10

 

 

IMPLOSION

Have you ever been experienced? I have.

—JIMI HENDRIX

 

 

IT’S NOT OFTEN that you can pinpoint exactly when a massive undertaking fails. For the U.S. in Iraq, though, the moment was obvious. At 6:44 a.m. on Wednesday, February 22, 2006, two bombs detonated inside the al-Askari mosque in the city of Samarra in the heart of Nate Sassaman’s old area of operations. The Shiite shrine had stood since 944, its shining golden dome a bright spot in the tawdry old Sunni city. The mosque housed the venerated remains of the tenth and eleventh imams, revered by Shia believers inside and outside Iraq. The al-Askari mosque had hosted millions of pilgrims over the centuries. It had stood through wars, earthquakes, and storms. But modern demolitions proved its undoing. The well-placed charges cracked the north wall. The golden dome sagged, shrugged, then collapsed inward in seconds, casting up a vast cloud of dark dust, a lingering shroud over the devastation. Witnesses later alleged that five to seven men in Iraqi military uniform had been seen in and around the building. There were no casualties onsite that morning. Despite frantic immediate local searches and various follow-up investigations by Iraqi security forces, no viable suspects were ever apprehended.

It was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s greatest attack. For years, his suiciders had struck Shia markets and neighborhoods, running up the casualty toll. Zarqawi longed to pit Sunni against Shia in a death battle, one that would see the Allah-favored, educated Wahhabis triumph once and for all over the American-backed sheruggi bumpkins. By blowing the roof off the Samarra mosque, Zarqawi finally found the right catalyst to ignite the Iraqi sectarian inferno. Barely a step ahead of the Task Force, its ranks savaged, its leadership cut to ribbons, Zarqawi’s AQI still pulled it off, better late than never. American pursuers caught up with Zarqawi scant months later, on June 7, 2006, and vectored in a pair of Air Force F-16s to give the AQI chief two five-hundred-pound bombs up the gut. It was a clean kill, but too late. The demons were loose.

Within hours of the news of the February 22 mosque explosions, members of Sadr’s JAM were in the streets. They couldn’t find al-Qaeda agents, but they could locate Sunni just fine. Sectarian killings began. The violence escalated, with shops grenaded, mosques shot up, and houses burned. Sunni Arabs—already in rebellion—immediately initiated reprisals. Hundreds of Iraqi civilians died. Caught flat-footed, American troops stood back as the two sides went at it. The U.S. troops had their own problems, with both factions taking time out from slaughtering each other to hit the occupiers too. The winter troop rotation was ongoing, coming off the three successful Iraqi elections of 2005. The plan seemed on track: al-Qaeda out, Sunni in, Iraqis increasingly in the lead. Now there was this. One mosque bombing—not like there had not been others or would not be more—and the place went crazy.

Sadr’s people stoked the insanity with rumors. The Americans did it. The Israeli Mossad did it. They both did it. In an opportunistic move, AQI propagandists eagerly parroted the Shiite line. Zarqawi didn’t claim the attack. He didn’t need to. The societal damage exceeded his fondest hopes.

The Samarra mosque implosion found the Iraqi government in transition. Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish parties met and argued, endeavoring to split up the key ministerial posts after the December 2005 election. As this horse-trading persisted, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari remained in nominal charge, never too sure of himself even on good days. With armed sects shooting it out in cities and towns, al-Jafaari appealed for calm. “There are no Sunnis against Shiites or Shiites against Sunnis,” he intoned. As usual, this ineffectual man was ignored.

Here was the real Iraq, the age-old Sunni-Shia divide scored in blood. The mosque bombing was just the latest pretext. It was always something, and it always ended the same way: beheadings, shootings, stabbings, bombings, death retail and wholesale, violence as language. Death came pretty easily in Iraq. The propensity for murder and mayhem in Islamic Iraq made the gunfights of the American Old West or the Mafia gang clashes of New York City look like playground pranks. Purple-inked fingers; forming an inclusive government; al-Qaeda out, Sunni in, Iraqis increasingly in the lead—all gone, vaporized, swirling around in the crater that used to be the al-Askari golden dome. Clear-hold-build was reset to zero. Well, the Iraqis were definitely in the lead, Shia and Sunni. They would start by clearing each other.

Most Americans in uniform once more asked that perennially urgent question: Who was the enemy? In February of 2006 in Iraq, the answer came back real ugly: Everyone. And they all had guns.

 

Colonel Michael D. Steele had long ago told his troops what to do. Before they even left Fort Campbell, Kentucky, he’d made it clear to the soldiers of the Third Brigade, 101st Airborne Division: “The guy that is going to win on the far end is the one who gets violent the fastest.” He continued, “I’m talking about the moment of truth,” he said, “when you’re about to kill the other son of a bitch.” The soldiers’ training was sound. They knew the deal. “Men, it is time to go hunting. You’re the hunter. You’re the predator. You’re looking for the prey.”

Now they were out among the prey. Steele was with them on the helicopter assault that morning, knee to knee in the dusty cabin with the tired young riflemen of Company C, Third Battalion, 187th Infantry. They were going to a very bad place, Zarqawi country, the abandoned al Muthanna chemical weapons complex thirty miles south of Samarra. Steele’s intel guys predicted a hell of a shootout when the seven Black Hawk helicopters landed. A few even guessed that Zarqawi himself, the evil genius, bête noire of the Task Force, might be onsite. Steele didn’t think so. But he was pretty sure there would be plenty of Sunni insurgents, and a lot of resistance.

That was the colonel’s way, to set the example, to go where he expected trouble. Mike Steele had been in action before. He’d commanded the Ranger company in the center of the October 1993 Mogadishu battle and earned the Bronze Star with Valor device for his leadership under fire in that gruesome street fight. Tall and imposing, a former University of Georgia football player on the 1980 national championship team, Steele looked every bit the part of the infantry colonel at war. Because he spoke with a southern accent and used folksy terms, people who didn’t know him mistook his directness for ignorance. In fact, Mike Steele was among the most astute, educated men wearing an Army uniform in 2006. He had studied this war and this enemy with rare passion, even for a busy brigade commander, and prepared his air assault soldiers accordingly.

