Armed Humanitarians (11 page)

The 101st Airborne reached the outskirts of Najaf in early April 2003. It was the division's first real encounter with the Iraqi population; it also served as a test of how Iraq's Shia community would receive the Army—as liberators or as occupiers. For Shia believers, Najaf was a holy place. It housed the shrine of Imam Ali, considered by Shia to be the rightful successor of the Prophet Muhammad; after Mecca and Medina, it was the third most important site for Shia pilgrims. Standing atop a Humvee outside the gates of the city, Army Major General David Petraeus turned to his boss, the commander of V Corps, Lieutenant General William Wallace. “There sure are a lot more civilians on the battlefield in this particular scenario than there were at the NTC or at JRTC,” he said.

Petraeus was referring to the Army National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, and the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana. Those two “dirt” training facilities were where the Army conducted its full-dress rehearsals for war. A month-long stay “in the box” at NTC or JRTC was the closest you could get to combat without real shooting. At Fort Irwin, Army units would play a sophisticated version of laser tag against an OPFOR (“opposing force”) that was usually configured like a Soviet armored formation. For maximum realism, the OPFOR even had a fleet of Warsaw Pact equipment—tanks, helicopters, armored personnel carriers.
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It was practice for the type of conventional, tank-on-tank engagement the Cold War military had always prepared to fight: the Soviets crashing through the Fulda Gap in West Germany. What the Army called “COBs”—civilians on the battlefield—were notably absent from the NTC war games. Now, Army commanders were very rapidly learning that civilians were not just an unexpected obstacle that could be easily circumvented.

On April 3, a delegation of soldiers of the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne entered the city to pay a visit to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading Shia imam. As the soldiers approached the Shrine of Ali, a large crowd of Shia men began to assemble; they quickly blocked the streets near the shrine. Rumors swirled that the foreign soldiers would try to enter the Shrine of Ali, or that they would detain Sistani. As the crowd grew, someone began to pitch stones at the American soldiers. Lieutenant Colonel Chris Hughes, commander of the Second Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, decided on a show of restraint. He ordered his soldiers to drop to one knee and point their weapons to the ground. “We're going to withdraw out of this situation and let them defuse it themselves,” he said through a bullhorn. “All vehicles turn around.”
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A CNN reporter on the scene said Hughes's decision to call off the visit and avoid a confrontation prevented U.S. troops from making enemies of the civilians in Najaf. But the gesture actually had been proposed by Kadhim Al-Waeli, an Iraqi exile employed as a cultural scout and advisor to the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne. He was the one who suggested that U.S. soldiers drop to one knee to show respect as they approached the Shrine of Ali. A violent confrontation was averted by a suggestion from a native-born Iraqi; this was broadcast on CNN and Al-Jazeera.
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“I'm your Google. You don't have to go to Google, just ask me,” Al-Waeli had told Hughes. “I'm not a genius, but I was born in Iraq. I know that culture, I know the people.” That sort of advice was indispensable—and it was in extremely short supply. The Army had envisioned the creation of a three-thousand-strong force that would be charged with interpreting for coalition forces, acting as cultural guides, and helping handle refugees. The Iraqi volunteers, dubbed the Free Iraqi Forces, were supposed to act as senior cultural advisors, giving commanders insights into Iraqi attitudes and customs and helping smooth interactions with ordinary Iraqis.
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It was a good idea in theory. But in practice, the creation of the Free Iraqi Forces was a fiasco: Only a very small number of Iraqi exiles actually stepped forward to volunteer, and even fewer were prepared to deploy in time for the fighting. Many of those who did show up for training were not in particularly good shape.
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Few had combat experience. The Army quickly had to lower its expectations. Even an otherwise glowing Pentagon news story about Task Force Warrior, the Army's program for training the exiles at Taszar Air Base, Hungary, acknowledged that trainers had to dumb down the curriculum. A caustic e-mail by a major assigned to Task Force Warrior was passed around within the military community: “Never in the history of the U.S. Armed Forces have so many done so much for so few,” he observed.
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The program in Hungary produced only a few dozen graduates in time to join the war.

