The Fourth Star (30 page)

In June Abizaid had assured Petraeus that he would get whatever he needed for the new training command. Yet it had taken months to get him the U.S. staff he’d been promised. His initial staffing request sat for almost two months in Baghdad before it was forwarded to the Pentagon. It took another two months to find the soldiers to fill it. In October the Army began sending over soldiers from the 98th Division, a reserve unit based in upstate New York. Petraeus placed some of the new arrivals in his headquarters and made the others combat advisors. The critically needed advisors were supposed to toughen up the Iraqi formations.

The reservists, however, were ill prepared to lead foreign forces in
combat. Most were drill sergeants who spent two weeks each summer on active duty, putting American teenagers through basic training. Many of these part-time soldiers had joined the 98th because they thought the unit would never deploy overseas. Now they were being asked to fight alongside inexperienced Iraqi units and live on Spartan bases—a mission typically handled by elite Special Forces teams.

Petraeus’s staff knew they had a problem when the soldiers started unpacking shipping crates filled with their broad-brimmed drill sergeant hats, easel boards, flip charts, and urinal disinfectant cakes. They had assumed they were going to run basic training, teaching Iraqis how to shoot, march, and care for their equipment—not be pressed into battle with them. In late 2004, Brigadier General James Schwitters, Petraeus’s deputy in charge of the Iraqi army training effort, told Petraeus that only about a third of them were effective in their jobs. Most of the advisors didn’t even know how to operate an AK-47, the rifle of choice for the Iraqi military. Schwitters was one of the Army’s most experienced, unflappable professionals. He had commanded Delta Force, where his troops gave him the radio call sign “Flatliner,” a reference to a dead person’s electrocardiogram reading. Nothing seemed to unhinge him. His assessment of the American soldiers advising the Iraqi army battalions was blunt but accurate.

Outwardly and with Casey, Petraeus adopted a can-do attitude. He was going to figure out how to make it work with the soldiers that he had been given. He and Schwitters created a training academy north of Baghdad to teach the advisors the basics of fighting with foreign troops. Both men knew, though, that the solution was far from ideal, and not the proper way to conduct a mission that Bush and Rumsfeld were saying was the most important in Iraq. In truth, the Pentagon and Casey had no idea how difficult it was to rebuild a military in a country that was being torn apart by an insurgency. In the Balkans, where there was no fighting, the United States had handed the mission of training army and police forces off to private contractors, its NATO allies, or the relatively small Special Forces. The most relevant lessons when it came to rebuilding a foreign military were from Vietnam, but that war had been long forgotten.

Petraeus’s other big worry was Mosul. He had poured his heart into stabilizing the city, and still referred to himself as a Moslawi, or citizen of
Mosul. “I go back and it’s like the return of the prodigal son,” he told a
Newsweek
reporter in June 2004. “There’s even a street in Mosul named for the 101st Airborne, and you know it’s authentic because there are two misspellings in [the street sign].” In the fall of 2004 his project was coming apart. Petraeus had turned over the city in early 2004 to Brigadier General Carter Ham, who led a force about one-third the size of the 101st. Ham also received far less reconstruction money than Petraeus. “I wasn’t as aggressive as I needed to be in asking for money,” Ham would say years later. His other handicap was that he wasn’t Petraeus. “Petraeus has this big room-filling personality,” he recalled. “That just isn’t me.” After Petraeus had departed, the political deals that he had brokered began to unravel. He had urged Ham to make sure that the provincial governor, Ghanim al-Basso, a Sunni Arab, stayed in his job. “From day one the message from the council was that Governor Basso had to go,” Ham recalled. Basso was fired a few days after Petraeus left. The next governor, who was appointed by the council, was assassinated in June 2004 after only a few months in office.

