As the UH-60 Black Hawk skimmed low over the desert of southern Iraq, I noticed the “fun-o-meter” patch the pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Ryan Newman, had fixed to back of his flight helmet: ARE WE HAVING FUN YET OR WHAT?
It was late March 2003 when I flew into Iraq in the passenger compartment of Newman’s helicopter, perched on a carton of field rations. I was one of several hundred journalists the U.S. Defense Department had invited to cover Operation Iraqi Freedom, the military campaign to oust Saddam Hussein and hunt for weapons of mass destruction. It was a master stroke of public relations. My embed assignment was with the Sixth Battalion, 101st Aviation, part of the 101st Airborne Division. Six Bat was a “general support” aviation unit: basically, a battlefield taxi service. This aircraft was delivering Meals-Ready-to-Eat and water destined for a Pathfinder infantry unit. I was a piece of spare cargo, and things were off to a rough start. The night before the battalion crossed north into Iraq, its staging base in Camp Udairi, Kuwait, saw a real missile attack. Startled from their cots by a deafening crack, soldiers donned gas masks and climbed back in their sleeping bags. The all-clear sounded soon after over the camp loudspeakers.
It was friendly fire. As it turned out, we had heard the impact of a U.S. Patriot missile smacking into a Royal Air Force GR4A Tornado fighter. The missile battery failed to pick up the aircraft’s IFF (identification friend or foe) beacon, an electronic signal that is supposed to prevent fratricide.1 Both crew members were killed. Word of the incident spread quickly, but although it occurred within earshot, I did not learn the full details until I heard about it from the BBC (a young company commander, better prepared than I, had remembered to pack a shortwave radio). My pessimism deepened when I learned of a grenade attack the previous night in neighboring Camp Pennsylvania. A U.S. soldier, Sergeant Hasan Akbar, had lobbed some grenades in a 101st Airborne command tent. The attack claimed the lives of two officers, and several others were injured.* To me, at least, it didn’t seem an auspicious day to be going into a combat zone.
Captain Dana Bult, a signals officer, was designated as my escort. I had been bounced from several helicopter flight manifests like a piece of excess baggage; the night before we were to leave, Bult informed me that she had a spot for me on board her aircraft. I reported to her tent about an hour before the next wave of helicopters was scheduled to take off. She was talking distractedly on a field telephone; I waited outside. As it happened, her husband had been staying in the tent where the grenade attack took place. By sheer luck, he had been in the shower at the time of the attack. A military operator had connected her with her in-laws so she could tell them he was all right. After hanging up the handset, she grabbed her rucksack and hauled it to a waiting Humvee. She was perfectly collected. We headed to the flight line.
Bult’s attitude—businesslike, intent, focused on the task at hand—was reassuring. In the weeks I had spent in Kuwait, waiting for the war to begin, most of the soldiers in the battalion had been preoccupied with military chores: assembling their equipment, spray-painting helicopter blades to protect them from erosion, practicing “dust landings” in the desert sands of the Udairi range. There was little time for introspection. To unwind at night, soldiers passed around DVDs to watch on portable video players. Black Hawk Down was a particular favorite.
Shortly after Six Bat’s arrival in Kuwait, the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Fields, had given the soldiers a short pep talk. Fields had fought in the first Gulf War; he was with the “ready brigade” that airlifted helicopters to Saudi Arabia in August 1990, after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, as part of a quick-reaction force assembled to defend the kingdom’s oilfields from Saddam Hussein. “We’re ten times more prepared than we were last time,” he said.
The buildup in Kuwait had been under way for months, and Fields was confident of a successful reprise of Desert Storm. Chief Warrant Officer Shawn Mertens, another Black Hawk pilot, summarized the confidence in what was supposed to be a conventional military mission to defeat the Iraqi army and unseat Saddam Hussein. “We’re supposed to beat ’em up and go home,” he told me.
Mertens neatly described the operating assumption at the time. The United States was going to war in Iraq for a host of reasons: intelligence speculation about the regime’s ties to terrorists, a desire to upend the regional political order, unfinished business from the 1990–91 Gulf War. The campaign was largely billed as a hunt for weapons of mass destruction, although Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, perhaps inadvertently, let slip in a May 2003 magazine interview that the case for war was built around that selling point “for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy.”2
But as much as Saddam was an odious tyrant, he presided over a functioning state. The ruling Ba’athist Party—a thugocracy, really—held power through an ugly combination of patronage, repression, and political murder. Saddam’s malignant cult of personality was the state’s official ideology. The economy was a wreck: The state was the largest employer, and the country’s infrastructure had suffered through years of neglect, underinvestment, and sanctions. The disastrous UN-backed Oil-for-Food program had only created more opportunities for those with ties to the corrupt regime to enrich themselves. The U.S. invasion would destroy the regime, but a new system would have to be rebuilt from scratch.
The 101st Airborne Division had detailed terrain maps, access to up-to-the minute satellite pictures, and signal intercepts from the Iraqi military’s communications systems. But its familiarity with the cultural terrain it was about to occupy was marginal. Back at Fort Campbell, the public affairs office, the division’s media-relations shop, had printed up a short handbook called A Soldier’s Guide to Iraq. It was rudimentary at best, and a section on cultural considerations was particularly comical. It depicted “the Arab” as a sort of B-movie villain: Arabs are crafty, feckless, preoccupied with honor and shame. A few excerpts:
To show politeness when asked a yes or no question, the Arab will always answer yes, whether true or not. A flat “no” is a signal that you want to end the relationship. The polite way for an Arab to say “no” is to say, “I’ll see what I can do.”
