CHAPTER 28

Ricardo Sanchez

Over his head

M any Americans now remember the Iraq war simply as a string of mistakes by the Bush Administration—from overestimating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein to underestimating the difficulty of occupying the country.

While that is correct, it hardly tells the entire story. Less remembered are the errors committed by the military. One dissent to this narrative of solely civilian fault has come from Philip Zelikow, who became the State Department’s counselor as the war in Iraq descended into chaos. “I think the situation is worse than people realize, and the problems are primarily with the military,” he said. Discussing American generalship in Iraq over the course of the war, he added: “I don’t think people realized how bad this was. . . . The American people believe the problem is the civilians didn’t listen to the generals. This is very unhealthy for the Army.” In fact, he argued, the civilians were wrong, but so was the Army, because neither group was thinking clearly about Iraq. The U.S. Army in Iraq, Zelikow added, reminded him of the French army before World War I. “The military is venerated. It is the inheritor of Napoleon. The general is decorated with gold braid—but there’s no ‘there’ there. There is an aversion to deep thinking.”

American generalship in Iraq in 2003 and the following years is too often a tale of ineptitude exacerbated by a wholesale failure of accountability. The war began badly, with Tommy R. Franks failing to understand the war he was fighting. Why did Franks appear to be strategically illiterate, and why was he allowed to guide the initial stages of two wars, each time with large strategic costs? Franks retired not long after the fall of Baghdad and took off to enjoy the American version of a Roman triumph, going on the road to make speeches for large sums and issuing a quick memoir.

Franks passed command of the Iraq war to another Texan, Ricardo Sanchez, the newest lieutenant general in the Army, who resembled Franks but understood the conflict perhaps even less. “I came away from my first meeting with him saying this guy doesn’t get it,” said Richard Armitage, who was the deputy secretary of state at the time. Sanchez was a tragic figure, a mediocre officer placed in an impossible situation. Iraq was boiling over, the Pentagon and the Bush Administration were in denial, and he was trying to deal with this while operating in a confused command structure that generated constant friction between him and L. Paul Bremer III, the top American civilian in Iraq. Sanchez held the manpower, money, and machines, but Bremer believed he outranked him. Relations between the two deteriorated to the point that, in the spring of 2004, when Bremer asked Sanchez to tell him about the American plan to attack Shiite militias in Najaf, Sanchez refused. In his memoir, Sanchez appears proud of this:

“I’m not going to do it,” I said. “I guarantee you that we have a tactical plan. I am comfortable with it and have reviewed it with the division commander. I know he can execute the orders he’s been assigned.

“Well, we need to know . . . ”

“Stop right there, sir. I am not going to give you the details of our tactical plan.”

Sanchez did not explain why he would so refuse to brief the senior American official in Iraq.

This exchange was more than just an indication of personal enmity. It was a flashing warning sign that civil-military discourse over the conduct of the war had broken down. At this point, one of the two should have stepped aside or demanded that the other do so. Another officer might have risen to the occasion. Sanchez, an inveterate micromanager, instead sank into the details, correcting subordinates constantly but failing to provide overarching guidance. Like the worst generals of the Vietnam era, he tended to descend into the weeds, where he was comfortable, ignoring the larger situation—which, after all, was his job. Like many micromanagers, Sanchez also tended to criticize harshly in public. “He would rip generals apart on the tacsat”—the military’s tactical, satellite-based communications network—“with everybody in the country listening,” recalled an officer who served on his staff.

To be sure, the primary errors in Iraq should not be laid at Sanchez’s feet, because they were made well above his level. The original sin was President Bush’s decision to go to war preemptively on information that would prove false. The second major mistake was the failure of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to point out the fundamental contradiction between the civilian view of the mission in Iraq and the military’s view. The mission was never defined—a sin of omission committed by both the military and the civilians. The Bush Administration wanted to transform Iraq into a beacon of free-market democracy for the Middle East. The American military never said so publicly, but in its actions it rejected that revolutionary mission and instead stated that its goal was to stabilize Iraq—which was almost the opposite of the president’s intent. That was the root cause of much of the friction between civil and military authority in the first three years of the American occupation of Iraq.

