The Fourth Star Page 17

  Abizaid’s long stretches in the Middle East allowed him to see more clearly than just about any other officer the drawbacks of a long-term occupation of Iraq. He believed that as time passed, Iraqi resentment over the occupation would grow and the effectiveness of the military would be diminished. He recognized that until warring religious and ethnic groups were willing to share power, the fighting would grind on indefinitely.

  In a tragic way, though, his deep knowledge of the Arabic world also constrained him. He commanded a massive military force but worried that if it tried to do too much, it would only make the situation worse. Instead of pushing for a strategy that recognized the central role that U.S. troops would have to play in stopping the violence, he often seemed to be casting about for a quick fix to Iraq’s problems.

  In the fall of 2003 Petraeus secured the surrender of Sultan Hashem Ahmed, Iraq’s former defense minister and number twenty-seven on the United States’ most-wanted list. “You have my word that you’ll be treated with the utmost dignity and respect … in my custody,” Petraeus wrote in a letter sent through tribal intermediaries to Hashem. A few weeks later Hashem returned to Mosul, had a final breakfast with his family, and turned himself in to Petraeus. The two men talked in an airplane hangar in Mosul, and Petraeus found that the former general’s assessment of some of northern Iraq’s key political figures matched his own.

  Abizaid knew Hashem’s reputation well. The rotund former general had been a hero of the Iran-Iraq War. Despite his high position in Saddam’s government, he was never considered part of the dictator’s inner circle. “This guy could be what we’ve been looking for,” Abizaid suggested to Sanchez. Maybe he could serve as defense minister? Hashem had blood on his hands from his days as an Iraqi general, but so did everybody in the country, Abizaid reasoned. There was an air of desperation to the inquiry. Bremer had no interest in resurrecting former generals in any capacity; nor did the Shiites and Kurds who had been tortured by Saddam’s regime. Hashem was sent to prison and four years later sentenced to death by an Iraqi court for his role in the gassing of the Kurds.

  Mosul

  November 7, 2003

  Abizaid sat across from Petraeus in his second-floor palace office with its view of the Tigris River, a ribbon of greenish blue stretching to the horizon. He’d come to get Petraeus’s thoughts on replacing his 22,000-soldier airborne division with a much smaller force of about 8,000 troops. Abizaid and Petraeus had never had a particularly warm relationship. As they shot up through the ranks ahead of their peers, they’d always been rivals more than friends. Still, Abizaid respected the work Petraeus had done in Mosul, and told him as much. No one had done a better job winning over Sunni Arabs or working around the CPA’s disastrous decision to ban former Baathists and military officers from taking part in the government. “We are in a race to win over the Iraqi people. What have you and your element done today?” was the mantra plastered on the wall of every 101st Airborne Division command post. Petraeus had created a sense of hope in the north that didn’t exist elsewhere.

  Abizaid’s worry was whether it could last. He doubted that any American could ever really penetrate the tribal, sectarian, and ethnic politics. He was right about Iraq’s overwhelming complexity. Even Petraeus didn’t fully grasp the political undercurrents that the insurgency would exploit to undo his achievements and gain a foothold in northern Iraq after the 101st departed. But Abizaid underestimated the role that aggressive commanders such as Petraeus were playing in stabilizing the fractious country, at least temporarily. Without Saddam and his henchmen around anymore, only the U.S. military had the capacity to fill the vacuum.

  The news of the planned cuts didn’t come as a surprise to Petraeus. Cutting so dramatically was high-risk, he warned Abizaid. But he said he thought it could work. His division had already trained 20,000 Iraqi police and military troops, who had held their own so far. As long as his successor had enough money to keep his massive reconstruction program going, Mosul could get by with fewer Americans, he said.

  Shortly after their meeting, attacks spiked throughout Petraeus’s sector. The 101st suffered more deaths in November and December than any other division in Iraq. Petraeus thought he knew what was causing the unrest. Part of the problem was that his reconstruction money was running out. He’d spent $34 million in both captured enemy money and whatever funds he could harass out of Baghdad. Now the cash was gone and new funds from Washington were slow in coming. At his morning battle update briefings in the marble-floored palace auditorium, he tracked the division’s spending obsessively, reviewing upward of seventy slides each day. They all sent the same message: the manic pace of the division’s first months in Mosul was ebbing.