Echoing the approach of General George S. Patton Jr., Steele put it plainly to his soldiers:

 

I have been in more third world countries than anybody in this room, and I tell you most of them do not speak English. They all speak food chain. And from the time you set foot in their country, they’re checking you out, from top to bottom. They’ve figured out where you are on the food chain. Because if you look like prey, what happens? You get eaten. If you stand there and look people dead in the eye, you have your weapon at ready, and you don’t flinch. You look like you’re not scared. Even if you are scared, you look like you’re not scared. You send the message that I am the dominant predator on this street, and if you mess with me I will eat you.

 

Soldiers understand that kind of blunt talk. It scares the military lawyers and gives palpitations to the public-affairs types, but Steele cared little for either. His brigade combat team, the same organization that Frank Wiercinski had led into the fire in Operation Anaconda four years before, was designed and fielded to find and kill the enemy. At 5:00 a.m. on May 9, 2006, under cover of the last hour of darkness, that was what Steele’s men were about to do.

Steele’s air assault force was headed for a low, marshy patch west of the derelict al Muthanna compound. Informants, technical means, and even the Task Force analysts all agreed that the few mud huts there hosted hostiles. One source described training with shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. That could get interesting for Black Hawk helicopters. Another report indicated that AQI might be playing with residual chemical munitions hidden in the debris of an al Muthanna storage bunker. The fear of hidden Iraqi WMDs may have long evaporated among readers of the New York Times, but those in country were not so trusting.

Steele requested an airstrike to prepare the landing zone. There wasn’t much point to eating a shoulder-fired rocket on the final approach. Steele had lived that nightmare in Mogadishu in 1993. So the colonel asked for a good plastering of the two flat adobe huts near where the helicopters would set down. The 101st Airborne Division commander, Major General Thomas R. Turner II, turned it down. Deliberate and cautious by nature, Turner did not want to risk spreading potential chemical contamination if the rumors proved true. To make up for the missing aerial firepower, Turner ensured that Steele had a pair of AH-64D Apache attack helicopters accompanying the initial assault.

Aboard one Black Hawk, First Sergeant Eric Geressy looked down as the aircraft swung toward the landing zone. He saw tracer bullets coming up. “This is for real,” he recalled thinking. “The intel isn’t bullshit.” Then the chopper bounced down, twisting a bit on its big rubber side tires. The riflemen tumbled out, weapons level. And the aircraft was off, dust settling behind it in the darkness.

Night-vision goggles down, searching for enemy movement, Geressy’s soldiers moved toward the two mud huts. Some fired while others slowly edged forward. There was no return fire. The buildings sat there, windows blank, empty. “Like something maybe Jesus lived in,” Geressy said. The objective was abandoned—no enemy, no resistance, no civilians. But who was shooting those tracers?

Still focused on finding out who’d shot at them before the helicopter landing, Geressy’s commander, Captain Daniel Hart, directed a machine-gun team to the roof of one of the two abandoned adobe structures. As soon as the pair got up there, they reported a building a few hundred yards distant that had a light in the window. The M-240 machine gunners opened fire, cranking through a dozen 7.62 mm rounds. Geressy immediately ordered a cease-fire, and Hart was right with him on that.

“We don’t know what the fuck is in those buildings,” said the first sergeant. “We didn’t get fire from those buildings, and the enemy on the ground is not the enemy we were briefed on. You gotta be able to switch gears right away. Worst thing I want is we’re shooting up a fucking building with women and kids.” When the men reached the isolated hut, they found nothing but an oil lamp.

But the Apaches circling overhead found something. They saw a skiff with a motor puttering down the canal. The aviators guessed that the three men on the craft had exited the house with the lamp in it. Maybe they were the tracer shooters. But nobody was sure. Dan Hart, another former West Point first captain and already all too experienced under fire, told the Apache crews to pull the trigger. They killed all three as the Iraqis tried to exit their little boat on the far bank. Hart’s soldiers searched later but didn’t find the bodies.

So the great air assault turned up nothing: no insurgents, no weapons, no documents, no chemicals, certainly no surface-to-air missiles, and no Zarqawi. It was a dry hole, a bust. Well, at least the Apaches had gotten three. Steele stayed with his men for a few hours. Then, with the hot sun well up and the riflemen beginning to spread out to search other areas, the colonel called in a helicopter and moved on to check out other units working nearby.

 

One of Captain Hart’s other platoons hadn’t joined the air assault. The men came by road on armored Humvees to search the villages south of the al Muthanna complex along Highway 23, which ran southwest to Fallujah. Their target was Abu Abdullah, a known Sunni rejectionist cell leader. The brigade S-2 analysts tied Abu Abdullah (whose name meant “father of Abdullah,” a common sort of Arabic nickname) to the deaths of at least ten U.S. soldiers. He had links to other Sunni trainers and weapons suppliers in Fallujah. Highway 23 was his place of business.

Lieutenant Michael Horne’s platoon drew the Abu Abdullah mission. For this task, Horne’s platoon added three snipers and a squad of Iraqi soldiers. Horne’s men arrived at their first objective about dawn. The village was abandoned, although a few buildings had red handprints painted on them. Sometimes, that marked an insurgent area. Except for two Arabs digging in a field, the Americans found nothing.

From here, accounts differ regarding what happened next. Horne said later that they talked to the two Iraqis and moved on. According to several NCOs, however, Horne directed the snipers to shoot the two males in the field. The snipers, led by Sergeant Geoffrey Kugler, demurred. With the help of the Iraqi troops, the Americans instead approached and questioned the two civilians, who knew nothing. The younger one appeared to be mentally disabled.

