8

 

 

WHAT HAPPENED IN FALLUJAH

We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies. I know that this recent movement through Georgia has had a wonderful effect in this respect. Thousands who had been deceived by their lying newspapers to believe that we were being whipped all the time now realize the truth, and have no appetite for a repetition of the same experience.

—MAJOR GENERAL WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN

 

 

“MEN, WE’RE ORDERED to withdraw from the city.”

The company commander said it quietly. Still, he said it. They all knew what those words meant.

Corporal Ethan Place looked up from the scope atop his M-40A3 sniper rifle. He lay with his belly flat on the uneven cement floor, his tan desert camouflage gone gray with dust and stiff with sweat as well as some of his own vomit and some blood, thankfully not his. For six days, the corporal, his spotter, and a platoon of Marines had held this key vantage point, a three-story abandoned house overlooking the cemetery in the Jolan District of Fallujah. During his time there, Place thought he’d killed thirty-two insurgents. He’d hit more but couldn’t be sure what became of all of them. And then there had been the five-hundred-pound bombs, the Cobra attack helicopters hosing the other buildings down the street with 20 mm cannon shells, all the other Marines banging away, then the two tanks that came up, and even some expert SOF snipers—killing machines, those guys—all in all, a lot of firepower. Yet even in that maelstrom, the aimed single shots told. At one point, Place and his spotter counted twenty-two enemy bodies lying stiff and broken in the dirt street. At odd hours, gaunt dogs slid from the shadows and crept up to gnaw on the remains. The lurking Iraqi foe quit coming out. They’d learned not to try to recover their dead. Place and the other snipers educated the enemy, one 7.62 mm bullet at a time.

Now here was Captain Doug Zembiec, the skipper of Company E, Second Battalion, First Marines, an officer fighting alongside his men from the start, announcing that after all of this, after seventeen Marines wounded of thirty-nine in the shooting house, after all of the dead suffered by the U.S. and inflicted on the enemy over the last month, it was over. Some big guys up the chain evidently had had enough. Marines must follow orders, but they don’t have to like them. They hated these.

They called the April 2004 operation to clean out Fallujah Vigilant Resolve. To the tune of forty dead as they crunched and smashed to within a few days of securing Fallujah, Ethan Place and his brother Marines had proven plenty vigilant. But in Washington and Baghdad, others ran out of resolve.

The Marines pulled back. As is their tradition, they carried out every one of their dead and wounded. Behind them, Fallujah still belonged to the insurgents.

 

Several rungs up the chain of command, Major General Jim Mattis, the First Marine Division commander, gave voice to the frustration of men like Ethan Place and Doug Zembiec. “First we’re ordered in, and now we’re ordered out,” Mattis growled to his chief of staff. Then he quoted Napoleon: “If you’re going to take Vienna, then by God, sir, take it.” Something had clearly gotten very fouled up in Iraq that dark April of 2004. The problem was bigger than Fallujah.

For the U.S. war effort, the spring of 2004 was the eve of key strategic transitions. Ambassador Jerry Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority had worn out its welcome—if indeed it had ever been welcome—among the senior Iraqi civilians, already jostling for power as soon as the CPA went away. After much back-and-forth, which included strong Iraqi demands for immediate, sweeping nationwide elections, Bremer and his CPA team crafted a reasonably rational hand-over sequence. The American-selected interim Iraqi government prepared to take over on July 1. An election in early 2005 would create a transitional National Assembly to write a constitution for approval by plebiscite later that year. Finally, by the end of 2005, an Iraqi government would be elected under the new constitution. It all depended on enough security to permit the rule of law rather than the rule of the AK-47.

The second major transition enabled security. After months of the military burdening Lieutenant General Ric Sanchez and his overworked, undermanned CJTF-7 headquarters with both strategic and operational responsibilities, mid-May would see the long-awaited creation of a four-star theater command to handle matters of strategy and policy and a three-star corps headquarters to run day-to-day operations. This would match the long-established practice in Afghanistan. Sanchez would initially run the four-star headquarters, Multi-National Force–Iraq (MNF-I), although he expected to hand over command to a successor four-star officer by summer. At the three-star level, Lieutenant General Thomas F. Metz and his Third Corps at first filled in behind the departing Fifth Corps in CJTF-7. Metz and his Phantom Corps from Fort Hood, Texas, looked forward to their operational role as Multi-National Corps–Iraq (MNC-I) come May 15, 2004. These top-tier reorganizations came on top of the overall force rotations across the country, as the initial invasion divisions, brigades, regiments, and battalions handed off to their successors. It promised to be a very busy spring.

Their enemies, of course, had their own timeline. During the cool, wet Iraqi winter, they’d planted fewer IEDs and dropped fewer mortar rounds, but the warming trend of spring saw more hostile actions. Perhaps misreading the winter lull as more of an opportunity than it was, Sanchez directed a series of local offensives under the rubric Valiant Saber. The idea was to keep up the pressure.

