf. In return for pulling back his followers, Sadr was working out terms that permitted himself to go free. The Sadr crisis looked to be about over, with a messy but not disastrous ending.
That left Fallujah. Bremer believed the mood in the White House was not to take the city, and he felt he had allies for this point of view. Abizaid had sided with Rumsfeld in recommending a full-scale attack at the beginning of April; by the third week in April, Bremer believed Abizaid agreed that to recommence the attack would be a political blunder. The president of the Iraqi Governing Council, Massoud Barzani, was publicly complaining that the United States “has only itself for blame for the military deadlock in Najaf and Fallujah because it allowed its troops to change from an army of liberation to an army of occupation.” Feeding on its own negativity and reinforced by daily press attention, the Iraqi Governing Council was continuing its complaints about the American military while remaining silent about Sadr’s militia and the Sunni insurgents.
The Americans lacked support for an attack from both the Iraqis and the British. Although LtGen Sanchez preferred employing massive force, he had been warning Conway that White House support was slipping away. Conway understood: a full-scale attack would not be authorized.
The diplomats and generals were walking a fine line, in trying to reach agreement with the Iraqi negotiators to bring stability to Fallujah, using the threat of an attack as leverage, while knowing it was an empty threat.
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One hundred feet away from the generals and diplomats, in the regi-mental ops center, Col Toolan was planning the final attack. Early that morning the buzz had zipped through the battalions: the JTF and the MEF, fed up with weeks of lies, had reauthorized the offensive.
From around the periphery of the city the Marine battalion staffs arrived in small clusters of Humvees and LAVs, dismounting outside the walls of the MEF, striding in tight groups through the makeshift plywood door into the alcove of the stone mansion that served as the regi-mental HQ, draping their ceramic armor vests and Kevlar helmets over the wooden racks that lined the wall outside the conference room. Several carried M4 carbines or M16s, while others wore pistols on their hips or in shoulder holsters. It was like a meeting of knights in the fifteenth century—large, purposeful men neatly arraying their armor before sitting down at the banquet table to discuss the business of making war.
The mood was upbeat, with many smiles exchanged. The dickering was over. It was time to finish the task. They stood talking until Col Toolan strode in; then they took seats around a long, square table with a huge photomap of Fallujah on the wall.
“Gentlemen,” Toolan said, “the commanding general is planning a division attack against Fallujah. RCT 7 will block and clear around the outskirts. RCT 1 as the Main Effort will take the city.”
The regimental intelligence officer, Maj Bellon, gave the first briefing. ODA had identified seventeen enemy groups in the city, he said, with grandiose names like Allah’s Army and Battalion of God. A “battalion” numbered twenty to forty fighters. All together there were about five hundred hard-core fighters and a thousand part-timers. Some were assigned to city blocks, while others scooted around in small, orange-striped Nissan pickups. The insurgents didn’t employ standard infantry tactics such as interlocking fields of fire along fixed defensive lines. Instead, they tended to swarm forward.
Once the blood started flowing, Bellon believed many of the part-timers would stash their weapons and melt away. The hard core not killed on the streets would retreat to the safe houses where they ate and slept. There might be twenty to forty fortified houses like the one where Cpl Amaya was killed. Each house was an isolated pillbox, vulnerable to a tank gun or a laser-guided bomb. The danger came when those inside held their fire until the Marines were inside.
Toolan turned next to his ops officer, LtCol Renforth, for the scheme of maneuver. Square and stocky with a shaven head, Renforth looked imposing, like a wrestler or a bodyguard. The battalions appreciated that Renforth didn’t demand nitpicking reports. Renforth had started his career by enlisting as a sailor and was surprised when chosen to go to the navy prep school in Newport, Rhode Island.
Back in the early 1980s, he had seen himself as a rough-and-ready good old boy from Arkansas. At prep school he proved his rough manners by throwing a chair and a fellow student out a dorm window. His section leader gave him a scathing dressing-down for embarrassing his parents and disgracing himself. The section leader wasn’t going to foist him off on someone else and send him back to a ship. Instead, Renforth spent every Saturday and Sunday for the next twelve weeks in “special study,” meaning he was confined to base for three months. He grew to love the discipline of mathematics, graduated from the Naval Academy, and earned a commission in the Marine Corps. The name of the section leader: Jim Mattis.
In the ops center an electronic map tracked the positions of all friendly units. Below the map each new situation report was displayed in large type, with space for comments to be entered. Forty laptops tied together the staff sections. For a month Renforth had been studying the photomap and watching patterns develop from the sitreps and from visiting the battalions on the line.
For the attack Renforth had to plot the geometry of fires. In flat terrain rounds would travel for a thousand meters down straight streets. Battalion 2/1, under Olson, would provide the anvil, holding the rooftops in the northwest quadrant above the Jolan market in the old city. But which battalion would swing the hammer? To avoid friendly fire, they couldn’t all charge forward at once.
Three kilometers due south of 2/1, Lieutenant Colonel Gyles Kyser had moved into position with his battalion, 2/2. To Kyser’s right lay the section of houses called Queens. Byrne and 1/5 held the industrial quadrant east of Queens. He would swing west, flush out Queens, and join up with Kyser. The two battalions would then be set to drive straight north into the Jolan and crush the defenders against 2/1. At the same time 3/4 would push in from the east. The two forces would be at right angles. At some point Renforth would have to halt one battalion before they fired into each other.
