12

 

 

REQUIEM ON THE TIGRIS

EVELYN MULWRAY: When was the last time?

JAKE GITTES: Why?

EVELYN MULWRAY: It’s an innocent question.

JAKE GITTES: In Chinatown.

EVELYN MULWRAY: What were you doing there?

JAKE GITTES: Working for the District Attorney.

EVELYN MULWRAY: Doing what?

JAKE GITTES: As little as possible.

—ROBERT TOWNE, CHINATOWN

 

 

FADHIL WAS AN evil place, the oldest neighborhood in Baghdad. Maybe an irregular square mile and a half in area, Fadhil squatted a few blocks east of the languid Tigris River that bisected the Iraqi capital into its west and east sides. Fadhil’s narrow, twisting, uneven dirt streets stretched ten feet wide at most, flanked by tightly packed, ancient two- and three-story buildings that leaned toward each other like old drunks trying to stay on their feet. Fadhil reeked of hookah smoke and rotting garbage; its dank alleys were haunted by shades. This was the Baghdad of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, furtive Aladdin creeping through the darkness, djinn and devils wafting like smoke along the gutters. It felt all wrong, a cursed place akin to Germany’s Hürtgen Forest in 1944 or Vietnam’s Hue Citadel in 1968, a meat grinder with its maw ever gaping for more. The American soldiers knew it. So did the Iraqi soldiers. They all hated it.

They’d gone in there before, always at a high cost. In 2007, during the surge, U.S. soldiers probed and fenced in the dark warrens of Fadhil. Every time, they paid, with ten killed in total and more than thirty wounded in countless minor scrapes and four separate major encounters, including an all-day smashup in April and a vicious three-hour firefight in July. One of the wounded was an American brigade commander, and the enemy very nearly nailed the First Cavalry Division commanding general in that firefight too. Their partners in the Eleventh Iraqi Army Division suffered as well, with twelve killed and more than forty wounded. The insurgents in Fadhil downed a Blackwater contract helicopter in January and shot up a State Department convoy in May. Sunni every one, the fifty thousand denizens of cramped, hostile Fadhil boldly decorated their homes with eight-pointed Baath Party stars. They delighted in mounting forays into nearby Sadr City to slaughter sleeping Shiite families.

Several U.S. Army commanders estimated it would take an entire brigade combat team to clear Fadhil, a mini-Fallujah with the same rotten American butcher’s bill. Many Iraqi civilians would die, too, especially when the U.S. used artillery and airpower to break into all of those tightly packed old tenements. Instead of doing that, in late 2007, the Americans went with the Sahwa model pioneered in Ramadi. In classical mythology, the labyrinth hosts a monster at its center. In Fadhil, that monster was Adel al-Mashadani. Now he was on the American payroll. The deal ended the shootouts and bought time. But no deal lasts forever.

 

Adel al-Mashadani styled himself the Don of Fadhil, with no apologies to Mario Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola, or Tony Soprano. He was a charismatic, imposing figure, big and beaming, with his head shaved bald and a wide black mustache. He favored leather jackets and always surrounded himself with armed retainers as he strolled through the cubbyholes of Fadhil almost daily, checking on his people. Lieutenant Colonel Craig Collier, who commanded the Third Squadron, Eighty-Ninth Cavalry in Fadhil in 2008, remembered how “old women would come and kiss his hand, thanking him for stuff.”

Much of the largess Mashadani showered on his people was delivered by the Americans in the form of school renovations, street-corner electrical generators to light up the old buildings, and make-work street cleanups to keep the youth busy. Nearly two hundred young men carried weapons as Sons of Iraq, paid by the Americans but reporting directly to Mashadani. His militia scoured out al-Qaeda cells, taking their lives and their weapons. Mashadani knew the foe well because he used to serve them. One key AQI leader owed Mashadani a cut of a reward equal to $600,000 for attacking some Iraqi government officials. The Don of Fadhil didn’t get his money, but he got his revenge. By early 2008, the local AQI was liquidated. The U.S. troops appreciated Mashadani’s bloody handiwork and made no complaint when he kept the arms and ammunition that had been seized in the score-settling.

Rumors surfaced through Iraqi sources. Informants brought news of numerous shop owners strong-armed to pay protection money, with Mashadani’s entire take running up to $160,000 monthly. Stories circulated of husbands kidnapped, their wives taken by Mashadani for his pleasure. Both U.S. and Iraqi intelligence sources tied Mashadani to IED incidents. Some suggested he still did some side jobs for his old AQI contacts. A few Fadhil men who tried to stand up to the Don found themselves strung up to the walls of a subterranean dungeon in western Fadhil known as the Gonch and subjected to the usual Baathist motivational techniques involving electrical cords and power drills. In the midst of it all, the Fadhil Sons of Iraq kept vigil, smiling at passing American patrols. Cowed Iraqi army units stayed out. In Mashadani’s view, the U.S. contributed their money, so they received their due under his protection racket.