One particular thorn in the American side remained Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric son of a beloved grand ayatollah martyred by Saddam Hussein. The sprawling rectangular Thawra low-income housing district in northeast Baghdad, home to two million Shiites (more than a quarter of the city’s population), proudly called itself Sadr City in tribute to Moqtada’s father, Muhammed. Young Moqtada did not have the scholarly devotion to inch his way up the ladder of the Shiite ayatollah hierarchy. But what he lacked in academic skills, he more than made up for with charisma. Already blessed with a famous name that gained him immediate credibility among Shia Iraqis, Sadr found his issue: the infidel occupation. “I’m just striving to apply the Sharia law,” Sadr said earnestly. “Death to America!” he added. Sadr attributed Saddam’s departure to Allah’s will, which had at long last brought the Shia Arabs to power in the Land of the Two Rivers. Now, apparently, the great deed having been done, Divine Authority wanted the occupiers gone, and their collaborators too. Sadr’s Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM) kept up their own pressure, using press releases and targeted violence. Sadr himself was indicted by an Iraqi court in August of 2003 for murdering a rival Shiite cleric. When Jerry Bremer asked Sanchez to grab Sadr that month, the general chose not to do so. At the time, Sanchez dismissed the proposal as a potential “strategic blunder for us.” The Coalition units in the south, like the Spanish in Najaf, the Ukrainians in Al Kut, and the British in Basrah, were surrounded by large, suspicious Shiite communities. The allies much preferred to negotiate with local JAM leaders. So Sadr remained at large. Whatever else it did, the conscious choice to avoid confronting Sadr in 2003 allowed Sanchez and his people to focus on the growing Sunni insurgency. The Shiite flank remained cranky but contained.

With the reduced Sunni troubles in winter, it looked like the early 2004 Valiant Saber initiatives could include not only operations in Mosul and Samarra but also a long-overdue reckoning with Sadr. Bremer and the intel guys thought maybe some squeezing might work. Sanchez agreed. “We know who his lieutenants are,” Sanchez noted, “and whenever we have the opportunity, our forces will be more than glad to launch these kinds of operations.” The general expected a reaction, a JAM upsurge in every Sadr stronghold, but he figured his forces were ready. “We can handle that,” he concluded. Orders went out.

On March 28, the Sadrist newspaper Al-Hawza (meaning “the Islamic schoolhouse”) was shut down by U.S. soldiers of the 759th Military Police Battalion. On April 3, Sadr’s associate Mustafa al-Yaqoubi was detained. As expected, JAM trouble began to spin up in Sadr City and Shulla in Baghdad, as well as in Karbala, Basrah, Al-Kut, Najaf, and Nasiriyah. The Shiites were stirring big-time, but with the Sunni still quiet, the new challenge could be met.

But then came the bolt from the blue, the type of incident that Carl von Clausewitz rightly called “the kind you can never really foresee,” friction on a platter. On March 31, in Sunni Fallujah, four Blackwater security contractors, all U.S. military veterans, were ambushed, dismembered, and burned. A howling, grinning, celebratory mob strung up two of the charred bodies on the green-painted iron bridge over the Euphrates. Media outlets worldwide carried the shocking pictures. In the Fallujah neighborhoods, a strong U.S. response was considered unlikely; the enemy was shwaretek: “gutless.”

So now CJTF-7 faced twin challenges: the expected one with Sadr’s JAM, and the one that wasn’t supposed to happen in Fallujah. Indeed, a few weeks before, the outgoing American commander, Major General Chuck Swannack of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, had told reporters, “I’m discounting a very serious insurgency ongoing here right now.” The Marines, newly arrived in Anbar Province, hadn’t been so sanguine. Now came the desecration of the Blackwater foursome.

The graphic images seemed to demand a strong reaction. In Baghdad and Washington, senior leaders pounded the table. In country, the Marines, led by Jim Mattis and his three-star higher commander, Lieutenant General James T. Conway, argued for doing this right, not just dropping bombs and killing people. Anbar was the most Sunni-populated (97 percent) province in Iraq, the largest of the eighteen provinces, with most of its million-plus people living in the thirteen major cities clustered along the Euphrates River. Fallujah, the most eastern city, held two hundred and eighty thousand people. Sometimes called the City of a Hundred Mosques (forty-seven inside the city limits, another fifty or so in surrounding villages), Fallujah had long been a hotbed of antigovernment sentiment. The 1920 revolt against the British Mandate originated in Fallujah. Many imams in those hundred mosques preached the Wahhabi line in a style that might have brought comfort to Osama bin Laden himself. For many reasons, including lack of manpower, the Eighty-Second Airborne had manned no permanent posts inside the city. Now the Marines owned the problem.

The U.S. Marine Corps has a long heritage of fighting counterinsurgency campaigns. Between the world wars, Marines led U.S. efforts in Haiti and Nicaragua. Like most successful campaigners, the Marines learned to develop and rely on local forces and native intelligence sources to gain enough popular support, or perhaps acquiescence, to find the bad guys. The Marines collected their successful methods in the Small Wars Manual, published in 1940 and used ever since. In Vietnam, the Marines applied these kinds of techniques in their effective Combined Action Platoon program. The Communists greatly feared these local forces and had worked diligently, and with increasing effect over the years, to divert the Marines from the villages. Now the Marines brought this approach to the landlocked desert and river towns of Anbar Province. They intended to train and accompany Iraqi soldiers and police on patrol. They would help with civic action, building schools, wells, and clinics. And when enemies resisted, the Marines would fight, but always arm in arm with local Iraqi units. As Mattis put it, “No better friend, no worse enemy.”