Arabs, by American standards, are reluctant to accept responsibility. They will accept shared responsibility, but if responsibility is accepted and something goes wrong, the Arab is dishonored.
The Arab approach to time is much slower and relaxed. If God wills things to happen, they will, so why rush. Relationships are more important than accomplishing an act.
An Arab sees friendships with anyone outside the family as meaning, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”
The handbook also offered a few pointers for dealing with the press. Some tips were practical (“Don’t lie”); others encouraged spin (“Do not provide the enemy with propaganda material by complaining about things”). It had few specifics on Iraqi, as distinct from Arab, culture, although page 8 also featured a small map that crudely outlined “dissident areas” (predominately Shia and Kurdish). It gave no hint of the ethnic and sectarian conflict the invasion would inadvertently ignite.
Prior to the division’s departure to Kuwait from Fort Campbell, I watched a briefing by a young Civil Affairs major on Iraq. It was embarrassingly brief. The takeaway: Iraq had three major groups, Shia and Sunni Arabs, and the Kurds up north. They didn’t always get along. The Shia and the Kurds will probably be friendly, because they were oppressed by Saddam. And don’t eat with your left hand; Arabs consider that unclean. He glossed over a slide on arts, monuments, and national archives (“There’s a lot of stuff here,” he said), and he was stumped by a basic question on the distances between Baghdad and the borders of Syria and Turkey.
An Army lawyer also gave an overview of “ROE,” the rules of engagement on the battlefield. Soldiers received two “ROE cards”: a green one for “pre- and post-hostilities” (in preparation for the invasion and after victory, respectively) and an orange one titled “ROE during hostilities.” The orange ROE cards outlined the basic rules for engaging enemy forces and also gave instructions for dealing with civilians. Rule 1: “You may stop civilians and check their identities, search for weapons and seize any found. Detain civilians when necessary to accomplish your mission or for your own safety. Use the Four S’s when dealing with civilians demonstrating some form of hostile intent.”
The Four S’s were a simple formula for using “graduated force” against civilians: “1. SHOUT verbal warning to halt; 2. SHOW weapon and intent to use it; 3. SHOVE use non-lethal physical force; 4. SHOOT to eliminate the threat. Fire only aimed shots. Stop firing when the threat is neutralized.” These guidelines were to be followed whenever troops set up a roadblock or a security perimeter in Iraqi towns and cities. A series of bullet points on the back of the card outlined a few possible scenarios, like a civilian deliberately driving a vehicle at friendly forces (response: shoot to eliminate the threat) or a young civilian woman pointing out to the enemy the location where friendly troops were concealed (response: shoot to eliminate the threat).
The rules seemed to encourage the assumption that civilians were potentially hostile, not potentially friendly. At the top of both cards, in boldface type, was the prime directive: NOTHING IN THESE RULES PROHIBITS YOU FROM EXERCISING YOUR INHERENT RIGHT TO DEFEND YOURSELF AND OTHER ALLIED FORCES. The U.S. military’s preoccupation with what it called “force protection” would have serious consequences. And the forces the invasion would unleash—sectarian conflict from within, a new front for international jihad—would create the conditions for a deadly internal war.
The 101st Airborne reached the outskirts of Najaf in early April 2003. It was the division’s first real encounter with the Iraqi population; it also served as a test of how Iraq’s Shia community would receive the Army—as liberators or as occupiers. For Shia believers, Najaf was a holy place. It housed the shrine of Imam Ali, considered by Shia to be the rightful successor of the Prophet Muhammad; after Mecca and Medina, it was the third most important site for Shia pilgrims. Standing atop a Humvee outside the gates of the city, Army Major General David Petraeus turned to his boss, the commander of V Corps, Lieutenant General William Wallace. “There sure are a lot more civilians on the battlefield in this particular scenario than there were at the NTC or at JRTC,” he said.
Petraeus was referring to the Army National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, and the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana. Those two “dirt” training facilities were where the Army conducted its full-dress rehearsals for war. A month-long stay “in the box” at NTC or JRTC was the closest you could get to combat without real shooting. At Fort Irwin, Army units would play a sophisticated version of laser tag against an OPFOR (“opposing force”) that was usually configured like a Soviet armored formation. For maximum realism, the OPFOR even had a fleet of Warsaw Pact equipment—tanks, helicopters, armored personnel carriers.* It was practice for the type of conventional, tank-on-tank engagement the Cold War military had always prepared to fight: the Soviets crashing through the Fulda Gap in West Germany. What the Army called “COBs”—civilians on the battlefield—were notably absent from the NTC war games. Now, Army commanders were very rapidly learning that civilians were not just an unexpected obstacle that could be easily circumvented.