This cozy arrangement changed on January 1, 2009, a consequence of the Bush administration’s security agreement with Maliki. In accord with articles 4 and 22, all detentions after that date required an Iraqi warrant. Although the Americans could (and did) still capture Iraqis they deemed threats, missions worked best when done with Iraqi partners. While many Americans worried about the warrant drill, those documents proved amazingly easy to get and could even be procured after Americans had picked up a miscreant. Unlike a domestic U.S. warrant, the Iraqi version lasted pretty much forever and had no limits regarding location either. A warrant issued in Basrah could be executed a year later in Baghdad. Keeping a close eye on the target lists, Iraqi police maintained solid contacts with favorable judges. Sometimes warrants for Shiite subjects took more elbow grease, but with Maliki in office, Sunni could be indicted pretty easily. Throughout 2009, the Iraqi Baghdad Operations Command and the First Cavalry Division worked together well on getting and using warrants.

Yet the Maliki government had its own views. As part of the security agreement, the government took over the payment of the Sons of Iraq and transferred the militias to Iraqi command. The prime minister fully embraced the program and rode Sahwa support to a substantial victory for his political coalition in the January 2009 Iraqi provincial elections. In accord with this effort, in Baghdad, the Sons of Iraq were told to report to the local Iraqi army and police commanders. In Fadhil, that meant the Forty-Third Brigade of the Eleventh Iraq Army Division, a unit that had never dealt with Mashadani. Their American partners now had to make this work. Complicating matters, in December of 2008, an Iraqi judge had indicted Adel al-Mashadani for murder, extortion, and working with al-Qaeda. The evidence against him would easily have stood up in any U.S. court. It was compelling.

The outgoing American unit let it be, unwilling to go into the dreaded Fadhil buzz saw. “We let everybody know you’re going to have a hornet’s nest on your hands,” Lieutenant Colonel Craig Collier said he’d warned his higher commanders. “You’re screwing with something that doesn’t need to be screwed with.” Come 2009, to back up their Iraqi teammates, the new U.S. commanders chose to screw with it.

 

Decisions like that brief very nicely up at MNF-I, MNC-I, and division headquarters. It fell to Captain Frank Rodriguez and his Troop A, Fifth Squadron, Seventy-Third Cavalry (Airborne) and his fellow Eighty-Second Airborne paratroopers to pull it off. A former Air Force combat controller commissioned through ROTC at the University of North Carolina, the man the Iraqis called Naqeeb Raad (Captain Rod) was a bit older and wiser than his airborne peers. But he was as tough and shrewd as they came, and his airborne cavalry troopers knew how to shoot and how to move mounted and dismounted. Even so, Rodriguez didn’t relish a knife fight in the tight, dusty Fadhil alleyways.

The captain had been thinking hard about the problem. He was among those who’d eagerly read the Petraeus-authored FM 3–24. Rodriguez taught his men from the manual, using it extensively in their training. He often quoted the list of cryptic paradoxes. One really appealed to him: Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is. Rodriguez and his paratroopers knew how to unleash a Fallujah. Could they take out Mashadani—or, even better, get the Iraqis to do it—without destroying Fadhil?

Rodriguez, his squadron commander, and the brigade combat team came up with an approach they called Operation Shwey Shwey (meaning “slowly, slowly” in Arabic). In essence, they wanted to take a few months to infuse Lieutenant Colonel Ali Mahmoud’s First Battalion, Forty-Third Iraq Army Brigade into Fadhil, to supplant Mashadani’s mafia with legitimate authority. They would keep meeting with Mashadani and his men and get the Sons of Iraq to join the American-Iraqi patrols. They anticipated emplacing Iraqi army checkpoints in Fadhil alongside those manned by the Sons of Iraq. They planned to assist the Iraqi military in civic action programs instead of funneling funds through Mashadani. Finally, when the Iraqi soldiers were ready, they would raid several suspected weapons cache sites. Mashadani would either cooperate or, at some point, fight. Either way, the Americans planned to be present in force to quash any violent reaction if and when the Iraqis got definitive orders to move on Mashadani.

Operation Shwey Shwey accomplished something else that turned out to be crucial. Each long walk through Fadhil, each inspection of a little storefront or invitation to share tea inside a cramped apartment, stripped away the dark mysteries of the neighborhood. The American and Iraqi squads spent hours and hours on foot, learning all the nooks and crannies of the district. Over the weeks, they compiled a house-by-house, shop-by-shop, block-by-block census of Fadhil. They placed checkpoints wisely and positioned an Iraqi company in the southeast corner of Zaibeda Square, a key vantage point that dominated the major entry road into Fadhil. The district ceased to be a no man’s land and became familiar turf. When it came time to go in hard, Rodriguez and his men—and the Iraqi soldiers too—would know their way. It happened little by little, shwey, shwey.