The slow, smart Marine methods might have worked if not for that gruesome tableau at the Fallujah bridge. In Washington, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared, “We’ve got to pound these guys.” President Bush agreed. In Baghdad, Ambassador Jerry Bremer said to Sanchez, “I encourage a vigorous attack.” Sanchez concurred. His operations deputy, Brigadier General Mark T. Kimmitt, told the press on April 1 that “U.S. troops will go in. It’s going to be deliberate, it will be precise, and it will be overwhelming.”

Overwhelming it was, but it turned out to be the Coalition command that felt the pressure. The JAM uprising arrived right on schedule but exceeded the intelligence predictions. Sadr’s people outdid themselves. In Baghdad, a horrific street fight erupted in congested Sadr City. Newly arrived troopers of the First Cavalry Division went toe to toe with crowds of fanatic JAM militiamen. The Americans killed hundreds at the cost of seven of their own soldiers killed and sixty wounded. In Al Kut, the Ukrainians were swamped by Sadrists who grabbed the radio station and threatened the CPA compound. In Najaf, the Spanish backed away as Sadr’s gunmen took over the key religious shrines. At the encircled Najaf CPA center, Ric Sanchez himself got involved in a rooftop firefight. Fighting in Karbala, Nasiriyah, and Basrah flared as JAM shooters roamed the streets. Except for the British, who dealt with matters in Basrah, the embattled allied contingents in the south pleaded for U.S. help.

With the Marine offensive under way in Fallujah, Ric Sanchez needed additional forces to clean up the Shiite south. He was compelled to turn to a former command of his, Major General Marty Dempsey’s First Armored Division. A third of Dempsey’s soldiers were already en route home to their bases in Germany. Sanchez had to hold them, turn them around, and use them to clean up the JAM uprisings, starting with Najaf and Al Kut. He also brought down reinforcements from Mosul to help in Baghdad.

For Marty Dempsey, it was a hard decision. An officer who had been in plenty of fights himself during a tough year in Baghdad, Dempsey gave his soldiers the news straight: “I know you are eager to get home. I am too. But not if it means allowing one thug to replace another. We’ve worked too hard here to watch that happen.” In one case, soldiers who had just gotten off the airplane in Germany reboarded and went right back. The American campaign teetered. Most military operations reach such a point, when only the will of the commander and the valor of the troops can win through. With Sunni surging in Fallujah and Shiites rampaging at multiple sites, that juncture had arrived.

The enemy knew it and jumped on it. Sunni insurgents in Fallujah played on this crisis atmosphere. The Marine attack began on April 5 with four battalions and immediately made solid progress. In a very shrewd move, far more important than acquiring another crate of RPGs or better car bombs, the insurgents invited reporter Ahmed Mansour of Al Jazeera into the city. He and his camera team camped out at a crowded city hospital just west of the bridge where the Blackwater men had been strung up. Ahmed Mansour’s cameramen sent out a steady stream of images of dead babies, mangled elders, bloodied children, wailing mothers, and thin, pathetic, still corpses in civil dress. Given that every hostile in Iraq wore civilian clothes, that only made sense. But it did not play well in Peoria, let alone in Baghdad, Riyadh, Amman, or Washington. Joined with the television footage of fighting in the Shiite areas, it got immediate attention from residents of the ever-fevered Arab Street and the wider, troubled Muslim Boulevard. Those worthies expressed loud and extensive sympathy for the “honorable resistance” in Fallujah, referring to it as another intifada (uprising), akin to the Palestinians battling the Israelis. Always mindful of their fiery followers, Arab potentates also objected, many in strong public statements. Even the British complained that the Americans were too heavy-handed. Grumbling escalated: too much firepower, too many civilian casualties, too many bombs, too much violence, too much, too much, too much. It looked a lot worse than it was, but sober military judgment cannot easily trump a parade of bold images. The Americans persisted. Fast-moving First Armored Division units cleared Al Kut and trapped Moqtada al-Sadr himself in Najaf. Some of the senior U.S. commanders, though, started looking over their shoulders. As well they should. In this prizefight, too many in the audience had brought their own white towels.

The tragic Al Jazeera footage resonated in Iraq. Not much brought Iraqi Sunni and Shiites together, but the April combat did the trick. Sadr’s people immediately dispatched a symbolic aid convoy to the beleaguered Sunni; the Sunni insurgents likewise sent some trucks with arms and a few fighters into Shia enclaves in Baghdad. A vociferous Shia mob in Baghdad convinced a new battalion of Iraqi soldiers not to proceed to Fallujah. The unit disintegrated; the men climbed off stopped trucks, shucking their uniforms as stunned U.S. advisers watched, powerless to stop it. Other enemy cells and networks began to blow holes in bridges on the major highways leading down to Kuwait, snarling Coalition troop and supply movements. Finally, the senior Iraqis in the governing council went wobbly. Several resigned in protest over Fallujah, Najaf, or both. One Sunni elder, Adnan Pachachi, said, “We consider the actions carried out by U.S. forces as illegal and totally unacceptable. It is a form of mass punishment.” Even Shiite members like Ayad Allawi and Ahmed Chalabi expressed reservations. If the governing council fractured, there would be no Iraqis to take over from the CPA.