On April 3, a delegation of soldiers of the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne entered the city to pay a visit to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading Shia imam. As the soldiers approached the Shrine of Ali, a large crowd of Shia men began to assemble; they quickly blocked the streets near the shrine. Rumors swirled that the foreign soldiers would try to enter the Shrine of Ali, or that they would detain Sistani. As the crowd grew, someone began to pitch stones at the American soldiers. Lieutenant Colonel Chris Hughes, commander of the Second Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, decided on a show of restraint. He ordered his soldiers to drop to one knee and point their weapons to the ground. “We’re going to withdraw out of this situation and let them defuse it themselves,” he said through a bullhorn. “All vehicles turn around.”3
A CNN reporter on the scene said Hughes’s decision to call off the visit and avoid a confrontation prevented U.S. troops from making enemies of the civilians in Najaf. But the gesture actually had been proposed by Kadhim Al-Waeli, an Iraqi exile employed as a cultural scout and advisor to the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne. He was the one who suggested that U.S. soldiers drop to one knee to show respect as they approached the Shrine of Ali. A violent confrontation was averted by a suggestion from a native-born Iraqi; this was broadcast on CNN and Al-Jazeera.4
“I’m your Google. You don’t have to go to Google, just ask me,” Al-Waeli had told Hughes. “I’m not a genius, but I was born in Iraq. I know that culture, I know the people.” That sort of advice was indispensable—and it was in extremely short supply. The Army had envisioned the creation of a three-thousand-strong force that would be charged with interpreting for coalition forces, acting as cultural guides, and helping handle refugees. The Iraqi volunteers, dubbed the Free Iraqi Forces, were supposed to act as senior cultural advisors, giving commanders insights into Iraqi attitudes and customs and helping smooth interactions with ordinary Iraqis.5
It was a good idea in theory. But in practice, the creation of the Free Iraqi Forces was a fiasco: Only a very small number of Iraqi exiles actually stepped forward to volunteer, and even fewer were prepared to deploy in time for the fighting. Many of those who did show up for training were not in particularly good shape.6 Few had combat experience. The Army quickly had to lower its expectations. Even an otherwise glowing Pentagon news story about Task Force Warrior, the Army’s program for training the exiles at Taszar Air Base, Hungary, acknowledged that trainers had to dumb down the curriculum. A caustic e-mail by a major assigned to Task Force Warrior was passed around within the military community: “Never in the history of the U.S. Armed Forces have so many done so much for so few,” he observed.7 The program in Hungary produced only a few dozen graduates in time to join the war.
Chris Straub, a retired Army officer and former member of the Senate Intelligence Committee staff with extensive experience working with Iraqi exile groups, blamed the relatively low pay—Free Iraqi Forces were paid one thousand dollars a month—for the poor turnout. The U.S. government did not want it to look as if it was raising a force of mercenaries, but Iraqi exiles could make much more money working as interpreters for Titan, the firm that held the main linguistics contract for the Army. “We [the U.S. government] were competing against ourselves,” Straub later observed. Straub had been hired as a Pentagon contractor to recruit Iraqis for the Free Iraqi Forces from half a dozen exile groups that qualified for U.S. assistance under the Iraq Liberation Act, signed into law in 1999 by President Bill Clinton. Free Iraqi Forces were supposed to provide an Iraqi face for the U.S.-led invasion, but Straub said the names of most volunteers were provided by the Iraqi National Congress, an Iraqi opposition group led by the exile politician and neoconservative favorite Ahmad Chalabi. “A lot of them didn’t show up,” Straub said. “Lots of them were old.” But Straub believed that the program, despite its faults, paid dividends. He later told me, “In my mind [the Najaf incident] paid for the program.”
In Najaf, the 101st Airborne Division also discovered that it would have to take on some distinctly nonmilitary missions: restoring essential services for the besieged city. Temperatures in early April were already rising into the nineties, and the city was running short of potable water. The unit shipped in a thousand gallons of water for local residents in neighborhoods occupied by the First Brigade, and made plans to deliver diesel fuel to restart a pumping station that had been out of service for several days.8 Even as the U.S. military delivered a swift, overwhelming defeat, another kind of war was taking shape. And those small hearts-and-minds victories could not alter perceptions in the Arab world that the United States was an occupier.
