'Absurdistan': Mission Impossible.
The Iraq War
September 12, 2006
Mission Impossible
By Hans Hoyng and Georg Mascolo
service.spiegel.de
After the Warsaw Pact fell apart, Americans felt safer than ever. Jolted by 9/11, US President Bush and his advisors resolved to deter any future attacks. But ousting Saddam Hussein only put Iraq on the brink of civil war and exposed the vulnerability of the world's only superpower.
The soldiers from Fort Hood, Texas, face an impossible mission. Like the other units in the 4th Infantry Division, the 1st Battalion of the 67th Armor has been ordered to keep the peace in and around Baghdad. As their commander in chief, George W. Bush, has told them, they are deployed on the "central front" in the global war against terror.
President Bush was spot on. Terror has taken over the provinces surrounding the Iraqi capital. The bombed-out mosques that the soldiers pass on patrol attest to this, as do the corpses of decapitated Iraqis, recovered by the troops in ever-increasing numbers.
But there was something that George W. Bush neglected to mention. A critical detail: their presence, far from suppressing the violence, is only making things worse. The central front where they are deployed was created by the American invasion in the first place.
Initially the president would accept nothing but "complete victory." Now the United States is considering how to withdraw as quickly as possible without losing face entirely. The Iraq war is fast becoming a debacle for the world's last remaining superpower - reminiscent of Vietnam, the trauma that haunted America for decades.
This is the third war in Iraq for the GIs from Fort Hood. The first time they came in at the tail end. In March and April 2003, the U.S. units left the staging area in Kuwait, swept northward up the Euphrates and far beyond Baghdad, their swift advance interrupted only by a sandstorm.
They spent the rest of that year and the first months of the next going out on patrol. Nothing much happened. The search for insurgents had yet to become a priority. "Dead-enders," was U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's disparaging description of the last few holdouts. In his view, the advance guard for the insurgency proper still hadn't grasped that their time was up. The troops of Fort Hood returned home in April of 2004.
The armored unit's second war began at the end of 2005. By the time they received their redeployment orders, hunting guerrillas was the main mission in Iraq. A thousand soldiers were stationed some 30 miles south of Baghdad, in what has become the notorious triangle of death.
The rebels' stronghold was a village called Jurf al-Sakhr. The Medina Division of the Republican Guards, Saddam's former elite troops, had once been headquartered nearby. The former officers, thrown out of work by the coalition-run Provisional Authority, eagerly offered the insurgents refuge and support.
The rebels were headquartered in the fertile Euphrates valley, on an island between the river and an irrigation canal. Here the insurgents had hidden thousands of grenades, the main component in the "improvised explosive devices" (IEDs) - the universally-feared booby traps. They also set up their own court, where collaborators were sentenced to death and summarily executed. The GIs were finding their mutilated bodies in the surrounding swamps with increasing regularity.
At first the troops from Texas tackled this war with a tenacity that would have made their commander proud. The aim was to maintain the upper hand, come what may.
At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld had declared: "The core question is: Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" The answer to this question boiled down to a doctrine to which the Americans clung - for much too long: kill and capture. But the hunt for terrorists caused collateral damage.
The Texans drove their tanks onto the rebels' island; they kicked down doors, discovered huge arms depots and blew up houses. But the insurgents were nowhere to be found: they had headed for the hills long ago.
As often on such missions, the inevitable happened. In their pursuit of fleeing combatants, the soldiers of the 1st Battalion made mistakes. In the most horrible case, they shot a young girl. The screaming mother charged at the troops, wild with grief, brandishing the severed leg of her daughter. The girl bled to death before the soldiers' eyes. Such incidents created new enemies for the occupation forces.
Under the relentless assault of the Americans, the terror inflicted by the largely Sunni insurgents abated slightly. At the same time, a third war began - a campaign of retaliation launched by the Shiite majority once harassed by Saddam Hussein. The battles were bloody - on bad days tantamount to civil war. The good days were few and far between. President Bush had long since lost the support of his compatriots for the war in Iraq. In Washington, a feverish search for an exit strategy was under way. The watchword: Iraqization. Responsibility for pacifying the country was to be delegated to the Baghdad government.