Ignoring their many critics, dismissing complaints fueled by insurgent propaganda, American and Coalition commanders kept up the pressure. The military situation improved. By mid-April, the Sunni and Shia uprisings had been contained. The Marines were within days of finishing off the enemy in Fallujah. The First Armored Division flying columns restored order in Al Kut and cornered Sadr in Najaf, awaiting only a final okay to nab him. Baghdad had been quieted, to some degree, by the First Cavalry Division. Coalition elements restored security on the highways. Yet in April of 2004, the propaganda front proved to be the only one that counted. As Marine commander Jim Conway summarized, “Al Jazeera kicked our butts.” With Iraqi senior civilian officials objecting, the British chafing, the publicity all wrong, and the U.S. 2004 presidential campaigns well under way, Bremer and Sanchez got the word: Stand down. Placing a cherry on the crap sundae, the Abu Ghraib detainee-abuse story broke worldwide on April 28.

Fallujah lapsed into a negotiated settlement that left insurgents running the city under the fig leaf of a Fallujah Brigade, members of which were incapable of cooperating with one another, let alone with the Marine cordon fronting the city. Moqtada al-Sadr squatted in Najaf, still a free man, declaring victory. His JAM continued to stage events, but the heavy casualties suffered among the faithful took their toll. When Sadr ran the same drill again in August, he faced a different lineup. By that time, the Iraqis were (sort of) in charge.

That day had come. On June 28, 2004, with little fanfare, Jerry Bremer completed the CPA mission. He handed authority over to Ayad Allawi and the Iraqi interim government. It was a small event held in the Iraqi prime minister’s office. A photographer took a few posed pictures. The big ceremony had been scotched for fear of an enemy attack. That told its own tale. Bremer left Iraq after a thankless year.

His military counterpart followed him three days later. On July 1, Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez turned over command of Multi-National Force–Iraq to General George W. Casey Jr. Sanchez departed a bitter man. He was rightly proud of his Coalition and U.S. subordinates, lauding their bravery and sacrifice. But he knew things had not gone well. “The last week of March and the first two weeks of April 2004,” he wrote later, “were a strategic disaster for America’s mission in Iraq.” The American military view is clear: the commander is responsible for everything his unit does or fails to do.

 

Few American commanders have inherited a worse situation than George Casey. The Sunni enemies were active in all of their home provinces, and Sadr’s Shiite JAM seemed determined to pop up when and where least wanted. Casey’s MNF-I was engaged in a counterinsurgency, yoked to an unelected Iraqi government that featured too many former expatriate slicksters like Ahmed Chalabi. The Iraqi army and police existed here and there. But by and large, those facing the insurgents with firearms were foreigners and so, by definition, irritants to the native folk. The Iraqi population was at best tolerant of the occupiers, and that was only in the Kurdish and certain Shia regions.

A student of history, Casey knew that successful counterinsurgencies prosecuted by an external power demanded a long-term commitment, up to a decade of actual fighting and several more decades of follow-up and follow-through. Like smoldering forest fires, even after suppression, insurgencies tended to flare up now and again. They were rarely really and truly over. Think about America’s long road in the Philippines (since 1898) or South Korea (since 1945), both of which endured hot wars and cold, consistently backed by lengthy U.S. troop deployments, formal mutual-defense treaties, and firm political and economic support. For counterinsurgency to work, the enemy had to be convinced that he couldn’t outwait you. Regardless of how the upcoming 2004 U.S. elections came out, Casey hoped he could count on that long-term commitment.

Like his friend and superior John Abizaid at USCENTCOM, Casey understood that a long-term U.S. effort needed to focus on helping the Iraqis. Hours after taking the flag from Sanchez, the new general questioned his MNF-I staff. “Okay, who’s my counterinsurgency expert?” A major general dutifully answered, but to be fair, the question was rhetorical. If the U.S. and the Coalition intended to win this thing, they were all going to have to become counterinsurgency experts—starting now.

For observers expecting a driving, imposing, forceful general, George Casey didn’t look like much. Short, stocky, with a shock of graying hair and reading glasses he pushed up onto his head when thinking, Casey wasn’t a West Pointer. He’d gone to Georgetown and got his commission through ROTC. His West Point graduate father, George Senior, a major general commanding the famous First Cavalry Division (Airmobile), had been killed in Vietnam months after young George earned his infantry commission. Army insiders had pegged George Senior to go all the way. Now his son had done it, four stars, and he’d stepped into the toughest wartime command since Vietnam.

George Casey didn’t look like the general you’d get from Central Casting, the one with a colorful personality who slapped backs and barked memorable one-liners. He didn’t say a lot to the press, nor did he grandstand for the troops. To be honest, rather than a dashing commander, he seemed more like an insurance salesman or a small-town storekeeper. Clever types had once said much the same thing about a rumpled, nondescript former shop clerk from Illinois named Ulysses Simpson Grant. They were wrong then too.

Like Grant, there was a lot more to George Casey than met the eye. As a Georgetown student, he had served as an intern for Coach Vince Lombardi during the football legend’s tenure with the Washington Redskins. Like Army chief of staff General Pete Schoomaker, Casey was one of fewer than twenty out of an initial hundred handpicked men to gut his way through one of the brutal initial selection courses for the Task Force. Schoomaker stayed; Casey chose to return to his conventional infantry unit. Yet the achievement showed the measure of the man. As had John Abizaid, Casey served in the Middle East as a United Nations truce observer in the Sinai. He commanded a mechanized battalion in the Fourth Infantry Division, a mechanized brigade in the First Cavalry Division—his father’s legacy loomed large—and, finally, the First Armored Division in Kosovo in 2000. It was unusual for an infantryman to command an armored formation. But George Casey was an unusual infantryman.

