The Fourth Star Page 19
“Do these people even want us here?” a frazzled Bush asked Abizaid in a mid-April videoconference. “Can you find anybody to thank us for giving them democracy and freedom?”
“Part of the problem is that there is no strong Iraqi leadership,” Abizaid replied. Iraqi soldiers and police officers weren’t going to fight for American commanders, he insisted. They needed to establish a legitimate government as quickly as possible.
Chiarelli didn’t have as much experience with the Middle East as Abizaid did, but he grasped what was happening. The most important battle was not over who would control the streets; it was over who would win the allegiance of the people living there. And as lopsided in the Americans’ favor as the street skirmishes were, Chiarelli feared he was losing the bigger battle.
In mid-April, he went one evening with Colonel Kendall Cox, his chief engineer, to the walled compound in the Green Zone that served as Bechtel’s headquarters in Iraq. Chiarelli had wanted to meet with Bechtel since learning from Spike Stephenson that the San Francisco-based engineering firm controlled nearly $2 billion in USAID reconstruction projects. He was ushered into the company’s dining facility, an air-conditioned double-wide trailer. A white bedsheet had been thrown over a large table at the rear of the trailer and set with real silverware and china in his honor. Around the table were places for Chiarelli and Cox, a handful of Bechtel executives, and Stephenson. After dinner, Cliff Mumm, a grizzled Bechtel engineer who had spent decades in the field, laid out the company’s plans for rebuilding Iraq’s main power plants, sewage-treatment facilities, and large bridges. Most of the American-run projects he was describing had stalled because Bechtel had been forced to send its workers out of the country until security conditions improved. Mumm argued for using U.S. troops to guard Bechtel’s work sites.
“Stop, just stop!” Chiarelli bellowed. “I know you are a good company and you are doing wonderful things. But none of this—nothing—is going to get built unless I get the sewage off the streets of Sadr City. If I don’t clean up the streets, I’m going to get run out of Baghdad, and you are going to be right ahead of me!” In the days leading up to the meeting, he and Cox had painstakingly compiled a list of all of Bechtel’s and the other big contractors’ projects by going from office to office at the CPA. The effort was a mess. In late 2003 the Bush administration told the CPA that it had three weeks to put together a plan to spend $18.4 billion in reconstruction money. Short on time, the CPA funneled most of the money into a small number of expensive infrastructure projects. One of Bechtel’s biggest was the overhaul of sewage-treatment plants that served Baghdad. CPA didn’t set aside any money to connect the plants or most of the other big water and power projects up to actual houses. Instead it assumed that foreign donors would come up with $2 billion to $3 billion to cover those bills. By the spring it was clear to Chiarelli that the foreign money wasn’t ever going to arrive.
Having cut off the Bechtel executive, Chiarelli hijacked the rest of the dinner with his own PowerPoint briefing. His main slide consisted of stick-figure Iraqis standing between crudely drawn houses and big squares representing sewage-treatment plants and power stations. The pipes and the power lines emanating from the plants stopped before they reached the homes.
“Rather than spending money to build a sewage-treatment plant, let’s start at the other end,” Chiarelli said. “Let’s start in the guy’s front yard and improve his life, and if that means we continue to dump raw sewage in the Tigris River, so be it. It’s been dumped in there forever; the Iraqis aren’t upset about it. What they are upset about is the sewage in their front yard.”
He suggested using the money that had been set aside for mammoth infrastructure projects to lay cheap sewage pipe, repair pumps, buy generators, and rehabilitate electrical substations. At least those kinds of projects would make life more bearable, and they could be done with local contractors, which would create jobs for Iraqis. He had already divided up his engineering brigade into five battalions that lived at each of the forward operating bases around Baghdad and could help with the smaller projects. But to really have an impact he needed more money and more engineering expertise. There was little that Bechtel, which was committed to the CPA’s list of fanciful projects, could do to help him.
