Searching in vain for a strategy in Iraq
By Tom Bissell
Harper's Magazine, January 2006
Although it is a short trip, Captain Jared Stoughtenborough tells us, the journey will be dangerous. Two dozen young Marines stand around him in a semicircle. Nearby is the parked fleet of Humvees we will shortly take to Camp Habbaniyah, where Iraqi security forces are being trained. The Marines not wearing ballistic goggles and Kevlar helmets and body armor soon will be, because they are not allowed outside the base's perimeter, known as "the wire," without them. Several Marines have marveled at my own body armor, which I ordered from a Dutch company called Engarde. I had decided to go top of the line, sparing no expense. "Wow," one Marine said to me, rapping a knuckle against the ceramic plate inserted into my handsome and weighty raiment. "We give our translators better shit than this."
Captain Stoughtenborough, who has a bald head and expressively dark eyebrows, begins his mission brief by going over the proper procedure if an "improvised explosive device," or IED, is discovered. This procedure is classified. He then reminds the Marines of their rules of engagement, also classified, but which are rigorously detailed and, if anything, extremely restrained--at least until their terminal phase. Captain Stoughtenborough dons his ballistic goggles. "Let's go see how our replacements are being trained."
Each Humvee in our small convoy receives a classified numbered call sign I will approximate as Sneaky. Major Maria Pallotta's and my Humvee, Sneaky 4, has large Goodyear tires and an open turret on top for its M240G machine gun. Everything inside the Humvee is covered in powdery dust, and space is coach-tight. The dashboard--flat and sparsely adorned with gauges--looks like that of a biplane circa 1933. I am in back with Major Pallotta, and between us maneuver the camouflaged legs of our turret gunner, who occasionally boots the large blue cooler filled with 1.5-liter water bottles.
On our way out of Camp Taqaddum, or TQ, we pass a sign that instructs all Marines to load their weapons just inside the final checkpoint. With that the Marines announce, "Condition one!" and proceed to make their weapons "hot." With a harsh metal chock the turret gunner slams shut the feed tray of his M240G, Major Pallotta efficiently click-snap loads her sidearm, and the driver and passenger whap clips into their M-16s. In an attempt to feel prepared, I uncap my pen.
We cross over into the Iraqi countryside near an overpass, up which our Humvees rumble one by one. The designation of the highway below this overpass is classified. But I remember the map I saw back at TQ's command center, upon which the area's Main Supply Routes were color-coded blue, brown, or black according to their security status. The highway below us, which runs between Fallujah and Ramadi, is black, which is to say, the least secure, and travel upon it is highly proscribed.
From the overpass's modest zenith I look out upon bursts of vegetation growing valiantly out of the rocky soil and see dozens of hulking gray Hescos.(n1) We clear the overpass, drive for approximately one minute, and then wend our way through another Hesco maze outside the entrance to Camp Habbaniyah. "Condition four!" the Marines call out. Once we are inside Habbaniyah's wire they exit their vehicles and remove the ammo from all weapons. The entire journey from TQ to Habbaniyah lasted ninety seconds. Such are the security precautions one is forced to take within a free and sovereign Iraq.
It is hard to believe that the garrisons of TQ and Habbaniyah are so close. The former's desert wasteland has given way to the latter's relatively lush glen of trees and rambling, tropico-elegant buildings. The British built Habbaniyah in the 1930s, and it once served as British Mesopotamia's main air base and was home to hundreds of RAF personnel. As we park I half expect to see the ghosts of T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell sipping tea upon one of Habbaniyah's shady porticos.(n2)
My purpose in coming here was to divine the current U.S. strategy against the insurgency. Before debarking for Iraq I was asked by many people what I planned to write about. "The strategy!" most responded acidly. "What strategy?" One even quoted Homer Simpson to suggest the apparent U.S. approach: "During the exam, I'll hide under some coats and hope that somehow everything will work out." I laughed, but I also thought it was more complicated than that. I imagined U.S. strategy as a difficult-to-summarize combination of intelligence-gathering; secret negotiation with some insurgents to enable the same divide et impera tactics the Romans used during their imperial rule, whereby insurgents were turned against one another and skillfully neutralized; and the careful, judicious use of military force.
Once in Iraq, however, I found that few Marines wanted to speak about tactics or strategy. In fact, I cleared a lunch table within days of my arrival when I began to ask some Marines about insurgency in general and the tactics they believed might be used to defeat it. My official questions as to the current U.S. strategy were greeted only a little more warmly and often found me being passed up the chain of command. The longer I stayed in Iraq the more it became evident that the question of U.S. strategy was so vexing not because the war itself was complicated. Rather, the war was complicated because the question of U.S. strategy was so vexing. I began to worry that there was no larger strategy, or, if there was, that this strategy was not in wide circulation among those charged with implementing it--which, when fighting a difficult insurgency war in many ways dependent upon public faith, amounted to the same thing.
We enter Camp Habbaniyah's Division Training School, the chipped peach walls of which have been papered with Marine Corps posters. Taped to one wall I see a key for "Primary Words for Weapons Training," including "Firearm (in general)," "Target," "Kill (w/any weapon)," "Friendly," Enemy," "Chest," all followed by a phonetic Arabic translation. I follow my Marine escorts into a large open room packed with cafeteria-style lunch tables, which are themselves littered with Styrofoam coffee cups. On these walls are many posters displaying weapons with bullet-point descriptions of their particulars: the SVD Dragunov sniper rifle ("Country of origin: Russia"), the Walther P38 ("Country of origin: Germany"), and the Tariq ("an Iraqi copy of the Beretta Model 1951"). In the middle of the room is a laptop computer, the screen of which is projected onto the far wall. Beneath an 800-point-font header ("Summary"), the projected screen reads: "During this period of instruction we have discussed the lensatic compass, handling a compass, using a compass, presetting a compass, using a 90-degree offset, movement, route selection, and dead reckoning."
Near the room's entrance Chief Warrant Officer Terry Walker, the training officer for the Second Marine Expeditionary Force, is describing for General John E. Wissler, the commanding officer of the Second Force Service Support Group and who traveled with us here in the convoy, a bit of his work with the Iraqi trainees. Chief Walker is a short, owlish man who looks like Woodrow Wilson and talks like H. Ross Perot.
"The Iraqi," Chief Walker says, "only has to be as good as he was. Remember, this was the dominant army in the region. This army will probably look like it used to, minus its Baathist, fascist element."
General Wissler inquires about some specifics. "Iraqis," Chief Walker obliges, "will follow orders if you explain why they're doing it. Safety, for instance. They don't have a lot of patience for safety rules if you don't clearly explain why they're important. But once you do, they all nod. Every Iraqi knows someone who's been shot." Another problem, he says, is the fact that every Marine trainer can expect certain things from an American boy or girl because we have a standardized educational system. Not so in Iraq. "There's no expectation here. We always go back to foundation zero with every soldier." For instance, rifle training. "Not one Iraqi trainee has exhibited proficiency with a rifle scope. Not one. One guy had been in the Iraqi army for seventeen years and never once used his scope. But when you ask the average Iraqi soldier if he can shoot his weapon, he's a sniper. You have to get beyond Iraqi pride. When one guy finally learned how to use a scope he told me, 'Now I feel like a soldier.'" Chief Walker smiles. "That was a good day."