Meanwhile, another of Horne’s squads had better luck. The men unearthed a sheikh, his wife, and three children. The sheikh told the Americans that he had been dragooned into housing and feeding insurgents and al-Qaeda fighters as they passed up and down Highway 23. The sheikh hadn’t seen any enemies for days. But he’d heard there was some kind of major meeting a few miles to the south that morning, at a gas station on Highway 23. Horne and his sergeants saw their opportunity. The sheikh agreed to come with them.

Horne called Hart on the radio. The Company C commander okayed the impromptu raid and shifted two Apaches to cover the operation. Horne left part of the platoon to continue the search at the first site, and he took four Humvees with a squad, the snipers, and a few Iraqi soldiers to check out the gas station. The Apaches would suffice for backup if it turned out to be a mess.

As the attack helicopters circled on the horizon, awaiting the call, Horne’s trucks rolled toward the gas station. They got there around 11:00 a.m. Although the locals appeared unhappy and suspicious, nobody opened fire. The Americans parked, got out, and surrounded the gas station. There were plenty of people there, mostly men, a lot of stink-eye but no AKs in sight.

Then the sheikh motioned to a man sitting on a curb and told Horne the person was an insurgent. That was enough for the lieutenant, who was pretty keyed up. “Shoot that man,” he ordered. Taken aback, the nearby riflemen did not. One NCO, Sergeant Nathan Beal, flatly said, “We’re not going to kill a guy just for sitting there.” They detained the man instead. He squirmed some, but gave up.

The scuffle with the detainee got the crowd agitated. People began moving away from the gas station. Some Iraqis got in their cars. Engines started. That demanded attention, as even without bombs aboard, vehicles can run down a soldier on foot. And they certainly allow a speedy getaway for those intending to leave.

Seeing clearly that he was about to lose a bag of potentially useful prisoners, Horne, already emotional, ordered his men to fire on the fleeing Iraqis. The American riflemen immediately opened up, as did the Iraqi soldiers and two of the U.S. snipers. Horne then got on the radio and attempted to bring down the Apaches, but the pilots couldn’t sort out the scrum on the ground and declined to engage. A Humvee gunner began shooting 40 mm grenades onto the roof of a building across Highway 23. It went on for about a minute, a mad minute, some seven hundred rounds flying out, ninety degrees of mayhem tearing up the road and its fronting buildings. The Iraqi people in the area crouched against walls, slithered down low in their car seats, or froze prostrate on the dusty ground.

Steady and clearheaded, Sergeant Beal gained control of the shooting. He and the other NCOs shut it down. “What the hell were you shooting at?” he asked Horne. The lieutenant, clearly confused, didn’t say much. Told that some civilians might be down, the officer used the term collateral damage. One truck driver was dead. A woman and two other men were wounded.

In the search and cleanup, the Americans took sixty-four detainees. Several hailed from Fallujah. Three were part of al-Qaeda in Iraq. One was Abu Abdullah, who had been walking to a car carrying a baby—getting away cleanly—when the shooting started. No Iraqis carried weapons; there had been no hostile fire. For the price of one dead Iraqi civilian and three wounded, Horne had gotten his man. But the Americans knew well they had done it all wrong.

 

Lieutenants make mistakes in war. With enemies intermixed with civilians, all dressed alike, it’s amazing they don’t make more. The Army knows that, and it is part of the duties of sergeants like Geoffrey Kugler and Nathan Beal to speak up and intervene when young officers give dumb orders. The “death blossom” at the gas station was bad news. Thanks to the NCOs, it was fixed quickly, although too late for four Iraqis.

Things did not work out even that well on the west side of the canal. There, about the time it all went haywire at the gas station, Captain Hart’s other platoon moved to a secondary site aboard two Black Hawks. The helicopters deposited two squads near a single hut with a roof of thatched reeds.

Staff Sergeant Raymond Girouard led his squad right at the brown mud building. When the NCO saw a male in an off-white man-dress appear at a window, he fired. His men followed suit. In infantry small-unit tactics, soldiers are taught to do as their NCOs do. If the sergeant takes a knee, you take a knee. If he moves right, you move right. If he shoots, you shoot. They shot.

When they entered, Girouard found a splayed, skinny, white-haired seventy-year-old man, Jasim Hassan Komar-Abdullah, with a hole blown in his chest, blood everywhere. His final breaths rattled out. Two teenage males and two women huddled in the corner, the women being held in front of the men. Another middle-aged man stood there. The Americans saw no weapons. With one combat deployment behind him already, a graduate of the Army’s tough Ranger course, Girouard had taught himself Arabic to be more effective this time in Iraq. As his men tried to help Jasim Hassan, the NCO questioned the Iraqis. An Iraqi soldier joined in to help.

They figured out that the teenagers were grandsons and one woman was a daughter. The other man was in the wrong house at the wrong time, as was the other female. While this was being established, Jasim Hassan died.

One of the Iraqi soldiers objected to how the old man had died. He spoke English. “You guys know the situation,” Sergeant Mohammed said. “This incident makes the people, the citizens, hate us.” The Americans made no reply. Instead, one photographed the three other men. A few U.S. soldiers prepared the Iraqi threesome to be flown out for questioning. The Americans bound the detainees’ wrists with zip ties, heavy-duty versions of the plastic strips used to close trash bags. All three Iraqis were blindfolded.

Meanwhile, Girouard and his squad moved to the next house. They thought they heard somebody inside. Unsure, the Americans popped a few warning shots over the roof. After the shots, in loud Arabic, Girouard ordered whoever was inside to come out. Seconds later, an adult male came through the low door opening. He wore a white head wrap and a white man-dress and carried a baby girl at arm’s length, held out like a peace offering. Or a shield. Or a bomb. Girouard directed the man to put down the girl. The man continued walking slowly forward. The Americans converged on him. Soldiers removed the baby. The idea that the Iraqi was using a baby in some way enraged the soldiers. Girouard’s men got very rough with the Iraqi, wrestling him to the ground and dragging him back inside. They punched him several times before Girouard ordered them to stop. A search of the hut revealed nothing of interest. They didn’t even detain the Iraqi involved.