A few weeks later he and Spike Stephenson from USAID got fifteen minutes with Bremer to make a similar pitch. The occupation chief wore his customary white button-down shirt with rolled-up sleeves, khakis, and combat boots. On his desk was a wooden plaque bearing the message “Success Has a Thousand Fathers.” Early in the occupation when visitors noted that he’d left off the other half of the aphorism—“But Failure Is an Orphan”—Bremer confidently replied, “Failure is not an option.” Ever since the April uprisings, failure had become a grim reality. He blamed the collapse on Rumsfeld, Abizaid, Sanchez, and the rest of the military, who he thought hadn’t committed enough troops to contain the spiraling violence. Knowing that Bremer’s time for them was short, Chiarelli and Stephenson hurriedly explained that they had devised an initial list of projects in the Sadr City neighborhood that they could accomplish for about $162 million. They planned to spend the money on small-scale projects that created jobs and were actually visible to people. These were the kind of projects that could turn the tide in the violent slum.
“I’ll give you money when you get the place secure,” Bremer curtly told him.
“Sir, I can’t get it secure until you give me some money so that I can get people to work,” Chiarelli replied. His troops were spread too thin across Baghdad to lock down the capital. In Sadr City, for example, there were about 2.5 million people packed into a slum that had been built for about 300,000. He was trying to control the place with a 600-soldier battalion. There was no way he could fight 2 million people, he said. He needed to win their allegiance or at least their tolerance with some small, visible successes.
“Do you agree with this?” Bremer asked Stephenson, who said he thought the plan was worth a try. Bremer was just weeks from leaving the country and had nothing to lose. He gave them enough money to get started on their project list.
A few days later, a dozen of Stephenson’s USAID staffers clambered onto Black Hawks at the Green Zone landing pad and flew to 1st Cav headquarters near the airport. Most had never been in a military helicopter before and fumbled with shoulder and lap belts before takeoff. It was a field trip of sorts, organized by Chiarelli to introduce them to his brigade commanders and vice versa. The two groups gathered outside under a canopy, the scruffy aid workers in cargo pants and hiking boots next to the Army officers in their tan uniforms and short haircuts. “We didn’t give a shit about the war,” recalled Kirkpatrick Day, one of the USAID staffers who attended. But conditions in Baghdad and elsewhere had gotten so bad that it had become almost impossible for Day and his fellow aid workers to leave the Green Zone and do the humanitarian work that had brought them to Baghdad.
Chiarelli stood in front of the group, welcomed them, and told the story of the April 4 battle in Sadr City and the casualties his men had suffered in the days since the fight. “He’s tearing up and his voice is cracking as he’s talking about what his men had been through and what needed to be done,” Day recalled. The son of a Navy pilot, Day had grown up in military bases around the world and had spent the previous few years doing postconflict reconstruction work in Kosovo and East Timor. He was unflappable and experienced at operating in chaotic foreign cultures in a way that the 1st Cav officers weren’t. In Baghdad, he headed the Office of Transition Initiatives, a small arm of USAID whose mission was to do quick projects. In forty-eight hours he could write a contract for millions of dollars and, working with a cell phone and a list of contacts, put more than a thousand men to work. It was just what Chiarelli had in mind. The jobs program, which began in Sadr City in mid-June, paid workers $4 or $5 a day for picking up trash, cleaning out clogged sewers, or some other project from the list that Chiarelli’s and Stephenson’s staffs had put together. Soon there
were thousands of men working across Baghdad.
Chiarelli, who was hearing from his battalion commanders that attacks were dropping steeply in areas where they were spending money, had his staff sort through daily situation reports from the field and prepare charts that proved the program was suppressing violence. When Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz came through Baghdad that summer to meet with the division commanders, Chiarelli spent an hour showing him that data, and made sure Day was on hand at his headquarters. “That young man, sir—Kirk Day—is a goddamned hero,” he told Wolfowitz as the scruffy Day slumped in his chair. Wolfowitz in turn convinced Congress to put up an additional $200 million for the jobs program. Day, however, had his doubts about what he and Chiarelli were really accomplishing. “These are not real jobs,” he reminded him. Maybe the temporary work kept some of the men from joining the insurgency, but those gains could be as fleeting as the work unless a real economy replaced the taxpayer-funded illusion they were creating.