Because this basic contradiction was left unexamined, Sanchez really had no strategy to implement. That lack manifested itself in the radically different approaches taken by different Army divisions in the war. Observers moving from one part of Iraq to another often were struck by how each division was fighting its own war, with its own assessment of the threat, its own solutions, and its own rules of engagement. It was as if there were four separate wars under way. In western Iraq’s Anbar Province, the 82nd Airborne and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment got tough fast. The 4th Infantry Division, based in Tikrit, in north-central Iraq, operated even more harshly, rounding up thousands of “military age males” and probably turning many of them into insurgents in the process. Baghdad was its own separate situation, exceedingly complex and changing from block to block. Meanwhile, in far northern Iraq, Maj. Gen. David Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division made a separate peace, to the extent of ignoring many of the anti-Baathist rules coming out of Baghdad and conducting negotiations with the government of Syria to provide energy to Mosul. One reason for such distinctly diverse approaches was that conditions were very different in each of these areas. But another reason was that each division commander more or less went his own way, with little guidance from Sanchez. Jeffrey White, a veteran analyst of Middle Eastern affairs for the Defense Intelligence Agency, wrote early in 2004, “Some observers feel that the various U.S. divisions in Iraq have thus far waged more or less independent campaigns.”

Yet Sanchez compounded the problem through smallness of mind and inflexibility in approach. He did not seem willing to learn and adapt. Some commanders at the tactical level took effective approaches, but these were ignored or even discouraged by Sanchez. For example, a Florida National Guard battalion stationed in Ramadi in 2003 was more adept at police work than most military units, having many members of the Miami-Dade police force in its ranks. It emphasized local policing, setting up an academy and an Iraqi force, and also helped cooperative sheikhs win contracts for reconstruction projects, remembered an Army intelligence officer who served in Iraq. But, he noted, “The efforts of 1-124 [the Guard unit] were consistently undermined at the theater level by military leadership that lacked a campaign plan,” as well as by the failings of the Civilian Provisional Authority and other civilians. When Gen. John Abizaid, who had replaced Franks as chief of Central Command, visited Ramadi, he was so impressed with operations there that he told Sanchez to go there and get the same briefing. Sanchez did so, apparently rather unhappily. “Sanchez came in pissed off that he’d been ordered to get a clue from O-6s and below in the hinterland and was in full attack mode,” the officer recalled. “He lit up the staff, told us we didn’t know what we were doing, and went back to Baghdad having learned nothing.”

But Sanchez’s biggest failure as commander was that on his watch, some units acted in ways that were not only counterproductive but illegal. Not knowing how else to put down an insurgency, some divisions indiscriminately detained thousands of Iraqis and shipped them off to Abu Ghraib prison and other detention centers, where the Army lacked sufficient guards and interrogators to hold and sort them. Another, less noticed reason for these big roundups was that American soldiers expected to leave Iraq before long, either as part of a withdrawal or by way of troop rotation. “In the summer of ’03, we all thought we were going home by Christmas, so there was no consideration for the long-term consequences of locking up the wrong guys,” recalled Lt. Col. Russell Godsil, the senior intelligence officer for the 1st Brigade of the 1st Armored Division. “Commanders just wanted all the ‘possible’ bad guys out of their neighborhoods until they left.” Where those Iraqis wound up was someone else’s problem.

When the world learned in the spring of 2004 that American soldiers had sadistically abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Sanchez treated the scandal as a breakdown of discipline among a few enlisted soldiers, rather than a problem caused by a series of leadership failures, most notably his tolerance of massive roundups by some divisions. An Army intelligence expert later estimated that more than 85 percent of the detainees had no intelligence value. Even if it had been the right approach—and even now, some Army officers maintain that it was—Sanchez had failed to ensure that he had a back office capable of processing what the frontline force collected. Not only were more than ten thousand Iraqis imprisoned, but, because prisoners were not sorted by political orientation, hard-core insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists were able to use the prisons as recruiting and training centers. Worst of all, the Abu Ghraib prison was run by a small, undertrained, poorly led Army Reserve military police unit that amused itself by playing brutal games with prisoners. One detainee, for example, later told Army investigators of being made to “bark like a dog, being forced to crawl on his stomach while MPs spit and urinated on him, and being struck causing unconsciousness.” The revelation of their crimes was the biggest setback of Sanchez’s year of command in Iraq, a black eye for the American military and the United States, and a major boost for the insurgency.

It is telling that, even as some senior officers were wondering whether to relieve Sanchez, he was contemplating relieving Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the commander of the American jailers at Abu Ghraib. He did not do so, he said, because she was due to rotate home in less than two months. Once again, rotation was the enemy of competence and accountability.

Gen. John Cushman, the long-retired commander at Leavenworth, could not believe that the Army he had helped rebuild after Vietnam was so lacking in general officer supervision in Iraq. In a privately circulated essay on American generalship in Iraq, he concluded that Sanchez should have been relieved and that Gen. Abizaid, Sanchez’s immediate superior at Central Command, was derelict in duty for not acting at once to do so.