Along with the customary succession of line-officer duties, Casey had some other key assignments that provided crucial preparation for Iraq. After commanding the battalion, he served as a special assistant for the Army chief of staff, as close as Casey ever came to joining the AAA club; not the West Point Army Athletic Association, but the other one, the careerist self-promotion society that hung out near the military throne rooms: Aides, Adjutants, and Assholes. Casey eschewed that stuff. He held a key junior general post in the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, pulled together the homeland defense plans at U.S. Joint Forces Command after 9/11, stepped up to be the Joint Staff J-5 overseeing strategic plans and policy, and then took over as director of the Joint Staff, the chairman’s chief of staff overseeing worldwide military operations. In those latter two jobs, Casey followed his old teammate John Abizaid. Just before coming to Iraq, Casey received his fourth star and served as General Pete Schoomaker’s vice chief of staff for the Army. Casey understood the formulation of strategy, including the conundrum that had become Iraq, as well as any American general. He probably grasped it better than almost all of those who thought they did.

There was another thing. Although he hadn’t been in combat before he arrived in Baghdad, George Casey shared another characteristic with Ulysses S. Grant. Watching the stolid Grant ignore the strike of nearby bullets and even a shell burst during the vicious, hard-fought 1864 Battle of the Wilderness, a soldier of the Fifth Wisconsin Regiment remarked: “Ulysses don’t scare worth a damn.” So it was with George Casey. He evinced an extraordinary calm even under dire circumstances, constantly watching for opportunities and options. He looked always up and toward the horizon, searching for what might be done next rather than glancing back and down into the void.

 

That summer of 2004 appeared bleak indeed both inside and outside Iraq, a path strewn with grim milestones: Fallujah, Najaf, Abu Ghraib, rising casualties, and strong partisan dissent in the United States. The great, liberating march upcountry of 2003 had degenerated into the heat, squalor, and blood of Iraqi resentment, prisoner abuse, and baby-killing in 2004. Many Americans wanted out, pure and simple. Ever the strategist, even at this nadir, Casey saw an opportunity.

He started with the mission. Recognizing the erosion of relationships between the CPA and CJTF-7, Casey reached out early to John Negroponte, the first U.S. ambassador to post-Saddam Iraq. Negroponte was willing and interested in close teamwork. Together, the two crafted a joint mission statement: “To help the Iraqi people build a new Iraq, at peace with its neighbors, with a constitutional, representative government that respects human rights and possesses security forces sufficient to maintain domestic order, and deny Iraq as a safe haven for terrorists.” The words would change, but in essence, this remained the U.S. mission right to the end. It wasn’t overly ambitious. As Casey liked to say, “The more we do for the Iraqis, the more we do for the Iraqis.” It all rode on them, not us.

That said, Casey and his team worked with the ambassador and his people to come up with an operational construct, a campaign plan. They issued it within weeks of Casey’s arrival. It, like the words in the mission statement, changed over the years. But the basics stayed true until 2011. Casey summed it up: al-Qaeda out, Sunni in, Iraqis increasingly in the lead.

That little formula reflected Casey’s shrewd assessment of the opposition. To help the Iraqis win, the war effort must focus on the Sunni insurgency. It meant an unpalatable but necessary accommodation with Moqtada al-Sadr. That agitator antagonized the Americans—and killed too many—but the reality of 2004 Iraq was that the Shiites held sway, and they preferred to deal with Sadr’s JAM in the political arena, not to fight them. Sadr’s evident Iranian connection made this very hard. After all, Iran was a charter member of the Axis of Evil named by President Bush in January of 2002, and Iranian agents and their terrorist auxiliaries had spilled a lot of American blood over the years. Yet Casey recognized that for Ayad Allawi and his Shiite-dominated government, and any likely successors, Shiite Iran was a neighbor. The Americans came from an ocean away. The Americans might or might not stay. Iran was forever.

The one enemy that could be destroyed was obvious: al-Qaeda in Iraq, Zarqawi’s network. The Baghdad Shia elite always showed energy for going after “foreigners,” especially these militant suicide bombers who so hated Shiites. The Sunni worked with AQI, allies of convenience wearing the same sectarian colors. But you could see an Iraq where the Sunni had local power in places like Anbar and Salah ad Din Provinces. AQI wanted no deals, no quarter, simply Americans gone and Shia brought to heel, all of it run according to stringently force-fed shari’a law. Casey and his team saw a potential split here. If they could drive in a wedge, get AQI out and Sunni included, it might well defuse the entire insurgency. George Casey understood this in 2004. For seven years, the Americans pursued it, with three successive Iraqi governments more or less in agreement.