The Shwey Shwey approach got Mashadani’s attention. In his meetings with Rodriguez, he stayed cordial, but he dropped some telling hints. “Do not believe what you hear,” said the Fadhil strongman, “because you do not want things to go back to the way they were.” As the weeks went on, and the squeezing persisted, the Don began to warn openly of upcoming trouble as the Iraqi army checkpoints proliferated and the American-Iraqi foot patrols continued. After an Iraqi army raid removed an AQI operative from the center of Fadhil on March 15, Mashadani again reminded the U.S. captain of the bloody past. The Don smiled and bluntly stated, “You cannot control Fadhil for one day.” When Rodriguez replied evenly that in his view, the Iraqi army already controlled Fadhil, Mashadani’s deputy Qassim spoke up: “What if Naqeeb Raad makes a mistake?”

Two weeks later, that question still hung there unanswered. About one o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday, March 28, on the outskirts of Fadhil, a team from the Ministry of Interior’s emergency response unit blocked Mashadani’s SUV and apprehended him without a shot fired. In the militia leader’s truck, the Iraqi unit found eight hundred PKC machine-gun bullets and six thousand AK-47 rounds. The Ministry of Interior troops sped away with their prize. Behind them, Fadhil erupted.

 

The Iraqi police’s lightning raid surprised the American officers, who’d received no advance notice of it. As a result, it found the U.S. elements badly out of position to contain the ferocious reaction in Fadhil. Evidently, the Iraqi army also found out only after it happened, as did the Baghdad Operations Center and the First Cavalry Division. Within a half hour of Mashadani’s arrest, the Second Company, First Battalion, Forty-Third Iraq Army Brigade reported itself surrounded and under heavy small-arms fire at its Zaibeda Square outpost. The Americans had no soldiers there. East of Fadhil with his paratroopers at Joint Security Site Bab-al-Sheikh, Frank Rodriguez watched as the Iraqi police manned the walls and dispatched reaction-force trucks. He assembled Troop A’s First and Third Platoons, leaving the rest of the unit to guard the police post. A radio call confirmed the worst. His paratroopers strung out on other missions, Rodriguez’s squadron commander might be able to get Troop C into the area by nightfall. Reinforcing Iraqi army units were spinning up, but none would be there for hours. The American attack helicopters couldn’t fly due to blowing dust. Maybe some jet fighters might be available. The squadron was working on it. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Colonel Mahmoud of the First Battalion, Forty-Third Iraq Army Brigade was calling for immediate help. Right now, that amounted to Frank Rodriguez and his two airborne cavalry platoons. All of those hours of walking through Fadhil were about to pay off.

By about three o’clock, Rodriguez and his Third Platoon reached the outskirts of Fadhil a quarter mile from the surrounded Iraqi rifle company. The Iraqi Fourth Company commander met the American troop commander and told him that an attempted linkup had already failed. “Too much fire,” he said. Rodriguez sized up the situation. The Iraqis thought they could add five of their own armored Humvees to the American thrust. As the leaders worked out details through interpreters, Third Platoon was already shooting at the enemy. The former Sons of Iraq, now back to being insurgents, kept up a steady volume of gunfire. “Rounds could literally be seen skipping off the ground around us and off the vehicles in the blocking positions,” Rodriguez wrote later.

Within twenty minutes, First Sergeant Robert Cobb arrived with First Platoon, bringing the U.S. strength up to ten up-armored Humvees, about fifty Americans in all. Each truck mounted a machine gun in its open turret. Cavalry troops are small units by design, built for reconnaissance, not street fights. But they know how to fire and maneuver, and Rodriguez and Cobb had trained their paratroopers well on how to do so. If they moved fast and hard, they could catch a large number of the Mashadani men in Zaibeda Square. The opponents had not seen their leader’s arrest coming, so they probably hadn’t buried IEDs yet. Thus far, nobody had reported mortars or RPGs. Without Mashadani’s leadership, Qassim and the other second-tier guys had no particular claim on the loyalty of the militiamen. One good bloody nose might break this enemy. And nobody knew Fadhil better than Rodriguez and his people.

Rodriguez told the Iraqis to lead. He’d follow with Third Platoon, and Cobb would provide covering fire with First Platoon. Two F-16 jets came over to help get the relief column going north. The jets made one low pass, dipping out of the clouds with afterburners echoing like metallic thunder off the buildings. As the jets streaked across Zaibeda Square, the Iraqi and American trucks rolled north.

