After the war, when the looting began, essential services failed, and attacks upon Americans grew, the tone of the press reports changed from congratulatory to discontented. The bonds, however, between the journalists in the field and the soldiers remained a constant. IED explosions, like shipwrecks, made news, and the sympathy that the journalists harbored for the American soldiers sharpened the edge to stories describing American sacrifices for Iraqis who did not appear to be grateful or to be fighting for their own liberty. Conversely, the mainstream American press expressed no sympathy for the insurgents’ methods or goals, not wanting to see Iraq fall apart and become a breeding ground for terrorists. With the stakes too high for failure, the press focused on how long the fighting would go on and when Iraqi forces would begin to replace Americans.
At the Pentagon, Secretary Rumsfeld was not satisfied with the pace of the Iraqi training or with the clarity of the security assessments. The toughest area was Anbar Province, west of Baghdad and home of Fallujah and other hard Sunni cities. The Euphrates River sliced at a northwest angle across Anbar Province into Syria, 200 miles to the west. Most of Anbar’s tribal inhabitants lived in a string of nine cities along the river. Anbar, with two million restive Sunnis and no wealth or political influence, received little attention from the CPA or Iraqi civilian officials in Baghdad. Anbar was Indian Country, best handled by American military.
Despite the obvious insurgency in Anbar, at the beginning of the year General Sanchez was offering an upbeat assessment. “We’ve made significant progress in Anbar Province. Iraqis have gotten tired of the violence and are cooperating,” he said. “They want to get on with living their lives.”
Senior officials at the Pentagon weren’t so sure about such cooperation, and Wolfowitz was tired of haggling at long distance over minuscule budget matters. A deputy secretary of defense and a lieutenant general on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should not have to send cables to the CPA asking for money to buy trucks or machine guns for the National Guard, as happened on more than one occasion.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz decided to conduct an outside review under CentCom’s auspices. In mid-January Major General Karl Eikenberry, an army officer with a reputation for intellectual rigor, arrived in Baghdad with an assessment team. He and his team listened to briefings by the CPA and JTF staffs working in the shambles of the tasteless palace inside Baghdad’s heavily protected Green Zone. Each day a thousand Americans left their tiny air-conditioned trailers, lined up for breakfast cafeteria-style, then drifted off to their plywood cubicles to spend a twelve-hour day in front of computer screens. Most never ventured out of the sixty-acre compound, spending tours of three to six months as secure and as isolated as they would have been in any prison in the United States.
The assessment team members visited eighteen American battalions. The battalion commanders were not satisfied with the pace or direction of the training of Iraqi security forces. With the exception of the British down south in Basra, all were disturbed by the fact that the insurgency was growing much faster than the Iraqi security forces.
At the same time, the CPA was structuring an army that was intended to play a very small role inside Iraq’s borders. Given the military’s depredations during the Saddam era, an army was not to be trusted. The CPA strategy envisioned a peacetime state—starting at an indefinite time two to five years in the future—when the Iraqi police would provide internal stability. It was up to the JTF to bring Iraq to that state of relative normalcy, after which the American forces would pull back to cantonments and the Iraqi security forces would take over.
The Iraqi Army would be based to the north and east, facing mainly toward the Iranian border. Ambassador Bremer had prepared for Congress a budget that allocated $2 billion for the new Iraqi Army to protect the external borders and $75 million for the National Guard to protect the police inside the borders. Per man, the cost was $50,000 for an Iraqi Army soldier for border defense and $3,400 for a National Guard soldier for defeating the insurgents.
This division of labor and resources did not make sense to planners in the Pentagon. “We had the wrong design for that army,” Secretary Wolfowitz said.
The CentCom planners had told the study members that “it is not our desire to use the Iraqi Army internally.” The Eikenberry study disagreed, concluding that “we don’t have the luxury of an Iraqi Army not involved in defeating the insurgency.” The key to the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq lay “in building up the Iraqis,” not in pursuing offensive operations.
