The War Within (4 page)

As Casey had passed through neighboring Kuwait on his way to Baghdad, the Third Army officers had a message for him: "If you want to understand this, you need to talk to Derek Harvey."

* * *

Harvey, a 49-year-old retired Army colonel and Middle East specialist who worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency, was a controversial figure within the U.S. intelligence world. He believed in immersion intelligence work, spending months at a time gathering information in the field rather than relying solely on reports and statistics.

In the late 1980s, Harvey traveled throughout Iraq by taxicabó500 miles, village to villageóinterviewing locals, sleeping on mud floors with a shower curtain for a door. He resembled the television detective Columboófull of questions, intensely curious and entirely nonthreatening. After the 1991 Gulf War, when the CIA was predicting the inevitable fall of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Harvey, then a major, insisted that Hussein would survive because members of the Sunni community knew their fortunes were tied to his. He was right. Months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Harvey wrote an intelligence paper declaring that al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan posed a strategic threat to the United States.

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Harvey had intermittent Army assignments in the country, traveling quietly, talking to insurgents, sitting in interrogation rooms.

One of his approaches was so-called DOCEXódocument exploitation. He spent hours poring over files found in safe houses and financial data discovered in Saddam's briefcases. It was clear to him early on that a vacuum existed in Baghdad. Where was political power?

Harvey made scouting missions into the provinces in an SUV, making contact with tribes, learning that former Baathist regime leaders, generals and other former officers were reuniting. He studied documents and letters found in buildings that U.S. forces had raided. Together with his interviews, they told a story: The old regime elements had plans to create a violent, hostile environment.

Within U.S. intelligence agencies, a debate was taking place about how much real organization existed among the insurgents. Who was really in control? Harvey found that the insurgency was based on the old trust networks of professional, tribal and family relationships connected with the mosques. Guidance, instructions and exhortationóeven the planning documents for operationsówere often written in the religious language of holy war.

Harvey found that U.S. units had reported a lot of attacks when they first arrived, but the longer they stayed in Iraq, the fewer they reported. It wasn't because the troops had appeased or vanquished the insurgents. Rather, near the end of their tours, they ventured out into the population less and lessósometimes never. He also concluded that only 22 to 26 percent of the violence directed at U.S. forces was being reported.

General Sanchez never bought into Harvey's conclusions about the insurgency, even as officially measured violence in the classified SECRET reports kept rising. During one four-month period in mid-2004, the attacks doubled from about 1,000 a month to 2,000.

* * *

Casey summoned Harvey to a meeting in early July 2004. Harvey found the general on a balcony at his new headquarters at Camp Victory, gazing out over Baghdad. Casey held up two cigars.

"Do you smoke?"

Harvey nodded.

"Okay, come with me."

What's really going on in Iraq? Casey asked.

The Sunni insurgency is growing and getting worse, Harvey explained. It's organized. It's coherent. And its members have a strategy. They are gaining popular support. They believe they are doing well, and by any measurement they areóthe number of attacks, their logistics, their financing, their external support, freedom of movement, ability to recruit. Every trend line was going up. Way up.

The insurgency is not a guerrilla war designed to win political power, he said. "It's all about wearing you out, getting you to leave and subverting the existing order, and infiltrating and co-opting the emerging Iraqi institutions."

The Iraqi government was weak, he added. It needed to be stronger, much stronger, but the United States was not going to change the attitudes or the culture. "We have to work around them," he said. "You're not going to force them to make decisions that they're not comfortable with. We don't have the leverage. We really don't."

Harvey said the Americans must learn to operate with humility, because there was so much they didn't understand about how and why the Iraqis made decisions. We think we know, but we're delusional. We get these glimpses, and we extrapolate. But if you really dig, what's it all really based on? Only whispers of the truth. "We don't understand the fight we're in," he said.

