The Fourth Star (29 page)

At an early Iraqi national security council meeting, Petraeus grabbed a seat at the main table with Casey, the prime minister, the minister of defense, the interior minister, and other senior Iraqi officials. “We’re fine
here at the head table,” Casey told him, directing him to a seat against the wall with the other second-tier staffers.

Despite the tension, Casey badly needed Petraeus to succeed. He wanted the troops Petraeus was cranking out to fight alongside U.S. units as they cleared insurgent strongholds prior to the elections, putting an Iraqi face on what were essentially American assaults. By January, Casey hoped, there would be enough police and army units to guard polling stations during the election and allow for cuts in U.S. forces in 2005.

In early August, Petraeus’s forces were tested for the first time since the April battles in Sadr City and Fallujah. A U.S. Marine patrol in Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad, unknowingly strayed too close to a house where Muqtada al-Sadr was hiding, provoking a lengthy firefight. After the battle, Sadr’s militia fighters quickly seized police stations and government buildings throughout the city. “I was looking for the opportunity for the new Iraqi government to have a success and demonstrate that it could function,” Casey recalled. This was it. He ordered two U.S. Army battalions and three of Petraeus’s new Iraqi battalions to help the Marines retake the city from Sadr’s forces.

The U.S. troops, backed by helicopters and fighter jets, did most of the heavy fighting in the labyrinthlike cemetery around the Imam Ali shrine. The Iraqis were asked to play a supporting role. Still Petraeus was nervous. The troops had walked patrols in Baghdad, but this was the first time that they were being pressed into battle against their Iraqi brethren. A day after they arrived, Petraeus began fielding frantic calls from the Iraqi units’ U.S. advisors, reporting that the troops were desperately short of ammunition and rifles. As night fell, he and his small command gathered up all the bullets, mortar rounds, and guns they could find in storage depots and heaved the weapons onto the back of Chinook cargo helicopters.

Seeking refuge from the U.S.-led assault, Sadr and his militia forces retreated inside the Imam Ali shrine, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam. Casey met with the new prime minister, Iyad Allawi, in a small garden outside his residence in the Green Zone. The CIA had sources inside the shrine who were updating them on Sadr’s location, and Allawi wanted the troops to attack the mosque and capture or kill Sadr.

General Metz, who had raced down to Najaf to monitor the fighting, warned that the Iraqis needed at least twenty-four hours to come up with a plan. The delay gave Sadr time to negotiate a cease-fire and escape. “It got played as a victory for Sadr much like that stuff does, but it was good,” Casey recalled. The Iraqi army forces hadn’t crumbled under fire as they had in April. He and Allawi also grew closer during the crisis. “Frankly I didn’t expect such a key success so early,” Casey wrote in a note to Abizaid after the fight. “Muqtada Sadr gave the interim government its first real test and he lost.” He was so hopeful that he suggested to Abizaid that he might be able to reduce the number of U.S. troops in early 2005, after the scheduled January 30 elections.

Not all of Casey’s subordinate commanders were as convinced that the United States was on the right track. On August 14, as the Najaf battle was drawing to a close, Casey convened a meeting with his top commanders at Al Faw Palace. Around the table were Metz, Petraeus, Chiarelli, and several other senior officers. The new U.S. ambassador John Negroponte was sitting next to Casey, his position meant to signal that the civilian and military efforts were finally united. Casey started by laying out his plan for the next six months. “We have two priority efforts—training Iraqi security forces and the elections,” he told his commanders.

Marine Lieutenant General James Conway, who was responsible for Fallujah and surrounding Anbar Province, complained that Sunni tribes in his province had been given no voice in the new government and saw it as illegitimate. Allawi’s ministers, meanwhile, ignored the area. “The silence is deafening,” he complained.

Chiarelli was upset as well. Less than two weeks earlier he’d turned out 18,000 people to work in Sadr City laying sewer pipe, wiring houses for electricity, and picking up trash. He saw the turnout as a major victory that he hoped would spur more funding for similar projects throughout Baghdad and the rest of the country. Casey and Negroponte, however, were moving in a different direction. As part of their strategy they shifted $2 billion out of the reconstruction projects that Chiarelli was championing to pay for more equipment for Iraqi army and police forces.

