The Fourth Star (37 page)

Once the new government was in place, Casey was eager to start reducing the size of the force to about 110,000 troops by the fall, with the first cuts coming in January. He also wanted to shrink the number of coalition bases by half, to about fifty. Fewer bases would drive home the idea that the new government was in control. Casey and Chiarelli hoped that once the new government was in place, Iraq would stabilize.

Not everyone agreed. The biggest reservations came from military intelligence officers who had been fretting over the possibility of a coming Sunni-Shiite civil war for almost a year. Colonel Marcus Kuiper, Chiarelli’s senior intelligence officer, was on his first tour of Iraq and had been in the country for only a few weeks, but he’d seen analyses from his predecessors. He sensed that the elections and wrangling over the next prime minister in parliament were likely to heighten sectarian tensions. “We’re going to have great difficulty making progress until the Shia feel secure and the Sunnis feel they can’t overthrow the government,” he told Chiarelli. The worst-case scenario was a major attack by Sunni extremists. Chiarelli listened, but Kuiper could tell his boss thought the assessment was too dire.

On February 22, Sunni religious extremists struck the Al Askaria Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, destroying its famous golden dome. By evening Casey’s cell phone was ringing incessantly with calls from panicked Sunni officials. Do something fast, they pleaded. Sunni mosques were being burned to the ground by revenge-minded Shiites. The country was on the verge of a bloodbath. From his
base in Tampa, Abizaid told his staff to shift surveillance drones and other intelligence-gathering equipment from Afghanistan to Iraq. “Give them all they need,” he ordered. “This attack could unhinge everything.” Casey and Chiarelli flooded the streets with troops, and Chiarelli caught the head of the Iraqi ground forces on his way to the airport for a trip to the United States and convinced him not to leave.

Other Iraqis weren’t as helpful. Casey and Khalilzad pleaded with Jaafari, who was fighting to keep the prime minister’s job, to issue a curfew and appeal publicly for calm. Jaafari hesitated. He saw the bombing as an act of treachery by the Sunni Baathists, and he knew that any Shiite politician calling for restraint risked appearing weak. He finally agreed to make the public statement but refused to impose a curfew for forty-eight hours.

Two days after the bombing, a worried Casey typed out a hasty e-mail to Chiarelli and his other commanders: “Troops, polit situation took a turn for the worse yesterday,” he began, warning them not to share what followed: “Situation is as volatile as I have seen it.” The curfew was in place, but Sunni sheikhs and politicians had been slow to condemn the attack and Shiite patience was “waning quickly.” Iraqis had passed along intelligence that thirty car bombs were heading to Baghdad. Casey wanted his men to look for signs that militia groups were stockpiling weapons or preparing for sectarian war. He didn’t know when the sectarian tension would subside, but he concluded, “It won’t be soon.”

After the mosque bombing, violence steadily increased. The war was changing. Shiite gunmen, many of them members of Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia, known as Jaish al-Mahdi, went block by block in mixed neighborhoods forcing Sunnis from their homes and in some cases killing those who resisted. Sunnis fought back with massive car bombs in crowded markets. Between late February and early May, 3,034 bodies were found in Baghdad. In late February Casey received an intelligence report noting that most of the bodies in Baghdad were concentrated in Sadr’s strongholds. Unless the violence could be contained, the report warned, there would be “intense sectarian strife across several provinces—likely resulting in civil war.” In the margins of the report, Casey drew a star and jotted two words to himself: “Must act.”

Sometimes he sat in his office or his quarters at night and methodically
composed lists of ideas and questions to ensure he wasn’t missing something: “What’s going on?” he wrote one day after noticing that attacks by Al Qaeda were growing larger and more deadly. “Are Sunnis with military experience moving to AQ?”

“May need an offensive,” he wrote in another list. At the same time, he mulled ways of halting the fighting. “Negotiated settlement,” he jotted, wondering if there was a way to bring the warring factions into what would amount to peace talks. He wanted to change the atmosphere. Maybe, he mused, they should “level Abu Ghraib,” the Saddam-era prison that, after the 2004 prisoner abuse scandal, had become a symbol to Iraqis of the hated occupation.

Chiarelli didn’t need a list of new ideas. Even after the Samarra mosque bombing, he was certain he knew what needed to be done. The problem was getting others in the military to embrace his ideas. A few days after the attack, he flew to the U.S. base on the outskirts of Samarra and was ushered into a dimly lit command post. He’d come to hear what the battalion responsible for the city planned to do to bring it back under control and win over the people. Even before the mosque bombing, Samarra had been a difficult place. The United States had mounted large assaults to clear the city of insurgents three times before. Each time the enemy had returned.

As he sat on a folding chair listening, Chiarelli became annoyed. The battalion had plenty of plans for killing or capturing insurgents. Troops, operating from a small patrol base in the center of the city, went out on daily patrols and raids of insurgent safe houses. They were working on finishing a ten-foot-high sand berm around the city so that they could prevent insurgents from going in and out. But he hadn’t heard any mention of plans to revive the economy, build up the local government, or bring jobs to its residents.

After listening for more than an hour, Chiarelli said he’d heard enough. “This is unacceptable. You are going to go around conducting
operation after operation, but you don’t give these people some reason to hope their life is going to get better,” he said. Then Chiarelli stood up and stormed out. It wasn’t often that a three-star general dismissed a battalion’s entire plan. More confusing to the officers in the room, Chiarelli’s thoughts on what was needed in Samarra were completely at odds with what their brigade commander, Colonel Michael Steele, had told them.