What happened next became the subject of numerous investigations and courts-martial proceedings. Girouard initially reported that the three detainees had tried to escape, that one had grabbed a knife, cut the zip ties, and tried to poke his guards. Then the Iraqi trio took off. Two American riflemen, Specialist William Hunsaker and Private First Class Corey Claggett, opened fire and killed the fleeing Iraqis. In the official verbiage of the first of many investigations that followed, a major stated: “I find that the Soldiers clearly acted in self-defense fearing for their safety as they were physically assaulted by the detainees.” Hunsaker had knife cuts on his hands and face; Claggett had been belted in the head.

The truth, established by the military courts, proved much more sordid: Girouard had directed his soldiers to kill the detainees. They did so, helped reluctantly by another soldier, Specialist Juston Graber. Then the NCO cut Hunsaker’s face and arms with a Gerber knife and punched Claggett in the head, producing injuries appropriate to their agreed-upon cover story. But the men erred in one big way. They let the three bodies be flown out—the intel guys wanted to see who they were, to check them against the list of known insurgents. All three Iraqis still had bound hands and blindfolds partially in place. As Major Stephen Treanor, the brigade S-2, asked: “Why would we shoot somebody, then put a blindfold on them?” This stunk. Steele immediately ordered an investigation.

 

We will never know what dark thoughts or feelings motivated Ray Girouard, William Hunsaker, Corey Claggett, and Juston Graber to kill three Iraqi prisoners on May 9, 2006. It was the entire Clausewitz friction list—bone-deep exhaustion, Murphy’s Law gone wild, an enemy hidden in the fog of an opaque population, and fear. Especially that last one. Every time those three Americans went out, they rolled the dice. In the heat and dust west of Highway 23 on May 9, 2006, all three decided to change the odds. But in the Army, as in Las Vegas, the house always wins in the long run.

Steele’s suspicions took a while to confirm. The officer heading the first investigation, finished within Steele’s Third Brigade by May 21, bought Girouard’s cover story. Statements were taken and proper prose prepared. Digging in this graveyard, though, brought up very grim rumors. As early as May 22, Private Jonathan Porter made a statement to the Criminal Investigation Division that placed Colonel Steele himself at the center of the killings. Porter, facing discharge for cocaine use and other infractions, wasn’t a very credible source. But his jungle telegraph had picked up some vibrations, and CID was not slow to follow up.

Word quickly got to the Multi-National Corps level. It reached a very anxious ear in Lieutenant General Peter W. Chiarelli. A smart, charismatic armor officer, Chiarelli had gained his commission through ROTC at Seattle University. His brains and skill got him a position teaching in the prestigious social science department at West Point, and Chiarelli benefited immensely from that experience and the insights he gained. In an army where the blitz-job crewcut or even the shaved head was de rigueur, Chiarelli cultivated a shock of dark hair and the free thoughts that came with it. He’d picked up some gray streaks over the years, but his mind remained young, questioning. Not old enough for Vietnam, left out of Desert Storm, Chiarelli got all the combat he wanted commanding the First Cavalry Division in Baghdad from 2004 to 2005, tangling with Sadrists and Sunni rejectionists. But ever the guy who looked past the obvious, Chiarelli became fascinated by the possibilities inherent in civic action. He believed that if average Iraqis received essential services, the insurgency would be deflated.

A senior combat commander interested in governance was rare indeed. Just as most NFL coaches specialize in either offense or defense, so most Army infantry, armor, and artillery commanders in Iraq focused on targeting or, maybe, developing partner forces to do likewise. Chiarelli was like an NFL coach who fixated on the punting game. General Tommy Franks’s lack of interest in phase-four reconstruction was typical. Coaches had to think about punting, and commanders had to consider governance, but it was a side matter, special, tertiary, something for reservists, contractors, and earnest young State Department types. The real war was about finding and killing the enemy. That’s what soldiers did. Colonel Mike Steele might be an especially bold example, but he was a lot more emblematic of U.S. Army leadership than Pete Chiarelli.

Yet now Chiarelli commanded the Multi-National Corps headquarters in Iraq. His predecessor, Lieutenant General John R. Vines, a manhunter to his core, would have dealt with the Highway 23 incident as a crime and left it at that, an aberrant act by undisciplined soldiers. In the wake of the February 2006 Samarra mosque bombing and the subsequent sectarian warfare, just keeping after the enemy and staying alive in Salah ad Din Province took everything Steele’s soldiers had. But Pete Chiarelli could not leave it at that. He knew Steele, and he did not think much of him. In one spring encounter with Steele at the colonel’s command post outside enemy-infested Samarra, Chiarelli called the brigade’s plans “unacceptable.” “You are going to go around conducting operation after operation,” said Chiarelli, “but you don’t give these people some reason to hope their life is going to get better.” Steele didn’t get the value of reconstruction. Whether anyone in Samarra, one of the most consistently hostile cities in Iraq, wanted anything reconstructed by American occupiers went unasked.

Even in the face of mounting Sunni/Shia violence, and long before the May 9 killings, Chiarelli had gotten worried about how often soldiers were shooting at the locals. When the general’s staff pointed out that American soldiers were killing an Iraqi a day at checkpoints or near convoys, Chiarelli ordered that every shot fired in an “escalation of force” was to be investigated by a field-grade officer under the provisions of Army regulation 15-6. The corps staff reported a few weeks later that such events had dropped by 85 percent. Chiarelli considered it progress, but he shouldn’t have been so optimistic. Out on the roads, embattled Americans had kept right on shooting. To avoid the endless burden of written investigations, units reported only the encounters that resulted in confirmed Iraqi casualties. American soldiers didn’t inquire too closely about those either.