As it became mired in Iraq, the Army began to hear echoes from earlier wars. In his farewell speech as Army chief of staff in mid-2003, Gen. Eric Shinseki, who frequently had been at odds with Rumsfeld, told the assembled crowd—which pointedly did not include Rumsfeld—that “the current war brings me full circle to where I began my journey as a soldier. The lessons that I learned in Vietnam are always with me.” In Vietnam, the American military had gone to war under the Johnson Administration’s unexamined and false assumption that Hanoi and its forces had a breaking point that could be reached fairly quickly. In Iraq, the military went to war under the Bush Administration’s unexamined and false assumption that occupation of the country would be relatively easy. Making the same mistake is a signal that our leaders were not thinking strategically in either 1991 or 2003, and in particular they were not unearthing and dissecting differences and assumptions.

In addition, the American generals in Iraq were burdened with a defense secretary who, like McNamara with Vietnam, frequently thought he knew better than they did. Further complicating the Iraqi situation, of course, was a factor unique to Iraq: the Bush Administration’s unfounded belief that the Arab state possessed an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.

•    •    •

Of all the commanders Ricardo Sanchez resembled, perhaps the best precedent was not any of the Vietnam-era generals but William Dean, the ill-fated commander at the outset of the Korean War. Like Dean, Sanchez led a force unprepared for what it faced. The troops sent to Korea were simply ill-equipped and undertrained. The force sent to Iraq was much more tactically competent, but it was led by officers who did not know how to deal with an insurgency. Sanchez was never captured, but, as with Dean, his reputation would be all but destroyed by his war experience. Andrew Bacevich’s verdict on Sanchez’s performance in Iraq is harsh but fair:

When Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez assumed command of coalition forces in Iraq in 2003, the first stirrings of an insurgency had begun to appear; his job was to snuff out that insurgency and establish a secure environment. When Sanchez gave up command a year later, Iraq was all but coming apart at the seams. Security had deteriorated appreciably. The general failed to accomplish his mission, egregiously so. Yet amidst all of the endless commentary and chatter about Iraq, that failure of command has gone all but unnoted, as if for outsiders to evaluate senior officer performance qualifies as bad form. Had Sanchez been a head coach or CEO, he’d likely have been cashiered.

Given that dismal record, it is startling that one of the preoccupations of Sanchez’s memoir was how the Bush Administration had failed to elevate him to four-star rank. The end of his memoir dwelled not on the mess he had helped make of Iraq, nor on the American troops who were stuck there, nor on the American and Iraqi dead—thousands of them, perhaps unnecessarily—but on how he did not get a promotion he believed he had been promised. When the chairman of the Joint Chiefs called him to inform him that he instead would be retired, he lashed out: “You all have betrayed me.” As he was trying to salvage his promotion, Sanchez turned to an aide and uttered that most tired of Army lines: “Boy, am I glad to be leaving Washington. At least in Iraq I know who my enemies are and what to do about them.” Sadly, even this military cliché was false: In Iraq, Sanchez was even more out of his depth than he was in Washington. In the spreading war in Mesopotamia, he had only a dim idea of who his foes were, and even less sense of how to deal with them.

In a 2009 study, a veteran Army intelligence officer, Maj. Douglas Pryer, reviewed Sanchez’s performance. In his report, Pryer acknowledged that Sanchez was the victim of neglect by the Pentagon, but he still faulted him for poor leadership. “Perhaps most unforgivably, based on his staff’s recommendations, Lt. Gen. Sanchez approved two interrogation policy memoranda that were, at best, poorly considered and poorly written,” Pryer wrote. It was not lack of resources or training that was the basic cause of the Abu Ghraib scandal, he concluded; it was lack of ethical leadership. “The fundamental reason why interrogation abuse in Iraq occurred was a failure in leadership. The answer is that simple.”

The behavior of both Franks and Sanchez after they left the military may be seen as confirmation of Zelikow’s suspicions about their talents. Franks made news in 2008 when it was revealed that he had been paid $100,000 to endorse two veterans’ charities that, it turned out, used only a small portion of the money they raised to help veterans. The charities had been graded “F” by the American Institute of Philanthropy. Sanchez, for his part, reemerged in November 2007, delivering the Democratic Party’s radio response to the president’s weekly statement. He began disingenuously: “I speak to you today not as a representative of the Democratic Party, but as a retired military officer who is a former commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq.” Without skipping a beat, he proceeded to blast the Bush Administration: “In that capacity, I saw firsthand the administration’s failure to devise a strategy for victory in Iraq that employed, in a coordinated manner, the political, economic, diplomatic and military power of the United States. That failure continues today.” It was, noted one Marine colonel who had served in Iraq, like listening to George Custer lecture on Indian affairs. In 2011, Sanchez announced that he would seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for U.S. senator from Texas, only to withdraw at the end of the year after his fund-raising efforts fizzled.