The U.S. military claims to have trained 110,000 Iraqi policemen and 100,000 soldiers; more credible estimates range from 4,000 to 18,000. The effectiveness of U.S.-trained soldiers has been so erratic that the training program, which initially was outsourced to the Vinnell Corporation, had to be completely overhauled in early 2004. In April of that year, during the siege of Fallujah, an entire battalion of newly trained Iraqi soldiers laid down their weapons and refused to fight. However one feels about this war, training tens of thousands of men to use scopes and handle compasses was surely not what many imagined the war's crucial and now seemingly endless aftermath would hinge upon.
Chief Walker sums it all up: "We have to leave an army capable of defeating the insurgency."
Outside Camp Habbaniyah's arboreal center the desert reasserts itself. The sand has been bulldozed and flattened, and this firing range resembles nothing so much as a gray skating rink, the plowed up sand walls surrounding it as high as fifteen feet. In the distance, Iraqi trainees are firing at black silhouettes. About thirty Iraqis note our approach and talk among themselves. Most of their shirts are unbuttoned three or four notches down from the collar. Their helmets are mismatched, but their camouflage pants and tightly laced boots look new. A few wear body armor. Virtually all sport mustaches of varying thicknesses.
I am soon set upon by three of the younger Iraqis: a curly-haired teenager, a handsome and chubby young man, and a short little runt who looks fourteen. The handsome Iraqi, who is twenty-six and named Saddam, points at my watch, which I regret to report has a camouflage band. "Zero zero seven?" he asks in English.
I think. "James Bond, do you mean?"
"Yes! James Bond."
"Am I James Bond?"
"Yes!"
"I am not James Bond."
A few other trainees walk over. A tall and fearsomely mustached former member of the old Iraqi army asks if he can write his name in my notebook. I say, "Of course," and he diligently scratches out 2AERGNFADEL. Sergeant Fadel. Then he walks away. I ask Saddam where he is from.
"Baghdad."
I tell him I was just in Baghdad.
"Some problems in Baghdad," he says, smiling. "Karballah to Basra, no problem. Baghdad, problem. Kurdistan, no problem. Fallujah and Ramadi, problem."
The curly-haired teenager, who is in fact twenty-one and named Ali, seizes on this, and charades holding a sniper rifle. "Zarqawi," he says, pulling an imaginary trigger. "Bang. Osama. Bang."
"Yes," Saddam agrees. "They are bad. Moqtada, good. Shia, good."
Are these young men telling me what they think I want to hear? I have no idea. Surely Zarqawi would slit both their collaborating throats if he could, and they know it. But Saddam's endorsement of the Shia and Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shia's most famously militant son, is darkly suggestive of Iraq's mishmash of sectarian and ethnic conflicts. In a few weeks, the journalist Steven Vincent will be murdered, apparently for detailing the efforts of Shia clerics in Basra to take over Iraqi security forces there by inundating the ranks with their acolytes. Yet I have been told that U.S. trainers working with Iraqi security forces have been forming teams of Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia soldiers in the hopes that they can set aside their differences and learn to work together.
The Marines here keep their distance from the Iraqi trainees. A few are taking pictures of them, which has a slightly zoological feel, although the Iraqis themselves do not seem to mind. I sidle alongside one young black Marine from Ohio. Do Marines, I ask, interact with these Iraqis much ?
"We talk about family stuff, where they're from. But nothing beyond that."
Sammy, Chief Warrant Officer Walker's translator, whom Chief Walker heralded on the way over as the most gifted student he has ever trained, is talking to General Wissler, saying he wishes very much to go to an American city someday, and he hopes the general will communicate this to Chief Walker. "Please tell him I will grab his legs when he flies away if he doesn't help me," Sammy says and smiles. General Wissler touches Sammy on the shoulder and says he will see what he can do.
Another Marine, one of Chief Walker's assistants, is briefing the Iraqis before chow, and Sammy is needed. The trainees are gathered under a tent. A few squat and most stand, even though there are open chairs. They are all chugging water. The Marine tells them they did very well today, and he hopes that the good work will continue. Do they have any questions? Sammy fields a few; apparently they all have the same question. "Iraqi weapons are very old," Sammy summarizes. "When can they fire new weapons ? The M-16? This is what they want to know."
The Marine sighs in a we-have-gone-over-all-this-before way. "When they've mastered the AK-47, and the RPK, then they can fire the M-16. We need to master Iraqi weapons first."
Sammy tells the trainees this, and they confer. Sammy again turns to the Marine. "Do you solemnly promise ?"
"I do," the Marine says, then glances back at us. "And tell them I hope I will get this much attention from them when this crowd is gone after lunch."
I look at these men. Are they here because they believe in what the Americans are doing, or are they part of some Shia strategy to make certain the Sunnis will never take power again? I cannot help but think well of them for wanting to rebuild their country. But the fact that they are creatures of an American occupation cannot be elided in my mind--nor, I imagine, in the minds of their countrymen. The danger of creating an army from the outside is that it will melt away the moment the occupier withdraws, as all occupiers eventually must, just as the South Vietnamese military, which at the time of the American withdrawal in 1973 was the world's fourth-largest, with more than one million men, fell apart against the North Vietnamese army, which was funded by outside powers but which also--crucially, it turned out--created itself.
When President Bush declared, on May 1, 2003, the termination of "major combat operations," Operation Iraqi Freedom I was brought to a close and the curtains were drawn back on Operation Iraqi Freedom II, which, in General Wissler's words, marked the "shifting from a kinetic fight into stability and support operations against an insurgent element." Stability and support operations are not, within the pandect of modem conflict, considered war at all but "military operations other than war," or MOOTW (pronounced mootwah). During OIF I, as in Desert Storm, the logistics were run out of Kuwait's Ash Shuaybah port and involved the incremental movement of personnel and matériel through what General Wissler calls a "pretty clean battlefield" to their various points of destination. Keeping the logistics "tail" in the rear, safe from enemy activity, is traditional military strategy. Now, during OIF II, logistics bases are placed deep within hostile territory, and insurgents often target logistics convoys and even the bases themselves. In the current MOOTW there is no rear echelon.
Insurgency wars often live and die by logistics. The French lost at Dien Bien Phu in large part because they were not able to resupply. Osama bin Laden cut his fangs working in logistics during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and his success in creating a viable logistics network was one of the reasons the anti-Soviet insurgency was so effective. Insurgents know well that what logistics units move has incalculable benefit to the occupiers' morale and fighting efficiency--as the mujahedeen discovered in Afghanistan, when they so frightened Soviet troops that they rarely traveled outside of their bases for fear of ambush. As one Afghan guerrilla later explained, "These tactics had the effect of creating a deep sense of insecurity in the minds of the Soviets …. They reacted by deploying more and more troops in static guard duties, thus reducing their ability to mount offensive operations."
Not surprisingly, logisticians themselves are highly aware of logistics' importance. "Amateurs talk tactics," Colonel Robert DeStafney, the commanding officer of TQ's logistics unit, told me.(n3) "Professionals talk logistics." During OIF I, "the thing that made the Iraqi army so vulnerable to defeat were logistics issues. They couldn't move themselves. They had the Republican Guard, but they didn't have any kind of ground transportation capability, they didn't have any maintenance capability." Colonel DeStafney went on to describe how the U.S. military's current logistical capabilities are the most advanced of any fighting nation in history. U.S. forces are able to track in real time nearly every friendly vehicle within the theater of war and can even monitor the progress of vehicle parts as they are shipped from the United States to TQ.