Getting the Iraqis into the lead, especially in security, was the means to push and keep AQI out and bring the Sunni inside the fold. Here the somewhat disjointed activities of 2003 left a lot of room for improvement. The CPA-led effort was fine as far as it went, just too small scale and too slow to field new Iraqi forces. Most U.S. units, like Nate Sassaman’s battalion in Balad and Samarra, did good work raising local Iraqi elements variously labeled as Iraqi Civil Defense Corps and the Iraqi National Guard. As the Marines learned in Fallujah in April, though, these new Iraqi battalions proved fragile as well as few. This effort needed a jump-start, a top-to-bottom shakeup, billions of dollars, and quality advisers. Casey got all of that.

The jump-start came in the form of newly promoted Lieutenant General David H. Petraeus, the most ambitious, energetic, and articulate officer in the U.S. Army. Petraeus had led the 101st Airborne Division during the 2003 invasion and did a creditable job in and around Mosul, including some excellent recruitment and fielding of new Iraqi police and army units. Now he came to activate and command the Multi-National Security Transition Command–Iraq (MNSTC-I, pronounced “minsticky”), with the mission to build numerous and competent Iraqi forces as quickly as possible. A charter member of the more dubious version of AAA, Petraeus was the polar opposite of Casey in terms of personality and press profile. He was exactly the sort of guy you’d think would be a general, and a top one, a brilliant one, a Douglas MacArthur in every way. Indeed, as Petraeus took over, Newsweek ran a story with the new three-star “warrior-scholar” (the editors’ term) on the cover behind huge, urgent letters: “Can This Man Save Iraq?” That kind of thing grated on Casey, but he was willing to give “This Man” his shot. And Petraeus was the guy to take it. Every future operation after midsummer of 2004 would feature more and more Iraqi forces.

Casey’s other two key subordinates enjoyed no such adulatory press, nor did they seek it. Tom Metz of Third Corps would take the Iraqi army and police generated by MNSTC-I and employ them in battle. Another long-term Casey comrade, Metz was all about work. He had no shortage of that. The other key MNF-I element, the Task Force, sought no limelight whatsoever. Yet its members were refining effective manhunting techniques they would soon share with their conventional brothers and sisters. Casey wanted al-Qaeda out, and the Task Force would shortly enjoy the capacity to exterminate AQI’s leadership cadre.

Along with getting key U.S. generals in place, one other organizational step was necessary. George Casey led a multinational command, with twenty-five thousand troops from thirty-two countries in addition to the United States. The turbulent Iraqi spring of 2004 shook many of the Coalition countries. Some, like the Netherlands, announced their departure in early 2005. Others left sooner, spurred by domestic events. The 3/11 terrorist train bombings in Madrid resulted in a government change and the subsequent withdrawal of the Spanish brigade. The Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Nicaragua followed suit. Grateful for U.S. help in its own 1980s counterinsurgency, doughty El Salvador stayed and even increased its forces. Wary Iraqi insurgents in Babil and Najaf Provinces greatly feared “the little people,” the tough Salvadorans led by highly capable, veteran American-trained officers. But the Salvadorans were the exception. Many participating countries expressed reservations at how the American-led campaign had gone. They did not think their voices were being heard in the headquarters.

As the largest contributor after the Americans, the British took the lead in arguing for an expanded Coalition role in the high command. The British made a strong case. Three of Casey’s seven divisions—the British in the southeast, the Poles in the central south, and the Koreans in the northeast—were Coalition. These contingents allowed the U.S. to focus its troops on the Sunni regions. The Coalition commitment had value and needed to be nailed down. Multi-National Force–Iraq could ill afford any more defections or discontent.

As he shaped his team, Casey consciously and carefully integrated senior Coalition officers into MNF-I and its subordinate organizations. The British, ever ready to play the sage Greeks to the bumptious American Romans, immediately supplied deputy commanders at force, corps, and MNSTC-I, as well as other well-placed subordinates on each staff. The British generals and colonels were not shy about offering opinions and advice. Other countries also sent key leaders. Casey’s operations chief came from Australia. Italy assigned a two-star deputy to the corps headquarters; Poland also provided a senior officer to Third Corps. NATO sent a training mission to serve under Petraeus in MNSTC-I. It became common to see people in non-American uniforms in the major headquarters. Other voices had their say and were often heeded. Casey knew it all strengthened MNF-I for the long haul.

His mission set, his plan developed, his team formed, Casey turned to his able diplomatic partner John Negroponte to get the Iraqis involved. Prime Minister Ayad Allawi proved quite amenable. He was the typical refined, well-educated, English-speaking expatriate Shia leader, a close colleague of the ubiquitous Ahmed Chalabi. Allawi, however, had survived a personal brush with death that kept him wonderfully grounded as he wrestled with the situation in 2004 Iraq. In 1978, an ax-wielding Baathist assassin broke into Allawi’s home in Surrey, England. Allawi was left for dead, and it took him a year to recover. When Negroponte and Casey came to him, they found an Iraqi grateful for the gesture of respect and willing to cooperate in strengthening the country. Allawi agreed wholly with Casey: al-Qaeda out, Sunni in, Iraqis increasingly in the lead.

Moqtada al-Sadr gave them the first opportunity to try the new approach. In August in Najaf, outraged by continuing U.S. patrols, JAM elements took over police stations and Iraqi government buildings. American Marines and soldiers responded rapidly, accompanied by three of the brand-new Iraqi army battalions. Allawi publicly directed and authorized the action, a bold step for a Shia Arab leader in Iraq. He also drastically limited Al Jazeera’s access, which cut off a key propaganda avenue for the insurgents in Najaf. This response worked. His JAM ranks shredded once again, trapped in Najaf, Sadr pleaded for negotiations. Of course, his request was granted, and he slipped out of the noose, as usual. Yet the message was clear. The new Iraqi government would fight insurgents, even Shiite militiamen.