It all circled back to the same damnable question: Who was the enemy? In the Kurdish north or Shia south, or even in Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad—provided Sadr wasn’t acting up this week—you could find friendly Iraqis. In shattered Samarra and the wasteland around it, and in all the Sunni Arab regions, friendly Iraqis were rare indeed. Polls conducted in Sunni areas showed 85 percent support for the “honorable resistance,” especially for attacks on Americans. How did you categorize an Arab man in such an area? Enemy? Sympathizer? Potential sympathizer? Every man shot by U.S. soldiers wore civilian clothes. If he had an AK-47, was he getting ready to shoot you or merely defending his family? If he was talking on a cell phone, was he tipping off the insurgency or setting off an IED, or was he phoning his wife? Multiple times a day, in hundred-degree heat and gritty dust, young Americans bet their lives on answering these questions correctly. Chiarelli had agonized over the fact that his people were killing one Iraqi a day in roadside encounters. Steele’s men could well have replied that seventy-nine Americans had died in May 2006 alone, nearly three a day. The troops did their own math.

Under the pressure of questioning, Steele’s accused soldiers tripped over their lies. Cornered, implicated, they began to claim that their orders on May 9 were to “kill all military-age males.” Of course, no such orders had been issued, in writing or verbally. Smart defense attorneys, however, saw an opening to mitigate their clients’ guilt. The atmosphere in Company C got a hard look. But that was an appetizer. The defense counsels really keyed on Mike Steele’s fighting words. The colonel supposedly set the tone of “kill them all.” It all echoed a similar incident in Sicily in 1943 when soldiers in the Forty-Fifth Infantry Division had killed seventy-three Italian prisoners and then justified their acts by reference to the pre-battle “blood and guts” exhortations of their Seventh Army commander, Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr. Patton’s superior, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, dismissed the entire episode as a desperate court-martial ploy, a distraction from winning a world war. But this wasn’t World War II.

It was tragic to watch the colonel and general heading toward their certain collision. They were two strong-willed, passionate commanders. Mike Steele didn’t want to kill every Iraqi. He was just struggling to find some who didn’t want to slaughter him and his soldiers. For his part, Pete Chiarelli had been under fire more than enough, and his First Cavalry Division had slain thousands of insurgents who’d needed to be eliminated. But he knew enough to realize that manhunting wasn’t solving this thing. Maybe civic action would work. It might help, for sure. In some ways, Pete Chiarelli would have been the perfect corps commander for Iraq in 2016 or, better, 2026, many years after the blood-soaked dust settled. But in 2006, with Sunni and Shiites at war with each other and with the infidels too—well, it was like trying to fix a slashed throat with a Band-Aid.

In late May, Chiarelli got word of what had happened on Highway 23. He was already absorbing a lengthy, dire account about a Marine element that had killed twenty-four Iraqis at Hadithah in November 2005, another confused, awful event with junior people pushed too far. In addition, word had percolated up of a murder-rape in Yusufiyah, south of Baghdad, perpetrated by another brigade of the 101st Airborne Division in March. Now came word of the prisoner deaths in Steele’s brigade. If the Marines and the 101st Airborne—some of the military’s most select, well-led units—were doing such things, Chiarelli had to wonder what it indicated about the overall morale and discipline of the corps. The general knew how the U.S. military had disintegrated as Vietnam wrapped up. This stuff had to stop immediately. Chiarelli was inclined to act.

The early line coming from Samarra fed Chiarelli’s bias. The “kill all military-age males” phrase alarmed the corps commander. True or not, it was an extant perception, reported by multiple witnesses. As CID investigators probed further, they heard things that raised other serious questions for Chiarelli: Dan Hart’s Company C maintained a scoreboard listing the number of enemy deaths credited to each platoon. Mike Steele gave out kudos and commander’s coins for good kills. Accounts of Lieutenant Horne’s emotional kill orders surfaced, as did the solid work done by NCOs in keeping things under control. Then the videos of Mike Steele’s pre-battle speeches turned up. It wasn’t hard to connect the dots: an overly aggressive chain of command, a lot of emphasis on killing, and an enemy who wore civilian clothes. It seemed like a rerun of the worst episodes of the Vietnam War.

Chiarelli left the criminal matters to the CID investigators, who proceeded to deal with them apace. But he wasn’t content to leave suspect commanders in place in Samarra. He could have gone after the company or the battalion leadership, but Chiarelli knew where he wanted to look. The MNC-I commander asked a general officer to investigate Steele. Brigadier General Tom Maffey, an experienced infantry officer who knew Steele well from the Rangers, was detached from the Fourth Infantry Division fighting in Baghdad. Maffey was told to examine Steele’s command climate. Chiarelli wanted to fire the brigade commander.

Maffey did a thorough job. His report clarified a lot. He stated that Steele “did not condone or attempt to cover up detainee deaths,” and in fact, immediately after the event, he’d commenced an investigation. Despite the rumors, Steele had nothing to do with the prisoner killings beyond determining they looked fishy, a positive reflection on the colonel’s desire to sort out the incident. Although aggressive, Steele had consistently emphasized discipline and lawful treatment of captives. Even his pre-combat speeches, the ones alternately enthralling and horrifying civilian audiences on YouTube, included clear instructions to adhere to discipline. Steele had done nothing wrong. This was about a few soldiers, not the brigade as a whole.

Chiarelli didn’t see it like Maffey. He issued a memorandum of reprimand on July 11, 2006, long before the CID wrapped up its work. In the view of the MNC-I commander, Colonel Mike Steele had played fast and loose with the rules of engagement, resulting in the deaths of “five unarmed people.” In a favorite phrase, one he used often in daily discussion, Chiarelli noted that Steele had not considered the “second- and third-order effects” of his words, actions, and decisions. Chiarelli stated: “Your acts, omissions, and personal example have created a command climate where irresponsible behavior appears to have been allowed to go unchecked.” When Steele reported to Baghdad to receive the dressing-down, some of Chiarelli’s personal staff worried the big colonel might react violently. To the end, they misjudged Mike Steele. He took it like an officer and a gentleman.