It was an illusion—and Chiarelli, despite his enthusiasm for the program, knew it. His goal to “totally reprioritize” the U.S. effort demanded that he take on the contractors, the embassy, and the fledgling ministries. Soon he was summoning representatives from all three groups to his headquarters for weekly meetings, where he and Colonel Cox, his engineer, would harangue contractors who were falling behind schedule on big projects in the capital. When he learned that several ventures had been delayed for months because contractors were required to abide by peacetime federal contracting rules and were making Iraqi subcontractors follow Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards, he was irate. “What I’m getting is not what I require,” he bellowed at representatives of Black and Veatch, an engineering firm that was responsible for repair and cleaning of the main sewage line running south through Sadr City. “And we’re paying the price in soldiers.”
On July 23, he poured out his frustrations at a meeting in the Republican Palace with Ronald Neumann, a senior diplomat. “We are blowing our window of opportunity,” he insisted. Other than Day’s modest program, the reconstruction effort was failing. A recent bidders’ conference, where the contractors solicited bids on upcoming projects from local firms, had been a “total disaster,” Chiarelli complained. The projects had been posted in English on a U.S. government website, completely ignoring the fact that Iraqis spoke Arabic and rarely had Internet access, even if they were lucky enough to have electricity to run a personal computer, he said. Neumann, who had once served as ambassador to Algeria, replied that he’d had similar problems with Bechtel there, and he recommended calling the CEO if Chiarelli wanted quick action. But Chiarelli had something else in mind: why not cut out the big contractors entirely and route reconstruction money directly through his division? “I can go from identifying a project to breaking ground in less than a month, working with Iraqi contractors,” he declared. “It takes the big contractors six months.”
He didn’t even need Bechtel’s engineering expertise, he boasted. His men had found a group of engineers at Baghdad University who had trained in Europe, spoke decent English, and didn’t require any security to move around the capital. He’d also stumbled upon a plan for revitalizing infrastructure that the city government had drafted in the late 1970s just prior to the Iran-Iraq War. Most of the projects had never been completed. He’d only been in Iraq for five months, but Chiarelli was sure that he and his battalion commanders, who lived on small bases scattered throughout the city, knew what Iraqis wanted far better than the embassy or the contractors stuck in the Green Zone. The U.S. government, for example, liked building schools in Iraq, but Chiarelli insisted that they were a waste of money. “You know, when a guy is unemployed sitting at his house surrounded by sewage, no water and no electricity, it might make him feel good for a couple of days to walk his kid to school, but sooner or later he’s going to get tired of that,” he said.
Could he absorb $100 million? Neumann asked. “Easily,” Chiarelli replied. To do what he wanted actually required about $500 million, but $100 million was a start. In his frustration he was, in effect, proposing to unite the civilian and military efforts in Baghdad. Not only would his division fight the insurgency, it would control the reconstruction budget, an approach that had been tried in the latter years of Vietnam. General Creighton Abrams had dubbed it the “one war” strategy. The meeting ended with the diplomats promising Chiarelli they would raise the issue with Ambassador John Negroponte, who had served in Vietnam as a young foreign service officer and had taken over from Bremer a couple of weeks earlier.
On August 3 Chiarelli had perhaps his best day in Iraq. He and Kirk Day put 18,000 people to work in Sadr City building a landfill and laying PVC pipe to begin removing the ankle-deep sewage that usually collected in the sprawling neighborhood’s streets. Five months had passed since his troops fought the pitched battle with Sadr’s militia. Now the slum was quiet. A jubilant Chiarelli toured the area and talked with the laborers who filled street after street. “I have these pictures of 18,000 people at work,” he’d recall years later. “Sadr City was moving in our direction.” For at least that one day he was sure he was winning the war.