In late August 2004 Petraeus visited northern Iraq, ostensibly to inspect a new regional police training center. His real goal was to check on Mosul, and he arranged to spend two days there, visiting Ham and his former Iraqi cohorts. A few weeks earlier, a female law professor whom Petraeus helped place on the Mosul city council had been found tortured and killed in her home. Attacks were on the rise, and the police chief and new provincial governor were feuding. Petraeus visited a police station in downtown Mosul and gave a pep talk. Afterward, Mohammad Barhawi, the Mosul police chief, warned him that foreign jihadists were infiltrating the city and that he was having trouble with the governor, who was trying to drive him from his job.

Before he left, Petraeus stopped by the governor’s office. “I lost fifty-three soldiers in Mosul and it pains me enormously to see you two bickering,” he told him. “This is a time when all Moslawis have to pull together.” As night fell he headed to his helicopter, which was waiting for him with its rotors spinning. Petraeus turned to his assistant, Sadi Othman, a skillful translator who had stayed with Petraeus for years. “You can’t go home again,” he said ruefully.

Three months later, insurgents attacked Mosul’s police stations. Petraeus was in his Baghdad office when Barhawi called in the midst of the battle, begging for help. The Iraqi’s voice, normally strong and deep, trembled with fear. There was little Petraeus could do but try to stiffen Barhawi to fight back. “You’ve got to hang in there,” he told him. “This is your opportunity to show what you’re made of.” Petraeus had equipped Mosul’s SWAT team with new vehicles, body armor, and heavy machine guns. It had far more firepower than the insurgents could ever muster. “Just get out there with your machine guns and your SWAT team and you can fight these guys off,” he said, trying to sound as calm as possible.

Ham suspected that Barhawi had been cooperating with the insurgency for months and might have been involved in the assassination of the Mosul governor. Petraeus was more sympathetic; he believed that Barhawi, a former general in Saddam’s elite Republican Guard, was a good man who was under intense pressure from the enemy to surrender or switch sides. “We knew he was a former special operations guy and all this stuff, but in the early days when Mosul had nothing he stood up and was ready to lead,” he recalled. Since Barhawi had become chief, insurgents had kidnapped his sister, blown up his house, and shot him in the calf. Even after he had been wounded in the fall of 2003, he continued to run the Mosul police force from his hospital bed. But as Petraeus hung up the phone, he could tell that his friend had nothing left. Barhawi fled to Kurdistan with a sack full of cash. The police, whom Petraeus had touted as a model, collapsed as insurgents took over nearly all of the city’s two dozen stations.

In the weeks after the Mosul uprising Petraeus looked tired and dispirited. He was working sixteen to eighteen hours a day and guzzling coffee to stay awake. He believed that a commander should never express doubt in front of his troops. “You might put your head down privately somewhere, but then when the door opens you’ve got to show determination and total commitment. You’ve got to be unyielding,” Petraeus often said. But his slumped shoulders and bloodshot eyes betrayed him. For the first time in his accomplished career he was failing.

Abizaid knew things weren’t going well and that relations between Casey and Petraeus had been strained. He wanted to try to fix things and thought he could, if the three of them could talk it out. They were three of the most experienced generals in the Army, solid professionals and dedicated soldiers. He knew the Middle East and what it took to bring stability to its fractured societies. Petraeus had probably thought and studied more about counterinsurgency than anyone. Casey knew the Army and its capabilities like few other officers. If the three of them could think through the problems, they might be able to devise a new way forward. They met around the mahogany conference table in Casey’s Al Faw Palace office. “Between the three of us we need to figure this out in a nonaccusatory manner,” Abizaid said. “We are missing something philosophically. This is the only war we have got. We have to win it.”

It was a meeting that could easily have happened in Saigon in 1968, the last time the United States found itself in a war against a vicious insurgency with no victory in sight. A few days earlier the Marines had taken Fallujah, flattening the Sunnis’ stronghold in a block-by-block operation. The huge attack had destroyed the insurgency’s primary safe haven and knocked the enemy off balance. But Abizaid took little encouragement from the victory. A year and a half after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqis were still unwilling or unable to fight for their own country. Ninety-five U.S. troops had been killed and 560 wounded in the battle. By contrast, only eleven Iraqi soldiers died in the fighting and just forty-three were wounded, he said.