Afterward, bowing to the characteristically judicious advice of Major General Tom Turner at the 101st Airborne, Chiarelli left Steele in command. The reprimand ensured that the colonel would never make general. But one of Turner’s deputies, Brigadier General Mike Oates, pegged the real issue. Chiarelli’s intervention arose from “a fundamental difference of opinion about how to prosecute the war in Iraq.” In the U.S. Army, three stars always trumps an eagle. Uninterested in such intramural infidel scrapes, the Iraqi enemy fought on.

 

One level up from Chiarelli, General George Casey at MNF-I recognized that the situation in Iraq was sliding into a bad state. The U.S. four-star didn’t waver. He hewed to the strategy long ago agreed on with his USCENTCOM superior, John Abizaid. Help the Iraqis take over; al-Qaeda out, Sunni in, Iraqis increasingly in the lead. But after Samarra, that mantra rang very hollow. The Iraqis were not ready to take over, and conditions were deteriorating. The end, or even a reduction in U.S. effort, was nowhere in sight. Three years into the war, Casey and those back in Washington stared at what a counterinsurgency really meant: an unending war among a hostile people going on as far as you could see.

Casey had been in place two years, Abizaid three. They were hanging in there, and they recommended that America do the same. In their view, if the U.S. remained committed, a good result might emerge. But if the U.S. bailed out, failure was certain. Thanks to the hard work done by Pete Schoomaker’s U.S. Army, the Marine Corps, and the other services, the rotational forces would keep coming, and they would be ready. This wasn’t the crumbling U.S. force of 1971. The volunteer military was in it for the long term, deployment after deployment.

Still, the prospects for success were poor. Casey’s intelligence people saw that “sectarian violence had become self-sustaining.” Casey identified “an almost predictable cycle of al Qaeda suicide attacks, followed in a few days by Shia death squad attacks against Sunni areas in Baghdad.” Civilians were now the primary victims of both Sunni and Shia insurgents. According to MNF-I estimates, there had been more than a thousand civilians killed in sectarian slaughter every month since the Samarra mosque bombing in February. American casualties remained high, averaging more than seventy dead a month. Enemy attacks ran more than a hundred a day, a third higher than in 2005. It was getting worse.

American soldiers saw the awful evidence daily in the Iraqi capital. Each morning revealed bodies floating in the Rustamiyah water-treatment plant a half mile from the Iraqi military academy. Random corpses decorated markets and gutters, usually on the borders between Sunni and Shia blocks. “Every patrol, you’re finding dead people,” remarked Staff Sergeant Ian Newland of the Fourth Infantry Division. “It’s like one to twelve a patrol,” he continued. “Their eyes are gouged out. Their arms are broken. We saw a kid who had been shot ten to fifteen times.” It was brutal, with little relief in sight.

The Iraqi government wasn’t improving either. The promise of the 2005 election cycle soured into the reality of a very weak Iraqi partner. The new Iraqi government in Baghdad, finally seated by June, reflected sectarian dealmaking, not meritocracy. Kurd Jalal Talabani served as president, nominally ceremonial, but in fact, a player, perhaps the most able and certainly the most pro-American voice in Baghdad. The Sunni got one of the two vice presidencies, the Speaker of the parliament, and the vital defense ministry. The Shia, however, held most of the power, notably the interior ministry, the key social welfare ministries, and, of course, the prime minister. Sadrists held several key posts, including the leadership of three ministries, as integral parts of the ruling coalition. Nouri al-Maliki succeeded Ibrahim al-Jafaari as prime minister.

Maliki’s last name meant “king” in Arabic, but his résumé screamed “pawn.” This slight, quiet man was an unlikely pick, clearly a compromise choice plucked from obscurity over several stronger candidates. He had spent twenty-three years outside Iraq, much of that time in Syria and Iran, hardly positive recommendations. Maliki appeared even more hesitant and inept than Jafaari had been. Tellingly, he refused to shake hands with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Maliki didn’t deal with women.

He also didn’t want to deal with the Shiite insurgency. When General George Casey and Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad appealed to Maliki to cooperate in cleaning out the Sadrist/Iranian rat’s nest in Sadr City, Maliki flatly refused. He preferred to chase “Baathists,” the various Sunni rejectionists, and the al-Qaeda network. Exerting his authority, the Iraqi prime minister often refused to commit his forces against the Shia side.

Unshackled, Sadr’s JAM and its Iranian facilitators went hard against the Americans in Baghdad and the British in Basrah. The Iranians had been experimenting with a new kind of IED, a neatly machined concave copper warhead that, when fired, formed a molten metal jet capable of spearing through an M-1 Abrams tank like a hot nail through butter. The Americans called it an EFP, for explosively formed penetrator (or explosively formed projectile). In the summer of 2006, EFPs turned up over and over again in and near Shia districts. American soldiers died. Beholden to his Sadrist supporters and, perhaps, his Iranian backers, Maliki prevented the Americans and their Iraqi partners from going in to address the threat.

There was another problem. In the early days of MNSTC-I, Dave Petraeus and his team gave in to Ministry of Interior requests to raise two divisions of special police, complete with armored vehicles. Such separate armies are common in the Middle East as regime-protection troops. The Saudi National Guard and Saddam’s far more sinister Republican Guard come to mind. In 2004, hungry to aid any Iraqi who wanted to get into the fight, Petraeus had supported the formation of the two divisions. Since that time, both had become Shia-dominated. They often had their own agendas, thoroughly anti-Baathist, in Maliki terms. As early as November 2005, Brigadier General Karl Horst of the Third Infantry Division found fifty-six prisoners, all but three Sunni, being horrendously maltreated in Site 4, a Ministry of Interior facility near central Baghdad. Briefed by Horst, Casey and MNSTC-I cut off some support. For their part, the Iraqis took no action beyond releasing those particular captives and reassigning a few officers. The Site 4 follow-up got lost in the undertow after the February 2006 Samarra mosque bombing. The Americans needed Iraqis to fight. And the Iraqis would do it their way, more and more as the U.S. turned areas over to them.