Harvey said the revelations about abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib months earlier had inflamed Iraqis. Photographs of smiling U.S. soldiers alongside naked, hooded, manacled and leashed inmates had flooded newspapers, television screens and the Internet. They had spread like a lightning bolt through Iraqi society and sent a devastating message: The U.S. occupation was the new oppressor.

As their cigars burned down and their conversation drew to a close, Harvey fixed his gaze on the new commanding general. "We're in trouble."

* * *

In Washington, infighting over the war had gone from bad to worse within the administration since the 2003

invasion.

"Control is what politics is all about," legendary journalist Theodore H. White wrote. War is also about controlóboth on the battlefield and in Washington, where the strategy and policy are supposed to be set. But from the start, no one in the administration had control over Iraq policy.

In the early days of the war, the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Hadley, her deputy at the time, had worked on Iraq nonstop and yet they never got control over the policy making. They were no match for Rumsfeld. The president had signed a directive before the invasion, giving the authority for an occupation to the Defense Department.

Bush and Rumsfeld's selection of L. Paul Bremer, a career diplomat, to act as the viceroy of Iraq further diminished the role of Rice and Hadley, as well as Powell at the State Department. Bremer all but ignored the National Security Council.

"We're all told to stay out of it," Hadley complained to a colleague. "This is Don Rumsfeld's thing."

Bremer, who as a presidential envoy had a direct reporting line to the president, bypassed even Rumsfeld and made important decisions unilaterally and abruptly. Some of those decisions proved disastrous, such as disbanding the Iraqi army and excluding from government service tens of thousands of former members of Saddam's Baath Party.

Rumsfeld had his own view of how the U.S. should proceed. He would send out one of his "snowflakes," brief documents asking questions, looking for details, demanding answers, when it was unclear to him what had happened.

Though unsigned, everyone knew they represented his orders or questions. But if a snowflake leaked, it provided deniability.

The snowflake sent on October 28, 2003, was two pages long and classified SECRET: "Subject: Risk and the way ahead in Iraq. In discussing the way ahead in Iraq, all agree that we should give Iraqis more authority more quickly."

Powell had a different view. Control was about security. In the first year after the invasion, Bush and Rice repeatedly expressed worry that the oil production in Iraq and availability of electricity were droppingóvisible signs that conditions were worse in Iraq than prior to the invasion.

"Petroleum is interesting. Electricity is interesting," Powell said, but added, "Mr. President, none of this makes any difference unless there's securityÖSecurity is all that counts right now."

Chapter 2

A
s Casey set off in July 2004 to decipher the puzzles of Iraq, Hadley worked the problem in Washington. At a meeting with NSC staff members on September 7, 2004, he told the group they had to find a way to measure success.

"We need a framework," he said, "to think about or use to determine how we know if we are winning or losing."

Everyone, it seemed, had a different focus. Rumsfeld wanted to hand off to the Iraqis and get out as soon as possible.

Powell believed the United States now owned Iraq and must protect its citizens. Rice and Hadley were intent on getting a functioning government in place.

Some suggested measurements included: how many countries were withdrawing their troops; how many companies were leaving Iraq, and which ones; recruitment rates in the Iraqi security forces; the number of flights that came under fire; assassination attempts.

The Pentagon's chief measure was how many Iraqi security forces were being trained and sent into the field. Quality control received little emphasis. Tens of thousands of Iraqis supposedly had been trained, but the Pentagon threw around numbers and cited so many increases that Powell could only laugh. An army could not be built in a matter of months or even a year. These numbers came from nowhere. Powell knew how the Pentagon worked: pumping up numbers that were guesses from the people on the ground.

And yet, some numbers seemed depressingly accurate. A SECRET analysis showed that in September 2004, about 50 percent of assassination attempts in Iraq were successful. By December, the success rate had jumped to 81

percent.

* * *

While the leaders in Washington wrestled one another for control, debated the strategy, and tried to determine how to measure progress, Iraq seemed to be blowing up. An epidemic of violence erupted around the end of October 2004, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Daily attacks doubled from about 70 early in the month to nearly 140 at the end of the month. Derek Harvey's take on the insurgency now seemed prescient. Rumsfeld summoned the lone-wolf DIA intelligence analyst to brief him and other Pentagon intelligence brass. They sat around the conference table in the secretary's office.