Steele, a barrel-chested former offensive lineman on the University of Georgia national championship football team, was sitting just a few chairs from Chiarelli. He’d led the 1993 rescue mission in Somalia made famous in the book and film
Black Hawk Down
. The experience on the chaotic streets of Mogadishu had driven home to him the importance of aggressively pursuing the enemy. Before his men left Fort Campbell in Kentucky he’d gathered them in an auditorium to tell them what he expected of them. “Anytime you fight—anytime you fight—you always kill the other son of a bitch,” he said, pacing back and forth like Patton. “You are the hunter, the predator—you are looking for the prey.” He had undisguised contempt for anyone, including Chiarelli, who suggested that the Army should be trying to create jobs or convince insurgents to lay down their weapons. “This is real, and the guy who is going to win is the guy who gets violent the fastest,” he told his troops, some of whom began using “kill boards” to track how many Iraqis they had shot during the deployment.

Steele repeated none of this as Chiarelli was sitting across from him that day in Samarra. He was, after all, only a colonel, and Chiarelli was a three-star general. A few weeks later Chiarelli returned to Samarra for another visit, which was even more disturbing. This time his aide called Steele and told him that Chiarelli was bringing along Major General Adnan Thavit, who had led the police commandos and was a native of the city. Thavit knew all of the sheikhs in Samarra, and Chiarelli thought that he might be able to provide Steele with some insights. First Steele tried to bar the Iraqi officer from coming, arguing that he planned to discuss classified information. Chiarelli was astonished. “Thavit is on our side,” he thought. “Don’t they understand?” At Chiarelli’s insistence he grudgingly let the Iraqi into the briefing. Later Steele refused to give Thavit a seat in the convoy of Humvees that was ferrying Chiarelli’s entourage back to the helicopter pad. Major Steve Gventer, Chiarelli’s aide, pointed out that the
sixty-four-year-old Thavit would have to walk. “I don’t fucking care,” Steele yelled. Gventer hustled away and found Chiarelli, who ordered Steele to surrender his seat.

Steele’s disdain for Iraqis, though extreme, was not atypical. Three years of occupation duty had left the Army tired and indifferent. Worried about suicide attacks and car bombs, convoys now routinely fired off warning shots at cars that strayed too close. The gulf between occupier and occupied had never been wider. Chiarelli was bothered by the incident with Steele’s brigade but kept going back to Samarra, determined to win over at least some of his subordinates.

In Baghdad, the parliament fought over who would be the next prime minister. Months passed. Violence continued to climb. The government that was supposed to unite the country was paralyzed. Chiarelli’s optimism that Iraq had turned a corner began to fade as the months without a new prime minister went on. He began looking for ways to show average Iraqis that life would improve. In April, Chiarelli’s helicopter lifted off in an eddy of hot wind and turned west. Leaving the sprawl of Baghdad, it soon was speeding low over palm groves and green wheat fields, part of the country’s farm belt, which is startlingly lush to anyone who thinks of Iraq as purely a desert country. The pungent smell of manure wafted up from the ground. Over the
whap-whap-whap
of the rotors, Chiarelli told the Iraqi general flying with him that he was arranging for aerial pesticide spraying of the date palm groves below. Saddam Hussein’s government had done the job every year, but the groves had gone unsprayed since the American military had arrived, and the once-lucrative crop was a mess. A smaller harvest meant fewer jobs for Sunnis in western Anbar Province, fueling the insurgency in what had become one of the most violent and chaotic spots on the earth. “We’re going to do it!” Chiarelli said of the spraying. “I’m following it every day.” He planned to give credit for the idea to the still-to-be-decided prime minister in the hope that it would further bolster his support in the Sunni heartland. The general nodded but said nothing, seemingly puzzled by the American general’s interest in dates.

Chiarelli landed at al Asad Air Base, a vast American installation in the middle of the desert. There, they were met by Colonel W. Blake Crowe, the regimental commander in far western Anbar Province. With his high
and tight haircut and buff biceps, Crowe was the picture of a squared-away Marine. The Marines were under Chiarelli’s command, and Crowe, the son of a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was keen to make a good impression. But he was also a Marine, and they tended to look upon the Army as a plodding outfit without the Corps’s warrior ethos.

Ushering Chiarelli into the regimental command post in a crumbling one-story masonry building, Crowe and a half dozen of his officers launched into a detailed briefing about enemy activity in the area and the difficulty of performing the kinds of civic tasks that Chiarelli wanted. Only a few days earlier, Crowe said, a suicide car bombing just outside their front gate had killed two policemen. The only workers willing to help clear a large ammunition dump, among other Chiarelli-type projects, had to come all the way from Baghdad. But the hiring of these outside workers had angered the local sheikhs, causing still more problems and attacks. Crowe’s implication was clear: the tactics preferred by Chiarelli might work in Baghdad, but in violence-ridden Anbar the Marines would have to handle things their own way, and that meant, first and foremost, killing insurgents. He didn’t have enough troops to cover the vast territory he was responsible for and carry out the kinds of assistance projects Chiarelli wanted.

Chiarelli heard Crowe out. “If you’re saying you’ve got to get an area secure before you do any reconstruction, you’ll never get any reconstruction done,” he said. Crowe, realizing that his presentation had gotten him nowhere (except perhaps in trouble with a general), said he was trying his best. He described how his Marines had recently tracked a suspected insurgent leader to an isolated house. A year ago, he said, they probably would have called in an air strike to kill him. Mindful of Chiarelli’s directives on limiting destruction, they raided the house and captured the man alive. “You probably got more intelligence and avoided killing civilians,” said Chiarelli, beaming. “That’s what I’m trying to make everyone understand.” The Marine evidently was off the hook.