The first thing one notices at TQ is the number of Third Country Nationals from Romania, Bangladesh, or the Philippines. Most TCNs work for Kellogg, Brown, and Root, the Halliburton subsidiary that has been contracted to do much of the menial work on U.S. bases throughout Iraq. The more menial the job around TQ, I quickly notice, the browner the person employed to do it. Nevertheless, KBR does much for TQ, from cleaning its toilets every morning to preparing and serving its food to servicing the showers and driving the forklifts. Ten years ago, one Marine told me, in Desert Storm, all the cooks were Marine cooks, and all the food was Marine food. The only thing not currently slated to be contracted out, many Marines joke, is infantry.
Walking around TQ, it is sometimes hard to believe that this is MOOTW, much less war. It also does not much feel like life. In some respects, the American fighting force in Iraq has been effectively Islamicized: deployed U.S. troops cannot drink alcohol, have sex, or view pornography. Perhaps never in the history of warfare have so many men (and, now, women) been asked to function in what is essentially a massive and formless war zone without the emotional release valves of sex and inebriation. There is no Saigon to run off to, no raunchy Thailand. The nations most Marines and soldiers visit for R and R are the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, which themselves have fairly strict morality laws, though they are Hefnerian by Middle Eastern standards. The official explanation for these policies is that they are borne in deference to the U.S. military's Muslim hosts, though some Marines are not so sure. A few view it as a weird social experiment in wartime stress management. British soldiers in Iraq, for instance, are allowed two beers a day.
Strolling across TQ at dusk, I see Marines playing softball, basketball, returning from the gym. Can this truly be modern war? What about the T-shirts I see worn around the base ("Who's Your Baghdaddy?" and "Co-ed Naked Camel Watching" among the more popular), or the Hotel California fitness center, or the dispensers of coconut-scented soap in the shower trailers, or the flyers posted all over for Bible study, or the AT&T phone center, or the mountains of snack sized bags of Lays and Baskin-Robbins ice cream available in the chow hall? How, finally, to account for the PX? TQ's PX is a virtual Kmart that sells the Hooah! Nutritious Booster Bar, bottles of Starbucks Frappuccino, DVDs (The Dukes of Hazzard: The Complete Third Season, Punk' d, Team America: World Police), Nintendo Gamecubes, twelve-packs of Coca-Cola, Spam, Sugar Smacks, and item after item in the Operation Iraqi Freedom line of garmentry and house-wares. For instance, the Operation Iraqi Freedom beach towel. The Operation Iraqi Freedom soft collar shirt. The Operation Iraqi Freedom coffee mug. The Operation Iraqi Freedom shot glass. The Operation Iraqi Freedom tote bag. Surveying the PX's aisles of these items, many of them marked down, feels somehow archaeological, almost as if one were examining the leavings of a P.R. push for some botched and disastrous product such as New Coke: The Iraq War, now half price.
Lieutenant Chris Eyre asks his Marines to stand as he leads them in a pre-convoy prayer. "I want to tell God," he says, "that we're thankful to him for allowing us to successfully complete our missions safely thus far. I request his guidance and decision-making abilities to execute our mission. I thank him for keeping our families safe back home, and for watching out for us here. I also pray for our enemies, that their hearts will change."
While listening to his prayer I wonder if this war needs any more religious additives, but I also know that Lieutenant Eyre credits prayer for his Marines' safety thus far. We are standing within a hangar off the convoy's main staging area, and along with the Marines are drivers from KBR, whose haul the Marines will accompany tonight. Many of these drivers are former military, and a good number of them are implausibly fat. One jaunty fellow wears a straw Panama hat, a flowered Hawaiian shirt, and smokes a chokingly fragrant cigar. Scarcely any KBR drivers bother with body armor, despite the fact that their Mercedes Benz 16-wheelers are not armored.
A convoy takes a day to plan; loading begins about twenty hours before the departure time. Our nighttime convoy will number about two dozen vehicles: nine KBR tractor trailers, four security Humvees, two scout units, six seven-ton gun trucks, six troop trucks, two command-and-control vehicles, and a huge wrecker the grill of which reads "Mad Max." The gun trucks are the most impressive. Their Goodyear tires are four feet high with waffle treads the size of actual waffles. On the front of the lead gun truck is a sign in English and Arabic that reads: "Danger! Stay back 100 meters. Deadly force authorized." The gun trucks are not as heavily armored as the Humvees, but what they lack in armor they make up for in firepower, which provides what is called "protected mobility." This becomes evident after they queue up at the test-firing range, as every convoy must do before journeying outside the wire to make sure its weapons are operational. The M240G sprays 7.62mm bullets into the firing range's faraway dirt wall. The M249 is slightly less powerful, and during the test fire hurls a few beautiful red tracer rounds into the dirt. The M2.50-caliber machine guns are of another phylum altogether, their barrels as long and striking as a narwhal horn. During the test fire even those Marines who have seen them fired a hundred times whistle in awe. While the .50-cal sprays shell casings as long and thick as metal fingers, the dirt wall explodes in fiery bursts utterly unlike the dusty tattooing the previous guns gave it. One Marine tells me you do not even have to hit your target with the .50-cal. An impact a meter away is enough to take off someone's foot or arm. The velocity of the bullet is such that it can tear off someone's skin, and a direct hit in the chest can literally suck the internal organs out of the exit wound.(n4)
While we mount up to leave I hear several Marines complain about how Ramadi, one of our two destinations tonight, is always running low on water--water being a large part of tonight's haul. Earlier I asked Lieutenant Eyre about what surprised him the most out here. The lack of austerity in his base-camp surroundings, he replied. Much of tonight's haul is not exactly what one thinks of when confronted with the term "combat support": furniture, air- conditioners, televisions.
Humvee doors are heavy, and to slam one shut creates a sound similar to dropping ten pounds of chain on concrete. "Uparmoring" a Humvee with additional protection changes the nature of the vehicle so profoundly that it tends to create a few glitches, and I find I can push my notepad lengthwise through an alarmingly wide gap between my door and the vehicle's frame. Meanwhile I ask Lieutenant Eyre if there are any "intel alerts" tonight. In fact, the low-water bridge over the Euphrates River between Camp Ramadi and Blue Diamond, our other destination, is said to have been targeted by "foreign fighters" who want to blow it up with a "vehicle-borne IED," which is to say a car bomb, sometime in the next three days.
The radio chirrups indecipherable talk. Since the pathways and call signs are classified, I can offer only approximate versions of what is being said: "T-Rex, this is Chainsaw. We are turning onto Venus Boulevard, over." "Roger that, Chainsaw." "Jailcell, be advised that sniper fire has been reported on MSR Sacramento, over." "Roger that, Sneaky Six."
Lieutenant Eyre's driver is a young Skoal-dipping Marine who complains more than once about this particular Humvee's lack of "balls." I would like to know how fast we are traveling, but the Humvee's speedometer is broken, as is my seat belt. We are the convoy's fifth vehicle, behind gun truck one. Some lieutenants mix up the placement of the command vehicle to prevent decapitation strikes against convoys and some do not bother, since the command vehicle is easily identified by its number of antennae. Each vehicle maintains seventy-five to one hundred meters of space between it and the forward vehicle, and the two scout units drive five to seven kilometers ahead of the convoy, investigating suspicious-looking holes or trash piles and then dropping a noctilucent green "chem-stick" by areas of irregularity it has deemed safe.