Together, Franks and Sanchez proved just how much American generalship had abandoned the model of George Marshall. Marshall consistently turned down lucrative business offers and always distanced himself as much as possible from politics. The activities of both of these Texan generals were damaging to future generals, because they undercut trust in the military profession. Franks fundamentally misconceived his war, leading to the deaths of thousands of Americans and an untold number of Iraqis. This eroded civilian confidence in the military and may help explain President Barack Obama’s skepticism about military advice. Sanchez’s venture into politics also was damaging. When generals engage in partisan politics, they venture into an area where they are amateurs and so are unlikely to operate effectively. But by doing so, they could make future politicians take politics into consideration when choosing and working with generals. Politicians might select a lesser officer for a command because he was seen as less of a possible political threat. Such thinking by civilian leaders would result in reduced military effectiveness.

The troops: Lions often led by donkeys

Under both Franks and Sanchez, the failures of the American military in Iraq were not those of frontline soldiers. American troops deployed to Iraq fit and well trained. However, training tends to prepare one for known problems, while education better prepares one for the unknown, the unpredictable, and the unexpected. Like their civilian overseers, the generals leading the Army in Iraq had a major gap in their educations. They were not mentally prepared for the war they encountered in Iraq. “The troops were good at what they were told to do, from day one,” observed retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a longtime student of strategy and leadership. It was the generals who were unable to tell their soldiers how to counter an insurgency. “Had counterinsurgency been invoked on day two, [the soldiers] would have adapted.” As an exception, Killebrew pointed to the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul, which in 2003, under Gen. David Petraeus, moved quickly to a counterinsurgency strategy and kept Mosul surprisingly quiet for almost a year. The problem, Killebrew continued, was not the troops but the senior leaders. “As is often the case in war, the question is not whether the troops can adapt, but whether the leaders can. The troops, as always, paid the price of educating their leaders.” It would take more than three years for Army leaders simply to begin listening—that is, about as much time as the U.S. military spent altogether in World War II.

The result of being tactically proficient but strategically inept was that the American Army in Iraq was powerful but poorly led. The warning Huba Wass de Czege had issued in 1984 was, despite his best efforts in creating the School of Advanced Military Studies, coming back to haunt the Army: “A system of officer education which emphasizes how-to training applicable only to present methods, means and conditions will fail to provide the needed education the Army officer corps will need to be adaptive in the uncertain future.”

Tactical excellence may in fact have enabled strategic incompetence. The irony of the DePuy model of the U.S. Army was that its combat effectiveness allowed its generals to dither for much longer than if the Army had been suffering clear tactical setbacks. Competent tactical leadership bought time for the generals to adjust. That is the way it always goes in war, because the shock of reality that wakes generals up and forces them to adjust tends to hit first at the tactical level. Good generalship is measured by the time it takes from first contact with the enemy for the generals to readjust their thinking to the actual conditions they face. In Iraq, it took far too long for the Army’s senior officers to make that adjustment. “One of the reasons we were able to hold on despite a failing strategy and then turn the situation around was that our soldiers continued to be led by highly competent, professional junior officers and non-commissioned officers whom they respected,” concluded Sean MacFarland, who as a brigade commander in Ramadi in 2006 would be responsible for a major counterinsurgency success. “And they gave us senior officers the breathing space that we needed, but probably didn’t deserve, to properly understand the fight we were in.” MacFarland’s point is one not often made, but worth pausing over, because its implications are far-reaching. Imagine a U.S. military at the other extreme—tactically mediocre and manned with draftees. In such a circumstance, it is hard to imagine the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan being allowed to meander for years without serious strategic direction.

A few reliefs might have broken the strategic logjam, but the vocabulary of accountability had been lost. In 2005, a RAND Corporation study of Army generalship referred not to “firings” or “relief for cause” but, vaguely, to “performance departures”—which could mean leaving voluntarily or not. Similarly, a fine essay by Col. George Reed on “toxic leadership” in the military analyzed the problem bravely but tiptoed around the obvious solution, saying only, rather tentatively, “If the behavior does not change, there are many administrative remedies available.” And a study done at the Army War College by Col. Steven Jones at about the same time again pointed to persistent problems with rotation and unaccountability of officers, as well as an Army system of assessing officers that tended to reward abusive leadership—but, again, it never could quite mention the need for firing such leaders.

