How Bush Lost The Key Battle for Iraq
Turning point
A journalist who was embedded with the U.S. Marines in Fallujah explains how the Bush White House lost the key battle of the Iraq war.
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By David J. Morris
Sept. 16, 2004 | On Sunday, at his change-of-command ceremony, the outgoing top Marine general in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James Conway, gave tragic voice to what thousands of servicemen throughout Iraq have believed for months. He announced that the April assault on Fallujah had been an overly aggressive mistake and that the often-vacillating American approach to the town had undermined U.S. efforts to win the hearts and minds of local Iraqis.
I arrived in western Iraq shortly after the siege of the town was called off, and whenever the subject came up, young Marine officers -- men with crew cuts in the duty-honor-country mold who evince an almost pathological optimism about all things Iraq -- would look away wistfully or just shake their heads in disgust. Many of the Marines involved in the attack would have preferred to complete the assault once it started, despite the likely huge increase in civilian casualties. Those who fought on the ground have complained about the timing, intent and restrictive rules of engagement of the White House-ordered assault.
Responding to the killing and subsequent mutilation of four U.S. contractors in Fallujah on March 31, Conway had led a 5,000-man Marine force that laid siege to the restive town for over three weeks. Bad press and reports of civilian casualties by Al-Jazeera later caused the Marines to halt their advance into the heart of the city and, on the eve of a renewed offensive, the Marines unexpectedly turned over the town to a local militia force that later became known as the Fallujah Brigade.
Reflecting on the course of the White House-ordered campaign on Sunday, Conway indicated that he had had serious misgivings about the Fallujah operation from the get-go, "We felt that we probably ought to let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge," he told reporters gathered on the sprawling Marine base just east of the embattled town. "I think we certainly increased the level of animosity that existed."
The mainstream press has largely overlooked the fact that in the case of Fallujah, the White House unnecessarily injected itself into the military's tactical decision-making process in Iraq, ignored the informed opinions of ground commanders, and in effect micromanaged the battle. According to many observers, the seemingly contradictory U.S. military actions over the course of the siege were largely the result of the wishy-washy directives being issued by the Bush administration and its failure to appreciate the implications of sending in a large Marine force to seize a notoriously hostile town.
To both outside observers and former high-placed officials, including former U.S. Central Command chief Anthony Zinni and historian Robert Kaplan, it appeared as if the Bush administration had ordered the punitive campaign out of anger and then lost nerve when Arab outrage over civilian casualties rose to a fever pitch. Says Kaplan, who was embedded with the Marines during the opening stages of the battle and who later wrote about it for the Atlantic Monthly, "It's fine to send in the Marines. It's fine to have a cease-fire, but you can't do both. What this amounts to is ... foreign policy incoherence."
In his unusually candid parting remarks, Conway appeared to echo this sentiment, saying, "When you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, you really need to understand what the consequences of that are going to be and perhaps not vacillate in the middle of something like that. Once you commit, you've got to stay committed."
In his remarks Conway likely was attempting to set the record straight on Fallujah and distance himself from the unmitigated disaster that it has become for the American mission in Iraq. For the Bush camp, intent as it is upon portraying its candidate as an unflappable war leader and John Kerry as an intellectually addled flip-flopper, such charges from high-ranking members of the military would seem to call Bush's vaunted decisiveness into question.
Little of this comes as a surprise to the men and women on the ground with whom I spoke in Fallujah in April. While rigorously apolitical, most Marines, up to the rank of major, when discussing the battle, readily admitted that it was overly politicized, and many bluntly told me that they "got fucked by higher-ups." One particularly conscientious 1st sergeant, from the 1st Battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment, kept getting choked up when I asked him to recount the battle and was openly disdainful of the command authorities who had ordered his men to attack the city and then paradoxically ordered them to retreat as soon as victory seemed within reach. "There's no two ways about it: We were robbed of victory at Fallujah."
The overwhelming impression one gains from these Marines is that while they were surprised by the decision to launch a full-scale assault on the city -- the people I spoke to expressed no desire for revenge -- they considered the decision to call it off in midstream disastrous, believing that higher-ups had seriously undercut their credibility in the eyes of local Iraqis.
Lamenting this turn of events, retired Marine Gen. Zinni, in a speech not long after the siege, said, "One thing you learn in this business is, Don't say it unless you're going to do it. In this part of the world, strength matters. And if you say you are going to go in and wipe them out, you'd better do it." Another Marine, a chain-smoking lance corporal from Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, Fifth Marines, put it more bluntly: "My buddies died in vain." |