Our convoy plows down the middle of the highway. Any time the highway intersects with another road, one of the security Humvees blocks it off and the Marines climb out, M-16s in hand, and keep back any oncoming traffic. Iraqi drivers by now know the drill: pull over, stop, turn on the hazards, and wait for the convoy to pass. I ask Lieutenant Eyre about IEDs, and what exactly looks suspicious. Giveaways include fresh-looking piles of dirt, wires, antennae, and animal carcasses. The radio suddenly crackles: "Chainsaw, be advised of one dark sedan left-hand side of the road, over." Roger that, Sneaky One." After a few moments, we pass a dark sedan on the left-hand side of the road, the solitary male Iraqi driver of which looks pinched and displeased.
"That's the sum of our interaction most of the time with Iraqi civilians," Lieutenant Eyre says, with a kind of sadness.
The road is now scorched with dozens of IED blast marks. On all sides is an endless and rather beautiful ravine-cut and lump-hilled desert. We pass devastated old Iraqi outpost buildings, moonlit dunes, thick dry clusters of brush as large as an economy car. "What," I ask Lieutenant Eyre, "is to stop some guy from popping out from one of those dunes or outposts or bushes and launching a rocket-propelled grenade at us ?"
He looks back at me. "Nothing."
Soon we get word that a TCN semi in a convoy ahead of us has blown a tire, and we and every other vehicle in our convoy "goes blackout" and stops. Sitting silently in the Humvee, I have the feeling of being in a submarine in the deep and shockingly black depths of the Iraqi night. I scan the desert, tricking myself into seeing guerrillas crawling from shrub to shrub. Everything looks suspicious or unnatural if I look at it long enough. Whenever we passed Iraqi cars I found myself studying how heavily the frame sat upon its tires, and now, while we wait, my brain momentarily registers a smudge on my ballistic goggles as the smoke plume of an explosion on the horizon.
Lieutenant Eyre gets out of the Humvee and with his flashlight makes sure we have not stopped near any IEDs. The wind has picked up, the air particulate with sand and dust, and Lieutenant Eyre looks as though he is wielding a translucent blade of light. When he returns to the vehicle, he allows me to look through his night-vision goggles and see a spooky jade world so electronically crystalline that the desert takes on the rumpled look of morning sheets.
A few minutes later, we push on. Other than two distant booms, a flare in the distance, a briefly terrifying mention from Sneaky 3 of "a guy sitting on a tire on the side of the road," the night passes without incident. Nothing happens at the low-water bridge. No IEDs are found. No sniper fire. We make it back to TQ in what I am told is record time. After proclaiming me a rabbit's foot, Lieutenant Eyre says, with an ecclesiastical confidence I do not yet share, "As you do this more, you realize, 'What was I scared about?'"
Two years of MOOTW is not the war anyone--not the President, not his generals, not the pundits, certainly not the Iraqi or American people--expected to fight. The mortality rate of the American occupation is currently estimated at 800 Iraqi lives a month, which is the per capita population equivalent of 9,600 Americans. Virtually everyone closely viewing the war acknowledges that there are not enough troops in Iraq, or anywhere else, and the situation is such that North Korea could invade South Korea and China could invade Taiwan and the United States could now do little about it other than resort to its own weapons of mass destruction. Terrorism continues to plague the world, and the Bush Administration not only has refused to admit the failure of its vision in the short term but has claimed to know all along that this would be a long, tough fight beset by the fog of war. This is demonstrably untrue, but as in Vietnam, the war in Iraq began with the concrete (stopping Communism, weapons of mass destruction) and due to battlefield realities quickly segued into the more abstract (U.S. credibility, Iraqi freedom). This amorphous sort of war, which is to say guerrilla or insurgency war, known to military thinkers as "fourth-generation warfare," is not the type of conflict the United States has proven very apt at winning. As retired Marine Corps Colonel Thomas X. Hammes writes in The Sling and the Stone, "Not only is 4GW the only kind of war America has ever lost, we have done so three times: Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia. This form of warfare has also defeated the French in Vietnam and Algeria and the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan."
As in the Soviet-Afghan war, various groups of insurgents in Iraq are fighting the occupiers with what is thought to be little more affiliation than who can front money for ammunition and weapons. This is most frustrating because the insurgency's "leaders" often have little idea whom they are aligned with or why. When I spoke to TQ's intelligence analysts, Lance Corporal John Trainor and Sergeant Warren Bubsey, about the makeup of Iraq's insurgency in general and its more local makeup in Anbar province, Lance Corporal Trainor voiced the popular line that he would rather be "sitting here getting shot at" by "everyone who's converging on Iraq" than see the United States suffer another attack. Sergeant Bubsey had a more nuanced view: "You have people coming, Saudis and Algerians, whoever else wants to come in and get their two shots. Those are who we consider the true terrorists, whereas these people, the local insurgents, they're pretty much justified in their actions. We invaded their country. We're sitting here occupying it; they have a right to counterattack us."
Saddam Hussein faced rebellion for much of his rule from Kurdish and Shia insurgents and was never fully able to put them down. In the beginning it was believed by American analysts that no more than 5,000 Iraqis were taking part in insurgent activity. By July 2004 that number was 20,000. A month later the estimate was 100,000--and that was just the insurgency's Sunni portion.
Despite the Bush Administration's various attempts to color the insurgency as foreign-fighter led, most of Iraq's insurgents are Iraqi: Baathists from the Return Party; former Iraqi intelligence officers; remnants of the Fedayeen, militia units upon whom Hussein relied to protect him from local insurrection; Shia guerrillas heavily influenced by Hezbollah tactics in Lebanon that were used against the occupying Israelis; and Sunni extremists. There are further categories: bored kids, misguided nationalists, and desperate farmers planting IEDs in exchange for a few hundred dollars. How often or how well these groups cooperate is largely a matter of conjecture.
Lance Corporal Trainor believes that "the way we're going to win this is through a lot of civil affairs missions here." This now more or less widely held view is a marked improvement upon President Bush's "Bring 'era on" strategy from July 2003. But it may be too late. The nineteenth-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz believed "the first, the supreme, most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish… the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature." The Pentagon ignored Clausewitz's advice resolutely. As its spokesman said in July 2003, "The discussion about what type of conflict this is… is almost beside the point." Almost. "Rather than identifying the war they were really in," Colonel Hammes writes, "the Bush administration continued to denigrate the resistance in Iraq as merely the aftermath of the short, decisive war they had planned." When I interviewed him by phone, Colonel Hammes told me, "Our military leadership has failed badly but is not coming forward and saying what they need as a unified plan. We've reached the five o'clock follies stage."
Although the war in Vietnam is the usual metric used to compare what is today occurring in Iraq, the U.S. war in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century is a far more appropriate point of comparison. The United States occupied the Philippines on exquisitely false pretexts, as President William McKinley's lovely, godstruck thoughts to visiting clergymen on why the United States had moved into the archipelago reveal: "I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance on more than one night." God told McKinley that "there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the best we could by them.., and then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly." The Bush Doctrine, a century foretold. (The Philippines, incidentally, had been Christianized already.) The debate about what to do next became paramount. President McKinley dispatched a commission to the increasingly insurgent-plagued islands. It came back with this report: "Should our power by any fatality be withdrawn, the commission believe that the government of the Philippines would speedily lapse into anarchy. … Only through American occupation, therefore, is the idea of a free, self-governing, and united Philippines Commonwealth at all conceivable." Harper's Weekly shortly published a dispatch from the islands: "Some of this territory we have occupied; the rest we have returned to the insurgents in a more or less mutilated condition, depending on whether the policy of the hour was to carry on a bitter war against a barbarous enemy, or to bring enlightenment to an ignorant people, deceived as to our motives."