Coda: Lieutenant Colonel Sassaman’s breakdown

Relief, if done early enough, might even save an officer’s career. For example, had Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division and now the Army chief of staff, removed Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman from battalion command back in late 2003, Sassaman probably would still be in the Army today. Given his track record before he went to Iraq, he might even be a general now.

Sassaman deployed to Iraq in 2003 as one of the highest-profile officers of his generation. Standing six feet seven inches, he had been a star quarterback at West Point, leading its football team to its first bowl game ever, the 1984 Cherry Bowl, at which it beat Michigan State University, 10–6. Sassaman played much of the season with three cracked ribs and, being a successful player, became a symbol of the rejuvenation of the Army. “I was with Nate at West Point,” recalled Conrad Crane, a military officer turned historian who taught there when Sassaman was assigned to the admissions office. The two sometimes played basketball. “He had the most intense desire to win of anyone I’ve ever seen,” Crane said. In Iraq, Sassaman continued to make a striking first impression. “In person, the ruggedly handsome commander crackled with competence and charisma,” observed Capt. Vivian Gembara, a legal officer. “Few who met him doubted that this was the sort of man soldiers would follow anywhere.”

Sassaman went into Iraq cocky, a believer in the efficacy of the pre-9/11 Army’s three “Fs”—fear, firepower, and force protection. “With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people we are here to help them,” he told Dexter Filkins, of the New York Times, late in 2003. Contrary to the experience of many commanders, his time in Iraq only confirmed his belief in this approach. “The simple, somewhat barbaric truth is that we had to convince the Iraqi people that they should fear us more than they feared the insurgents,” he would still believe years later.

But during his year in Iraq, Sassaman appears to have cracked, especially after one of his favorite subordinate officers was killed. Complicating matters, Sassaman was constantly at odds with his immediate superior, Col. Frederick Rudesheim, who was following a softer, more nuanced approach toward the Iraqis. “I neither trusted nor respected him,” Sassaman wrote of his commander, in a bitter memoir. When Rudesheim directed him to seek clearance for any use of indirect fire—that is, mortars and artillery—Sassaman told his soldiers to ignore the order. “Screw brigade,” he instructed them.

So it went between me and Colonel Rudesheim—a pattern of disrespect and disobedience having now been established, I gave orders based on instinct and experience, rather than on consideration for the chain of command and traditional army protocol. I had crossed a line, and I knew it, but I didn’t care. By now it was apparent that in my one year of combat duty, as a battalion commander, I was going to be working for a man who did not believe in fighting; who felt that we should be prosecuting the war with a policy of appeasement—where we paid people to stop attacking us, instead of just eliminating the attackers. I couldn’t do that.

The approach Sassaman denounced, that of paying off insurgents and finding other nonviolent ways of getting them to stop attacking Americans, became official American policy four years later and would be key to the success of the “surge” that helped the United States withdraw from the war. Had Sassaman been relieved at this point, when it was clear that he had developed a spectacularly bad relationship with his commander and was fomenting indiscipline, it would have been better not only for him but for the soldiers in his unit and for Iraqis in his area of operations. For example, Odierno could have ordered him to switch jobs with an officer on the division staff. But he was not removed, and his unit began to slide insidiously from indiscipline to criminality. Capt. Gembara, the legal officer who had been so impressed by Sassaman at first, developed second thoughts. “First Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment was a world unto itself, one where unlawful, even brutal, acts were, at best, condoned and, at worst, explicitly ordered,” she wrote.

One night in January 2004, some of Sassaman’s soldiers forced two handcuffed detainees to jump into the Tigris River. One was reported to have drowned. Sassaman obstructed the subsequent investigation, instructing his soldiers to lie and say that they had dropped the Iraqis at the side of the road. One officer, Lt. Jack Saville, later testified, in his own court-martial trial, that he had discussed with Sassaman how to mislead the Army investigators. This time Gen. Odierno gave Sassaman a written reprimand. “Your conduct was wrongful, criminal, and will not be tolerated,” Odierno stated. Yet in fact it was tolerated, by Odierno and by the Army. Official disinclination to relieve commanders had grown so intense that even at that point Odierno did not relieve Sassaman. Lt. Col. David Poirier, an MP battalion commander who witnessed the affair, was astounded: “When you have a battalion commander who leads a staff in rehearsing a story about murder—and he’s still in command?” Sassaman was allowed to retire quietly after his time in command.

It all sounded a bit like the U.S. Army in Vietnam, echoing Gen. Koster’s own letter of reprimand after My Lai. The biggest difference was that, four decades after the Indochina war, the American public was less critical of its military—and so the military was not forced to conduct the kind of self-examination that could have helped it correct its course.