The Fourth Star Page 14
These were the sorts of issues that Abizaid wanted to raise with Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials during the video teleconference. The March 26 briefing began with the weather—a sandstorm blanketing much of the region had slowed the push north—and a discussion of that day’s fighting. With the ground troops stalled, Air Force jets were doing most of the fighting that day, pounding Republican Guard units on the outskirts of Baghdad. After fifteen minutes, Rumsfeld departed, signing off with a wave. “We are glad you are so focused,” he breezily announced to Abizaid, and turned the discussion over to his close aide Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy, who suggested they talk about the postwar period.
As the discussion meandered along, Abizaid became more and more irritated. He had been warning for months that stabilizing the country after an invasion was going to be perilously hard. “The response I got was that you don’t know what you are talking about,” he recalled. Now, with the fall of Baghdad only days away, they were stuck debating about minor issues. Abizaid punched the white button on his console and a red border formed around his screen image in the Pentagon, Qatar, and Kuwait, indicating that he had the microphone. He suggested that the group spend a few minutes talking about how to handle members of Saddam’s government.
“Senior-level Baathists with money will flee the country. They will become a problem for Interpol,” he predicted. “Senior Baathists without money will be killed or will turn themselves in to us and try to trade information for clemency. Then there are the middle and lower tiers that run the country. We want them to come back to their jobs and work with us.” It was these party members, the roughly 30,000 to 50,000 bureaucrats, teachers, police officers, and engineers, who did the day-to-day business of the government. Many had joined the Baath Party because Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had offered no alternative. Even if their loyalties were suspect, they needed to be kept in their jobs to prevent a total breakdown in authority, he argued.
From Washington, Feith cut Abizaid off. “The policy of the United States government is de-Baathification,” he said. As he spoke, Feith drew out the syllables in a way that seemed intended to shut off further discussion. Abizaid had grown to despise the word, which he thought echoed de-Nazification and only served to feed a fantasy that had taken hold at the highest levels of the Pentagon that the Iraq war was going to proceed like the liberation of France and Germany at the end of World War II. Occupying a Muslim country with its almost impenetrable tribal and ethnic politics and whose minority groups had a long history of killing each other was nothing like running Germany after World War II.
Abizaid pressed the white button, claiming the microphone. “You shouldn’t even use the term de-Baathification,” he told Feith. His voice had grown clipped and angry. “This is not Nazi Germany and what’s needed is not de-Nazification. You have to hold this place together and if you don’t keep the government together in some form, it won’t hold.”
Feith fired back, emphasizing that the decision came from the civilian officials who gave the military its orders. “Let me repeat to you what the policy of the U.S. government is: de-Baathification.”
Outside Najaf, Iraq
March 26, 2003
Major General David Petraeus couldn’t afford to think about what was going to happen after Saddam fell. For the first time in his thirty-year career he was leading troops in combat. After crossing the Kuwait border and moving north hundreds of miles in only a few days, the leading edge of Petraeus’s 101st Airborne Division was hunkered down outside Najaf, a city of more than 500,000 people about 160 miles south of Baghdad. Because of the whipping sandstorm, mud and sand coated Petraeus’s face and reddened his blue eyes as he considered the division’s next move. His orders called for stopping the Fedayeen fighters in white pickups who were mounting suicidal assaults on U.S. tanks and supply trucks. Intelligence reports estimated that there could be more than 1,000 fighters inside Najaf. Petraeus told Colonel Ben Hodges, whose brigade was awaiting orders to attack, that there was no reason to rush headlong into a potential ambush. “We’re in a long war here. I want to keep our guys from getting killed in large numbers,” he said.
Tanks might be able to charge into a city, but a light infantry unit like the 101st was far more vulnerable. At the moment Petraeus’s division was strung out all the way to the Kuwaiti border. Supplies were running short. His helicopters were grounded. All were reasons to postpone the assault into Najaf until his division had time to consolidate its position. He told Hodges to dig in and defend the highway that skirted Najaf, which the Army needed to move supplies north. It was Petraeus’s first combat experience, but he wasn’t going to charge into the city when his orders were to move north fast.