The Iraqi way in mid-2006 proved utterly inadequate, especially in Baghdad. Two major American-Iraqi operations, Together Forward I and II, both fizzled. Americans and Iraqis cleared Baghdad districts and set up checkpoints. But the Iraqis couldn’t hold the areas, and the Americans just didn’t have enough troops to spread out into hundreds of outposts. Unless dragged along by Americans, Iraqi soldiers did not patrol on foot to secure neighborhoods or raid to root out militias. Iraqi soldiers and police stood impotent on their little street-corner checkpoints while each night, gunmen waylaid sectional opponents. Al-Qaeda suicide bombers hit Shiite markets and housing blocks. Sadrists retaliated by shooting Sunni Arab men and evicting the surviving families from their homes. Much of east Baghdad became wholly Shiite in a sectarian cleansing that often resembled the Balkan excesses of the 1990s. Turning over an area to Shiite-dominated Iraqi units meant running off the Sunni . . . or worse.

As Maliki’s Shia-led Iraqi forces took over, they also began limiting U.S. actions in “their” Baghdad districts. In an especially egregious incident, on October 23, Shiite militiamen snatched an Arab American soldier, Ahmed Kousay Al-Taie, outside a U.S. compound in central Baghdad. Unable to find the missing man, the Fourth Infantry Division established an extensive grid of checkpoints, focused on known Sadrist hangouts. Maliki objected to placing all of these new checkpoints in Shiite districts. After extensive face-to-face discussion, Casey got the prime minister to agree to allow the checkpoints to be manned at night. It was half a loaf, and not enough. Al-Taie wasn’t found until 2012, after the U.S. withdrawal. By then, of course, he was long dead, executed by his captors.

It all led to questions about the basic Casey plan of turning the war over to the Iraqis. With the three 2005 elections over, MNF-I wanted to begin passing cities, districts, and entire provinces to the Iraqis and commence the long-awaited U.S. drawdown. But Maliki was too weak to take the baton. Iranian influence was growing. The Iraqi forces, while numerous, varied widely in reliability. Clearly, the Shiite-dominated Ministry of Interior special police battalions could not be trusted. Confronted with all of this, Casey and Abizaid canceled all talk of American troop withdrawals. They had to reclear too many areas, starting in Baghdad. In addition, the U.S. and British, without a lot of Iraqi military help, were tangling with the Shia militias and their deadly EFPs. To meet the growing crisis, Casey requested a four-month extension of the 172nd Infantry Brigade from Alaska, one of the Army’s medium-weight BCTs equipped with the wheeled Stryker series armored vehicles and a lot of quality infantry, particularly suited for service in a city like Baghdad. As Casey ruefully wrote years later: “In retrospect, I waited too long to make the decision to cancel the drawdown and to extend the Stryker brigade.” With Abizaid’s full support, Casey persisted in working to turn over matters to the Iraqis. It would go more slowly, but go it must. To the MNF-I commander, it was the only viable strategy.

The numbers actually supported George Casey. Al-Qaeda was reeling, still striking back, but badly beaten up by the Task Force. The Sunni rejectionists continued to suffer at the hands of Casey’s forces and the Iraqi military and police. American casualties ran slightly below the 2004–2005 level, and the Iraqis had more than 250,000 men alongside on operations. Iraqi soldiers and police were in the thick of the fight, enduring 2,545 killed in 2005 and 2,091 throughout 2006. Provinces, cities, and districts shifted to Iraqi control—some were shaky indeed, but many passed smoothly in the south. In the war of attrition, MNF-I was more than holding its own. The unknown involved the Sunni-Shia bloodletting and the impressions it created within and beyond Iraq. Few wanted to risk two years, five years, ten years, or even more of this. Whatever resulted would never look like a victory.

In a way, Casey and his generals in Iraq resembled the British commanders on the western front in the Great War. They saw the problem, realized their methods were not enough, yet recommended the same old solution. From 1914 through 1918, confronted with consistent failure to breach the sodden German trench lines, the British generals plodded on, adding shells and manpower to each big push, all with little result beyond more casualties. It took tanks, airpower, major tactical changes, and some key new leaders, not to mention the shock of a near victory by the more flexible Germans, to change the calculus of the trenches. Casualties in Iraq never mounted as high as those in the vast slaughterhouse of World War I, but they were bad enough. As 2006 went on, Americans in Iraq and at home began to lose patience and stomach for the fight.

Those at home had been grumbling, louder and louder, since the first Iraqi summer in 2003. The U.S. domestic consensus held through the 2004 presidential election, but President Bush remained maddeningly inarticulate and stubborn in dealing with the Iraq campaign. Partisan griping grew strident. Certain figures within Bush’s own party also began complaining. Bush said and did nothing differently. Abizaid and Casey stayed in command. Their strategy continued. The enemy persisted. In November 2006, the American electorate changed the equation.

 

The repudiation of the Bush administration at the polls wasn’t unusual in American history. Second-term presidencies usually lose steam in the midterm voting. But this “thumping,” as Bush called it, placed the Democrats in power in both houses of Congress. Iraq wasn’t the major issue, but it was on the table, another indication that it was time for a change. With the Democrats now holding the purse strings, business as usual in Iraq wasn’t going to work. Change came swiftly.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went out on November 8, 2006, the day after the election. His replacement, Robert M. Gates, was a Vietnam-era Air Force veteran with a doctorate in Russian history, a former CIA officer, and a deputy national security adviser and CIA director under the president’s father. Along with his duties as president of Texas A&M University, in the autumn of 2006, Gates was a key member of the congressionally mandated bipartisan Iraq Study Group, one of several high-level committees reassessing the war effort. The panel had not yet put together its report, but clearly, it wouldn’t endorse more of the same.