The march to Baghdad continued at whiplash pace. Soldiers and Marines on the ground would quickly learn that civilians were the defining feature on this new terrain. Days after the 101st Airborne Division’s uneasy first encounter with the residents of Najaf, Lieutenant Nathaniel Fick, a platoon leader with the Marine Corps’s First Reconnaissance Battalion, was ordered to scout the Iraqi military airfield at Qalat Sukkar, an air base that would be used as a staging point for the final assault on Baghdad. As they approached the chain-link fence surrounding the airfield, a message came over the radio network from company headquarters. “All personnel on the airfield are declared hostile.”9
Fick paused, and prepared to override the order. He wanted his unit to stick to the established rules of engagement. He then changed his mind, trusting that the order might save Marines’ lives by giving them crucial seconds to respond to an ambush or attack. As the Marines moved forward, Fick heard a short burst of gunfire, and a snatch of radio traffic: Something about men with weapons, and possible muzzle flashes. Not long after, Fick’s Marines were approached by a small group of villagers pulling two bundles. The Marines unwrapped the blankets: The villagers were carrying two young boys hit by the Marine gunfire. One boy had a bullet wound in the leg; the other was punched through by four bullets. “In horror, I thought back to our assault on the airfield a few hours before,” Fick later wrote. “The pieces fell into place. Those weren’t rifles we had seen but shepherds’ canes, not muzzle flashes but the sun reflecting on a windshield. The running camels belonged to those boys. We’d shot two children.”10
As the platoon pushed farther through Muwaffiqiya, the Marines shot a civilian who had failed to stop at a traffic checkpoint. It was a classic “escalation of force” scenario. As they pushed farther north, Fick ordered one of his Marines to commit a small act of vandalism. They cut down an octagonal traffic sign with the word stop written in Arabic. It would be perfect, he thought, for their traffic checkpoints. It might even save a life.11
Fick finally drew a line. His platoon was ordered to search an abandoned amusement park on the Tigris River for pro-Saddam fedayeen—the word “insurgent” had not yet come into vogue—when a battered old sedan rolled up to their position. Inside the car they found a badly injured teenage girl, quite possibly wounded by U.S. fire, and her frantic parents. Fick had to decide between staying with the original military mission of searching the park to find a possible cache of surface-to-air missiles or helping the girl. The Marines chose to help the girl. After cleaning and dressing the girl’s suppurating wound, they sent her family to an aid station at a higher headquarters, with a handwritten note from Fick instructing U.S. forces further down the line to provide medical aid.
For Fick that encounter marked a sort of break with his conventional military training. But the decision did not rest easy with him. “I kind of berated myself for a few years, thinking I had made the wrong choice … We didn’t find the surface-to-air missiles and some helicopters then get shot down, and did our decision to help end up costing the lives of many?” he later told me in an interview. “And only recently have I sort of found peace with this decision.”
The point was, Fick continued, “that most of us—most of us in the NCO corps and the junior officer corps—wanted to default to doing the right thing.” In that case, doing the right thing meant setting aside a purely military mission—hunting for a weapons cache—in order to aid innocent civilians who had been caught in the crossfire.
But the biggest disappointment, Fick told me, was that no civilian reconstruction effort seemed to materialize in the wake of the destructive military campaign. The U.S. military’s success in Iraq had been catastrophic: the regime had been shattered, but Iraq’s creaky national grid was failing and its economy was in ruins. No one had stepped in to fill the void. Where was USAID? Where were the civilian relief agencies? The realization was dawning that the United States needed to fix things, and fast.
“It’s really startling,” Fick said. “We expected there to be this army of reconstruction people descending on the city. And once the supply lines from Kuwait were open, once we had fought our way to Baghdad, there were going to be trucks, you know, convoys of trucks full of equipment and people coming in behind us. And they didn’t come. And the disillusionment set in pretty quickly.”
Fick and his Marines were perhaps only dimly aware of a Pentagon-led effort to launch reconstruction projects and take the lead on administering Iraq. In January 2003, the Defense Department created the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), an “interagency” office that brought in officials and experts in postwar planning and reconstruction from the State Department, USAID, and other government agencies.12 On March 1, 2003, just a few weeks before the invasion, U.S. Central Command prepared CONPLAN (Concept Plan) AURORA, a planning document that outlined the “Phase IV” plan for rebuilding Iraq.* Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tapped retired Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner to run what was supposed to be Iraq’s caretaker government.
Garner had won acclaim in 1991 for overseeing Operation Provide Comfort, a relief effort to save thousands of Kurdish refugees who had fled to the mountains of northern Iraq after a failed uprising in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s defeat in Operation Desert Storm. When allied forces and relief workers scouted the region in early April 1991, they estimated that as many as a thousand people a day were dying of disease and exposure in the mountains along the Turkish border. Garner led an improvised task force of NATO troops to help protect the civilians, deliver food aid, and set up refugee camps.
It was a muscular model of postwar disaster relief. U.S. military aircraft enforced a no-fly zone overhead, keeping Iraqi government forces in check and delivering relief supplies by air. Garner, then a major general, led Joint Task Force–Bravo, a multinational contingent built around the Twenty-fourth Marine Expeditionary Unit, to the town of Zakho.* His task was to prepare the town for an influx of Kurdish refugees coming down from the mountains. The entire operation lasted just three months: Garner crossed back into Turkey on July 15, and the camps were handed to United Nations control. Operation Provide Comfort was a success: The Kurds came down from the mountains but did not remain stranded in refugee camps, dependent on international aid. Most Kurds returned home, many of them after passing through a tent city in Zakho designed by Fred Cuny, a Texan who ran Intertect Relief and Reconstruction, a small private company based in Dallas that specialized in disaster relief.14
The key to Operation Provide Comfort was its flexible, improvised design: Garner pulled together a loose coalition from different nations operating under varying rules of engagement. Everything was “done with a handshake,” as he explained later. Flying into northern Iraq on a helicopter with Lieutenant General John Shalikashvili, his boss, and with General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Garner explained how the arrangement with other allied nations would work.
Garner recalled that Powell asked to see his MOU, a formal memorandum of understanding between the different component commanders from different nations contributing to the force. “General Powell, there isn’t one,” Garner responded. “We didn’t sign an MOU.”
Powell flushed for a minute. “If I’d known that, I’d never have let you start this operation,” he said. Pausing for a moment, Powell added, “If I’d done that, you’d still be back in Turkey trying to get an MOU signed, so you did the right thing.”
