A travelog of Wolfowitz's trip.
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IRAQ
Ramadan Offensive
By James Kitfield, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Oct. 31, 2003
BAGHDAD -- Everyone seemed drawn to the windows. Dawn was breaking over Baghdad on October 26; the soft light of early morning was muting the city's many shades of brown into one primary mud-colored hue. Against that opaque backdrop, a car caught the eye of U.S. observers stationed on a rooftop: It was pulling what looked like a portable generator down a largely deserted road outside the barricaded Coalition Provisional Authority complex. As a precaution, an Iraqi paramilitary patrol was dispatched. For some reason, the trailer was freshly painted a bright, incongruous blue.
Are the latest attacks in Iraq the last gasp of a flash-in-the-pan guerrilla movement, or a sign of more urban warfare in the years ahead? A report on deputy Defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz's recent trip to Iraq.
On the upper floors of the Al Rashid Hotel, some 900 yards away, the entourage accompanying Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was crawling out of bed to the accompaniment of 6 a.m. wake-up calls. The night before, the bar of the Al Rashid had been filled with adventurous men and women -- soldiers, contractors, ex-military types, nurses, mercenaries, reporters -- all with stories to tell and no one to tell them to but each other. Not everyone was happy, then, to see dawn. However, when a sizzle-pop sounding like a giant Roman candle was heard outside, nearly everyone was drawn to the windows, including Wolfowitz himself. In that instant before the thunderclap, those who saw the mesmerizing contrails of the approaching rockets knew they were in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time, and that their lives were about to change.
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The fusillade of 68 mm and 85 mm Katyusha rockets caught the Al Rashid broadside in a rapid succession of sledgehammer blows that sheared off massive chunks of concrete. The rockets burst into hotel rooms and blew locked doors into hallways. For a few endless moments after the attack, the entire hotel was quiet, as if it was holding its collective breath. Then the Al Rashid exhaled pure pandemonium.
Acrid smoke and ankle-deep water filled the hallway of the 11th floor, which had absorbed some of the worst damage. Half-dressed men carrying guns spilled into the hallway, screams and shouts of "Fire!" echoed off the walls, and the order was given to evacuate. The emergency-exit stairway was covered in glass from shattered partitions, and the wounded were being carried in sheets used as makeshift stretchers. Despite the thick smoke, the way down was clearly marked on each step and landing by the footprints of boots stepping through thickly pooled blood.
History Repeated
"They do this every time. Every time we do something positive, the bad guys try to reverse the psychology with their own negative act," said Brig. Gen. Martin Dempsey, commander of the Army's 1st Armored Division in Baghdad as he briefed Wolfowitz on the afternoon of October 26. The positives in this case were the relaxation of curfews in advance of the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and the reopening the day before of the 14th of July Bridge to ease traffic congestion in downtown Baghdad. The bridge's reopening created a traffic thoroughfare right through the middle of the "green zone" of barricades and checkpoints that buffer the Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters complex downtown. The makeshift rocket launcher in the blue trailer had been parked on a side street just off 14th of July Street. "I don't think this fight will be won when the enemy raises a white flag," Dempsey said. "It'll be won when we can do more positive things than he can do negative."
First Armored Division commanders largely discounted the possibility that the rocket attack was targeted at Wolfowitz. They described the improvised nature of the rocket launcher -- which Dempsey called a "Rube Goldberg device" -- as a sure sign of the enemy's relative weakness and lack of sophistication. The commanders and other officials see the attack itself as a sign of desperation from an enemy that realizes each day that U.S. authorities are making progress in improving security in Baghdad. The enemy's increased difficulty in finding recruits, the commanders said, is reflected in the skyrocketing price for a contract hit on American forces. It has spiraled from $300 shortly after Baghdad fell to roughly $5,000 today. "Though the Al Rashid attack was certainly sensational, and will no doubt create an uproar, tactically the damage it inflicted was pretty insignificant," said one 1st A.D. commander.