The Iraq Study Group also included former secretary of state James Baker, former representative Lee Hamilton, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Clinton administration adviser and civil rights attorney Vernon Jordan, former attorney general Edwin Meese, former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, former representative Leon Panetta, former secretary of defense William Perry, former senator Chuck Robb, and former senator Alan Simpson. This panel of worthies talked to leaders in Washington and went to Baghdad and interviewed many key figures there. Over the course of eight months, they wrote a fine, erudite document with seventy-nine recommendations and a lot of footnotes. It could be summarized in two words: Get out.

Simultaneously, though with considerably less star power, the National Security Council, the Joint Staff, the U.S. Central Command, Multi-National Force–Iraq, and Multi-National Corps–Iraq all carried out their own assessments. They looked at the Baker-Hamilton option (get out) but also identified two others, with variations. The U.S. could stand pat for a while, two years or so, then draw down to a residual troop commitment; this was the Casey-Abizaid hand-over scheme. Or America could reinforce, actually add troop strength, blow back the Sunni and Shia insurgents, and give the Iraqis one more chance to unscrew themselves in Baghdad. This idea became known as the surge.

Baker and Hamilton and their bunch, nudged by Vietnam veteran Chuck Robb and Cold War Army veteran Ed Meese, also offered a surge as a bridging effort to set up a clean U.S. withdrawal. Hadn’t President Richard Nixon concluded the U.S. effort in Vietnam with massive B-52 strikes on Hanoi and Haiphong in December of 1972? It didn’t win the war, but it did force Hanoi’s hand and got its leaders to release U.S. POWs and sign an agreement. It had also provided a “decent interval” for the Saigon government to try to become functional. Maybe a surge in Iraq could do as much, or more. In the Bush White House, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley began to think that way too.

A loud discordant note came out of Baghdad. Casey didn’t want the surge; neither did Chiarelli, nor Abizaid up at U.S. Central Command. To a man, the senior field commanders saw a surge as going the wrong way, re-Americanizing a war the Iraqis had to win for themselves. All were willing to hold the line for two years or so. But they wanted no more U.S. forces. This campaign had to be passed to the Iraqis. Led by their chairman, General Peter Pace, the Joint Chiefs of Staff squarely and unanimously supported the generals in theater.

President George W. Bush, a man who’d once labeled himself “the decider,” now faced a critical choice on Iraq, the biggest since the initial invasion. He could continue to defer to the strategic acumen of George Casey, as he had done since July of 2004, and stay. He could go with his new secretary of defense, Bob Gates, and withdraw. Or he could try the minority position held by some of the Baker-Hamilton team and his own national security adviser, Steve Hadley, and surge. To send more troops would go against the stark election results, the polling data, and the conventional wisdom. Surging did not promise a win—nothing did at this point—but leaving or standing pat looked to Bush like sure paths to immediate defeat.

One more voice weighed in at this point, a soldier no longer in uniform but still unwilling to see America lose or quit. Defying convention, practice, and the customary deference and gentility of the retired general officer corps, Jack Keane got involved. General Keane had served with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, ending his career as Army vice chief of staff in 2003 as the Iraq campaign began. Tall, direct, and forceful, Keane stayed close to the war effort, serving as an adviser to key military and civilian senior leaders in Washington, including Rumsfeld and Cheney. He traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan as an unofficial consultant to the commanders there. He also cultivated long-standing ties with Washington insiders like former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and Senator Hillary R. Clinton. The general used his considerable influence to get in front of President Bush at an Oval Office meeting on December 11, 2006. Keane’s message was simple: Time is running out. Send more troops now. Tell them to protect the Iraqi people. Hold off on transition until the situation settles. It’s our last and only chance to win this thing.

Along with the surge, Keane advocated one other step. When another participant raised the matter of a new commander in Iraq, the retired four-star emphatically recommended David Petraeus. Casey had been there long enough—maybe too long. All agreed that it was time for him to move on. The current crop of four-stars, who opposed the surge to a man, had their own candidates: Chiarelli, Dempsey, Mattis, Vines, maybe even Pete Schoomaker. That last one would have been an inspired choice indeed. And none of them wanted a surge. They could sort it out with what they had, that and the Iraqis, who had to win it anyway.

But Petraeus? He wasn’t a four-star (yet). He hadn’t been a corps commander in country. He wasn’t some SOF manhunter. Indeed, he was running the Army’s staff college out in Kansas. Bush pointed out that some of Petraeus’s fellow generals didn’t want him to take over. The word around the Army, which had reached the White House, was that Petraeus was all about Petraeus, and he had been politicking pretty openly for this promotion. Keane told Bush to ignore all of that inside baseball. The retired four-star had known his energetic protégé well for fifteen years and was sure that, unlike the other candidates, Petraeus would back the surge all the way. Keane told Bush to pick the former MNSTC-I commander. Bush took it in.

On January 10, 2007, Bush announced his decision to his fellow citizens. “America will change our strategy,” he said. “I’ve committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq.” He defined victory in Iraq as creating “a functioning democracy that polices its territory, upholds the rule of law, respects fundamental human liberties, and answers to its people.” It was the president’s most significant strategic decision since the initial choice to invade. Once more, this time by a definite accountable action, the president doubled down.

Not mentioned in the speech was the man Bush had chosen to make it all work, the new commander of Multi-National Force–Iraq, General David Howell Petraeus. The most uniquely talented and openly ambitious U.S. field commander since Douglas MacArthur surely had his work cut out for him. Those in uniform who knew him—and thanks to his extremely high profile, most did, or thought they did—knew exactly what to expect when Petraeus and his substantial entourage reached Baghdad. It would be just like the arrival of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery at U.S. First Army headquarters on a particularly bleak day during the Battle of the Bulge in December of 1944: “like Christ come to cleanse the temple.”