The Fourth Star (39 page)

Chiarelli hadn’t completely lost hope that if he could just get the economy to function, provide jobs, and build a decent government, Iraqis would put their sectarian hatreds behind them. Ward wasn’t sure what to make of his optimism. In 2003 she had left her job at a foreign policy think tank when she heard the Pentagon was looking for civilians to build the new Ministry of Defense. She had been reluctant to head off to a war zone, but volunteered because she believed in the invasion and felt obligated to help. A Stanford graduate, she was smart and a little bit cynical. By 2006 she was convinced that Maliki had different goals for the country than the United States did. Increasingly it appeared to her as if the Shiite-dominated
police, working with illegal militias and death squads, were determined to drive the Sunnis from Baghdad. Sunnis and Shiites weren’t fighting because they lacked jobs, clean water, and electricity. It was much more complicated.

As the violence worsened over the summer, she’d join Chiarelli on the smoking patio at Al Faw Palace and gently voice her doubts. Maybe the unconditional support of Maliki and his sectarian government was driving the Sunnis into the arms of extremist groups, including Al Qaeda, that at least promised protection from the death squads. Chiarelli listened, but she could tell that he still believed the Iraqis could overcome their hatreds. “They lived for thirty years under Saddam Hussein. They just don’t know how to run a government and administer a country,” he replied.

On a helicopter ride over Baghdad, General Abdul Qadir Mohammed Jassim, the head of the ground forces, had told Chiarelli that for most of his life he hadn’t even known whether his neighbors were Sunni or Shiite. They were all just Iraqis. Chiarelli loved the story and must have repeated it a hundred times. It proved reconciliation was possible. All they needed was a decent government to provide for them and jobs. Some days Ward thought that Chiarelli was fooling himself. Other days she had a grudging respect for his optimism.

Gradually, Chiarelli’s frustrations grew over the late summer and fall. The date palm spraying effort that he had championed hadn’t worked out the way he’d hoped. He’d tried to get the Ministry of Agriculture to back it, but they proved woefully incompetent or unwilling to expend effort helping the Sunnis. So he ordered his men to find a private contractor. The United States paid a firm based out of Dubai to spray the date palms and then gave credit to the Iraqis, claiming in public that they had organized and executed the first spraying since the beginning of the war. Everyone in Iraq knew it was a lie.

Chiarelli also was disgusted with Bayan Jabr, who had been the interior minister during the Jadiriyah debacle and had taken over the Finance Ministry under Maliki. He refused to spend money for infrastructure projects in Sunni areas. The government had pledged $50 million to help rebuild Tal Afar after Colonel McMaster’s successful tour there, but a year
later had spent only about $12 million, despite Chiarelli’s protests. The city was falling back into the hands of Sunni insurgents.

Near the end of the summer, General Thurman, the commander in Baghdad, took Chiarelli on a tour of Adhamiyah, the only major Sunni enclave left on the capital’s east side. He and Thurman had grown up in the military together as armor officers. Both of their fathers had been butchers, and their wives often joked that they had married SOBs—sons of butchers. Thurman wanted his friend to see up close what was happening in the once-prosperous Sunni neighborhoods. As Chiarelli walked down Adhamiyah’s streets, piled with trash, a woman dragged him into her house to see her refrigerator, which was full of maggots. She had no clean water. The militia had blown through the neighborhood and shot up the electrical transformers. The area looked worse than any of the slums he’d seen in Sadr City during his first tour in 2004. “We wanted to get members of the government to come down and see what was going on,” Chiarelli recalled. “We couldn’t get them to leave their offices. It was so frustrating.”

When U.S. troops arrested members of the swelling Shiite militias, Maliki frequently intervened. Chiarelli happened to be at Thurman’s headquarters when a call came from Casey’s staff ordering the release of a Shiite bomb maker who had been picked up south of Baghdad. Incensed, Thurman ripped off the Velcro patch that held his two stars and started waving them in the air. “Goddammit, I am going to just quit,” he bellowed while Chiarelli stood there, sympathetic but unsure what to say. He couldn’t tell his friend that it wasn’t that bad, because he felt the same way. The thought of resigning had crossed his mind, too. From the moment you pinned on your first lieutenant bars, he thought, the Army drilled you to consider the moral dimensions of being an officer. He recalled seeing an old Army training film in ROTC class at Seattle University that showed a team of soldiers, clad in Vietnam-era uniforms, firing a mortar while under enemy attack. In a freak accident, the mortar tube malfunctions, injuring several soldiers. Soon after the explosion, one of the other mortar teams nearby refuses to fire, insisting they might get injured as well. At that point, Chiarelli remembered, the short film ended with a final question: “What would you do, Lieutenant?” Back then, the answer the Army wanted—the moral
answer—was obvious: stand with your soldiers, share the risk, and keep firing.

But he faced a different dilemma in Iraq. How could he remain in his job if he wasn’t effective? Didn’t he owe it to his soldiers and his country to resign and go public with a statement explaining in terms the public could understand how and why they were failing and what they needed to do to win? His closest aides could see the frustration in Chiarelli’s face. He had gained weight and was smoking far too much.

He also felt increasingly under fire from some corners of his own military. Shortly after he arrived in Iraq a reporter for
Time
magazine had shown Chiarelli a disturbing video from Haditha, west of Baghdad. Twenty-four Iraqis, including some women and children, had been killed after a bomb attack on a Marine convoy. When Chiarelli learned that the Marines hadn’t investigated the incident, he ordered an inquiry, which came back later that summer. He spent the next ten days with his top staff reading every page of the foot-and-a-half-high report, which painted a disturbing picture of the Marines’ actions. The investigation concluded that senior officers in the 2nd Marine Division had been negligent in failing to investigate the killings—a conclusion that Chiarelli endorsed after plowing through the voluminous report. “We had to learn from this, and one of the things we looked very hard at was whether something was missing in the training. Could this have been handled differently?” he recalled. He was particularly disturbed that the killing of that many civilians hadn’t been considered significant enough to warrant any special attention at headquarters in Baghdad.