This shift led to more cooperation between the armored troops from Fort Hood and the Iraqis' new security forces. But the new strategy also sparked new conflicts - for obvious reasons. The poorly trained Iraqi security personnel were usually Shiites, as were most of the freshly recruited police and soldiers. They had old scores to settle. Often, on joint patrols with the Iraqi trainees, the Texans were unwittingly used by the Shiites to hunt down Sunnis.
Unlike during the Sunni-led insurgency, the country's religious majority no longer looked on in silence. The Shiites began to exact a terrible revenge. Of about 3,000 Iraqi civilians who die each month, very few fall victim to the Sunni insurgents' bombs. Many are kidnapped and killed by Shiite militias. The bodies of murdered Iraqi Sunnis turn up every day, many of them tortured and mutilated with power drills.
Early this year, black-clad fighters of the Mahdi army - the militia of the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr - suddenly descended upon the Shiite city of Musayyib, some 25 miles south of Jurf al-Sakhr. Since then, Sharia law in its harshest form has prevailed in Musayyib. Women have been splashed with battery acid for so much as showing an ankle.
Stunned, the GIs watched al-Sadr's moral storm troopers go to work. The U.S. soldiers couldn't counter this kind of violence by conducting raids. In their third war, they needed a weapon that wasn't in their arsenal - tactful diplomacy. All of a sudden, the Texans were convening meetings of sheikhs and imams to get the Shiites and Sunnis talking again.
The battalion has a budget of nearly $500,000 for reconstruction projects. The military would gladly hand out small business loans to foster commerce between the feuding Islamic factions. But the merchants of Jurf al-Sakhr and Musayyib are afraid to venture into a neighboring village that's on enemy territory.
Fear and mistrust cannot be dispelled by money alone. Building bridges between the deeply hostile religious groups takes time, lots of time - a commodity in short supply for the GIs. A new congress will be elected in November, and the Republicans - who currently hold majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives - will need to convince voters that an end to the unpopular war is on the horizon.
President Bush has repeatedly stressed that domestic politics must not be used to justify an over-hasty retreat, and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has fended off every rumor of withdrawal: "Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis."
So much for the rhetoric. In reality, the Pentagon can't wait to disengage from this conflict. By the end of the year, half of Iraq is to be turned over to local security forces; probably fewer than 100,000 U.S. soldiers would remain stationed there. In the meantime, though, the Americans need to concentrate on Baghdad - and perhaps send in reinforcements - to avert a full-blown civil war.
The reconstruction aid for the devastated country is being cut back drastically. In November 2003, the U.S. Congress allocated $18.4 billion. This year only $1.5 billion in additional assistance has been earmarked for the next budget. That's all. Yet the electricity supply continues to be a disaster. Already crippled by fear, Baghdad has become a city without electricity and a dependable water supply. And this at a time of year when daytime temperatures are topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit: a hell from which the occupying power would like to escape sooner rather than later. Perhaps by taking the same route that Republican Senator George Aiken recommended for ending the Vietnam War in the 1960s: declare victory and get out.
But the old tricks could reopen old wounds. The Americans celebrated the victorious military campaign of George H. Bush against Saddam Hussein at the start of the 1990s as the time when they finally laid the Vietnam nightmare to rest. Now his son's hubris may inflict further decades of self-doubt upon the nation, even if the two conflicts are not comparable in other respects.
The quagmire in Vietnam cost 3 million lives between 1957 and 1975, with 58,000 U.S. soldiers among the dead. In Iraq, the number of people killed by soldiers is probably well below 100,000. By the end of July, 2,600 GIs had lost their lives.