The study recommended shifting from the CPA to CentCom control over the budgets and policies of the Iraqi Army and police. Training of the army had already migrated to CentCom, and it made sense to consolidate the various security functions under one manager. The Eikenberry study advocated unity of command, collocating budgetary authority, held by the CPA, with operational responsibility, held by CentCom. After hearing a spirited rejoinder from the CPA about disruptions to existing programs, Rumsfeld worked out an agreement whereby control over the Iraqi Army passed to CentCom, while the CPA retained control over the police.
In Fallujah and elsewhere Iraqi police with scant training and old, thuggish habits struggled on. The CPA wanted to bring in European advisers, as had been done in Bosnia, but few volunteered, and none for Fallujah. The 82nd rated all forty-nine police stations in its area of operations as noneffective. The CPA had provided 92 of the 318 police vehicles requested by the 82nd, 274 of the 1,445 radios, plus sixty pistols and a three-week training course for a thousand officers.
Month after month Gen Swannack asked the CPA for the equipment. Swannack believed his requests were hampered by “bureaucrats” who remained in Iraq only for a few months, leaving before they had made good on their promises. “My comments fell on deaf ears,” he said.
The 82nd complained that the CPA retained tight control from Baghdad but failed to deliver. While illustrating the lack of communication between the CPA and the JTF, the charge did not do justice to the thicket of regulations surrounding the CPA. Congress had tied money for Iraqi forces to a labyrinth of peacetime restrictions. Some members of Congress urged the CPA to cut through the bottlenecks, while others blamed Bremer for hasty decisions that seemed to result in waste. Many in the CPA pointed to the layers of congressional restrictions placed upon purchases, slowing expenditures to a dribble.
“Every major project had to go to Washington for a budget review, then over to Congress for authorization. Any change over two percent among dozens of programs had to go back to congressional committees for approval,” Lieutenant General Jeffrey Oster, the CPA chief of staff, said. “The congressional process for releasing money was a maze.”
Rather than have local seamstresses sew uniforms for the Iraqis, competitive bids had to be taken on the American market, causing delays of months. Vehicles purchased for the Iraqi police had to be advertised and competed for in the United States, when a five-hour drive over the border into Jordan yielded trucks at a fraction of the cost (an option several battalion commanders quietly chose).
Inside the administration, friction and backbiting arose about the causes of the slow expenditure of funds. The deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, directly blamed the CPA for not spending the authorized money. “We have little complaint about congressional restrictions on [Iraqi] spending,” he told a congressional committee. “CPA moved more gingerly than they should have.”
Bremer was damned if he rapidly spent the money and damned if he didn’t.
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At the tip of the spear in the most dangerous city in Iraq, LtCol Drinkwine didn’t care about the high-level issues of assigning blame or about billion-dollar budgets. His concerns were the lack of equipment for the police, the daily attacks on his troops, and sorting out which city leaders were secretly supporting the insurgents.
Drinkwine began 2004 by coordinating with the special operations forces to search the souk next to the Brooklyn Bridge at the western end of the city, an area the police refused to patrol. The souk consisted of hundreds of one-story boutique shops jammed side by side in a maze of twisting alleyways in the oldest section of the city, called the Jolan District. The insurgents boasted that the Jolan was invulnerable; the tangle of streets provided them with hundreds of back alleys through which to escape and circle back to swarm over any invading force of Americans.
The Special Operations Command came to Drinkwine with an unorthodox solution that he supported enthusiastically. On the morning of January 2 the souk was jammed with people and cars, the smoke from faulty exhaust pipes obscuring the view of the Brooklyn Bridge, a few hundred meters down the street to the west. Drinkwine had two companies poised for a quick raid. Two Delta soldiers were in the souk marking the target shops. None of the hundreds of Iraqi men wandering down the cluttered side streets challenged the crazed man in a filthy dishdasha who hobbled from shop to shop, peering at the weapons for sale and mumbling to himself.
At the edge of the souk he stumbled as he walked around a bread truck. When he angrily slammed a fist against a dented rear fender, the rear doors suddenly opened, he was hauled inside, and the doors slammed shut. The Delta soldier paused a minute to catch his breath in relief. Had an arms dealer challenged him inside the souk, his rudimentary Arabic would have betrayed him. If his partner, fluent in Arabic, couldn’t talk their way out, Drinkwine would have had to rush in when the shooting began. Whether he would have arrived in time was another matter.