The war in the Philippines was won through several tactics. "In this country," William Howard Taft, McKinley's appointed head of the Philippine Commission, argued, "it is politically most important that Filipinos should suppress Filipino disturbances and arrest Filipino outlaws." Another tactic was brutality. As one U.S. general had it, "An eight p.m. curfew went into effect. Any Filipino found on the streets after that hour would be shot on sight. Whenever an American soldier was killed, a native prisoner would be chosen by lot and executed." A young lieutenant witness to these atrocities later wrote, "The American soldier in officially sanctioned wrath is a thing so ugly and dangerous that it would take a Kipling to describe him." In time, Taft's softer hand--trials rather than executions, infrastructure-building rather than crop-razing--generally won the day. Although the insurgency lasted for another decade and a half, by 1902 the most organized and deadly of the insurgent groups had been defeated. More than 4,000 American soldiers had been killed in combat, thousands more perished of disease, and close to 200,000 Filipino civilians were left dead. As a U.S. senator said on the Senate floor, "What has been the practical statesmanship which comes from your ideals and sentimentality? You have wasted six hundred millions of treasure. You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives. … You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit …. Your practical statesmanship has succeeded in converting a people … into sullen and irreconcilable enemies, possessed of a hatred which centuries cannot eradicate."
Inside TQ's Combat Logistics Operations Center (CLOC), two refrigerator-sized air conditioners drone industriously and cables as fat as nautical rope run in thick bundles high along the wails. Two six-man teams of Marines work twelve-hour shifts here, and there are two laptops for every Marine in the room. Many of these laptops display a bright red desktop screen emblazoned with "This medium is SECRET," and the computers themselves are fed with a "secure" red Internet-connection cable. On the far wall loom three huge flat-screen monitors alongside an assortment of clocks that display East Coast time, West Coast time, Baghdad time, Okinawa time, and Zulu time.
Everything in this room is classified, and Gunnery Sergeant Adam Moore is clearly amused by my questions regarding what I can and cannot mention. I can mention that these Marines have the ability to monitor the progress of every mission in TQ's Area of Responsibility in real time. That there are four ways in which to stay in unbroken contact with the AOR's every convoy and security detail. That they can, in seconds, dispatch a response team to deal with disturbances, most of which, these days, are IEDs. "A boring day," Gunnery Sergeant Moore says, "is good. A boring day means no one got hurt."
Gunnery Sergeant Moore tells me that the current strategy, from his perspective, is unit placement and visibility, which is to say disrupting known insurgent paths and showing the flag to the Iraqi people insurgents intimidate and cajole into cooperating with them, although he allows as how the latter strategy relies on many untestable assumptions. He admits that the insurgency has shown a decent learning curve. "They're studying how we react," he tells me. To wit: the IED. The first IEDs were simply roadside bombs. The Marines quickly figured out how to identify them, and improvements in Humvee armor allowed Marines to take direct hits without suffering serious injury. The IED then became a decoy for the second, deadlier IED that was detonated while the first was being dealt with. Then the second IED became the decoy for the third IED. Now, Gunnery Sergeant Moore says, the insurgents are looking for ways to increase the destructiveness of the bombs themselves. This is done with TNT (which may not pierce the vehicle's armor but can flip the vehicles over and crush those inside) or by strapping IEDs to propane tanks.
In the meantime, the Marines who run the CLOC are forced to grit their teeth and, like every American in Iraq, wait out the insurgency until a trained Iraqi army is ready to battle them alone, although every Marine I speak to resents the implication that they are waiting for anything. The fact is that other than TQ's patrols, which cover the same stretch of road day after day, relatively little offensive action is being taken against the local insurgents, and TQ's intelligence apparatus, however thoughtful, has no Arabic speakers, which inevitably leads to a static form of information-gathering.
As Gunnery Sergeant Moore admits, many insurgents, after setting off an IED, will retreat to villages and cities they know the Marines will not chase them into for fear of causing civilian casualties. In this, at least, the lessons of Vietnam have been heeded: insurgencies are not defeated by killing large numbers of insurgents. Brutal tactics have already and unsuccessfully been employed in the Iraq War, as a U.S. Army soldier's comments in January 2004 to a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor attest: "If someone runs into a house, we're going to light it up. If civilians get killed in there, that's a tragedy, but we're going to keep doing it and people are going to get the message that they should do whatever they can to keep these people out of their neighborhoods." Restraint is now understood as a more useful counterinsurgency tactic, and it is a matter of policy that another Fallujah-style siege (during which U.S. missile attacks killed a large number of civilians, including women and children, which was promptly reported by Arab media and led the Pentagon to stop the assault in medias res) be avoided at all costs.
I ask Gunnery Sergeant Moore if it is frustrating that, even with all this technology at his disposal, note-passing insurgents and IEDs stuffed with shredded-wire shrapnel can in some ways override what the Marines are able to accomplish. No technology can erase certain on-the-ground advantages the insurgents possess, and although the insurgents' weapons are in many cases low-tech, they are no less deadly for it. But Gunnery Sergeant Moore shakes his head. The insurgents likely have an operations center very similar to the CLOC. Really? I ask. Moore mentions the tunnels that have been found, the computer-laden bunkers. "I would not doubt it if they had some room like this," he tells me. I wonder if that is not a bit fantastical. No, he says. "It's realistic."
The next morning I return to the CLOC after being told that four "bad guys" suspected of numerous IED and sniper attacks have been neutralized. An F18 filmed the engagement, and with several mouse clicks Corporal Sam Meek brings to one of the CLOC's three flat-screen monitors the relevant footage. I see a road buttressed on both sides by the scruffy Iraqi desert, all of it cast in silvery bright grays and inky blacks and atomic-blast whites. Into the shot cruises a four-door sedan, from which two men emerge and begin to dig IED holes in an area where Marines have been hit several times.(n5) After the two men dig for a while, they clearly become rattled--possibly they have heard the F18--and quickly climb back into their sedan and motor off. The camera, which is attached to a jet traveling 400 miles per hour, tracks all this as firmly as a department-store camera fixed on the cosmetics aisle. The clip jumps ahead a few minutes in time, and the sedan has returned. The diggers get out again, and a third man follows. He runs out of frame, only to reap pear a moment later. The film burps again, and now the car is seen from another angle. Two men are clearly visible next to the car, while the third stands a few feet away. Suddenly a bright javelin of light streaks into frame. The screen goes white, incrementally develops fluffy black edges, and fades to something resembling an explosion's aftermath. From 2.5 miles high, the jet has hit the insurgents' car with a 500-pound laser-guided bomb. This is referred to by pilots as "warheads on foreheads." The investigatory team that later arrived at the blast site confirmed the remains of several unplaced IEDs and four charred torsos.
The day after the death, at ninety-one, of General William Westmoreland, whose "war of attrition" strategy helped doom the American effort in Vietnam, I fly down an Iraqi highway with three young Marines who have barely heard of him. We are Sneaky 5, the "rear-security element" in a patrol looking for IEDs and searching Iraqi vehicles for signs of insurgent sympathies. The patrol's second in command, Sergeant Zachary Doty, is a blond, square-headed, chain-smoking North Carolinian of twenty-two years. Lance Corporal Christopher Wetzel, the driver, is nineteen (I am shocked to realize he was five during the first Gulf War), from Maryland, and possesses a sweet, boyish face similar to Pinocchio's. Lance Corporal Anthony J. Burks, twenty, our gunner, is from Alabama and has the lumbering look of a high-school tailback. Neither Lance Corporal Wetzel nor Lance Corporal Burks had traveled out of the United States before being deployed to Iraq, and Sergeant Doty has a photo of his wife and child taped to the Humvee's windshield, at which he blew a quick kiss before we rolled out.