The Vietnam War was a national struggle against the American invaders. The Iraq conflict is on its way to becoming a civil war in which Sunnis and Shiites butcher each other - while the Kurds, chuckling on the sidelines, prepare to break with the multiethnic state. Iraq seems to be splitting back into the three Ottoman provinces from which it was pieced together by the colonial powers, erasing the lines in the sand drawn by Britain and France after World War I.
The military adventure in Iraq could turn into a new American trauma, because it reveals the superpower's limits more glaringly than Vietnam ever did. By spring, the campaign in Iraq had already lasted as long as the Korean War. By July, it had already outlasted the U.S. involvement in World War II.
Data collected by Washington's respected Brookings Institution traces the decline between November 2003 and May 2006. The number of insurgents climbed from 5,000 to 20,000 during this period. When President Bush prematurely announced the end of major combat operations from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003, there were five attacks a day. Now there are nearly one hundred. Some 250 clashes between Sunnis and Shiites are now recorded every month.
The costs are skyrocketing as well. In 2003, the war cost $51 billion; this year's figure will top $100 billion. In equivalent dollars, the current campaign comes at a higher price than the Vietnam War. And concern that the Iraq war could overtax the country's fighting capabilities is widespread among the Pentagon's top brass: last April, six generals retired and immediately demanded the resignation of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.
The campaign that was touted as bringing democracy to the Middle East was forced through by a handful of politicians convinced that, in a post-Cold War world, no one could pose a serious threat to the United States. After the shock of 9/11, this group - all civilians - wanted to demonstrate, once and for all, that any assault on their country would be punished. Hard.
The war in Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Taliban were not enough to hammer this point home. Rumsfeld complained that there weren't enough targets in Afghanistan for the United States to showcase its full military might. Only two days after the attacks on New York and Washington, the defense secretary was huddling with his officers and telling them to rework the war plans for occupying the oil fields in southern Iraq.
The communist bloc had disintegrated, China was only starting to emerge as a major power, and Western Europe was embarrassingly divided by petty squabbles. To the hawks in the Bush administration, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to flex their muscles - and show that the superpower could impose itself on the rest of the world. At will.
Take the chilling experience of U.S. star reporter Ron Suskind: he was summoned to the White House ostensibly to hear a complaint about his reporting. Instead, he was given a lecture on the new world order. A high-ranking aide to George W. Bush let him know the score: The era of the "reality-based community," in which knowledge was acquired by observing perceivable facts, was over once and for all. As Suskind's instructor at the White House explained, the world no longer worked that way.
"We are an empire now," the Bush confidant said. "And when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality ... we'll act again, creating other new realities." This is the view from Absurdistan. It's also the attitude that created this latest war.
It is a conflict with many sponsors. Vice President Dick Cheney is certainly one of them; Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, too. Perhaps the most ardent advocate of invasion was Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense. Outside the government, the mission was championed by an Iraqi exile - Ahmed Chalabi - who used his charisma and political savvy to convince other administration officials of the need to fight Saddam.
Each of the proponents of the war had bones to pick. Dick Cheney, secretary of defense under George H. Bush, opposed a full-scale invasion in the Iraq war of 1991. Saddam Hussein, he was certain at the time, would not last long once the Iraqis had been driven out of Kuwait. He even made private bets on the outcome. The dictator did hang on and Cheney lost.
During the Clinton administration, Cheney joined a circle of influential conservatives who publicly called for the overthrow of the "butcher of Baghdad."
As vice president, Cheney generally maintained a low profile during the planning sessions, exerting his influence with the president more privately. President Bush knew when to play his vice presidential trump. When someone was needed to sell military intervention, he dispatched Cheney. With scant regard for reality, Cheney remained adamant that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and needed to be removed. The mere thought of an alternative bordered on treason for Bush's VIVP. General Brent Scowcroft, who served on George H. Bush's team as national security adviser, recently went on record that he no longer recognized his old friend Cheney in this ultraconservative fanatic.
Wolfowitz, by contrast, was the Pentagon's intellectual and in-house genius: the man for strategic overviews and unvarnished truths. He was the first to concede that Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction were only a pretext to sell the war to Americans - and, if possible, to the rest of the world.