The insurgency is gaining strength, Harvey said again. They have a strategy, they know what they need to do to win, and they are on the right trajectory. The insurgency continues to be driven by former beneficiaries of the old Saddam regime, motivated by both nationalist and religious messages, who fear the loss of power. Rumsfeld's pointed questions to Harvey suggested that he disagreed. The secretary viewed the insurgents as thugs.

They're not just thugs, insisted Harvey, who'd acquired the nickname "Grenade" when he served a tour in the State Department. "This is not a bunch of disenfranchised, decentralized, incoherent, local-generated insurrectionists going around." They are not just pissed-off Iraqis. They want power, influence and authority, and they're rejecting this forced change. The war had actually gone pretty well in the early part of 2004, but the dual catastrophes of Abu Ghraib and the botched coalition attack on Fallujah had added fuel and purpose to the insurgency. Recruitment and support are going up, Harvey told Rumsfeld.

"This is all very interesting," Rumsfeld replied, "but it's more opinion than fact."

"We've got good evidence," Harvey said. He cited documents, messages, interrogation reports. We are not doing the right things to check and thwart the insurgency, he said. One solution was tribal outreach.

"What underpins this?" Rumsfeld asked him. "Why are you saying that?"

Harvey reminded him that for years he had visited the tribes and their leaders. "We are constantly understating the violence." There was no good way to collect numbers, and the violence was much greater and more widespread than reported. He estimated that only about 25 percent of the attacks were being reported.

"Well," Rumsfeld said, "you can't count every bullet that's being fired."

Harvey didn't disagree.

"So you believe this?" Rumsfeld asked.

"Yes."

"We need to take this over to the White House," he said.

Harvey brought his briefing to the Situation Room, where Rice and Hadley listened to his description of an organized, powerful, well-honed insurgency.

"Well, this is the first time I've heard any of this," Rice said.

Hadley too was surprised. He opened a three-ring binder. "We've got all these programs," he said, describing the massive efforts to help with electricity, water and sewage treatment.

Harvey said he had been part of a team set up by General Casey to look at such programs, and it found that despite all the contracts, the money was being spent in the wrong places and sometimes not at all. Money needed to go to the areas of high unemployment where people felt most disenfranchised. But, he said, the response from those in command was "Well, it's not safe there."

Harvey next briefed Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Libby had a different reaction from Rice and Hadley's. "I was worried that this was really what we're dealing with,"

he told Harvey.

In December 2004, Harvey came back to the Situation Room to brief President Bush. Rumsfeld, Rice, new CIA Director Porter Goss and CIA expert John Charles were present.

Bush had been warned that Harvey had an unorthodox view. The president asked three questions right off the bat: Who are you? What's your experience on Iraq? And why should I believe what you're saying?

"I've spent nearly 20 years working the Middle East" for the Army and DIA, Harvey answered. "I have advanced degrees. I've spent the last 18 months working, traveling, talking with insurgents, sitting in interrogation rooms." He described going into Fallujah, the epicenter of the insurgency, in the middle of the uprising when the city was walled off. He had entered the city without armed escort and spent the night talking with Abdullah al-Janabi, one of the clerics leading the insurgency. "We label him a religious extremist," Harvey said. "He's a Baathist who's very angry, has lost family members, okay? Drinks Johnnie Walker Black Label."

"Okay," Bush said, "let's go on."

You have a coherent enemy, Harvey said. They have a strategy. They're doing well by any measure. They're very well organized, and they're gaining popular support. All the measurementsóthe attack data, the logistics, the financing, external support, freedom of movement, ability to recruitóall these trend lines are going one wayóup. This enemy is made up of the old Sunni power brokers, not a bunch of angry young men. Holding elections right now would be counterproductive. The Sunnis would boycott, thereby fueling the insurgency.