Having secured the Shia side by the now-familiar combination of killing JAM and shaking hands with Sadr, Allawi moved on to a tougher problem in Sunni Arab Samarra. Things there had not improved since Sassaman’s time. The U.S. Army’s First Infantry Division, joined by Iraqi army forces, mounted a long, methodical, and ultimately successful campaign to reclaim that city. Again, Allawi spoke up strongly, authorizing the operation. The Iraqi battalions fought credibly. Petraeus and MNSTC-I delivered.

Fallujah remained. There, with the Marines effectively besieging the city since April, the Sunni rejectionists created an insurgent sanctuary. Marine and SOF strikes and raids kept the enemy guessing, nervous, and off balance, but inside the ring, what was theirs remained theirs. Zarqawi moved key segments of AQI into this “liberated” zone. Enemy strength swelled to forty-five hundred and included hundreds of foreign fighters sponsored by al-Qaeda in Iraq. The local citizenry grew less and less supportive of AQI as Zarqawi and his confederates imposed strict shari’a law. Western music compact discs, magazines, and DVDs were eradicated. Barbers were run out of town. Male beards became mandatory. Females learned to stay scarce and covered. Any use of alcohol—a guilty pleasure for many Fallujahans, as it was for many citizens in Iraq—became a cause for beatings. Commercial and private truck drivers stupid enough to pass through or near town “contributed” to the defenders. Civilians left Fallujah by the thousands. Maybe thirty thousand, less than a seventh of the April head count, remained by November of 2004, most of them anxious for relief.

It was coming. George Casey and Tom Metz looked carefully at what had been done in Najaf and Samarra. Together, with Allawi and Negroponte orchestrating the political aspects, the Coalition military leadership developed an integrated plan that set conditions for a successful offensive. The Third Corps called it Phantom Fury, intentionally using the corps nickname and so indicating that the operation was bigger than the Marines. Iraqis referred to it as al Fajr (New Dawn), and Casey saw the benefit of that Arabic title: it emphasized Iraqis increasingly getting involved in suppressing the insurgency. Getting the word out—telling the Iraqi citizens first and often just what kind of hideous enemy was running Fallujah—formed an important aspect of the MNF-I and Third Corps planning.

The Marines would again lead. Last time, there had been four Marine battalions, a regiment-plus. This was a full-scale divisional attack. Two Marine regiments, each reinforced with a U.S. Army mechanized/tank battalion task force, intended to advance abreast from north to south. Another U.S. Army brigade served to isolate Fallujah, preventing enemy reinforcement or escape. At Casey’s request, the British sent up the Black Watch (the Royal Highland Regiment) from Basrah to augment the outer security ring. Six Iraqi army battalions prepared to join the assault, following right behind the Americans. Ayad Allawi declared a national emergency in all Iraqi provinces except Kurdistan and agreed to curfews, press limits, and full cooperation in clearing the insurgents out of Fallujah. Emboldened by Najaf and Samarra, Allawi echoed Casey and Negroponte: “Start together, stay together, finish together.”

 

The Jolan District in northwestern Fallujah had not gotten any better since April. The Third Battalion, Fifth Marines drew the unglamorous duty of clearing Jolan, building by building. Infantrymen hate this kind of task. It is exhausting, dangerous, and grinding. Lieutenant Colonel Patrick J. Malay and his Marines leaned into the job, well aware that it had to be done. The Army tankers, riflemen, and other Marine battalions had pushed right on south to Highway 10, shooting as they went. Now, just as their forefathers had once pried Japanese holdouts from bunkers on Peleliu and Okinawa, young Marines in Jolan slowly cleared out the enemy, room after room, floor after floor. The sequence rarely wavered: toss in a grenade, let it blast, go in shooting, check the bodies, remove any documents or computer media, leave the dead for the Iraqis.

Sometimes the enemy made it sporting. AK fire or an RPG might spurt from an upper floor as Marines approached. At that, some Marines flattened against the walls and others slid behind junked trucks, clearing the street. The AK bullets pinged into the hard dirt. Then the Marines waved up a big, flat-topped M-1 tank. The tank would trundle down the street. A few AK shots or another RPG might annoy the behemoth, scarring its metal hide. Still, on it came, slowly elevating its 120 mm cannon, centering on the offending window. Then the massive metallic shots rang out, a slow-cadence drumroll, ten or more, tearing open the top floor and its feisty occupants. What was left wasn’t too feisty.

In the Jolan, each Marine carried seventy or more pounds of weapons, body armor, ammunition, water, and medical items. The Corps strove to make each piece weigh as little as possible, but seventy pounds of lightweight gear still weighs seventy pounds, which amounts to fighting with a medium-size baboon clinging to your back. Water and ammunition just didn’t compress well. Short on sleep, slurping up individual food packets stripped from random MREs at dusty halts, sweating constantly, the Marines pressed on, house after house.