In fact, the strategic nature of the Ramadan offensive would become clear only the next morning. Between 8:30 and 10:15 a.m. on October 27, a coordinated wave of four suicide bombings would kill 40 people, wound 224, and plunge Baghdad into chaos (a fifth attempt failed). The chosen targets -- four Iraqi police stations and the offices of the International Red Cross -- were picked to counter a new U.S. strategy of greatly accelerating the handoff of security responsibilities to Iraqi authorities, and of eliciting greater international assistance in Iraq's rebuilding. The message from the guerrillas was clear -- siding with the United States in this war could kill you. Anyone who failed to receive that message was left with the example of Faris Abdul Razzaq Assam, one of Baghdad's three deputy mayors, who was assassinated on the same day as the Al Rashid attack by two executioners who shot him at point-blank range at an outdoor cafe. His slaying was just the latest in a string of assassinations of Iraqi officials who have dared to cooperate with U.S. authorities.
The United States has not faced a moment such as this since January 31, 1968, when the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched an early-morning offensive in South Vietnam to coincide with the Tet Lunar New Year holidays. Then as now, the U.S. military plausibly argued that the offensive was a last, desperate act of a foe that was losing virtually every battle on the ground. Then as now, the U.S. was developing a strategy for more rapidly handing over security responsibilities to local authorities, in that case through "Vietnamization." Then as now, an enemy hopelessly outgunned in every conventional sense tried to change the terms of the debate with an unconventional war of attrition aimed directly at the will of the American people.
The U.S. military never forgave the press for what it perceived as the media's unwitting complicity in that strategy, or for missing the back-story of how the Tet offensive was a military setback from which the Viet Cong never fully recovered. For its part, the media blamed U.S. political leaders for never adequately fortifying the will of the American public against the challenges of Vietnam, or ever giving an honest accounting of the likely sacrifices in national treasure and blood that surmounting them entailed. Lyndon Johnson famously refused a large-scale call-up of the Reserves during Vietnam. Nor did he suspend expensive Great Society programs in order to pay for the war.
In late October, when the Office of the Secretary of Defense phoned a handful of journalists and asked whether they would be interested in accompanying Wolfowitz on a hastily arranged trip to Iraq, it was very much with the idea of reporting the back-story of the Iraq reconstruction campaign. Once again, a U.S. administration was publicly complaining that the media were accentuating the negative and missing the bigger story of progress. As before, a skeptical press was questioning whether a U.S. administration was giving a full and accurate accounting of the mammoth hurdles involved in a project of nation building during an ongoing guerrilla war. Like LBJ, President Bush has refused to fund the war by delaying cherished domestic initiatives (in this case, expensive tax cuts). And like LBJ, he has so far refused to increase the size of a stretched-thin military in order to fight it.
In some ways, the Wolfowitz trip was an opportunity for both sides -- the Pentagon and the media -- to avoid a repeat of 1968. Doing so, however, would require finding a common narrative to describe a journey to Iraq on the eve of Ramadan 2003. And that task, it turns out, was hard to do.
Hard Lessons
From the moment Paul Wolfowitz disembarked from a C-17 transport onto the tarmac of Baghdad International Airport on the early morning of October 24, his entourage was accorded unusual deference. Probably no Western functionary has so captured the imagination of Arabs since British intelligence officer T.E. Lawrence joined the forces under Faisal al Hussein in 1916 and became "Lawrence of Arabia." In the minds of many Iraqi sheiks and governing officials, and the international press, Wolfowitz is the man most readily associated with the United States' drive to oust the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein and set Iraq on the largely uncharted path to democracy.
Indeed, the arc of Wolfowitz's advocacy for that proposition has remained one of the few true constants in U.S. policy-making circles during the tumultuous period between the two Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003. With the campaign to remake Iraq at roughly the six-month mark, its intellectual architect thus wanted to take the measure of a grand endeavor that the Bush administration acknowledges will likely shape a generation of Americans. Although the mold of this new American epoch may take years to fully form, the tumultuous forces unleashed in its forging would become abundantly evident in the coming days.
"I am pleased to be here, again, in free Iraq," Wolfowitz told waiting TV cameras and reporters on the Baghdad tarmac. "I am in Iraq to thank our brave troops and their international partners who are fighting alongside courageous Iraqis -- Iraqis who, in increasing numbers, are putting their lives on the line to defend their country and to build a free, prosperous future of Iraqi self-rule. They are taking the fight to the enemy, whose goal is to destroy substantial progress being made here, and take Iraq back to the prison of tyranny from which they've finally been liberated."