Safely inside the truck, the Delta operative drew a quick sketch, showing the paratroopers their key targets. Minutes later a company of paratroopers leaped from hiding places as Bradley fighting vehicles roared up to form a cordon. Led by their special forces guides, the paratroopers rushed from alley to alley, arresting fifteen Iraqis and seizing seventeen IEDs. Breaking into back rooms, they found so many explosives and weapons that they had to call for four dump trucks to haul them all away. They withdrew before the insurgents could organize a counterattack.
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While the raid was a success, it had no wider implications. A few days later insurgents in Fallujah killed two French citizens. The two, working for a U.S. company, had stopped for a quick repair outside Fallujah on Highway 6, the heavily traveled main artery. A passing car had opened fire on the two men. After that no prudent Westerner traveled near Fallujah in a small group.
Travel by air near the city was equally perilous. On January 8 a Blackhawk helicopter, with five huge red crosses on the fuselage, was flying a medevac mission along the Euphrates south of Fallujah when it was downed by a surface-to-air missile, killing nine soldiers and bringing the number of Americans killed to thirty-seven in and around the city. It was the second shoot-down in a week. Of the six helicopters shot down since Baghdad was seized, four had occurred in the Fallujah area.
Informers reported that Khamis Sirhan had sent a surface-to-air missile (SAM) team into the farming district south of the city. A major general under Saddam, Sirhan was the highest-ranking insurgent in the Fallujah area. Before his arrest, Sheikh Barakat had moved money for Sirhan.
Drinkwine set out to find Sirhan, surrounding the farmlands with two companies and searching house to house. The SAM team had left, some said going back to Syria. Sirhan, though, made the mistake of remaining in the city. A woman admitted knowing his cousin, and his cousin gave up an address. At three in the morning of January 11 the house was surrounded and Sirhan was seized without a struggle. He was the eighth high-ranking former officer to be captured in six weeks.
“It had taken us five months to figure it out,” Dudin said. “But at last we had a technique. The special ops and intel guys were putting together diagrams of the movers and shakers in the city. Most of them had big houses and big egos. They didn’t like living in the boondocks. Sooner or later they came home for a few days. Some nights we’d search their houses and not even wake up their kids. We got that skilled, all quiet like. We missed a lot of times, but we kept coming back.”
Believing he had momentum, Drinkwine organized an FPAC, or Fallujah Provisional Authority Council, comprised of sheikhs, business leaders, and imams. Janabi emerged from hiding to claim one of the spots reserved for the imams, and Drinkwine put aside his suspicions in a gesture toward a new beginning. With General Sirhan behind bars, he invited the FPAC to take charge and to work with eleven Fallujah Liaison Teams appointed from his battalion. Bring your requests, Drinkwine said, and we’ll try to resolve them.
The mid-January FPAC meeting seemed to go well. A torrent of complaints about American conduct and contracts not delivered poured forth, but there were no threats of violence. Drinkwine noticed that Janabi didn’t say a word. The meeting ended with the election of a council president, and a meeting was scheduled for the next month.
Two days later a mob gathered outside the mayor’s office at the Government Center to protest the election of the council. When the paratroopers were called to disperse them, a riot ensued and two Iraqis were killed.
“It’s great to be nice,” Drinkwine said. “But we’ve found out if you let up for one second against the bad guys, they’re right back at your throat.”
Drinkwine had tried political suasion and municipal improvement, but in the end it came back to raw military muscle. The battle lines were clear: it was the Americans against the insurgents.
The composition and leadership of the insurgents were changing. As the FREs weakened, Drinkwine received warnings that foreign fighters were infiltrating into the Jolan, including the arch-terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi. From Fallujah, Zarqawi sent Osama bin Laden a letter in January asking for help in continuing the guerrilla war. On a night raid two Egyptians were arrested in an apartment with slogans supporting bin Laden scrawled in sheep’s blood on a wall. Neighbors told a reporter that foreign fighters were threatening people who played Western music, styled their hair, wore revealing clothes, or even sold wood to contractors working for the Americans.