  “Why aren’t we digging more wells?” Petraeus asked.

  “Because we’re out of money,” his briefer replied.

  “Dig,” Petraeus said. He’d take a risk and bet the money would eventually come.

  The other big stumbling block was the CPA’s de-Baathification policy, which was finally catching up with him. Earlier in the summer Bremer had permitted him to fire and then temporarily rehire teachers through final exams. After the exams Petraeus assembled a team of Iraqis to evaluate the former Baathists for permanent positions and was delighted when it gave 66 percent of them a reprieve. He sent their voluminous findings to Baghdad on two cargo helicopters, but the CPA reconciliation committee, run by Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi, never gave permission to rehire them. In late November Chalabi visited Petraeus at his stone palace in Mosul, and Petraeus pleaded with him for relief: “I am not saying that all these people should be kept, but if you are going to tell people that they’re never going to work again, you might as well throw them in jail.”

  “At least they can eat there,” a less-than-sympathetic Chalabi replied.

  A few weeks later, a colleague who worked for Pentagon deputy Paul Wolfowitz visited Petraeus in Mosul and warned him to watch his back on the de-Baathification issue. “The policy Nazis in the defense secretary’s office are keeping their eye on you,” he said.

  By boosting the number of raids and capturing several insurgent leaders, the 101st was able to drive the attack rates back down. Petraeus also worked hard to give former military officers and Baathists who had been blackballed by Baghdad a sense that they were going to have a future in the new Iraq. One way he did it was by staging periodic Baath Party renunciation ceremonies. On a drizzly winter day in December a line of about 2,200 former military officers snaked down a hill in front of the Mosul Police Academy. When he first saw the huge turnout from his helicopter, Petraeus was stunned and delighted. At best, he had expected a crowd of a couple of hundred.

  Most in the crowd had fought in Iraq’s bloody war with Iran during the 1980s. They felt as though they had served their country bravely. Now they were standing in the rain begging forgiveness for sins they didn’t believe they had committed. “I am here for my kids and nothing else,” one of the officers angrily told an American reporter. Petraeus couldn’t give the men their old jobs back. All he could offer was a piece of cake, a soda, and a little bit of hope for the future. He pressed his soldiers to treat the Iraqis with dignity, and warned them not to run out of renunciation certificates. Petraeus wasn’t naive; he knew the ceremony wasn’t going to win anybody over. Years later he’d refer to the event as a “wild scheme.” But maybe it could buy him some time with the fence-sitters before they slipped over to the side of the resistance. The penitents were searched for weapons and brought into the police academy building in groups of 100. Petraeus addressed them from a plywood riser.

  “The individuals gathered here have assembled voluntarily,” he said by way of welcoming. “Their only benefit will be the sense of personal closure that comes from disavowing links with the former regime and supporting those who are building the new Iraq.” The Iraqis solemnly, and in many cases sullenly, raised their hands and vowed to embrace the new Iraq. Then they signed a renunciation pledge, were handed a certificate, an
d were encouraged to visit the “veterans’ employment office” that had been set up by Petraeus’s artillery unit.

  Before he left Iraq, Petraeus also tried to shore up Basso’s hold on his office. The governor’s detractors had unearthed a tape of him giving a pro-Saddam speech prior to the invasion and broadcast it on Mosul television. Once again, council members began to complain that he was a Baathist and needed to go. Petraeus met with the two top Kurdish leaders, Talabani and Barzani, and received commitments from them that they would support the governor. He thought Basso was fine.

  Although he didn’t realize it, Petraeus was holding Mosul together with the force of his personality and his 22,000 troops. Neither was sustainable over the long term. As soon as he left, the political compromises that he had imposed on the Iraqis—in many cases for their own good—would start to unravel. The provincial council, which rarely made a decision on anything without Petraeus pushing, forced Basso to resign less than a week after the 101st left Iraq. The reconstruction effort slowed as well. Without Petraeus’s hectoring, Mosul would get less money from CPA and Baghdad. The city was headed for problems.