“The feeling in D.C. is, ‘What the fuck are the Iraqis doing?’” Abizaid said.

In a weird paradox, the more American troops fought to stabilize the country, the more resentment they generated among ordinary Iraqis, frustrated at the presence of U.S. troops in their neighborhoods. They had to do something to change the dynamic, Abizaid said. There was only one real course: they had to figure out a way to get Iraqi troops to take more responsibility for maintaining order. Abizaid was quick to reassure Petraeus
that the Iraqis’ failures weren’t his fault. Many of the men sent to act as advisors didn’t have the experience or skills to train soldiers for combat. “Dave, I think we have missed the mark,” Abizaid conceded. “We didn’t give you the best and the brightest. We put the third team out on the field.” The key to fixing the Iraqi forces was using the best and most experienced U.S. troops as combat advisors, he argued.

As Abizaid searched for a historical parallel his mind drifted back to what he recalled from studying Vietnam. It was hardly an inspiring example, given the South Vietnamese army’s collapse in 1975, but it was the last time the Army had tried to rebuild a military on anything like the scale it was doing in Iraq. In the early 1960s the Pentagon had created a special command to select, train, and oversee U.S. officers advising South Vietnamese units. Maybe it was time to build a similar advisory command in Iraq, Abizaid said. He suggested filling the advisory jobs with lieutenant colonels from the Army War College. These were officers who had promising careers ahead of them and in most cases had already done a tour in Iraq or Afghanistan. “That could be what we want,” Casey agreed. They’d need to clear it with the Pentagon first.

Abizaid also was worried that the United States wasn’t finding tough Iraqi leaders who were willing to stand up to the insurgents. “In the Middle East there is usually one guy who holds a unit together,” he told Petraeus. He wanted to step up efforts to lure Sunnis and even some of Saddam’s former military commanders back into the army. “I don’t sense that we have a Sunni outreach program that isn’t AC-130-based,” he said, referring to the heavily armed ground attack planes that had killed hundreds of insurgents in Fallujah. Petraeus said that they were trying but were running into resistance from the predominantly Shiite interim government, which feared a Sunni coup. “They are afraid of Sunni leaders,” he said. The meeting ended with more questions than answers. Everyone was coming to the conclusion that the insurgency would continue for several more years and that the Iraqi security forces would not be able to handle the fight anytime soon. “It’s tough to make a nation of sheep move forward,” said Abizaid. “But that is our deal; that is our challenge.”

More immediate problems intervened, as they always did. Every six months Casey got an assessment of military operations in Iraq. He usually
asked one of the British generals to write it, believing that a foreign officer would be more willing to give him the honest assessment he needed. The December 2004 review was brutal. There was more and more hard evidence that the strategy wasn’t working, at least not on the ambitious timetable that he had laid out in August. U.S. military operations over the previous six months had eliminated insurgent safe havens in a dozen cities. The Shiite uprising in Sadr City had finally been beaten down by Chiarelli’s men. Despite those military successes, conditions were worsening. Since October, more than 300 Iraqi government officials had been assassinated as part of a campaign aimed at hollowing out the ministries. Polling data showed that 40 percent of the Sunnis in Baghdad supported the armed opposition, more than supported the current interim government. If the Sunnis didn’t turn out to vote in January, there was very little chance that the elections would produce a representative government that could win over insurgent sympathizers, the six-month assessment warned.

It wasn’t only Casey’s staff that had doubts. The CIA station in Baghdad was issuing dire warnings that the country was too unstable for elections. Even Ambassador Negroponte wondered if it wouldn’t be prudent to postpone. “I think it may be too risky,” he suggested one evening over dinner in Casey’s residence, a small villa across the lake from Al Faw. Casey insisted that they had to go forward and asked Negroponte to sleep on it. The next morning Negroponte dropped his objections. In an effort to ease worries, Casey temporarily boosted the number of troops in the country to 150,000, the highest number since the invasion.