These Marines are part of TQ's Military Police detachment. All three have nicknames: Sergeant Doty is "Legs" due to what he himself refers to as his "sexy legs," Lance Corporal Burks is "Boomhower" due to the resemblance of his impressive drawl to that of the King of the Hill character, and Lance Corporal Wetzel is "Pretzel" or "Wetsuit."
It is upward of 125 degrees today, the wind stiff and useless. A dark bank of it-might-rain clouds forms along the horizon a layer as distinct as a black shelf. (It never rains.) This is my first time on these roads during the day, and the sunlit desert glows with a bright golden menace. In the near distance shimmers Lake Habbaniyah, contaminated by years of Iraqi military and septic waste. KBR treats the lake's water at a plant on base using reverse osmosis, and the water is subsequently used for bathing (but never drinking).
Sergeant Doty mentions that on this road yesterday three Iraqi men were detained, then released, and that Delta Company found two IEDs near TQ's entrance. He speaks of these events excitedly, and I ask him if he enjoys patrols.
"Bravo is the IED team," he says. "We're the get-shot-at-every-day team."
"That must get nerve-racking," I say.
"I like being shot at, sir," Lance Corporal Wetzel says.
"Really? Why?"
"Because you get a combat action ribbon, sir. You don't get shit for being blown up with an IED."
I ask Lance Corporal Burks if he has ever had the pleasure of shooting his .50-cal back at the enemy, and he describes one day, months ago, near Baghdad, when his convoy was ambushed as it passed "Abu Grah."
"Where's that?"
"It's the prison, sir."
I have now heard it pronounced Abu Grah, Abu Garabe, Abu Grabi, Abu Gray, and Abu Greib. Similarly, at Baghdad's airport, I sat and listened to the flights announced, marveling at the marble-mouthed manglings of Irbil ("URbul"), Mosul ("MoeZOOL"), and Tikrit ("TICKrit"). "Abu Ghraib, do you mean?"
"Yes, sir. Abu Grah. It was pretty intense, sir."
We discuss getting blown up, and I ask why so many Marines do not wear their groin protector, which when attached to the Velcro strip beneath the flak jacket's hem dangles before one's crotch like a small steel apron. Lance Corporal Wetzel mentions a guy in Fallujah whose Humvee got hit with a rocket-propelled grenade round and he only got a few cuts out of it. The unstated moral: The groin protector just gets in the way. While Sergeant Doty and I shake our heads (we are both wearing ours), Lance Corporal Wetzel says, philosophically, "I don't need a cock. I have personality."
We are now entering Hajji country. "Hajji" technically means a Muslim who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca; here it is used as the stand in term for Iraqis. Although it is a vast improvement on "gook" (to say nothing of "sand nigger"), the term is troubling because it does nothing to distinguish between insurgents and noncombatants. Just as Marines fight "Hajjis" outside the wire, they despair of eating any "Hajji food" and buy souvenir stacks of old Iraqi dinars in TQ's Iraqi-run "Hajji shop."
I ask Sergeant Doty about the insurgents. "It's like a chess game," he says. "You always need your counterattack ready. We patrol these roads every day. We know when something's not right."
Lance Corporal Wetzel's belief is that the insurgents are "cowards." He shakes his head. "They won't stand and fight."
Sergeant Doty says he wishes he'd been alive during Vietnam, because he would have loved to fight there. Then: "We've had many arguments about whether the insurgents are stupid or not."
"They're stupid for attacking America," Lance Corporal Wetzel says. "Jeez."
I ask Sergeant Doty what he thinks about the war.
"It's not my place to say, sir." He turns back to the windshield. After a moment he says, "There's good people out here. They're not all bad." Sergeant Doty credits his Marine Corps culture classes for giving him "respect" for Iraqi culture, admitting that, "I came over here not knowing a whole lot."
Sun Tzu's ancient advice, "Know the enemy, know yourself; your victory will never be endangered," has been only partially heeded in Iraq. The Marine Corps has distributed to its soldiers many thousands of "Iraq Culture Smart Cards," packed with mini tutorials on "Religion," "Cultural History," and Muslim holidays; "Survival Phrases" such as "What types of mines are these?" and "Is the place guarded?" and "Can you get us out of here safely?"; as well as "Do This" ("Appear relaxed and friendly; social interaction is critical in building trust") and "Don't Do This" ("Don't engage in religious discussions") primers. One Marine described to me his cultural training as little more than a couple of hours of classes, one of which was led by a civil affairs captain who did one tour in the Middle East and responded to several questions with, "I can't answer that." Another Marine related a far more intensive experience at Marine Corps Basic School, where an Iraqi town was built on base as a "free-play" exercise. Dozens of native Arabic speakers staged a riot outside the gates of the Marine's simulated base. The extremely convincing exercise ended, the Marine told me, with a bunch of freaked-out jarheads shooting into the crowd.
One unclassified document I was provided by the Marines is titled "Marines are from Mars, Iraqis are from Venus." It was written by Major Ben Connable, who admits that the paper's language is "skewed and hyperbolic toward the ideal to make a point." Major Connable first writes from the Martian Marine perspective: "Our altruism and earnestness often make us somewhat naïve. We expect that everyone else can see that our hearts are pure, and we expect them to play by the Marquis of Queensbury rules that we try to live by ourselves …. We have trouble adjusting to other people's way of life because we think our way of life is the ideal." Venusian Iraqis, on the other hand, "don't dream of Outback Steakhouse." Moreover, if "our wives dressed in public like Brittany [sic] Spears we would kill them or bum them with cooking oil." It goes on: "Because our lives are so brutal, we have almost no capacity to view the long term …. We're masters of achieving effect. Everything we do is designed to coax, cajole, trick, or steer you into doing what we want you to do …. You pretend to be so honest, but we see you as the biggest liars of all. You promised us security, jobs, and peace. All we have is crime, unemployment, and war.
Who's the liar?"
Up ahead the patrol has stopped its first car of the day. Only Sergeant Doty gets out to survey the situation. Marines from other Humvees fan out toward the perimeter. I watch three Iraqis dutifully exit their stopped white sedan. They are herded off and instructed to put their hands on their heads and turn away from the road. A queue of cars and dump trucks and semis is already clogging the highway behind them. The turret gunner of Sneaky 1 waves all of them off to the side of the road, and vehicle by vehicle their occupants climb out. We have only one translator with us today, a Jordanian, who rides in Sneaky 1 with Gunnery Sergeant Sean Spatar, the patrol's laconic, Copenhagen-dipping commander. A kind of tense, bored alertness hangs over these proceedings, and after ten minutes the word comes to "mount up," and we continue down the road.
"Punch it up," Sergeant Doty tells Lance Corporal Wetzel on the next detail, and sings "Come On, Eileen" as the Humvee streaks past Sneakys 4, 3, 2, and pulls abreast of another car, from which four Iraqis are now exiting. Sergeant Doty has told me that seeing four Iraqi men in one car instantly creates suspicion, as the new IED method they have seen appears to involve four-man bomb placement teams. They are what the Marines call "MAMs," or military-aged males, and all wear long gray garments that look a bit like dresses. In fact, that is what Marines call them, "man dresses," which leads to the identification method, often overheard on the radio, of, "We've got four MAMs in man dresses."