CHAPTER NINE
All Glory Is Fleeting
Al Faw Palace, Camp Victory
July 1, 2004
Okay, who’s my counterinsurgency expert?” asked General George Casey, sounding impatient. It was his first day in command and his first meeting with the staff he had inherited from General Sanchez, who had left Iraq for good that morning. A dozen Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine officers sent to Iraq from posts around the world stared at him, stumped by his question. Finally Air Force Major General Steve Sargeant spoke up. He had spent his career flying jets, an experience that was largely irrelevant to a fight against low-tech Iraqi guerrillas. “I guess that must be me, sir,” said the general, who was in charge of strategic plans at headquarters. The Air Force officer’s hesitant answer drove home to Casey how little progress the military had made during its first year in coming to grips with the kind of war it was fighting.
In the four years prior to his arrival in Iraq, Casey had held some of the most critical jobs in the U.S. military, overseeing U.S. Army forces in Kosovo in 2000 and serving on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He had managed to be well liked by Clinton administration officials and by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In many ways, Casey was the model Pentagon general: steady, apolitical, and hardworking. He didn’t make bold decisions or draw attention to himself. He was an efficient manager who knew how to make big bureaucracies run and how to anticipate problems.
He’d been only occasionally involved in the Iraq war before arriving in Baghdad. In the lead-up to the invasion, Rumsfeld’s insistence that the Iraqis would have to take charge of rebuilding their country had stifled most serious postwar reconstruction planning. From his position on the Joint Staff, Casey sensed that there was going to be a need for the U.S. military to oversee the rebuilding effort. Just three months before the invasion he assembled a small group of active and retired officers that was rushed to the Middle East to deal with electricity generation, clean water, and other expected postwar problems. The small pickup team consisted of only fifty-eight people and was better suited to a relatively peaceful mission than to the chaos in Iraq. But with Rumsfeld’s aversion to nation building, it was probably the best anyone could do.
After the 2003 invasion, Rumsfeld selected Casey to be the Army’s vice chief of staff, a job that came with a promotion to four stars. He sat through hundreds of hours of meetings focused on troop rotation schedules for Iraq, plans to start bringing soldiers home, and the hurried push to buy more armor for the thin-skinned Humvees that were being shredded by insurgents’ bombs. To Casey initially the occupation didn’t seem all that different from the 1990s peacekeeping operations. The two missions had much in common. But in the Balkans the military had pressed the Clinton administration to ensure that its aims in the war-torn countr
y were limited. Its job was to enforce a peace agreement between warring parties. In Iraq the task was far tougher. The military was essentially being asked to rebuild a society and defeat a ruthless armed resistance.
It wasn’t until he arrived in Iraq that Casey started to understand the huge challenge he faced. Casey’s headquarters at Al Faw Palace were located on the western outskirts of Baghdad. On the morning he took command, his palace office was mostly empty except for a few pictures of his wife, sons, and grandchildren. Video screens, flags, and maps covered the walls. A chandelier dangled from the elaborately carved, pastel-colored woodwork on the ceiling.
Saddam Hussein had built the palace in 1992 as a present to himself following the 1991 Gulf War. When Baghdad fell a dozen years later, the U.S. military moved into the sprawling building and its surrounding grounds. The hulking stone structure sat in the middle of a weed-choked lake. The only approach to its heavy wooden doors was a two-lane bridge. In the first year of the war the Army had remade the complex into a version of the military bases it had left behind in the United States. To house the 50,000 soldiers who lived and worked at Victory, it bought thousands of small trailers, which the Army called “containerized housing units,” and arranged them in neat rows. Troops dined on leathery steaks and Baskin-Robbins sundaes in dining halls the size of airplane hangars, each decorated with sports memorabilia shipped from back home. They could shop in large post exchanges, stocked with luxuries such as flat-screen television sets, DVD players, and the latest video games.
Inside the palace, staff officers worked in modular cubicles in marble ballrooms and former bedroom suites. Fluorescent lights were nailed to the walls to augment the glow from crystal chandeliers. Outside the palace the smell of fuel and raw sewage hung in the air. Generators droned, tank and Humvee engines roared, and helicopters thumped. The massive base violated just about every rule of counterinsurgency strategy, which preaches the importance of small groups of soldiers living among the people and providing security. But the Army didn’t know much about counterinsurgency when it built Victory Base Complex in 2003. It built what it knew.