Wolfowitz was convinced that world peace was at risk. The Middle East had become an incubator of international terrorism, and its autocratic regimes had repeatedly demonstrated their inability to reform. This and the apparently irreconcilable conflict between Palestinians and Israelis had created a volatile situation that was being aggravated by terrorist attacks and suicide bombings in Israel. These conflicts, he felt, had culminated in the appalling tragedy of 9/11.
Saddam Hussein offered the path of least resistance; it was hoped his removal would provide fresh momentum for the entire region. Although Wolfowitz had many allies, mainly within the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, no one else espoused the neoconservative ideology of this war as eloquently. Wolfowitz and his neocon colleagues saw themselves as missionaries. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which their patron Ronald Reagan had bankrupted with an arms race, a heroic new goal was on their agenda: democracy for a region of the world that for centuries had known only repression.
The Iraqi exile Chalabi, a banker convicted of fraud, was as persuasive as the American neoconservatives. With the help of other Iraqi expats, he talked his Republican friends into believing that weapons of mass destruction really did exist. Even more fatefully, he convinced his protectors in the Pentagon that the Iraqis would greet their liberators with candy and flowers. And, finally, he insisted that a relatively small army - just tens of thousands of soldiers made up of Iraqi exiles and U.S. troops - would be needed to drive Saddam from power. According to an advisor to John Negroponte, later the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, the Washington "illusionists" should have been brought back down to earth by one fact: their all-purpose weapon, Chalabi, was only able to recruit 700 exiled Iraqis as volunteers.
Unlike many of his subordinates, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was no neocon. Nor was he one of the intellectuals. Rumsfeld came from a strongly nationalistic political wing that favored isolationism. For him, the United Nations and even NATO are little more than repulsive windbags. In his eyes, the Kosovo campaign under Bill Clinton - when the Americans argued bitterly with their European partners over which Belgrade buildings to bomb - was the most ineffective international operation imaginable.
In the Afghanistan war, too many cooks were at work for Rumsfeld's taste, even though they were all Americans, i.e. the members of the U.S. intelligence agencies, which he regarded as clueless. Once the Taliban were toppled, he set his sights on the State Department, the Pentagon's perennial rival.
This time, everything was supposed to be different. Rummy needed a war because he had something to prove. He wanted to revolutionize the way the United States waged war - nothing more and nothing less. He wanted his generals to get the message, once and for all.
The secretary of defense was convinced that recent wars had proven one thing. The United States could strike quickly using relatively small forces; its precision weapons were capable of weakening the enemy critically and from a safe distance. Above all, however, he wanted to show that massing hundreds of thousands of soldiers, as in the first Gulf war, was a tactic more suited to the Cold War era.
Rumsfeld's army would be "lean and mean" - compact and deadly efficient. It would strike swiftly and withdraw. The money saved by downsizing the armed forces could be better spent elsewhere - for example, on a space-based missile-defense shield or on other superweapons.
Ramming this view home within his own agency was already creating a furor. After all, the Pentagon inherited by Rumsfeld was still keyed to the mindset of his predecessor and political adversary, Colin Powell. As a general, Powell had won the first Iraq war for ex-president Bush by using overwhelming force. Nothing could go wrong, because there were plans for every eventuality. But this time around, nothing could be allowed to go wrong because no one could even imagine that anything would.
Rumsfeld was the embodiment of this unshakable optimism. Time and time again, he sent the campaign's chief planner, General Tommy Franks, back to the drawing board, demanding troop numbers be further reduced. In his early deployment scenarios, Franks was assuming he would need 385,000 soldiers to conquer and occupy Iraq. Rumsfeld seized on the figure of 125,000, apparently plucked out of thin air. In the end, a force of 150,000 was dispatched. Rumsfeld had prevailed over the professionals.