These Iraqis immediately and without instruction fall into their required and humiliating postures. One of them looks over at me and seems to note my differently styled flak vest, my lack of a weapon, my incessant scribbling in my notepad. He shakes his head and turns away with a fatigued and irritated look.
We have stopped near a junction where the highway is joined by a curvy road that vanishes behind some higher dunes. No one has bothered to cover this road, despite Sergeant Doty's request, and when a gray sedan appears from behind the dunes and begins making its way toward us, Sergeant Doty abandons his duties of covering the Iraqis Lance Corporal Wetzel is thoroughly frisking and rushes over to the junction's mouth. He holds his M-16 downward, its butt untucked and thrust up onto his shoulder, to indicate his lack of a hostile posture. He waves for the car to stop. It does not. Sergeant Doty reaches down, grabs a small gun, and points it at the car. The resultant whoosh is startlingly loud. He has fired a white star cluster, a flare made of white phosphorus, and it is as bright as a tiny white sun. Leaving behind a thick gray trail of smoke, the star cluster floats out toward the car, burning away its last bit of fuel only a few feet above the hood, and then blinks out and drops harmlessly onto the sand.
"Wetzel," Sergeant Doty says, "help me with these people." I turn to see Lance Corporal Wetzel, carrying his huge M240G machine gun, leave his frisking duties to another Marine. Several more Marines step up to cover the Iraqis who have already been searched, and I am left with the image of American soldiers holding their weapons to the backs of several human beings long after it has been determined that they are not dangerous. Sergeant Doty seems to read my mind. He jogs over and, one by one, pantomimes to the Iraqis who have already been searched that they can lower their hands, it's okay.
Soaked and shiny with sweat, Sergeant Dory, Lance Corporal Wetzel, and I jog toward the gray sedan. The car's occupants number three: a man in an Adidas track suit, a younger man in a soccer jersey, and a woman in the flowing black traditional garb known as an abaya. Sergeant Doty frisks the men but not the woman. They roll their eyes and feign ignorance (or perhaps not) at the proper procedure. Hands up? Down? What? Sergeant Doty tries on them an Arabic phrase none of them understands, then resorts to sign language. The Iraqis still do not seem to understand what is happening. Sergeant Doty gives up. Lance Corporal Wetzel covers the Iraqis while Sergeant Dory thoroughly but also gently inspects their car's interior and trunk. The star shell is a few feet away, coldly extinguished. One of the Iraqi men studies it expressionlessly.
According to Colonel Hammes, U.S. forces in Iraq average one to two translators for every 150 troops, and to find a U.S. soldier able to speak Arabic is rare. And yet translators are paid by the military more poorly than the KBR workers who refill chow-hall salad bars. Consequently one hears unending stories of untrustworthy translators, thieving translators, taciturn translators, spy translators. I had asked General Wissler if he believed TQ needed more translators, but he said, "I think we've got what we need to do our mission now." Here, with Sergeant Dory, the patrol's poverty of translators is painfully apparent. I ask him, "Do you think you need more translators here ?"
"No," he says, pawing under the driver's seat.
"Why?"
I retrieve my jaw from the pavement. "What," I ask, "are you looking for, exactly?"
"Hollowed-out spaces."
"Why didn't these people stop, do you think?"
"They might just be passing through. I don't know."
When he is finished, he walks over to them and attempts another Arabic phrase. Again, no recognizable comprehension. "Stay," Sergeant Doty then tries.
"I don't speak English," the Iraqi in the soccer jersey says.
Sergeant Doty smiles. "No? You're speaking it pretty well right now."
"I don't speak English," he says again.
Sergeant Doty looks at him. "Stay."
"Stay?"
"Stay."
"Sit down?" the other Iraqi smilingly hazards.
"Yeah," Sergeant Doty says. "Sit down. Chill out."
The men sit, chuckling, while the woman remains standing, hatred and disgust filling her eyes. I wonder if I am the only one to notice it.
As we walk back to the highway, which is now host to a mile-long traffic jam of dump trucks, flatbed semis stacked with new cars, and ubiquitous white and gray sedans, I ask Sergeant Doty if he is sometimes uncomfortable putting people through all this.
He instantly looks over at me. "I'm an MP, dude."
"No, I know that, but--"
"I always try to treat people with respect. And I do feel bad sometimes. If I were late for work because I got stuck behind some convoy, I'd be pissed, too. But we have to do it." It is one of the cruelest aspects of insurgency warfare, and the most open to enemy exploitation: the need to treat those one is supposed to have liberated as though they are the enemy.
I am now walking beside Lance Corporal Wetzel, who surprises me by saying that he wants to study Arabic before his next tour in Iraq, which he is already anticipating. "It'll give me a bit of an up on everyone else," he explains.
For years the Marine Corps was the only branch of the U.S. military to embrace the challenges of insurgency warfare. The first translator of Mao's On Guerrilla Warfare was a U.S. Marine named S. B. Griffith, and Mao's seminal work was published in the Marine Corps Gazette in 1940. Around the same time, a Marine colonel was so impressed by the Chinese Communists' tactics that he imposed many of them upon the Marine Corps itself.
At Guadalcanal the Marines were able to adapt and use guerrilla tactics against the Japanese with surprising and fatal speed. In Vietnam the Marine strategy of "clear-and-hold" whereby the Marines captured towns, killed or arrested local Viet Cong insurgents, and then stayed put to live among the Vietnamese--was far more successful than U.S. Army General William Westmoreland's "search-and-destroy" tactics. But according to one of his aides, pacification "bored" Westmoreland.
As Colonel Hammes writes, in the mid-1970s the Marine Corps "shifted focus from small wars to fighting a huge conventional conflict." There was some discussion of the insurgency issue, however. A now-famous study, "The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation," written by a team of military experts, asked, "Is it not about time for a fourth generation [of warfare] to appear?" This paper was written in 1989, three decades after the tactics of fourth-generation warfare appeared and confounded U.S. efforts in Vietnam.
Nonetheless, one would think that, by the end of the Cold War, and with the regular appearance throughout the 1990s of low-intensity, fourth-generation conflicts, insurgency would have become a subject of intense military study. This has not been the case. Insurgency remains a specialization within the military, the idée fixe of a few edge-wandering theoreticians such as Colonel Hammes. The current Department of Defense fixation, in Hammes's words, is that of "high-technology, short-duration war where technology is vital and essentially machines fight machines." (At a May 2001 news conference hosted by Donald Rumsfeld, Senator Robert Smith, then a member of the Armed Services Committee, announced, "There are nations out there who are hostile to us, and they are in space. They have such weapons as lasers, anti-satellite weapons, and electromagnetic pulse weapons, and we have to be ready to recognize that threat.") As recently as 2003, the DOD issued a report that detailed its plans to deal with future threats. Hammes: "It is interesting that the threats the DOD plans to be ready to defeat by the end of the decade have no resemblance to the actual enemies we are fighting today."