The enemy let up a little when the F-16 pair roared over but picked up again as soon as it became obvious the jets weren’t dropping or shooting anything. Rodriguez said later that “the volume of fire became so intense that clouds of dust and rounds enveloped the vehicles.” Enemy gunmen fired from rooftops and upper windows, from doorways and street corners. The place was crawling with bad guys, every one with a barking AK. Fortunately, they didn’t aim, merely pointed and yanked the trigger. That might work in Hollywood, but in real combat, it causes automatic weapons to skew up and to the right, so rounds soared uselessly over the heads of the Humvee gunners. The American machine gunners in the turrets of the moving trucks shot back, doing what they could as they bounced north. But the real work was being done by the machine guns atop the first sergeant’s stationary trucks back at the launch point. Those paratroopers shot low, the way they’d been trained. They aimed and hit. Together, all of the U.S. gunners suppressed the enemy enough for the Iraqi platoon to get to the Second Company outpost. The Iraqi trucks stopped, doors opening before the tires stopped moving. Ducking a sheet of AK rounds, Iraq soldiers piled out and sprinted for the outpost entrance.

Airborne cavalrymen went in with them. Rodriguez followed his men inside. The captain had to dodge and shoot as he did so, with hostile rounds hitting near the front entrance. Next door, a building was burning furiously, belching oily smoke. It made it hard to see inside the Iraqi-held structure. Nearly out of ammunition, the Second Company soldiers were glad indeed to see that the cavalry had arrived. They assembled to depart with the armored trucks.

There was a problem, though. One Iraqi officer told Rodriguez that he could not find seven of his men and presumed they’d been captured. A quick head count of Second Company tracked with the bad news. Rodriguez lacked the manpower to hold the square against a hundred militiamen. With no idea of where the missing seven Iraqi soldiers could be—and with fifty thousand Fadhil residents, thousands of apartments to sort through, and night coming soon—the captain convinced the Iraqi commander to pull back. Having burned through a lot of ammunition, the relief column had to get out and resupply. They intended to come back.

With Second Company’s men aboard the Humvees, the American-Iraqi column fought their way south. When they reached the relative safety of the start point, the men got out and began reloading ammunition. As they did, most had a few minutes to look at their scarred trucks: sand-painted metal sides pitted by bullet hits, bulletproof-window blocks spider-webbed by impacts, and multiple tires flattened. Luckily, and typically, the enemy’s marksmanship did not match their enthusiasm. In the cases where it did, the armor did its job.

Rodriguez expected to go back in as soon as the Apache attack helicopters came on station. The blowing dust was abating as the sun set. In congested Fadhil, only a few dim bulbs glowed in upper windows as the shroud of darkness descended. The thousands of civilians in there stayed put, paralyzed, waiting to see how it all played out. Rodriguez and his paratroopers reloaded their rifle magazines and kept watch. Any time now, he expected an order to head north.

Instead, his squadron commander told him to hold his position. All around the perimeter of Fadhil, Iraqi and U.S. units arrived, one after another, including Troop C to the west, additional battalions from the Eleventh Iraq Army Division to the south, and T-72 tanks from the Ninth Iraq Army Armored Division to the east and north. A Black Hawk helicopter clattered overhead, dumping hastily printed leaflets. The fluttering handbills announced that Mashadani had been lawfully arrested for murder and collusion with al-Qaeda and that his men must put down their arms. The assembling American and Iraqi forces left no doubt what would come next, beginning at dawn. A few gunshots continued on the edges of Fadhil as the evening wore on. But clearly, after the wild late afternoon at Zaibeda Square, the air was leaking out of Mashadani’s militia movement.

Rodriguez was right there to the south with Troop A, preparing to return to Zaibeda Square with his Iraqi army partners. Things were trending differently, though. As Rodriguez listened, he heard Mashadani’s deputy Qassim on the cell phone with the Iraqi battalion commander. The interpreters caught and relayed snatches as Lieutenant Colonel Mahmoud spoke. Qassim had his hands on the seven missing Iraqi soldiers, and he and his former Sons of Iraq wanted to negotiate. In the tradition of Ulysses S. Grant, Mahmoud gave Qassim a hard answer: Deliver the prisoners. Lay down your arms. If you don’t, face annihilation. While Qassim thought it over, the Iraqi soldiers announced they were ready to return to the Second Company outpost to the north. The Americans of Troop A mounted up. It was time.

With attack helicopters overhead in the dark sky, Rodriguez and Mahmoud returned with their men to Zaibeda Square, rolling slowly north under sporadic fire. Within an hour, just past ten o’clock, the Iraqi army found all seven prisoners just outside the Second Company outpost. Evidently, Qassim had set them free. The Americans and Iraqis spread out and held the square all night. Just before sunup, thousands of Iraqi soldiers, a dozen sand-yellow T-72 tanks, and the paratroopers of Troops A and C moved in. Some gunmen shot at the advancing soldiers. Well-aimed return fire quelled those erratic, isolated attempts to fight back. Resistance had dissipated by midmorning. Iraqi soldiers led a house-by-house clearance of Fadhil that took a week to finish. Every militiaman was disarmed, with some twenty detained briefly. Amnesty was eventually granted. Numerous weapon caches were removed from basements and storage rooms. Store owners stopped fearing for their lives. Women held against their will went home to their families. The Gonch torture chamber went out of business for good.