For someone driving through Baghdad for the first time since just after major combat ended, the signs of change were striking. The dirty sidewalks and market stalls, the small shops hawking everything from satellite dishes to chickens, all were jammed with crowds and rang with the full-throated shouts of commerce. Long lines of beat-up cars snaked toward gas stations; roadside peddlers, their arms shiny with petrol up to their elbows, ladled black-market gasoline from open barrels into small plastic containers. The exuberance of liberation has now passed, and gone, too, are the constant waves and shouts of support for U.S. troops. So, too, have passed the blast-furnace months of summer, and the worst of the electricity blackouts.
In the interim, Iraqis have learned that the same United States that put a man on the moon is incapable of instantly transforming an electric grid and oil infrastructure fallen into decrepitude from decades of mismanagement and from years of international sanctions. Yet the signs of improvement in the Iraqi capital are nevertheless unmistakable. Electrical power output has now returned to prewar levels and is still climbing, a process greatly facilitated by the decision to turn the project into a high-profile military campaign involving the Army Corps of Engineers.
Nearly all of Baghdad's hospitals and schools have reopened, and U.S. commanders in Iraq have launched numerous drives to outfit local schools with supplies donated from hometown U.S.A. Through a burgeoning system of neighborhood, district, and city councils, the Iraqis are also learning the early cadences of democratic discourse. This lesson includes regular exercises of a citizen's right to vociferously criticize U.S. and Iraqi authorities through a raucous free press and frequent street demonstrations. "In a recent election for a local council, I personally witnessed the loser coming out and officially congratulating the winner," said a member of the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council who asked that his name not be used. "This has never happened before in Iraq! I thought I was dreaming!"
The intervening months since the war have proven instructive for U.S. officials as well. Mostly what they've learned is that the United States alone will bear the overwhelming and unexpectedly onerous burden of Iraq's reconstruction. Just in recent weeks, for instance, a much-needed deployment of Turkish troops to Iraq has been shelved because of objections by the interim Iraqi Governing Council, and an international donors' conference in Madrid produced only a fraction of the anticipated costs of Iraq's reconstruction over the next five years. Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers are still reeling over the Bush administration's request to spend $87 billion on Iraq and Afghanistan in fiscal 2004.
A chief message delivered by Wolfowitz to the Iraqis -- repeated at virtually every stop in the three-day whirlwind of meetings throughout the country -- thus indicated a distinct shift in U.S. strategy. Rather than focus on "internationalizing" the reconstruction effort and counting on further pledges of international troops and donations, the Wolfowitz delegation stressed to U.S. and Iraqi officials alike that they must greatly accelerate the transfer of responsibilities to nascent Iraqi police, security, and governing entities. The Pentagon will help with additional resources where possible, but the subtext was unmistakable: There was a finite window of American forbearance under present circumstances, and this window is closing.
"In some ways, the most important subject we want to hear about, principally but not exclusively from the Iraqis, is how we can accelerate Iraqi assumption of responsibility for their own affairs, for their security, for their economy, and for their governance," said a senior Pentagon official. "That is really the key to success, and there has been a lot of progress made already."
At the headquarters for the Coalition Provisional Authority -- a sprawling palace complex in central Baghdad incongruously crowned with Rushmore-like busts of Saddam -- a senior U.S. military officer briefed the delegation on what U.S. military commanders have learned about an enemy that has evolved in the months since the end of major combat. Having taken the measure of the hard tip of the American spear, the enemy was increasingly focusing his attacks on what is perceived as the soft underbelly of U.S. resolve and political will.
"Whereas 90 days ago we primarily thought the bad guys were a bunch of disorganized numb-nuts, we're starting to see more signs of centralized command-and-control and some type of organization directing these attacks," said a senior U.S. officer during a briefing on October 24, noting that the average daily number of attacks against U.S. soldiers had doubled since the summer. Increasingly, the enemy was employing "hard-core guerrilla tactics," he said, using remotely detonated explosive devices, hit-and-run mortar attacks, and carefully planned ambushes. "We don't have adequate intelligence to diagram out who or which organizations are involved, nor do we have evidence that Saddam is behind it. I will blanket tell you, there is a lot we don't know about who we are fighting, or how the percentages break down between Saddam loyalists, foreign fighters, and mercenaries. But we do see enough linkages and threads of communications to suggest a central brain or nervous system behind many of these attacks. We just can't tie it all together to the source yet."
END OF PART ONE |