  As the 101st prepared to head home, Petraeus and Sergeant Major Marvin Hill, the division’s senior enlisted soldier, spent a Sunday afternoon walking the palace grounds, which they had dubbed “Camp Freedom.” “We were looking at all the things that had changed and remembering all the division had accomplished,” recalled Hill. He’d been warned prior to going to work for Petraeus that the general was a noncommissioned officer’s nightmare—a real micromanager. But Hill liked the general’s energy and was proud of what the division had accomplished. After an hour, they walked back to Petraeus’s office in the palace and talked about their next jobs in the Army. Petraeus told Hill that he’d be an ideal candidate to take over the Sergeants Major Academy at Fort Bliss. His Iraq experience would be a huge boon there and the job would give him time to see his family.

  Petraeus had been hoping that the Army would reward his success in Mosul by promoting him to three stars and giving him command of 18th Airborne Corps, one of the top combat commands. He’d learned a few days earlier that he wasn’t going to get it, and when he told Hill his disappointment was unmistakable. Hill said the Pentagon almost certainly had other plans for him. Petraeus agreed. The decision, however, seemed to send a signal: success in Mosul was not what the Army most valued.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “We Didn’t Know”

  Camp Victory

  March 2004

  It was his first day in Iraq and Major General Pete Chiarelli was going downtown. He had arrived the night before and slept a few hours at the airport camp where the Army had its main headquarters. Now he was headed to an appointment in the Green Zone, the walled enclave in the city center where L. Paul Bremer III and his Coalition Provisional Authority were installed. It was no more than a twenty-minute drive, but the road linking the airport and the Green Zone was hazardous, so generals usually flew. As his helicopter lifted off the pad with its side doors open, he looked out on the capital. It was a teeming city of tightly packed concrete houses and neighborhood shops that stretched mile after mile into the distance. The only skyline was formed by towering mosques, a few hotels and apartment complexes, and battle-damaged ministries. Even the patches of eucalyptus and date palms were coated in a yellow-brown dust. The roads were almost deserted at that early hour. Things looked peaceful, at least to a newcomer skimming above the rooftops.

  This was Chiarelli’s new domain. He was the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, just beginning a yearlong deployment in Baghdad. His was the only division assigned to the capital and had probably the most critical mission in Iraq. The other five major military headquarters, commanded by one-star or two-star generals, were scattered throughout the country. All the commanders, including Chiarelli, reported to General Sanchez, who oversaw all military forces in Iraq. Sanchez, in turn, reported to Abizaid, who was constantly crisscrossing the region.

  Chiarelli and his 20,000-soldier division were taking over from the 1st Armored Division, which was finishing its tour and going home to its base in Germany. The formal handover wasn’t scheduled for a few weeks, and many of the soldiers under Chiarelli’s command were still arriving, driving up from Kuwait in long convoys through the desert. Reaching Baghdad, they funneled into a half-dozen forward operating bases around different sections of the city. Chiarelli would oversee them from the division headquarters, which at least for the time being was a large green tent on the north end of the airport base, known as Camp Victory.

  For decades, he had dreamed of taking command during wartime, never sure his chance would come; now it had, finally. His division, the same one that George Casey’s father had led in Vietnam, had a history that reached back into the frontier wars of the nineteenth century and reflected the constant evolution of the American way of war. Once its troopers had moved on horseback wearing Stetsons and yellow kerchiefs. In Vietnam, the division had been known as the 1st Air Cav and was equipped with hundreds of helicopters to seek out the Viet Cong on search-and-destroy missions. Later, as the Army erased the memory of that conflict, the 1st Cav converted into a heavy division, equipped with the latest tanks and precision-guided weapons. In his imagination Chiarelli had once seen himself directing its armored columns on a vast open plain, the Army’s vision of modern warfare. His year in Iraq was going to look nothing like that. This was occupation duty in a crowded city of 8 million people, with car bomb attacks, rampant crime, and only a few hours of power a day.

  When Chiarelli pressed the Army staff in the Pentagon to let him bring his division’s full complement of hundreds of Abrams tanks and personnel carriers, he was told the heavy armor was unnecessary for his mission. His troops were supposed to be manning checkpoints and patrolling in Humvees. Inside their tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, they wouldn’t be able to interact with civilians. One other big concern was that the tanks and Brads sent the wrong signal to the Iraqis and the rest of the Arab world. Their presence on the streets made it appear as if the liberated capital was under siege.

  “Why not let me leave the armor over there and park it if it’s not needed?” Chiarelli had asked his superiors in Baghdad and Washington. Eventually General Sanchez told him he could bring over about a third of his armored vehicles—less than he’d wanted but better than nothing.