Chris Straub, a retired Army officer and former member of the Senate Intelligence Committee staff with extensive experience working with Iraqi exile groups, blamed the relatively low pay—Free Iraqi Forces were paid one thousand dollars a month—for the poor turnout. The U.S. government did not want it to look as if it was raising a force of mercenaries, but Iraqi exiles could make much more money working as interpreters for Titan, the firm that held the main linguistics contract for the Army. “We [the U.S. government] were competing against ourselves,” Straub later observed. Straub had been hired as a Pentagon contractor to recruit Iraqis for the Free Iraqi Forces from half a dozen exile groups that qualified for U.S. assistance under the Iraq Liberation Act, signed into law in 1999 by President Bill Clinton. Free Iraqi Forces were supposed to provide an Iraqi face for the U.S.-led invasion, but Straub said the names of most volunteers were provided by the Iraqi National Congress, an Iraqi opposition group led by the exile politician and neoconservative favorite Ahmad Chalabi. “A lot of them didn't show up,” Straub said. “Lots of them were old.” But Straub believed that the program, despite its faults, paid dividends. He later told me, “In my mind [the Najaf incident] paid for the program.”

In Najaf, the 101st Airborne Division also discovered that it would have to take on some distinctly nonmilitary missions: restoring essential services for the besieged city. Temperatures in early April were already rising into the nineties, and the city was running short of potable water. The unit shipped in a thousand gallons of water for local residents in neighborhoods occupied by the First Brigade, and made plans to deliver diesel fuel to restart a pumping station that had been out of service for several days.
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Even as the U.S. military delivered a swift, overwhelming defeat, another kind of war was taking shape. And those small hearts-and-minds victories could not alter perceptions in the Arab world that the United States was an occupier.

The march to Baghdad continued at whiplash pace. Soldiers and Marines on the ground would quickly learn that civilians were the defining feature on this new terrain. Days after the 101st Airborne Division's uneasy first encounter with the residents of Najaf, Lieutenant Nathaniel Fick, a platoon leader with the Marine Corps's First Reconnaissance Battalion, was ordered to scout the Iraqi military airfield at Qalat Sukkar, an air base that would be used as a staging point for the final assault on Baghdad. As they approached the chain-link fence surrounding the airfield, a message came over the radio network from company headquarters. “All personnel on the airfield are declared hostile.”
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Fick paused, and prepared to override the order. He wanted his unit to stick to the established rules of engagement. He then changed his mind, trusting that the order might save Marines' lives by giving them crucial seconds to respond to an ambush or attack. As the Marines moved forward, Fick heard a short burst of gunfire, and a snatch of radio traffic: Something about men with weapons, and possible muzzle flashes. Not long after, Fick's Marines were approached by a small group of villagers pulling two bundles. The Marines unwrapped the blankets: The villagers were carrying two young boys hit by the Marine gunfire. One boy had a bullet wound in the leg; the other was punched through by four bullets. “In horror, I thought back to our assault on the airfield a few hours before,” Fick later wrote. “The pieces fell into place. Those weren't rifles we had seen but shepherds' canes, not muzzle flashes but the sun reflecting on a windshield. The running camels belonged to those boys. We'd shot two children.”
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As the platoon pushed farther through Muwaffiqiya, the Marines shot a civilian who had failed to stop at a traffic checkpoint. It was a classic “escalation of force” scenario. As they pushed farther north, Fick ordered one of his Marines to commit a small act of vandalism. They cut down an octagonal traffic sign with the word stop written in Arabic. It would be perfect, he thought, for their traffic checkpoints. It might even save a life.
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Fick finally drew a line. His platoon was ordered to search an abandoned amusement park on the Tigris River for pro-Saddam
fedayeen
—the word “insurgent” had not yet come into vogue—when a battered old sedan rolled up to their position. Inside the car they found a badly injured teenage girl, quite possibly wounded by U.S. fire, and her frantic parents. Fick had to decide between staying with the original military mission of searching the park to find a possible cache of surface-to-air missiles or helping the girl. The Marines chose to help the girl. After cleaning and dressing the girl's suppurating wound, they sent her family to an aid station at a higher headquarters, with a handwritten note from Fick instructing U.S. forces further down the line to provide medical aid.