Each battalion wanted to seize the Jolan. For three weeks they had lain on the rooftops absorbing mortar attacks and exchanging sniper fire and taunts with the insurgents. Wounded Marines had left the field hospitals and returned to their companies to finish the job.
The four battalion commanders were good friends. Olson had been McCoy’s best man at his wedding, and Kyser, a hard-charging recon type, had served as McCoy’s executive officer in a rifle company years earlier. Byrne and McCoy had attended command and staff school together.
Each battalion commander knew that his Marines wanted to be in the fight and that they were relying on him to give them that chance. Byrne looked at Queens on the photomap. To him, it was a matter of jujitsu, pushing the insurgents off balance and letting their own confusion trip them up. He liked using the darkness to move forward a kilometer, then back-sweeping when light came, catching the insurgents off guard.
McCoy planned to have Kilo and India Companies press forward, followed by Lima Company. When a strongpoint was hit, the lead company would mark it for Lima to destroy.
Kyser and Olsen each had six tanks in support. Renforth gave McCoy two and held six in reserve. McCoy considered this an injustice, arguing mightily for eight tanks.
“Do you think I’m crazy?” Renforth replied. “With eight tanks, Bryan, you’d be on the Euphrates in a day and I’d be stuck cleaning up the mess in the rear. Unh-unh, buddy. I’m keeping you on a leash. Two tanks, that’s it.”
“Too much back-clearing could slow us down,” Bellon said, coming to McCoy’s defense.
Back-clearing, the tedious searching of the thousands of houses behind the front lines of the advancing Marine troops, could bog down the speed of the offensive, allowing thousands of civilians to gather before the accommodating cameras of Al Jazeera. Bellon’s concern was massive civilian protests filling the streets in front of the onrushing Marines.
“Maybe Bellon’s got a point about too much back-clearing,” Renforth said to McCoy. “We’ll see about getting you more tanks once the attack gets rolling.”
Renforth sat smiling like the cat that ate the canary. He wasn’t about to let McCoy set too fast a pace. He might give McCoy and the “Black Plague” battalion more tanks—it depended on how the division attack developed.
“Satisfied I’m not screwing you?” Renforth asked with a smile.
He wanted to give 2/2 and 1/5 to the south enough time to straighten their lines. That way, as the battle unfolded, Toolan would have a choice of seizing the Jolan from the east (McCoy) or the south (Byrne and Kyser).
“No. Let me explain again why I need more tanks,” McCoy replied.
While the two argued back and forth, Toolan stepped out to take a phone call. He was gone for less than fifteen minutes. When he returned, he looked grim.
“The attack has been called off,” he said. “Instead, each battalion is to begin joint patrols with the Iraqis. We’re to meet with the Iraqis tomorrow.”
18
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STRATEGIC CONFUSION
“IN WAR, YOU SUPPORT THE TROOPS,” President Bush said. “It’s not complicated. You give them support.”
In Fallujah, supporting the troops had become complicated. On April 23, President Bush said that “most of Fallujah is returning to normal,” an assessment that threw into question who was providing him with information. Continuing the unilateral cease-fire was causing American casualties and increasing the morale of the insurgents. Thirty-two soldiers and Marines had died in the fighting west of Baghdad—thirteen inside Fallujah itself—in the past three weeks.
The president prided himself on making firm decisions, showing no tolerance for hand-wringing. But the longer he uncharacteristically agreed to incremental extensions of the cease-fire, the more the political pressures were building to call off the attack altogether. On April 24 the president conferred with his advisers about whether to risk the “potentially disastrous public relations impact” of an American assault on the city.
Although Bremer had delivered a tough speech warning that hostilities could resume shortly, he had repeatedly cautioned that widespread uprisings would be a consequence of an attack and he did not want that to happen. Rumsfeld was pushing Abizaid to get on with the attack, and Abizaid was pushing right back, arguing that the Sunnis had to be given a chance to determine their own futures. From Bremer’s perspective, he and Abizaid were in agreement that taking the city would be a disaster. Instead, both wanted to see moderate Iraqis step forward as leaders rather than have Americans thrust themselves into the lead.
“We must in all things be modest,” Gen Abizaid had said. “We [Americans] are an antibody in their culture.”
The president’s pro-consul to Iraq (Bremer), the president’s representative (Blackwill), and the theater commander (Abizaid) all offered judgments to the White House. But despite the ease of worldwide communication, the military’s rigid hierarchical system prevented those with the battlefield knowledge from giving the president advice. Mattis talked to Conway, Conway to Sanchez, Sanchez to Abizaid, and Abizaid to Washington. Mattis insisted that his battalions were poised to attack, but Mattis wasn’t even at the meeting at the MEF.
Had they been asked by the White House, Conway and Mattis would have said that taking the city would require two to four days—after eighteen days of waiting on the lines. But they were not asked. The MEF and division commanders were like the general manager and the coach of a football team, sometimes included in discussions about the game being played and sometimes not.
The mood at the White House was not to take the city. The president had expressed serious reservations about both American and civilian casualties as well as damage to the city, shown to be extensive by Arab TV crews.
Lacking any other source, the press worldwide repeated Al Jazeera’s estimate of over six hundred dead and a thousand wounded civilians in the city. Based on the sheer volume of repetition, the allegations acquired plausibility.
Stu Jones sensed that all the negotiators—Marines, American diplomats, and Iraqis from Baghdad—were affected by the incessant reports of mass civilian casualties.
“The Iraqis were so excited,” Jones said. “Incessant complaints about Marine snipers. I thought at least a thousand civilians had died. Only later did I learn it was under three hundred.”