  Before leaving Fort Hood in Texas, he had drilled into the nearly 20,000 soldiers under his command that their primary mission would be not fighting but improving daily life for ordinary Iraqis. He sent his officers to the Texas capital, Austin, to spend several days observing a big city’s sewage, trash collection, and power systems. He flew them to London for briefings on the British counterinsurgency operations in Northern Ireland, and later to Jordan for a weeklong course on Arab society and culture.

  He had turned fifty-four a few days earlier. In his middle age, he was beefy and imposing, no longer the slightly plump and easily awed officer he had once been. Along with his desert fatigues and body armor, he wore the wraparound sunglasses and high suede boots favored by tankers. In his battle garb he resembled a stiff-gaited robot warrior, as most soldiers did, but in fact he was the most compassionate of generals, always struggling to control his overflowing emotions. In his journal a few weeks earlier Chiarelli had recorded his feelings about leaving his wife, Beth, at Fort Hood. By the time he came home, Patrick, the youngest of his three children, would be in college, out of the house for good. “Day 1,” he wrote on the day he departed for Iraq. “Got out of own bed for the last time in a year at 0600, very difficult … Toughest thing I have ever done … Knowing I will never live in the house again with Pat makes me tear up … I will never forget Beth whispering in my ear through tears that she was afraid to be alone.”

  As difficult as leaving had been, Chiarelli didn’t view the coming year, as many in the military did, as something to be endured. He was fascinated by the Middle East, and there was no way he would hold himself aloo
f. “Drank camel’s milk and ate dates with a Kuwaiti in the desert today. Carpet on the desert and all, it was an experience,” he wrote in a journal entry from Kuwait, the division’s last stop before Iraq.

  Now that he was on the ground, he was plunging ahead. His first appointment after the short flight to the Green Zone that morning was in the Republican Palace, where the CPA had its headquarters, with James Stephenson, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s mission in Iraq. For weeks, Chiarelli’s aides had been sending Stephenson e-mails telling him that the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division wanted to see him as soon as he arrived. A craggy-faced veteran aid worker who went by the nickname “Spike,” Stephenson couldn’t imagine why. His job was to rebuild Iraq, or, more accurately, to keep tabs on the big U.S. engineering firms that had won USAID contracts to undertake mammoth infrastructure projects. The Army officers he had encountered defined their job as capturing or killing shadowy insurgents, and he expected that Chiarelli would be little different. When this imposing general walked into his ground-floor office in body armor and goggles, with a Kevlar helmet under his arm, Stephenson was pretty sure they didn’t have a lot to discuss.

  Chiarelli removed his gear and the two men sat in frayed chairs facing each other. “What can I do for you?” Stephenson inquired. Chiarelli launched into a ten-minute description of the problems in Baghdad and what he thought needed to be done. The way to tamp down the violence in the capital, he said, was to deliver as quickly as possible more hours of electricity, cleaner streets, running water, and, if possible, jobs. Iraqis had to see their lives getting better. “USAID is critical for what I want to do because the expertise resides with you,” he said. As the division commander, he had millions of dollars at his disposal but was limited, in most cases, to expending no more than $10,000 at a time. To do what he had in mind, he needed help from USAID, which had more money, as well as expertise in writing big contracts and planning construction projects. It wasn’t the first time a military officer had proposed to work together, but Chiarelli was the first who actually seemed to understand what USAID did. Still, Stephenson could tell Chiarelli didn’t understand how things worked in the Green Zone. The general acted like there was a big pot of money that he could tap for new sewage lines, power stations, health clinics, and other projects around the city. It wasn’t that simple. Congress had approved $18.6 billion the previous fall to help rebuild Iraq’s shattered infrastructure, and Stephenson’s portion of that was more than $2 billion. But most of that money had already been earmarked for just one company, Bechtel Corporation, which had won contracts to do a few large projects that would take years to finish. The projects were generating few jobs for average Iraqis and would do little anytime soon to change the crushing realities of life in Baghdad. Stephenson didn’t like the approach, but those decisions had been made in Washington. After Stephenson explained this, they parted, promising to talk again. But Stephenson was being polite. There were too many obstacles to the kind of joint venture Chiarelli had in mind. “I thought he had the right ideas. I just couldn’t see how I could help him,” he recalled.