The defense secretary's military advisers, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, were largely excluded from the planning: the uniformed military command seemed too inflexible to Rumsfeld. After all, every problem in the Pentagon - his loyal colleague, Steve Cambone, once ventured sarcastically - could quickly be solved if 50 generals were taken out and shot.
Franks had occasional shouting matches with his boss, but as a rule he then submitted meekly. That was not good enough for Rumsfeld, who dispatched loyal civilian supporters to keep an eye on Franks at headquarters and report back. These civilians hailed from the Pentagon department with chief responsibility for the propagation of new realities. The Office of Special Plans, directed by Undersecretary Douglas Feith, was the Pentagon's version of the Holy Inquisition. It gave significant weight to the statements of Iraqi exiles, and refused to dilute their words with the doubts of the intelligence community.
The Office of Special Plans became the focus for everything that helped justify a new, hard-hitting military. The Pentagon informants acted as watchdogs and ensured that no member of Powell's State Department had a role in the war preparations - much less any influence. In the internal struggle over the upcoming deployment, the secretary of defense won hands down.
Rumsfeld got his minimalist campaign. Within 21 days it brought him to Baghdad - but no further. In July 2002, nearly threequarters of a year before the invasion, the British secret service chief - Sir Richard Dearlove - had warned that there had been "little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."
Bush and his secretary of defense firmly believed that the Iraqi dictatorship was no different from the regimes of the Warsaw Pact - a quick prod would be enough to topple the whole house of cards. George H. Bush had refrained from overthrowing Saddam Hussein: he feared that the multiethnic state might disintegrate, causing the entire Middle East to go up in flames. George W. brought the dictator down - without giving a second thought to the consequences. There were scarcely any plans for the subsequent pacification of Baghdad, and the little that did exist was completely useless. The U.S. Army, which had marched into postwar Germany armed with more than 400 pages of instructions and rules of conduct, entered Iraq completely unprepared - and found itself powerless as the chaos spread in the wake of Saddam Hussein's ouster.
The U.S. military was expecting the Iraqi forces and police to provide security. But these groups had ceased to exist. During the U.S. military assault, they had gone home and donned civilian clothes.
Neither the victor nor the vanquished could stem the orgy of looting that quickly swept the country. U.S. troops are still suffering from the mistrust that this anarchy sparked today: Ordinary Iraqis witnessed their liberators' utter inability to guarantee even the most basic necessities of life. The hospitals were only supplied with electricity when Paul Bremer, responsible for the reconstruction of the country, showed up with cameras in tow and handed out teddy bears to sick children.
Disastrously misreading the situation, the U.S. civilian administration believed that new security forces could be installed in a matter of weeks. A few days after his arrival, Bremer sent home the last remnants of the army and the police force. From that point on the rebellion of the vanquished could draw on an inexhaustible reserve of fighters.
Even as Iraq was descending into anarchy, Washington interpreted this as the encouraging first steps toward democracy. America's politicians refused to abandon a reality they themselves had created. Signs that they were fast undermining their own success were blithely ignored.
Not that the evidence was lacking. The country's new rulers had formed a special unit - named "Baghdad Mosquito" - that was tasked with gauging the prevailing mood and relaying its findings back to Washington. It reported that the conquerors' inability to improve living conditions was harming America's reputation and destroying the goodwill that many had initially accorded their liberators. But the administration preferred to ignore the reports - waving them away like flies. The more dire the forecasts, the less credible they appeared to Washington. After a particularly pessimistic assessment from his Baghdad CIA station chief in July 2004, President Bush exploded: "What is he, some kind of defeatist?"
Only recently - almost too late - has it dawned on leaders just where this denial is leading. The army is trying now to avoid the old mistakes, hoping to erase the ghastly pictures of Abu Ghraib and the memory of the Haditha killings. In ethics courses, the GIs are being trained to avoid killing Iraqis.
And as once before - during the Vietnam War - U.S. officers are required to attend courses on counterinsurgency. The Pentagon is distributing recommended reading: the pamphlet "The History of Modern Iraq," and even Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the work written by the former British colonel T. E. Lawrence - better known as Lawrence of Arabia.