Four of Mahmoud’s soldiers were killed and four wounded, all in the Second Company. Mashadani’s militia suffered twenty killed in action and some fifty wounded, all in the afternoon firefight around Zaibeda Square. Despite the massive hostile fusillade, the Americans didn’t suffer a single casualty, defying the law of averages and perhaps ballistics too. It turned out that, precisely as Mashadani had warned, Rodriguez could not hold Fadhil for a day. But after that one brief spasm, he held it for good, side by side with the Iraqi army.

 

Frank Rodriguez, Robert Cobb, and Troop A found plenty of combat in Fadhil. Their work reflected the nature of U.S. operations in Iraq in those final years, smaller American units backing up more numerous Iraqi forces carrying out orders from the Baghdad government. Iraqi soldiers took the lead, with the Americans providing air support, helicopter cover, overhead surveillance, key intelligence leads, medical assistance, civic action funds, and, most important, combat units to stiffen their partners’ resolve. In the words of article 4 of the U.S./Iraqi security agreement, the Americans had both the authority and the duty to aid their Iraqi teammates by “training, equipping, supporting, supplying,” all while retaining “the right to legitimate self defense.” In soldier-speak, that meant the U.S. would advise and assist the Iraqis in their fight. Without Frank Rodriguez and Troop A, the Iraqis might have retaken Fadhil in their own sloppy way over a few days, with a lot more death and destruction.

By 2009, when you rolled with the Iraqis, you could find fights if you wanted them. But you had to look harder than you did in the old days. They didn’t come to you as often as at the height of the war in 2006 and 2007. In all of 2009 in Baghdad, attacks averaged fewer than ten a day; there had been nearly sixty every twenty-four hours in the bad old days. The First Cavalry Division suffered thirty-eight dead, and they killed or captured 1,602 insurgents. Each of those American deaths hurt badly, but by comparison with the nearly five hundred lost in and around the Iraqi capital in 2006 and 2007, it showed just how much the violence had tapered off.

In quelling the insurgency, the American troop surge played its part, especially in Baghdad and its surrounding belt villages. The last reinforcing units departed by early 2009. The U.S. Army was able to revert from the grueling fifteen-month deployments to twelve-month stints. In 2011, deployments dropped to nine months, for the first time since 2003. Even at nine months, Army unit deployments still exceeded the standard Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and SOF tour lengths. But the shortened stretches, coupled with troop reductions, certainly eased the pressure on America’s soldiers.

Although the troop surge made the news in America, in country, the Sunni Awakening delivered the real and lasting difference in the rate of attrition. Renegades like Mashadani were exceptions. The Sons of Iraq proved overwhelmingly loyal. Nearly a hundred thousand strong, half of that number in and near Baghdad, the Sahwa movement allowed the Sunni to carry weapons lawfully and get paid, effectively removing much of the incentive for the “honorable resistance.” It was by far the most successful and widespread jobs program in Iraq. The various reconstruction and civic action projects had patched up the roads, oil pipelines, power plants, schools, and hospitals, employing hundreds of locals at times. The Sahwa, however, paid tens of thousands of Sunni Arabs to kill each other, not Americans. Cynical it might seem, but you couldn’t argue with the results. The Sons of Iraq fielded some six times as many Sunni with firearms as the highest estimate of enemy strength. It showed the potential depth and resiliency of the Sunni insurgency. As George Crook learned with the Apaches, better to pay some than fight all.

Iraq being Iraq, enemies persisted. Somebody was always trying to take a whack at the infidels. Shards of al-Qaeda in Iraq still struggled to mount a car bombing or two every other month. They pulled off three major multisite suicide car attacks in Baghdad, in August, October, and December of 2009, all horrific, yet equal in total to a week’s work back in 2006. The Americans stayed after AQI. On April 18, 2010, they nailed Abu Ayyub al Masri up near Tikrit, not far from where they’d yanked Saddam out of his hole back in December 2003. The manhunters didn’t let up until the end; neither did the opposition.

Not all Sunni rejectionists reconciled under the Sahwa program. Die-hards hung in there. Gunmen of the 1920 Revolutionary Brigade and Jaysh al-Rashadin (Army of the Rightly Guided) made attacks near Baghdad, and the Jaysh Rijal al-Tariq al-Naqshabandi (Army of the Men of the Naqshabandi [mystical Islamist] Order) fought up north near Mosul and Kirkuk. These groups kept laying IEDs and shooting up American convoys, although at a much reduced rate. With the Americans committed to departure by the end of 2011, few Sunni Arab fighters wanted to be the last to die tangling with the aggressive Americans. Whether insurgents or Sahwa, the majority of Sunni Arabs bided their time, jockeying for their place in Iraq after America’s time.