It had been more than a decade since Petraeus had been shot in the chest in the Fort Campbell training accident. In 1999, he had broken his pelvis while skydiving during his free time near Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Although the painful accident required months of therapy, he liked to tell colleagues that it made him faster. He had his scores on the Army’s physical fitness test to prove it. The fifty-year-old general, at five foot nine and 150 pounds, was still in better shape than the vast majority of his much younger soldiers. Few could match his toughness or his drive.
Still, he had his doubters. The long stretches Petraeus had spent at the elbow of senior generals had caused him to miss all of the nation’s previous wars, big and small, over his thirty-year career—Grenada, Panama, the Gulf War, and Afghanistan. Some of his subordinates thought his lack of combat experience had made him too cautious. They wanted to charge into Najaf.
Brigadier General Benjamin Freakley, one of his two assistant division commanders, held an impromptu meeting in the command post with two other senior officers: Brigadier General E. J. Sinclair and Colonel Thomas Schoenbeck. Freakley, a Gulf War veteran, dominated the gathering, leaning in close as he spoke. The best way to protect the highway was to attack into the city, he maintained. If Fedayeen troops were fighting for their lives, they wouldn’t be able to attack convoys. The other U.S. units involved in the invasion were already driving toward Baghdad. If the 101st didn’t move fast, it would get left behind, he worried. The officers agreed to present a united front. Of the three, Colonel Schoenbeck, an easygoing officer who years before had played wide receiver for the University of Florida, was closest to Petraeus. “Tom, you need to convince the boss it is going to be okay,” Freakley told him. “First Brigade can take this fight by itself.” Schoenbeck promised to deliver the message.
In the days that followed, two brigades from the 101st edged toward Najaf. When the enemy fighters showed themselves in the city, the Americans hit them with rockets, artillery, and machine guns. It wasn’t the headlong rush that Freakley wanted but a slow, deliberate attack. “We were all trying to understand, ‘Who is it that’s fighting?’” Petraeus recalled. Were the forces in the city Fedayeen, foreign fighters, Republican Guard or a mix of all three? Would they fight block by block or fall back? After a few days Petraeus and Hodges began getting reports that Iraqi defenses in Najaf were disintegrating. Instead of a thousand fighters, Iraqi sources were saying there were at best a few hundred left. Hodges ordered seven of his tanks to race a mile into the city and then dash back. The resistance had vanished. The siege that Petraeus had worried might take weeks had ended in a few days.
“The good news is that we now own Najaf,” he told Hodges later that day. “And the bad news is that we now own Najaf.” He asked for planes full of food and water for the locals, but the disorganized humanitarian relief effort in Kuwait couldn’t produce them. Most of the 101st, meanwhile, pushed north toward Baghdad behind other Army and Marine units.
On April 11, the last of the resistance collapsed, setting off days of looting throughout the country. Abizaid, back in Qatar, began receiving reports that Kurdish fighters who had fought with the United States during the invasion were streaming into the northern city of Mosul. A few days later, a contingent of ninety Mar
ines at the Mosul city hall opened fire on a crowd protesting the lack of electricity. The outnumbered Marines retreated to the airport on the edge of the city of 2 million residents and hunkered down. “You’ve got to get a force in here and give them some tanks,” the Marine commander told Abizaid. “They’ve got to see we’re serious about this.”
Abzaid knew from his time in northern Iraq in 1991 that the pent-up hostility between Arabs and Kurds could turn explosive. He needed to lock down the city before things got worse. The best bet was the 101st Airborne Division, which had taken up a position in southern Baghdad. On April 18, Petraeus got orders to move his 20,000 soldiers to Mosul as quickly as possible. His division had performed respectably but had been only a secondary player in the invasion. Mosul was going to be different.