He also was dealing with allegations of misconduct by Colonel Steele, the 101st Airborne Division brigade commander with whom he had clashed in Samarra. A few months after Chiarelli’s visit there, soldiers from Steele’s brigade had killed four men on an island in the Tigris River. Several soldiers from the unit swore to investigators that Steele had instructed them to kill all military-age males on the island—a claim Steele denied. The investigation ultimately concluded that Steele had led his soldiers to believe that distinguishing combatants from noncombatants—a main tenet of the military’s rules of engagement—wasn’t necessary during the mission.
Chiarelli gave him a written reprimand, effectively ending his chances for promotion. On the day Steele arrived at Al Faw Palace for his punishment, several of Chiarelli’s staff were so worried about what the volatile colonel might do that they insisted his aide, Major Gventer, stand outside his office with a round chambered in his sidearm. But there was no blowup. After receiving the news, Steele sat down on the palace’s marble staircase, his head in his hands.

Chiarelli was certain he had made the right call, but his insistence on a thorough investigation of the Haditha incident and on disciplining Steele, a well-known officer, had led some in the military to question if he was being too hard on troops caught in a tough, unpredictable war.

Even one of Chiarelli’s proudest achievements in 2006 had led to pointed criticism. He was convinced that the killing and wounding of Iraqis at the hundreds of checkpoints around Iraq was creating new insurgents. “If this sort of thing was happening in Texas, it wouldn’t have been too long before the population was armed and taking action,” he said. He wanted every casualty that occurred at a checkpoint to be reported to his headquarters and investigated. He ordered new equipment, including sirens, bullhorns, and green lasers, to help soldiers get drivers’ attention without firing warning shots. The number of civilians killed by U.S. convoys or at checkpoints fell to about five a month from a high of twenty-five. Chiarelli received dozens of cards and letters from the States, accusing him of being more worried about Iraqis than about his own men. A soldier griped in the
Washington Times
that because of Chiarelli’s meddling the “military had gone severely soft.” He hadn’t changed the rules, but as with Petraeus and his counterinsurgency doctrine, Chiarelli was challenging something more fundamental: the notion that had taken root in the 1990s that protecting soldiers’ lives was more important than safeguarding civilians on the battlefield. No one would criticize him to his face, but he confided to friends that he feared he was getting a reputation as “the general who doesn’t want to kill anybody.” It was the sort of accusation that could end a promising career.

The graying men around the conference table carried themselves with assurance and the easy affability that comes with age and accomplishment. They were the members of the Iraq Study Group, a panel of experts and former officials appointed by Congress. For most the fact-finding tour was their first trip to Iraq, and the men had shed their gray suits for khaki pants and blazers—the war zone uniform of visiting dignitaries. They were creatures of Washington, and Chiarelli recognized most of the faces. There was James Baker, the secretary of state for Bush’s father, and William Perry, who had been secretary of defense under Clinton. A few chairs away was Robert Gates, the former CIA director (who two months later would replace Rumsfeld at the Pentagon), and Ed Meese, Reagan’s attorney general. Chiarelli had briefly met Meese years earlier when he was teaching at West Point and acting with Beth as a faculty sponsor for Meese’s son, Mike, who had been a plebe in 1978 and was now a colonel in charge of the Sosh department.

In some ways, Chiarelli felt that he was back at Sosh, a young professor wondering if he belonged. “Teaching at West Point, you had days when it worked and days when it didn’t,” he recalled. “That day it worked.” He didn’t use PowerPoint charts or read from notes. He could do this one cold.

He started with a recitation of the same points he’d been making for more than two years. Killing the enemy and training the Iraqi army and police weren’t enough. To win, the U.S. government had to reorient the effort to deliver electricity, jobs, clean water, and health care. It needed to push advisory teams into the ministries to teach the Iraqis how to run a government. Chiarelli had given more than forty members of his own staff to help the ministries, but it was nowhere near enough.

Nine months earlier his critique would have focused just on his own country’s shortcomings. Now Chiarelli realized the Iraqi government bore a lot of the blame for the chaos. Maliki was a Shiite pawn. The Ministry of Health was run by Sadr’s operatives, and they were using access to health care as a weapon in the war against Sunnis, who worried they’d be killed if
they went to the hospital. The United States had to use its leverage over Maliki to get him and his government to act in a less sectarian manner.

After the meeting, Perry, the former defense secretary, took Chiarelli aside and asked him if he needed more troops. “Could I use a few more brigades? Sure,” he replied. “You can send all the force you want here, but if you don’t get some sort of reconciliation started, it will still be a mess.” Perry walked out of the conference room with Gates. Neither had met Chiarelli previously and both had been deeply impressed. That guy, they agreed, might end up as chairman of the Joint Chiefs someday.

The Iraq Study Group was a sign that things were changing in Washington, often to the surprise of the generals in Baghdad. With the U.S. congressional elections a few weeks away and the war going badly, President Bush’s Republican allies were in danger of losing their slim majority in the Senate. After leaving Casey largely on his own for the previous two years, the White House had begun a far-reaching reexamination of the military strategy, an effort led by White House national security advisor Stephen Hadley. At the Pentagon, General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had assembled a group of officers, including Colonel H. R. McMaster, to study options. The retired general Jack Keane, one of Petraeus’s mentors, had teamed up with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, on a plan to flood Baghdad with troops. His work had caught the attention of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. None of the reviews had yet reached Casey or Chiarelli. They had their hands full with other matters.