On the Shiite side, the Sadrists officially remained quiescent after their March 2008 humiliation in Basrah, Moqtada himself supposedly studying Shia Islam in Iran. The JAM’s Iranian-backed affiliates and competitors stayed active. A new version of JAM, the Promised Day Brigade, took occasional cracks at U.S. targets. They were not very capable. The Sadrist breakaway faction Asib al Haq (League of the Righteous) maintained a tenuous cease-fire through most of 2009, broken by occasional rocket strikes on U.S. bases in Baghdad or the downtown Green Zone. Baghdad Khataib Hezbollah (Party of God Brigade) still placed EFP-shaped charges and fired their own rockets. They perfected a truck-borne contraption called an IRAM (improvised rocket-assisted munition), a calliope of heavy rockets on a flatbed covered with a tarpaulin. An IRAM truck could drive up near a U.S. compound, park a hundred yards outside the wall, yank off the tarp, then shower the base with a dozen high-explosive projectiles in a few seconds. After some ugly surprises in Baghdad during 2008, effective Iraqi and U.S. patrolling and raids preempted any incidents in the capital throughout 2009. But like sharks circling in the ocean just beyond the sight of a scuba diver, even if you didn’t see them, they still saw you. The Hezbollah IRAM gunners watched and waited for the Americans to drop their guard. A few times in 2010 and 2011, that happened.

It was all wrapping up in slow motion. Four weeks before Frank Rodriguez concluded America’s business with Adel al-Mashadani, the new U.S. president formally announced the end of the Iraq campaign. President Barack H. Obama ran on a platform that emphasized hope and change. He focused on matters at home. Like most prominent Democrats, Obama considered the Iraq campaign a bloody botch. In U.S. domestic partisan politics, after initial enthusiasm in March and April of 2003, the Democrats judged Iraq to be the bad war, brought on by (best case) George Bush’s arrogance or (worst case) outright dishonesty emanating from the White House. Afghanistan, however, was the good war, neglected under Bush, outsourced to overmatched allies like Britain, and overdue for attention. Deliberate and nuanced in contrast to his often impulsive, inarticulate predecessor, Obama decided to defer to the timeline already set by Bush and Maliki. The American departure wouldn’t be precipitous. But it would happen on schedule.

President Obama announced the Iraq pullout at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, on February 27, 2009, then cemented the policy during a surprise trip to Baghdad on April 9, 2009. In addition to emphasizing the final American withdrawal in December 2011, the new president added an interim step: “Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.” The U.S. troop strength at that point would be no more than fifty thousand, less than half of where it stood in 2009, and all would be advising and assisting. Lawyers and press flacks in the White House comforted themselves that such a mission didn’t constitute combat, which would have been news to Americans in uniform in Iraq. In any case, Obama was shifting to Afghanistan. Iraq was over.

Behind the scenes, certain of Obama’s people made noises about keeping a substantial U.S. follow-on force in country after 2011, an open-ended troop commitment akin to Korea. That neatly matched counterinsurgency doctrine. But it didn’t match American domestic sentiment. Soldiers and airmen heard what they wanted to hear, but they should have taken the president at his word.

Any follow-on U.S. force level depended on negotiating with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and he took his usual stance: he would cooperate only as far as it suited his purposes. Maliki had no intention of keeping any substantial American troop presence in his country. The Kurds desired a strong American presence, and so did the Sunni Arabs. Riding the Shiite majority wave, with enough Kurds and Sunni on his side to keep things semi-calm, Maliki was well past the need for U.S. soldiers in his country. He believed his own press releases.

One of the stranger provisions of article 24 of the security agreement directed that “all American combat forces shall withdraw from Iraqi cities, villages, and localities” by June 30, 2009. To Maliki, that meant the U.S. units would move to their bases and sit there as Iraqi army and police took over the entire war. His own Iraqi generals did not want that, knowing that, like Lieutenant Colonel Mahmoud in Fadhil, they needed a lot of reliable U.S. help. Ever legalistic, the Americans saw some wiggle room. They had to carry out their support role under article 4. What if such units were not defined as combat forces? Clearly, President Obama opened the door to that interpretation at Camp Lejeune. Could it be sold to Maliki?

The new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, inherited that task. He’d made his name trying to negotiate with the duplicitous, intractable North Koreans. Unlike the outgoing Ryan Crocker, Hill thought he could take the sole lead in managing Maliki. The military role was ending. General Ray Odierno at MNF-I, a team player all the way, was rankled by Hill’s overt insistence on taking charge. The general preferred the easy partnership the military had built with the embassy under Crocker. But he also knew his limits. Odierno had served during the rocky Bremer-Sanchez period and refused to get sucked into any similarly dysfunctional arrangement. The general set aside his ego and tried to follow the new ambassador’s lead.