Directive 3000.05 has been in effect since the end of last year. It prescribes that, when in doubt, peacekeeping and rebuilding should take precedence over the use of force. Presumably as a facesaving gesture, the document was signed not by Rumsfeld but by his deputy.
Word finally seems to have reached Washington that the sense of outrage over perceived humiliations is making more and more fighters join the nationalist insurgents - who far outnumber the al Qaeda activists in Iraq. They are retaliating for having to lie in the dust for hours; they are wreaking revenge for the women dishonored during house-to-house searches, for the deaths of friends and relatives. "We have to understand that the way we treat the Iraqis has a direct effect on the number of insurgents we are fighting," warned Peter Chiarelli, commander of the multinational force in Iraq. This U.S. general believes that onethird of all Iraqis regard the Americans as the biggest threat to their security.
In his State of the Union address prior to the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. president was still boasting that the aim of the global war against terrorism was to "rid the world of evil." Rumsfeld was soon bragging "with confidence" that the world had become a "better place today because the United States had led a coalition of forces into action in Iraq."
The opposite is true. When embarking on their Iraqi experiment, the Americans may even have tossed an urgently needed life preserver to the al Qaeda terror network - which had been badly shaken by the Afghanistan war. In any event, Osama bin Laden politely expressed his gratitude. The Iraq war, said the godfather of terror in an audiotape message, offers a "golden opportunity" to begin "the third world war against the crusaders and Zionists."
Egyptian al Qaeda strategist Seif al-Adl asserted that one of the organization's objectives had been "to provoke the United States and lure it out of hiding." As a result, he said, everyone would see that the Americans were waging war against the Islamic world. Many Islamists think this plan has succeeded spectacularly in Iraq.
The rebels there are feeding off the massacres that they themselves are committing. And the Americans and democratically elected government of national unity under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki are powerless to stop the carnage. For jihadists around the world, Iraq has become a "university of murder and bombbuilding," said the former head of counterterrorism at the CIA, Cofer Black.
With unprecedented cruelty, Jordanian terrorist Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi beheaded Western hostages and drove his Sunni comrades toward civil war against the Shiites. Now, after al-Zarqawi's death, bin Laden is personally calling for Shiite bloodbaths. Iraq can only hope to exist as a multiethnic state if the war already raging between the Islamic factions is halted.
The prospects are bleak. In broad daylight on the second Sunday of July, Shiite militiamen swept through a Sunni section of West Baghdad, randomly pulling victims from houses and cars, demanding identification. Anyone with a Sunnisounding name was shot on the spot. Days later, a heavily armed gang of - allegedly Sunni - gunmen appeared at a marketplace frequented by Shiites in a town just south of Baghdad and began firing assault rifles, heavy machine guns and rocketpropelled grenades. Some 50 people died; dozens were wounded.
Many Iraqis reacted by retreating even further within their homes, while others have sought to explain the inexplicable. Hamid Muhsin, a resident of Mahmoudiya where the attack took place, said members of the Mahdi Army had been at the market - justifying the Sunnis' actions. "The Mahdi Army launched a sectarian war in the city after the American forces turned over security to the Iraqi forces," he said.
There is an increasing risk that Iraq could split into three regions - Sunnistan, Shiistan and Kurdistan - with unpredictable consequences for an already volatile region. The Turks will not accept an independent Kurdish republic. The Iranians will insist on a Shiite theocracy modeled on Teheran being established in southern Iraq. Last but not least, the neighboring Arab countries will scarcely accept the dusty, desert region with no oil reserves that would be left over for their Sunni brethren.
Grim forecasts are already circulating at the CIA. They predict that the blood feud between the Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites could spill over into Iran and Saudi Arabia. This could prompt a fratricidal Islamic war that would endanger the whole world's oil supply.
Every war, the Chinese general and strategist Sun Tzu taught 2,500 years ago, is based on deception. The Iraq war was based on self-deception.
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