Equally important, Garner also collaborated with civilian relief workers and nongovernmental organizations, a major departure from standard military practice. Military commanders were trained to guard access to information, and the idea of civilian relief agencies being allowed to participate in planning meetings or set foot inside an operations center was anathema. Likewise, relief groups had also been quite wary of cooperating with the uniformed military, but Garner held a “town hall” meeting to build rapport. “We have to demonstrate you can trust us,” he told them. “We’re going to go full open kimono.” Garner gave NGOs and aid workers the opportunity to hitch rides on his helicopters and vehicles and granted access to the task force’s civil-military operations center so they could coordinate relief efforts.
Initially the relief workers may not have been comfortable around the military, but they quickly discovered the phenomenal logistics capability the armed forces had. Security and mine clearance also helped lay the foundation for effective relief. What started as a military operation became a unique hybrid experiment in collaboration among the military, international organizations, civilian aid workers, and private relief groups.
But the lessons of Operation Provide Comfort were largely forgotten within the institutional military, in part because of the spectacular success of Operation Desert Storm, the conventional fight between U.S. and Iraqi forces. As Garner later told me, “It was kind of lost in the shuffle.” His operation was viewed as a minor epilogue to victory, and little effort was made to study it. And Garner would never have a real chance to apply his experience. ORHA’s lines of authority in Iraq were less than clear, its staff was spread thin, and its planning guidance was almost nonexistent. Colonel Mike Fitzgerald, a deputy planner at U.S. Central Command, later recalled that the only ORHA-related planning document he ever saw was a “one to two page document that said these are your essential tasks. It didn’t tell him [Garner] where he was lined up in the chain of command and who he responded to.”15
Less than a month after his arrival in Iraq in April 2003, Garner was replaced by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, a career diplomat who became the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, a revamped occupational government that was funded through the Pentagon. As U.S. proconsul, Bremer reported directly to the president through the Defense Department. The military, through its new proconsul, retained the lead in rebuilding Iraq.
In civilian life, Lance Corporal John Guardiano was an editor; in Iraq, he would become entangled in municipal affairs. Guardiano had enlisted in the Marine Corps at the late age of thirty-four, in a put-up-or-shut-up fit of post-9/11 patriotism. After boot camp at Parris Island and training as a field radio operator, he joined a reserve Civil Affairs unit based in Washington, D.C. His actual Civil Affairs qualifications were minimal: The unit was supposed to provide him with training in the basic tasks during his weekend reserve duty, but he was called up for active duty before he ever got around to the training. Anyway, Marines were expected to be riflemen first.
Guardiano was activated in February 2003 in preparation for the invasion of Iraq. His unit, the Fourth Civil Affairs Group, was broken up into four- and five-man teams and parceled out to frontline Marine units preparing to cross the berm into Iraq.* Guardiano was assigned to the First Battalion, Fourth Marines. They crossed into Iraq in late March. After a short mission to Nasiriyah, Guardiano’s Civil Affairs team set up shop in Hillah, a mostly Shia town about sixty miles south of Baghdad. The Marines had been told to expect surrender en masse by Iraqi military units after the invasion. That never happened. The enemy dispersed, and Marines shifted into an uneasy constabulary role. Guardiano went out on routine patrols with the infantry, anxious to find the “bad guys.” They rarely found them: the fedayeen, former Ba’athist paramilitaries, had gone to ground. The unit’s mission shifted—subtly, almost imperceptibly at first—to rebuilding.
The Marines Civil Affairs team began arranging meetings with sheikhs and tribal leaders. The First Battalion, Fourth Marines set up an office at the municipal hall, where a Marine commander played the role of local grandee: meeting petitioners, hearing complaints, weighing requests for assistance. The occupying Marines also created a city council to create some semblance of a local government. Many Ba’athists had fled or gone underground, and the unit’s encounters with most Iraqis were positive. Guardiano felt that by and large, the residents of Hillah were genuinely grateful to the U.S. military for ousting Saddam.
Not everything was rosy. Hillah and the surrounding province was now home to fifteen thousand disgruntled ex-soldiers. On May 23, 2003, in the second decree he issued as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army. This act had far-reaching implications: It made it difficult to reconstitute the Iraqi military and security forces to assist in restoring law and order, and it created a pool of angry, unemployed men with military training who became willing recruits for the insurgency. When unemployed soldiers found out that the American military was providing stopgap salary payments to some local municipal employees, their discontent grew. One group of ex-soldiers even organized a small rally in protest outside the municipal hall. Guardiano wrote an opinion piece that touched on the protest in the Wall Street Journal. “The soldiers’ complaint was not that the United States is too heavily involved in Iraqi affairs,” he wrote. “They were instead complaining that we are doing too little to help them. They want more help, not less; they seek greater engagement, not a withdrawal of American military forces. The difficulties here aren’t the result of the U.S. being heavy-handed. Rather, they result from our inability to bring greater resources to bear.”16
The biggest frustration for the Marines, then, was the absence of outside help from the rest of the U.S. government. Political advisors from the State Department, it seemed to many in the military, were a no-show. Guardiano saw no nongovernmental organizations on the ground in Hillah, either. The only civilian representative of the U.S. reconstruction effort in the area was an elderly man working as a USAID contractor who had showed up to help advise the new city council. Recalling it later, Guardiano said, “We wanted the State Department. We wanted the UN to help. I mean, very badly.”