Mosul, Iraq
April 2003
The Black Hawk helicopter made a couple of lazy circles around the walled city. From the air Petraeus could see that, except for a few checkpoints manned by ragged fighters, the streets were empty. Plumes of oily smoke from blazing ammunition dumps spiraled skyward. He ordered his pilot to land at the airport and went into the main terminal building. A layer of chalky dust coated the floors and the smell of urine hung in the air. Soldiers and Marines were trying to grab a few hours of sleep on one of the baggage carousels.
Petraeus took a seat in a passenger lounge where a couple of lieutenant colonels gave him an update. There was skirmishing in Arab neighborhoods on the city’s west side. The city jail had been looted and all of the police cars had been stolen or destroyed. Electricity had been out for two weeks, the hospitals were all closed, and government workers and the police were afraid to return to their jobs.
Over the next few days, about 5,000 soldiers, an advance guard from the 101st, poured into Mosul in a massive show of force. Dozens of Apache attack helicopters buzzed overhead. “We had, in a real sense, almost a degree of omnipotence, and you had to exploit that,” Petraeus recalled. He set up a temporary command post in the airport terminal and began to scratch out the closest thing that anyone had to a postwar plan. He didn’t know anything about Mosul. The division didn’t even have maps of the area. He was working mostly on instincts honed during his years in Haiti and a tour in Bosnia. At a minimum he decided that he needed money to pay civil service workers, buy police uniforms, and repair medical clinics, the radio station, the city jail, the bank, and the court system. He also wanted to hold elections quickly to choose a new Iraqi government for the north. Whoever was selected could at least help him figure out the basics: how to fix the power, the water, and the telephones.
He wasn’t waiting for instructions or permission—or, at this early stage, help. Before the invasion, he and his fellow division commanders had been promised that the Pentagon-funded Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) would handle rebuilding the country. “Just get us to Baghdad and we’ll take care of it,” the head of the organization promised. In reality, ORHA was a joke. Its office in northern Iraq consisted of six civilians, one satellite phone that was incapable of receiving calls, and a Hotmail account that no one checked. Less than a week after arriving Petraeus stood in a former Baath Party reception hall, in front of a gaggle of tribal sheikhs in gold-fringed robes, ethnic Kurds in baggy pants, former generals, and businessmen in shiny suits. Behind them were the smaller tribes and ethnic groups—Turkmen and wispy-bearded Yezidis and Shabaks from outside the city. Petraeus had organized a meeting of about two dozen Iraqis to hammer out an agreement on holding elections.
His team, which consisted of the division lawyer and a lieutenant who had worked for him in Bosnia, had trouble keeping track of the constantly expanding cast of characters. The roster from the April 30 meeting listed some of the members simply as “Iraqi expatriate from Jabouri tribe,” “Unidentified engineer,” “Yusef judge?” and “General D?” There had been lots of fighting about who would get chairs at the main table and who would sit in the lesser seats along the wall. The bickering, which the Iraqis resolved among themselves, proved to be an unexpected blessing. It was the only way Petraeus had to figure out who was really important.
No one was quite sure how to run the gatherings, so Petraeus presided as if he were leading a staff meeting at Fort Campbell. His lieutenant passed out an agenda. The first item was always “old business.” The night before the meeting there had been a hail of celebratory fire commemorating Saddam Hussein’s birthday. Some of the demonstrators shot at U.S. troops, who returned fire, killing three Iraqis. Petraeus said he hoped the killings would send “a clear message” to those who were trying to disrupt their efforts to build a new Mosul. He then laid out what the group had agreed to during a marathon session a day earlier: a caucus of 213 delegates representing the region’s tribes, ethnic groups, and political parties would select a provincial council and a governor, with each group allotted representatives based on their approximate population.
Almost immediately the arguments began. The Kurds and Arab tribes both insisted that they hadn’t been given enough delegates. One participant argued that the entire process was invalid. Before the 101st arrived, 4,000 prominent locals in Mosul had held their own election and picked fifty delegates who deserved seats in any new government. “We voted in this very building,” he shouted, and threatened to leave. Others maintained that Petraeus was allowing too many former Baath Party members who had supported Saddam Hussein to dominate the negotiations. “Any election held at this time will only benefit the old regime,” a Kurdish leader insisted.