As Odierno expected, Hill got nowhere with Maliki beyond basic pleasantries. The two civilians discussed diplomatic visits and generalities but no hard matters, certainly not the true scope of the pending out-of-the-cities deadline. After a few sessions enjoying the circuitous stylings of Nouri al-Maliki, Hill probably longed for the old days dealing with Pyongyang. At least you knew for sure they would stiff you. With the new ambassador neatly boxed in by the dour Iraqi prime minister, it fell to MNF-I to sort out what the getting-out-of-the-cities thing really entailed.

Having served as both a division and corps commander in Iraq, Odierno chose an interesting, bottom-up solution. The big four-star made it clear that partnering with the Iraqis must continue, in and out of the cities and villages, as well as in the “localities,” whatever the hell those were. Odierno then directed Lieutenant General Charles H. Jacoby Jr. and his First Corps headquarters to back off and let the division commanders sort it out. In the spring of 2009, all the division commanders were in-country campaign veterans maintaining strong relationships with their local Iraqi counterparts. Jacoby had never served in Iraq and had been in country only a few weeks when the out-of-the-cities horse-trading began in earnest. He stepped back. Odierno figured each division would make local arrangements, and it would work. Maliki could claim his great “victory” over the occupiers, and article 4 support would continue.

Odierno’s idea produced the results he wanted. Up north, the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Division kept key outposts open in Mosul, Kirkuk, and other urban centers. Vehicles carried placards indicating they performed a support role, reinforcing the Iraqi forces. In the northern provinces, the larger, uniquely American MRAP (mine-resistant ambush-protected) armored trucks stayed out of the cities. Only Humvees, which the Iraqis also used, went in and out, lowering the U.S. profile. The Americans in Kirkuk and Mosul trod lightly, cajoling the Kurds and Arabs daily to keep them happy along what all euphemistically referred to as the “disputed internal boundaries” that traced the edges of semiautonomous Kurdistan. Out west, the Marines continued their successful embrace of the Sahwa, moving in and out of cities and villages as necessary with full support of the Anbar Sunni and without any attention from the sheruggis in distant Baghdad. Down south, the deadline coincided with the British departure, and they had long ago left the inner cities. The Americans slid into the old British bases without much fuss. Maliki and his cronies chortled over the departure of Abu Naji (Father of Those Left Behind), the same British who’d once ruled Iraq under the League of Nations mandate after 1918. Maliki’s circle then realized they had just evicted the forces of the country training their small navy, whose sailors and patrol boats guarded the offshore oil platforms that powered the entire Iraqi economy. Maliki backtracked and quietly got the British Royal Navy trainers to return for a while.

A quiet approach also worked in Baghdad, the acid test for “out of the cities.” In the capital, all of the U.S. brigades had areas of responsibility that extended from central Baghdad out to the rural belts, like slices of a pizza. Accordingly, the BCTs shifted the bulk of their power to the countryside over the spring. Fourteen combat outposts remained in the city to ensure article 4 support to the forces of the Baghdad Operations Command. The First Cavalry Division directed all of its urban-based American units to execute on a reverse cycle commencing on July 1. For about a month, the U.S. units in the city joined their Iraqi partners by night, and together they patrolled, raided, and resupplied. To the average Baghdad citizen, the Americans were gone. Nobody ever called them on the subterfuge. Given the 120-degree summer heat, nights worked out better operationally too.

Nouri al-Maliki celebrated the June 30 deadline as a great day of independence for all Iraqis. Television stations ran countdown clocks as if awaiting the new year. In Baghdad, there were fireworks and a Saddam-scale parade. Maliki designated the day a national holiday. He proclaimed: “The national united government succeeded in putting down the sectarian war that was threatening the unity and the sovereignty of Iraq.” He never mentioned the United States, by whose sufferance his regime existed. Obama had been right. It was time to go.

 

Maliki needed one more thing from the Americans. On March 7, 2010, after several delays, Iraq voted for a new parliament to replace the one chosen in December of 2005. The three primary candidates were truly the usual suspects: Maliki, al-Jafaari, and Allawi. Backed by a substantial number of Sahwa figures disenchanted with Maliki, Allawi’s list won in a squeaker, securing ninety-one seats to Maliki’s eighty-nine. The 2005 Iraqi constitution designated the leading party to form the government, and Allawi set to work doing just that. American soldiers saw this as a good outcome. Allawi was by far the most level-headed of the three. As for Maliki . . . well, he would not be missed.

Maliki did not go quietly—far from it. He demanded and arranged recounts in Shia areas sure to favor his prospects. The tenacious prime minister also argued that because Allawi’s list did not win a majority of the 325-seat assembly, he had no right to form a government. Maliki began courting smaller parties in an attempt to cobble together a majority coalition and retain his office. He also announced that as long as the electoral outcome remained unsettled, he planned to continue as acting prime minister.