Guardiano and the Marines were puzzled. Although Hillah was seeing sporadic violence, it seemed secure enough to begin work on “Phase IV,” the military’s shorthand for postconflict operations. “Honestly, that caused us to scratch our heads somewhat,” he said. “By our standards … well, you have to understand, it’s a little unfair—because we were walking around with guns. You’re there with a Marine infantry regiment … But the point is, we would have escorted the UN, we would have escorted the NGOs. We would have been their security guards, happily.”
In fact, the United Nations had established a mission in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had sent one of his most capable diplomats, Sergio Vieira de Mello, as his special envoy. But on August 19, 2003, a truck bomb laden with explosives detonated outside Baghdad’s Canal Hotel, headquarters of the UN mission. Vieira de Mello and twenty-one others were killed; after the bombing the United Nations pulled out nearly all its staff. Nevertheless, Guardiano and the Marines began reaching their own conclusion: They had been left holding the bag. “I think part of it, candidly, was an antimilitary bias,” Guardiano said. “And I think a lot of us felt that way: They don’t want to be seen with the Marines, they don’t want to be seen with the military.”
For Guardiano, as for other troops on the ground, a shared perception was beginning to take shape: Although Marines and soldiers were at war, the rest of the government was not. They would have to go it alone. And to make matters worse, they would have to tackle postwar reconstruction missions while being shot at. The collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime created a power vacuum within Iraq, and U.S. troops would quickly find themselves in the middle of a vicious internal war.
A civilian reconstruction effort was taking shape, however slowly. By late March, as U.S. troops reached the outskirts of Baghdad, humanitarian assessment teams from USAID had progressed no farther than Umm Qasr, the Iraqi port just over the border from Kuwait. “We don’t operate in a combat environment,” Donald Tighe, a spokesman for USAID’s Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) in Kuwait, explained to the Christian Science Monitor. “We have begun the assessment process in areas declared secure by the military.”17
The reality was a bit more complex. As a USAID official who was on the ground in Kuwait at the time later explained to me, the DART teams were in a bind, because they had no security of their own, and traveling with the military was initially not considered an option, because nongovernmental organizations that worked with USAID to implement their programs insisted on strict separation from the military mission. No one had planned to deliver aid in an active combat zone. The official said, “The USAID DART was refusing to leave Kuwait, because they were told the only way they were going to have security inside was with the military. And they were like, ‘Nope! None of our NGO [non-governmental organization] partners will have anything to do with us, oh no, no, no!’ ”
In essence, the war in Iraq was widening the military-civilian rift that had been exposed in Afghanistan. Part of the problem was political. Some charities, such as the U.K.-based Oxfam, refused government funds to finance operations in Iraq, partly because of their objections to the war.18 Many aid groups opposed efforts to place humanitarian projects under military supervision on principle: The International Rescue Committee, CARE, and WorldVision all refused to take part in a thirty-five-million-dollar USAID program to rebuild Iraqi schools and health clinics because, they argued, it undercut their independence and neutrality.19 But the problem was also bureaucratic. The organizational culture of USAID was not geared toward working in a combat zone, and despite the small experiment in armed social work that had begun in Afghanistan, the agency was waiting for a formal end to hostilities—a sort of punctuation mark—to begin their work.
USAID’s work began to pick up momentum in April 2003. On April 2, the agency announced $200 million in food aid for Iraq, a contribution that would be funneled through the World Food Program, and also began parceling out the first major aid contracts. On April 11, the agency announced an initial $7.9 million award to the North Carolina–based Research Triangle Institute, or RTI, to promote Iraqi participation in local government. It also gave a twelve-month contract to Creative Associates International Inc., an international consulting firm, to revitalize Iraqi schools. Finally, it announced a major overhaul of Iraqi infrastructure projects, awarding an emergency infrastructure repair contract to Bechtel, a construction firm based in San Francisco. The contracts would go toward repairing airports, dredging and upgrading the port of Umm Qasr, and repairing and rebuilding hospitals, schools, irrigation systems, and some ministry buildings. That contract had an initial ceiling of up to $680 million payable over eighteen months.20
But it was clear that USAID was farming out work to the usual suspects: established, well-connected firms such as Creative Associates International, RTI, and Bechtel. Much like Afghanistan, Iraq was shaping up as a bonanza for Beltway bandits. In an opinion piece in USA Today, Andrew Natsios, the head of USAID, defended the contract awards as a wartime necessity:
Instead of the usual procurement process allowing all firms to compete for contracts—a process that takes six months—the U.S. Agency for International Development used expedited procedures under federal law, allowing it to limit the number of competing firms to shorten the decision time. Naturally, the USAID issued invitations for bids (known as Requests for Proposals or RFPs) to multinational firms with a proven track record of tackling major reconstruction projects in post-conflict countries such as Bosnia and Haiti. And since the war in Iraq had not yet begun or is still underway, RFPs went to firms with security clearances.21
As in Afghanistan, preference would go to large international firms and established consultancies. It was a continuation of business as usual for USAID: outsourcing their work to the development-industrial complex.