In earlier meetings Petraeus had tried to calm arguments with lectures on the democratic process. “The beauty of this system is that everyone is entitled to their own opinion,” he told them. Now he was sick of the interminable debates and recriminations. If the Iraqis believed that they could roll over him and renegotiate every decision, they would never get anywhere. “Stop!” he yelled. “We are not going to begin each morning by renegotiating what we agreed to the night before. This will not happen, and if it does I will leave this room right now and we will cease this entire process.” He gathered up his papers as if preparing to storm out. Iraqis rushed over to him, promising not to revisit the previous day’s disputes. The proceedings still lasted six hours.
“An incredibly fascinating day,” Colonel Richard Hatch, the division lawyer, wrote that evening in the journal he kept on his laptop. He’d wedged his cot in the airport bathroom, which reeked of urine but was at least quiet. Petraeus was relying on Hatch’s legal training to help broker agreements between the feuding tribes. It was heady stuff for Hatch, who in his role as a military attorney was accustomed to playing second fiddle to swaggering combat officers. Still, he wondered if Petraeus’s energy and determination would be enough to keep the power-sharing deals from exploding on them. “The irony of us dictating to a group what they will do to achieve a democratic government was not lost on me,” he wrote.
The negotiations over the elections continued for nearly a week. Removed from the debates in Baghdad and Washington over which Baath Party members should be barred from the new government, Petraeus set his own policy. “Frankly, I would like to see discussion here of individuals rather than whole levels being excluded or included,” he told the Kurds who wanted to ban all Baathists. “If we draw the line too low, there will be nothing left in government.” More sheikhs trickled in and new arguments erupted. “Since nobody emerged completely happy we probably got it pretty close to fair,” Colonel Hatch wrote in his journal on May 3.
Two days later the delegates gathered in the former Baath Party reception hall to elect a new government. A schedule guided the proceedings down to the minute, mystifying the more laissez-faire Iraqis. At 9:59 a.m. Petraeus stood on a plywood stage at the front of the reception hall. “By being here today you are participating in the birth of the democratic process in Iraq,” he told the group. “This is a historic occasion and an important step forward for Mosul and Iraq.” A Saddam-era judge who was there to certify the resul
ts read a script explaining the caucus procedures. He was followed by a bearded imam who offered a blessing. Then Petraeus took the microphone.
“At this time would the Shabaks please move to their delegation room,” he announced, his voice echoing over the sound system. “At this time would the Yezidis please move to their delegation room… At this time would the Turkmen please move to their delegation room; Turkmen only.”
After caucusing, delegates dropped their ballots in plywood boxes built by Petraeus’s engineers. The new council had been selected by noon. By 3:00 p.m. there was a governor: Ghanim al-Basso, a retired major general, who stood next to Petraeus on the wooden stage behind the ballot boxes, an Iraqi flag, and a spray of purple plastic flowers. He was a thin man with sagging eyes, rosy cheeks, and a gray mustache. During the Iran-Iraq War, Basso had been celebrated for his battlefield heroism, but he had fallen out of favor with the regime in 1993 after his brother was accused of backing a failed coup. His brother was killed, and Basso was forced into retirement. Now back in power, the new governor raised his hands over his head and in a short speech promised to be a “soldier for all of Mosul.” Some delegates feared that Basso had remained a Baathist even after he left the military and had continued to profit from his ties to Saddam. He was an unacceptable candidate who would have to be replaced, they vowed. But for now at least the choice stood.
Petraeus spoke last and garnered the loudest applause. “Having walked the streets of this city, the second largest in Iraq, and having gotten to know the friendly nature of its citizens, I am beginning to feel like a Moslawi,” he proclaimed. Some in the audience were no doubt grateful to him for pulling off the first free elections in their city in decades, maybe ever. Others realized that despite the day’s events this American officer was in charge and would be for several more months, maybe years. He had money, attack helicopters, and big guns. They didn’t want to get on his bad side.