For Fick that encounter marked a sort of break with his conventional military training. But the decision did not rest easy with him. “I kind of berated myself for a few years, thinking I had made the wrong choice … We didn't find the surface-to-air missiles and some helicopters then get shot down, and did our decision to help end up costing the lives of many?” he later told me in an interview. “And only recently have I sort of found peace with this decision.”

The point was, Fick continued, “that most of us—most of us in the NCO corps and the junior officer corps—wanted to default to doing the right thing.” In that case, doing the right thing meant setting aside a purely military mission—hunting for a weapons cache—in order to aid innocent civilians who had been caught in the crossfire.

But the biggest disappointment, Fick told me, was that no civilian reconstruction effort seemed to materialize in the wake of the destructive military campaign. The U.S. military's success in Iraq had been catastrophic: the regime had been shattered, but Iraq's creaky national grid was failing and its economy was in ruins. No one had stepped in to fill the void. Where was USAID? Where were the civilian relief agencies? The realization was dawning that the United States needed to fix things, and fast.

“It's really startling,” Fick said. “We expected there to be this army of reconstruction people descending on the city. And once the supply lines from Kuwait were open, once we had fought our way to Baghdad, there were going to be trucks, you know, convoys of trucks full of equipment and people coming in behind us. And they didn't come. And the disillusionment set in pretty quickly.”

Fick and his Marines were perhaps only dimly aware of a Pentagon-led effort to launch reconstruction projects and take the lead on administering Iraq. In January 2003, the Defense Department created the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), an “interagency” office that brought in officials and experts in postwar planning and reconstruction from the State Department, USAID, and other government agencies.
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On March 1, 2003, just a few weeks before the invasion, U.S. Central Command prepared CONPLAN (Concept Plan) AURORA, a planning document that outlined the “Phase IV” plan for rebuilding Iraq.
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Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tapped retired Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner to run what was supposed to be Iraq's caretaker government.

Garner had won acclaim in 1991 for overseeing Operation Provide Comfort, a relief effort to save thousands of Kurdish refugees who had fled to the mountains of northern Iraq after a failed uprising in the wake of Saddam Hussein's defeat in Operation Desert Storm. When allied forces and relief workers scouted the region in early April 1991, they estimated that as many as a thousand people a day were dying of disease and exposure in the mountains along the Turkish border. Garner led an improvised task force of NATO troops to help protect the civilians, deliver food aid, and set up refugee camps.

It was a muscular model of postwar disaster relief. U.S. military aircraft enforced a no-fly zone overhead, keeping Iraqi government forces in check and delivering relief supplies by air. Garner, then a major general, led Joint Task Force–Bravo, a multinational contingent built around the Twenty-fourth Marine Expeditionary Unit, to the town of Zakho.
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His task was to prepare the town for an influx of Kurdish refugees coming down from the mountains. The entire operation lasted just three months: Garner crossed back into Turkey on July 15, and the camps were handed to United Nations control. Operation Provide Comfort was a success: The Kurds came down from the mountains but did not remain stranded in refugee camps, dependent on international aid. Most Kurds returned home, many of them after passing through a tent city in Zakho designed by Fred Cuny, a Texan who ran Intertect Relief and Reconstruction, a small private company based in Dallas that specialized in disaster relief.
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The key to Operation Provide Comfort was its flexible, improvised design: Garner pulled together a loose coalition from different nations operating under varying rules of engagement. Everything was “done with a handshake,” as he explained later. Flying into northern Iraq on a helicopter with Lieutenant General John Shalikashvili, his boss, and with General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Garner explained how the arrangement with other allied nations would work.