In parallel, the State Department was scurrying to find volunteers to fill the ranks of the newly created Coalition Provisional Authority. One internal notice in July 2003 sought volunteers for “TDY POLADS” (temporary duty political advisors) in Iraq. Volunteers would serve three-month rotations. Arabic language skills were preferred, but not required. The notice also outlined the incentives: Volunteers would receive 25 percent danger pay, plus a 25 percent differential (an extra salary allowance). In essence, volunteers would receive a 50 percent pay boost for service in Iraq. They would also be able to bank their pay, since housing, meals, travel, and laundry would all be provided in lieu of a per diem. Equally important, the State Department was not planning to break or curtail regular diplomatic assignments for temporary duty in Iraq. The bureaucratic routine of bidding for embassy assignments or jobs within the Washington bureaucracy would not be interrupted.
These temporary assignments meant, in essence, that service with the Coalition Provisional Authority would be a “ticket-punching” exercise: Volunteers would go on a brief assignment to a war zone, add another line to their résumés, but not hang around long enough to accomplish anything. In short, the diplomatic corps was not on a war footing.
The high turnover rate among civilians assigned to the CPA made a poor impression on the military, particularly those working staff positions in Baghdad. Most Army units were expected to serve one-year rotations in Iraq, at a minimum; as the situation worsened, units often found their tours were extended by several months.
Colonel Peter Mansoor, commander of the “Ready First” First Brigade, First Armored Division, arrived in Iraq in late May 2003; his unit effectively administered several districts in central and northeast Baghdad, an area of seventy-five square miles that was home to 2.1 million Iraqis. By late 2003, Mansoor’s brigade was already deeply involved in the stability operations across the Tigris River from the CPA headquarters in the Green Zone. They had helped to form neighborhood and district advisory councils to create some facsimile of local government, had begun training Iraqi security forces, and had undertaken Civil Affairs projects. But their encounters with the civilian-led occupation authorities were rare—and immensely frustrating. In his memoir of his tour in Iraq, Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander’s War in Iraq (2008) Mansoor recalled a dispiriting trip into the Green Zone, Saddam Hussein’s former palace complex on the west bank of the Tigris river, where the CPA had set up shop. Insulated behind the blast walls, HESCO barriers, and razor wire, CPA staff rarely seemed to venture outside the fortified perimeter.
“What we really needed was an embedded team of interagency advisors configured to help the brigade combat team deal with issues of governance, economics, and rule of law,” he wrote. “But the Ready First Combat Team was based on the east side of the Tigris River and rarely saw CPA personnel in our area. Furthermore, Ambassador Bremer had centralized decisionmaking in his palace headquarters in the Green Zone, which made support for brigade combat teams difficult if not impossible.”22
Not only did the CPA’s Humanitarian Action Coordination Center and representatives of the U.S. Agency for International Development ensconced in the Green Zone seem detached from what was happening on the ground, but the staff at CPA seemed young and underqualified. Mansoor recalled meeting a twenty-something employee of the State Department, who, despite her youth and inexperience, had been assigned as the coordinator for local governments throughout central and northeastern Baghdad. “I took her to a meeting of the Adhamiya District Advisory Council a few days later, gave her a personal briefing on our operations at my brigade headquarters, and invited her to return to coordinate complementary efforts,” he wrote. “I never saw her again.”23
Within the Green Zone, the CPA had its own internal conflicts. Faced with unfilled billets in the CPA, the Defense Department made the decision to hire “3161 appointees” to supplement members of the military and the diplomatic corps staffing the CPA. These were direct hires who would typically serve in Iraq on one-year contracts (3161 refers to the section of the U.S. Code that regulates the hiring of civilian experts). Many 3161 appointees were drawn from the private sector. They were experts in the oil sector, municipal services, and transportation; in order to recruit them temporarily from the private sector, 3161s were paid at the top of the government pay scale. At one memorable DoD-to-State transition meeting for 3161s in Baghdad, a visiting State Department personnel specialist announced, with some bewilderment, “Some people here make more money than the ambassador.” The 3161s also clashed with the Foreign Service culture: Many of them had never worked in an embassy or learned how to clear a diplomatic cable, but they also felt that diplomats had few real-world skills to offer when it came to repairing Iraq’s creaking infrastructure, and spent little time meeting their Iraqi counterparts.
An advisor to the Transportation Ministry recalled that a Foreign Service officer visited the ministry he was supposed to be advising only once. “It was a forty-five-minute, senior-level event and everyone came away talking about ‘the relationship,’ ” the advisor said. “Unfortunately, the minister never gave it another thought.” The 3161 advisor, on the other hand, visited the ministry several times a week. “We spoke to our Iraqi counterparts every day,” the advisor told me. “I sometimes went to the ministry (escorted by ten heavily armed friends) with no fixed agenda, but invariably something arose once I started talking to my Iraqi counterparts. And besides, the Iraqis made it to work. Why should we cower in the Green Zone?”