As hunters compare their various quarries, thoughtful Marines started to categorize their foes. The hit-and-run types they called guerrillas; these were the ones the G-2 intel people identified as Sunni rejectionists, combatants who followed the old Maoist dictates of Enemy advances, we retreat; enemy halts, we harass, and so on. The stay-and-hold characters the Marines called martyrs, and they were often non-Iraqis, Zarqawi’s AQI recruits from other countries. The guerrillas sometimes slipped away. The martyrs died in place.

The Marines didn’t see any civilians. Well, yes, the individuals shooting at them all wore civilian attire, but they weren’t innocent townsfolk. Company K ran into one bunch who hollered down in English from a third-story window: “Mister, mister, help us! Family! Family!” Sheets of hostile RPK machine-gun and AK fire belied the pleas for help. The tanks clanked up and ripped open the apartment’s façade. A Marine rifle squad found only adult male bodies.

Sometimes it got much tougher. A Marine colonel, himself wounded in an earlier Fallujah encounter, explained what happened in one such situation: “There’s four guys going into a courtyard. The first guy that goes in, he’s killed. The second guy is wounded. The third guy, he’s wounded. The fourth guy is [Private First Class Christopher] Adlesperger, Adlesperger takes charge. By the time he’s done, he’s killed eleven insurgents. He’s safe. He’s saved the lives of the two wounded . . . by dragging them upstairs onto a roof and defending it.” It was that kind of fighting.

In close-quarters infantry combat, Marine leaders are expected to be well forward. That acknowledged, there are never enough officers or staff NCOs, good as they are. In the Marine Corps, twenty-year-old corporals give the life-and-death orders. That happened in Fallujah. On the 229th birthday of the Corps, November 10, 2004, Corporal Michael Hibbert was running his part of the show as he led his tired, dirty Marines toward a battered, metal-sided warehouse near the river, on the far west edge of the Jolan. Nobody had shot at the Americans for a while. Hibbert’s point man found three 122 mm artillery shells in a drainage ditch alongside the building. Marine engineers clipped the wires and then slapped C-4 demolitions on the nearby wall. A ragged hole blew open. The dust blossomed and then subsided.

Hibbert and his men slipped quickly into the gloomy hall and found stacks of RPGs and artillery rounds. Evidently, this was a big cache for the enemy. The Marines began to search the side rooms. In one crawlspace, Hibbert uncovered a bony, chained man, slowly starving to death. The Iraqi had been held since August. In a larger room, Hibbert’s Marines found a makeshift movie studio. The green-and-black Islamic flag on the wall and dried blood on the floor matched the video made when Zarqawi had filmed the awful beheading of captured American contractor Nick Berg back in May. There was even a nice script in English and helpful instructions on how to get snuff tapes to Al Jazeera’s Baghdad office.

There was worse half a mile away. Near an abandoned children’s playground, complete with a metal merry-go-round, a small Ferris wheel, and a red, white, and blue pressed-metal moon lander marked USA, the Marines smelled . . . well, they smelled something they wished they did not recognize. But they did.

After entering a two-story house right near the Ferris wheel, battalion commander Malay saw a dead man with his legs chopped off, twisted in rigor mortis, blood all over. Another room had a similar corpse, also mutilated. The odor in the abattoir was overpowering.

Thanks to very smart preparatory work by Casey, Metz, the Marines, and notably Allawi’s Iraqis, these horror shows were widely publicized. In America, most of it got lost in the backwash of another very close, highly acrimonious domestic election. But for the first time on the Arab Street, especially on the Iraqi Street, the locals got a long, hard look at what an al-Qaeda caliphate really portended.

Four days later, Lieutenant Colonel Pat Malay and his command security team walked through the ravaged Jolan souk. The market was empty, trashed: metal sliding doors punched aside, tables upended, power lines dangling. Stall after stall featured various stacks of ammunition and weapons, organized not quite to Marine Corps standards, but close enough. All of it had been abandoned, the would-be users dead or gone. A single thin dog ducked into an alley.

The international news media, led by Al Jazeera, decried the April attack for its supposed excess, which included 150 airstrikes that put holes in or collapsed a hundred buildings. The November assault saw 540 airstrikes, more than 14,000 artillery and mortar shells, 2,500 tank main-gun rounds, and almost half of Fallujah’s 39,000 structures destroyed or damaged. It wasn’t exactly Stalingrad, but swaths of Beirut in the mid-1980s came to mind. Yet this time, shaped by thoughtful military advance work, the press narrative was much more balanced. It included lurid tales of what Zarqawi and his cronies had wrought, as well as their die-hard, bloody defense. The operation cost the lives of seventy Americans and wounded 609 others; in addition, six Iraqi soldiers were killed and fifty-five wounded. Outside the city, the British Black Watch lost four men, and eight others were wounded. More than twelve hundred insurgents surrendered. Some two thousand died. Fallujah was back in the fold.

Now, in the late-afternoon sunshine on November 14, Pat Malay moved slowly up the incline toward the green-painted bridge where the entire Fallujah thing began. In white flowing Arabic script, dimmed since it had first been daubed months before, the bridge proclaimed for all to see: Fallujah—Graveyard of the Americans. Beneath it, Malay’s Marines used black paint to write their message: This is for the Americans of Blackwater murdered here in 2004. Semper Fidelis 3/5 Dark Horse 9/11.