At MNF-I, Ray Odierno looked forward to the return of Allawi, especially with that leader’s substantial Sunni backing. The old Casey strategy of “Sunni in” remained a key MNF-I idea, emphasized by the Sahwa. Ambassador Chris Hill, however, wanted to build on his relationship with Maliki, such as it was. He advocated backing Maliki and cajoling Allawi to accept some ill-defined role running a new strategic council. The Kurd Jalal Talabani would continue as president of Iraq, and the Sunni could count on subsidiary posts. In other words, the same-old, same-old. Hill convinced Vice President Joe Biden to back the plan. Preoccupied with domestic policy and Afghanistan, Obama concurred. It took until November to convince Allawi to knuckle under. America cast its lot with Nouri al-Maliki.

He repaid the trust with his customary ingratitude. By 2013, he had moved to arrest his Sunni vice president, snubbed the Kurds, and was working to modify the Iraqi constitution so he could stay in office in perpetuity. The following year, Maliki reaped the whirlwind when the Sunni north and west rose up against his Shia-dominated ruling coalition. Defiant and stubborn, Maliki blustered in Baghdad, seeking help from Iran and the U.S. to hold his fractious state together. Whatever Nouri al-Maliki ran, it sure wasn’t a democracy. That was already quite evident in 2010.

It did not matter anymore; Maliki’s missteps were no longer of much interest to the United States. The Americans focused on finishing up their mission. Hill left. Odierno did too. All the Coalition allies were long gone, as were the Marines. Effective September 1, 2010, U.S. soldiers drew down to fifty thousand in six advice and assistance brigade combat teams. Sixty-six more Americans died before the campaign officially ended, on December 18, 2011. The last soldier killed, Specialist David E. Hickman of the Second Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, died in an IED strike in Baghdad on November 14, 2011. Few Americans noted his passing.

 

No division of American soldiers remained behind to honor Hickman’s sacrifice, though the military had expected to keep such a force in country right up to the end. Army planners had even designated the Third Infantry Division to carry out the enduring mission. The U.S. generals should have listened more closely to Obama and Maliki. It was not to be.

Many of the generals and admirals thought that Iraq’s strategic value, bordering Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran and sitting on huge oil reserves, supported keeping a significant U.S. force of soldiers and airmen in the country. Any vacuum left by the U.S. would certainly be filled by Iran, already present in country, playing footsie with Maliki, arming the Sadrists, and courting all the other Shia Arabs now running Iraq. To the senior leaders in the Pentagon, Iraq in 2011 looked like Korea in 1953, an unpopular, mishandled war that nevertheless positioned America in a pivotal location. President Eisenhower, a soldier and strategist to his bones, knew how to read a map. Newly elected on a wave of discontent over the frustrating Asian land war, Ike had held his nose and stayed on the Korean peninsula. He refused entreaties to shift forces to the failing French campaign in Indochina. But Barack Obama was not Eisenhower. His strategic education was just beginning. As he’d promised in his election campaign, Obama trained his sights on crumbling Afghanistan and unreliable, nuclear-armed Pakistan. The new president was willing to leave a token presence in Iraq, but nothing more.

So one American military element remained. To keep the security relationship going, the Americans employed a 4,318-strong contractor force superintended by a 157-man military Office of Security Cooperation-Iraq (OSC-I) under a U.S. Army three-star general. This “son of MNSTC-I” ran ten training and equipping entities at Irbil, Kirkuk, Tikrit, Basrah, Umm Qasr, and five Baghdad-area sites. Fielding plans for Iraq included M-1 tanks and F-16 fighter jets as well as other weapons, ammunition, and repair parts. The OSC-I resembled similar establishments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Along with the U.S. embassy, OSC-I represented all that remained of the once-massive American commitment to Iraq.

Even this relatively small contingent had its issues. The 2008 U.S./Iraqi security agreement ended with no follow-on document, another ball dropped in the haste to get out. Maliki didn’t much care, nor did his ministers. It all rendered movement difficult and left the contractors at the mercy of Iraqi law, such as it was. America intended to provide arms and training. The Iraqis wanted to receive them. Still, somehow, and characteristically for Mesopotamia, the fumbling continued. In the words of Lieutenant General Robert J. Caslen, OSC-I chief: “And this drives to one of the biggest issues we have and that is, what is our mission, what is the organization for this mission, what are the authorities, and what is our doctrine?” No answers came back. Caslen and his small headquarters were left to figure it out on their own.

Nobody in Washington wanted to look at Iraq anymore. It was in the rearview mirror. Bush’s war of choice, the bad one, the foul-up, was over. As the partisan critics had long predicted, it had not turned out well, with 4,486 Americans dead, 218 Coalition fatalities, at least 103,775 Iraqis lost, and a suspicious authoritarian regime running Baghdad under strong Iranian influence. President Barack Obama and his administration turned fully to Afghanistan, the campaign they believed to be the good war. As they soon discovered, the only good wars are the ones that are over.