The greatest media scorn, however, was reserved for the political hacks who seemed to dominate the CPA. Although the CPA staff had been drawn from various government agencies, and included a smattering of officials from other coalition states, it also had a fair share of ideologically motivated operatives who seemed to view their jobs primarily in terms of securing President Bush’s reelection in 2004. The CPA press office was a particularly egregious case: It was led by Dan Senor, a former press secretary for Spencer Abraham, the Michigan Republican who was then secretary of energy. Senor headed an office that included a healthy number of former Bush campaign workers, political appointees, and former Capitol Hill staffers. The Associated Press found that more than one third of the CPA’s press office staff had Republican ties.24
And then there was the “brat pack,” a group of politically connected youngsters inside the CPA. Ariana Eunjung Cha, a Washington Post reporter, profiled one group of twenty-something volunteers who served short tours with the CPA in Iraq. They included a twenty-eight-year-old legislative aide to Republican Senator Rick Santorum, a twenty-four-year-old Web site editor, and the twenty-eight-year-old daughter of the neoconservative pundit Michael Ledeen. They were all in their twenties or early thirties; few had any overseas experience; and they had been hired for low-level jobs. But because of high staff turnover and a lack of volunteers, they very quickly found themselves occupying positions of serious responsibility and drawing six-figure salaries. How did they manage to land these important jobs? “For months they wondered what they had in common, how their names had come to the attention of the Pentagon, until one day they figured it out: They had all posted their resumes at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank,” Cha wrote.25
Less well connected but equally inexperienced were Ray LeMoine and Jeff Neumann, a pair of enterprising misfits on a Valium- and liquor-fueled buddy trip to Iraq who also managed to land jobs in the CPA. LeMoine and Neumann, who previously had run a business selling YANKEES SUCK T-shirts at Boston’s Fenway Park, ended up running the CPA’s NGO Assistance Office after taking a bus trip to Baghdad on a lark in January 2004. As outsiders to government, they were perceptive observers. And they quickly found the CPA’s appearance of purposeful administration was little more than illusion. Their description of the “Bremer Look” (the CPA chief favored a navy-blue blazer, khaki trousers, and regimental tie, plus a pair of desert tan combat boots) was particularly withering. “By the time we arrived in Iraq, the Bremer Look had fully penetrated the CPA,” they noted. “Like a news anchor wearing a suit jacket and tie but naked below the desk, the Bremer Look suggested both serious work and slightly reckless adventure. Considering that most Iraqis wore plastic sandals, and didn’t live in palaces or travel by helicopter, they associated the Bremer Look with American arrogance … Fact is, most CPA combat boots never left the Green Zone. The Look, like the CPA itself, was all image.”26
Bremer would later write a self-serving memoir, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope. LeMoine and Neumann provided more insights about their own failures. In a heartbreaking summary of their time in Iraq, Babylon by Bus, they wrote: “In the end, it was our work that would come to define our time in Iraq. There is no point in romanticizing what we did. We thought we were helping Iraqis. We were wrong. Because of our failure, we’d leave the Middle East in a state of regret.”27
The biggest U.S. experiment in foreign assistance since the Marshall Plan was being run by amateurs. In an October 2004 U.S. Institute of Peace interview, Colonel Lloyd Sammons, a reserve Special Forces officer and a lawyer who served as a military assistant in the governance section of the CPA, described the atmosphere of deep disillusion that set in within the CPA under Bremer. The political appointees seemed more preoccupied with making the administration look good than actually improving the lot of ordinary Iraqis. Frustrated by the remoteness of the CPA and his isolation in the Green Zone, Sammons staged a minor act of rebellion. In the small shared office space, he started posting the names of soldiers whose deaths had been announced in Defense Department news releases and put up a sign on his desk that said, “Why I am here?” in boldface type.
Sammons departed Iraq in frustration. “I’m a big boy and I recognize things aren’t perfect in this world, but to me it was sad,” he later said. “Frankly, I left early. Nobody threw me out, but I knew that I was probably reaching an untenable level of anger and sadness. I would rant and rave right outside of Ambassador [Richard Henry] Jones’s office while visiting his MA [military assistant]. Jones had to hear me. When Bremer would walk in every once in a while (he had to pass my desk on the way to the john) I’d just look at him like he was a piece of shit, and that’s how I felt about him … I don’t know every inside deal and everything, but I’m not an idiot. You can sort of smell when you’re losing.”28
* Akbar would later be convicted of murder and sentenced to death by a court-martial. Incidents of fragging, murder of fellow soldiers or superior officers, were extremely rare in the Iraq War. A 2009 shooting spree by a soldier at a stress treatment clinic at Camp Victory, Baghdad, however, put the spotlight on the psychological toll of combat.
* The Army also had a similar facility in Germany, the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels. The Marine Corps did similar training at Twenty-nine Palms in the Mojave Desert.
* Details of that plan are still not public. On April 1, 2010, U.S. Central Command released a redacted version of the document in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Nearly all of its twenty-seven pages were blacked out.13
* The Twenty-fourth Marine Expeditionary Unit was commanded by Colonel James Jones, who would later go on to be NATO’s supreme allied commander–Europe and the head of U.S. European Command. In 2009 he was named National Security Advisor to President Barack Obama.
* At the Iraq-Kuwait border was a ten-kilometer-deep linear obstacle complex comprising massive tank ditches, concertina wire, electrified fencing, and of course berms of dirt.