As he headed into the palace meeting Negroponte knew he was going to get an earful on the subject from Chiarelli. Although he’d been in Iraq
only six weeks, the ambassador had already grown tired of hearing about Chiarelli’s bold plans to fix the embassy-led reconstruction effort by cutting out U.S. contractors and focusing on smaller projects and jobs for Iraqis. “I am not going to listen to Chiarelli … bitch about the State Department,” he told Casey. Negroponte didn’t have a choice, though. Chiarelli was incensed and let it show more than usual. He didn’t deny the need for more army and police forces, but he didn’t think the money to pay for them should come out of the reconstruction effort, which was already wasting too much money on big-ticket ventures that offered little immediate payoff in Baghdad’s neighborhoods. He wondered in conversations with diplomats in the Green Zone whether the United States was pursuing a “bankrupt strategy” by ignoring the crumbling infrastructure and its crippling unemployment. These were driving the insurgency, he insisted.

Chiarelli never got a chance to prove his approach could work. The flare-up in Najaf triggered a new eruption of violence in Sadr City, and his soldiers spent much of the next ten weeks fighting over the same ground they had fought for in April. In the earlier battle Sadr’s militia had fought with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Now they were using more-deadly roadside bombs. It seemed as if the cleric could turn up the violence at will. Once calm was restored, Chiarelli restarted his reconstruction program for two months before turning Baghdad over to a new division with different priorities. He returned to the United States convinced that he had been on the right track and penned a long article in
Military Review
, an Army journal, laying out his theories. “Will Sadr or his lieutenants attack again? Probably. But support for the attacks will not last if infrastructure improvements continue,” he wrote. His article also took a swipe at Casey and Negroponte’s strategy, which made training a higher priority than reconstruction. “If there is nothing else done other than kill bad guys and train others to kill bad guys, the only thing accomplished is moving more people from the fence to the insurgent category,” he wrote.

Chiarelli’s loss in the summer of 2004 had been Petraeus’s gain. Most of the $2 billion taken out of the reconstruction budget went directly to his new command overseeing Iraqi army and police development. He felt
good, and it wasn’t just because of the money. In Najaf his Iraqi units had held together, which was an improvement over the disasters that preceded his arrival. In late September Petraeus put down his thoughts in an op-ed in the
Washington Post
. His article began with a series of caveats. Training and equipping a quarter million Iraqis was a “daunting task.” Insurgent violence made it even harder. “Nonetheless, there are reasons for optimism,” he wrote. “Today approximately 164,000 Iraqi police and soldiers … are performing a wide variety of security missions. Equipment is being delivered. Training is on track and increasing in capacity. Infrastructure is being repaired.”

Soon after the op-ed appeared, Petraeus’s forces suffered a series of humiliating setbacks. In early October the newly formed 7th Iraqi Battalion was rushed to Samarra, a Sunni insurgent haven north of Baghdad, on seventy-two hours’ notice to fight in an American-led operation to take control of the city. On the way there, it was hit by a car bomb that killed one Iraqi soldier and wounded seven. As the injured were being treated, the commander and several of his aides quit, triggering an exodus of hundreds of rank-and-file troops from the 800-man unit. “They just walked out the gate and didn’t come back,” said Major Robert Dixon, an American advisor attached to the unit. Other disasters followed. In late October, Petraeus flew his Black Hawk to the Kirkush Military Training Base on the Iranian border to oversee the graduation ceremony for the 17th Iraqi Battalion. A band played as the new troops in their crisp tan-and-black uniforms marched past a reviewing stand. Petraeus gave a short speech. Immediately following the parade the troops were loaded onto buses, trucks, and minivans for two weeks of vacation. Petraeus hopped on his helicopter bound for the Green Zone. The helicopter flew fast and low over the dreary parched landscape, rising and falling to avoid electrical power lines that crisscrossed the desert. Hot autumn air whipped at his face. He felt good; he had produced yet another battalion.

A few hours later, his executive officer rushed into his Green Zone office. Three of the minivans carrying forty-nine of the new recruits had been stopped at a fake checkpoint. The soldiers were ordered out of the vans, forced to lie facedown in the sand, and executed with a bullet to the back of the head. “It was just a horrible experience,” Petraeus recalled. “We felt
like they were our guys. These weren’t just some Iraqis. These were our troopers. I’d seen them graduate. I’d been out there.” A few days later he got another grim report from Mosul: dozens of soldiers, also going home on leave, were found headless on the side of the road. Many of the officers on Petraeus’s staff blamed themselves for the deaths. They should have realized that troops, who were required to turn in their rifles before they went home on leave, were easy targets.

Assassinations weren’t Petraeus’s only problem. He depended on unarmed civilian contractors to ferry new AK-47s, body armor, and helmets to Iraqi bases. Soon insurgents were targeting them, too. “It was just a battle. Everything was a flat-out fight. Every single logistical convoy and delivery of equipment,” he recalled. When he commanded the 101st in Mosul, Petraeus had a massive staff made up of topflight officers. His new training command was an undermanned pickup team that had been thrown together without vital equipment such as armored Humvees or sufficient radios.

In November, as U.S. soldiers and Marines gathered on the outskirts of Fallujah, Petraeus’s units were once again thrust into the fight. In the months since the Marines’ aborted April assault, Fallujah had become a car bomb factory under the control of radical fighters. Casey was determined to seize it from the insurgents prior to the January elections and believed that Petraeus’s troops had to play a role in the attack to blunt the inevitable claim in the Middle East that U.S. troops and warplanes were destroying a Muslim city.

As the Iraqi units prepared to move to Fallujah, hundreds of terrified soldiers deserted. Major Matt Jones, who worked as an advisor, recalled that 200 soldiers in his Iraqi battalion quit before they even left their base. One of the deserters was the battalion commander. “He stole his pistol and his staff car—a Chevy Lumina—and an AK-47. We never saw him again. That wasn’t exactly a good day for morale,” Jones said.

Many of the units that made it to Fallujah were nowhere near ready to fight. General Conway, the Marine officer leading the attack, was dumbfounded when he saw the Iraqi troops, and immediately called Petraeus. “Why did you send me all these guys without any boots and kit?”

“What are you talking about?” Petraeus replied. “We issued all that stuff to them.”

“Well, you may have. But they don’t have it. What you got is a bunch of guys running around in flip-flops and running shoes.”

Petraeus raced out to Fallujah with one of his Iraqi generals to try to figure out what had happened. The Iraqi soldiers he found looked miserable, hungry, and cold. “Didn’t we issue you this stuff?” he demanded. “Where is it?” When they’d gone home on leave they gave the equipment to their younger brothers and sisters, the Iraqis explained. “Our families needed the blankets,” one of the recruits told him.

Back in Baghdad, Petraeus comforted himself by reading
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, T. E. Lawrence’s account of the Arab revolt during World War I. Lawrence had dealt with many of the same problems—poor leadership, desertions, and shortages of equipment. He found himself drawn to one scene in which Lawrence emerges from his tent to find that his Arab allies, whom he had been fighting with for months, are gone. They’d gone to visit their families, leaving him alone in the desert. “That just resonated with me,” Petraeus recalled.

The Iraqis’ failures were frustrating to Casey, who felt that Petraeus’s briefings to Bush and Rumsfeld in the summer and early fall had overstated the progress that he was making. “Look, you have got to be very careful when you are talking to civilian leaders,” he snapped after one video teleconference with the president, who had dialed in from his Crawford, Texas, ranch. “Don’t be so optimistic.” Frustrated with the setbacks, Rumsfeld began demanding more-frequent updates. Casey and his staff, in turn, began demanding more and more data as well. Petraeus never complained, but his staff bristled at the second-guessing.