What, then, is the hope of defeating an insurgency as vicious and widespread as Iraq's while the Department of Defense builds ever more drone planes (which are useless against insurgents who can hide in tunnels), lobbies for missile defense (which will not stop a suitcase bomb), and works to foil enemy laser blasts from space (which do not exist) ? One oddity of the American inability to successfully fight an insurgency war is that Americans themselves once waged one. The British were appalled and horrified by the savagery of the American insurgents: "The violence and the passions of these people," a British brigadier general wrote, "are beyond every curb of religion, and Humanity, they are unbounded and every hour exhibits dreadful wanton mischiefs, murders, and violence of every kind, unheard of before." A major reason the British lost the war was because they consistently lacked good intelligence--in a land in which everyone spoke English.
As Hammes notes, the military heirs of this brutally won liberty still discuss warfare "on the idea that if we service enough targets, we will win the battles. If we win the battles, the enemy will quit. As soon as he does, the war is over." Virtually no insurgency has ever been defeated this way. Insurgencies are defeated politically, militarily, and economically. As the Marines' Lieutenant General Victor Krulak said, despairingly, during the Vietnam War, "You cannot win militarily" when fighting an insurgency. "You have to win totally, or you are not winning at all."
Throughout time, patience has been the insurgents' single greatest advantage. As Hammes notes, the Chinese Communists fought for almost thirty years, the Vietnamese Communists exactly thirty years, the Sandinistas for almost twenty years, the Palestinians for almost forty years, the Chechens for ten years, and A1 Qaeda itself for more than twenty years (if one counts back to 1984, when the Afghan Service Bureau, Al Qaeda's previous incarnation, was founded in Pakistan). Now, imagine a Bush Administration attempting to argue for a course of action that would not feature the action hero Remo Williams single-handedly conquering Iraq but a casualty-heavy war that was going to last for a decade or two. It is impossible to imagine, and yet this is the war they have provided.
In the summer of 2005, the Pentagon assembled a sixteen-page blueprint intended to prevent the postwar chaos in Iraq from ever happening again. This document "assigns responsibilities within the Department of Defense to plan, train, and prepare to conduct and support stability operations." As a Pentagon official explained, "The idea is to apply the same sort of rigor to stability operations that we do to major combat operations." Why this blueprint did not exist before the invasion speaks powerfully to the current strategic confusion. Enlisted Marines seem particularly baffled by questions of strategy. With no weapons of mass destruction found and a hostile populace to contend with, the question of what this war is about, or whom it is for, proves impossible for many of them to answer. "I guess we're here for the Iraqis," one sergeant told me. "But I don't trust them. I guess it's good we're here. Saddam was just going to keep acting up. He would have done another 9/11. But I really want to get the fuck out of here."
I was finally able to discuss the larger strategy with Lieutenant Colonel Steven Boylan, a public affairs officer in Baghdad's Green Zone. The strategy, he said, is "at several levels. I can talk on the military side. All of that has to do with across-the-board military operations. We have thirty to forty battalion-level operations every day. This helps take the steam out of the insurgency, which has the luxury of attacking when and where they want." How, then, are they fighting the insurgents? "We've taken away their safe havens, so they don't have a base to work from." The insurgents' lack of safe havens would be news to many Marines in Anbar province.
The centerpiece of the current U.S. strategy is to rely on a people whose military the United States twice humiliated on the battlefield to destroy an insurgency it did not create. "The ultimate goal," Boylan told me, "is that we work ourselves out of a job. The Coalition is not going to be the ones who win this. The Iraqis will be the ones who win this, because they're the only ones who can."
Boylan believes that the polls have slipped because the media shows only one side of the conflict. He points to the 3,000 schools that have been renovated, the construction of water plants and other pieces of infrastructure, the 26,000 new Iraqi businesses that have been established. But much of this progress has been annulled by the security situation. Many parents keep their children out of school: "If you love your children, you won't send them to school here because we will kill them," one insurgent flyer posted in the city of Tal Afar read. Journeying four miles from Baghdad's airport to the Green Zone can take the better part of two days, and wandering two hundred yards beyond the wire of any U.S. base requires a full military escort. The Marines are forced to travel four hours out of their way to avoid a particularly dangerous highway between TQ and Fallujah. "The most powerful army in the history of the world," one soldier told me, "cannot keep a two-mile stretch of road open."
"Victory in Iraq" is now what it will take for the country to be successfully reconstructed, develop democracy, and stabilize into the tourist haven Donald Rumsfeld predicted in 2003. All of this, we are now told, will take time. "We are in a process," a senior Bush Administration official told the Washington Post in August, "of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."
While waiting for a flight out of Baghdad's airport with two American contractors, my impatience with Iraq's reconstruction was met with pitying headshakes. Both men had extensive experience in the Middle East and viewed Iraq as a project at least one decade in the making. They derided my generation's "quick-fix" mind-set. Too much television. Too many video games.
We had just dined at Baghdad International Airport's Sports Oasis, where we had our choice of soul food, Indian food, U.S. Thanksgiving-style food (the candied yams were particularly delicious) in a Wal-Mart-sized dining room draped with the thirty-two flags of every NFL team. The air-conditioning was triumphant, and a menagerie of big-screen televisions were all tuned to Fox News. No doubt it was tough work getting all of this stuff into Iraq--slow, painstaking, logistically demanding work. Baghdad's Green Zone is itself a masterpiece of corralling and misdirection, the beams piled high with sandbags and thousand-pound sectional cement blast walls looming everywhere one looks. The hours all this must have taken to lay out and arrange are astounding. But it was considered important, and resources were allocated to make sure it got done.
It is one of my last nights on Taqaddum, and I share a non-alcoholic St. Pauli Girl beer with a Navy commander who works in TQ's surgical ward. We speak not of the war but of home: what he misses (golf), what he will do when he gets back (golf). It is near dusk, and we both agree that, sometimes, Iraq can seem almost pleasant and its violence very distant. The moment comes for the commander to do what we are waiting for, which is to take down the U.S. and Iraqi flags that fly in tandem at every official site on the base. "Take hold of the grommets," he tells me when he unhooks the U.S. flag from its ropes. As I hold the grommets the commander carefully folds the flag, leaving the star side up, and by the end he has managed a tight triangle of bright, perfectly bundled cloth. The Iraqi flag is next. I stand there, waiting to be handed my end, but after he unclasps the Iraqi flag he bunches it up and throws it onto a nearby chair. I look at this sad, rumpled bit of cloth and then at him. He catches himself and does not quite smile as he looks down at his boots. "We don't usually fold that one."
(n1) These are large canvas containers, named for the company that produces them, that are held together by chain-link fence and filled with dirt to absorb blast damage and shrapnel. Hescos bracelet everything on TQ from latrines to the chow hall to the command center, and are the usual constituents of the partition mazes used to slow down potential car bombers.
(n2) Lawrence is still a presence in Iraq, and in more than one Marine's office I find his words on wall-hung plaques: "Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them." There is another bit of Lawrentian wisdom, however, that few have chosen to enshrine: "With 2,000 years of examples behind us we have no excuse, when fighting, for not fighting well."
(n3) That unit, combat Logistics Regiment 25, is the largest deployed supply detachment in the Marine Corps.
(n4) Such stories are common among Marines, I later learn from a ballistics expert, but are more than slightly exaggerated.
(n5) The insurgents' tendency to reuse IED holes, especially when considered alongside their deviousness in other areas, is either their most mysterious or most pathetic habit. Yet many Marines regard the insurgents as formidable opponents. The insurgents are believed to know the scheduling for most patrols and convoys, are assumed to spend weeks observing the traffic emerging from the base before an attack, and are known to possess maps of TQ's layout.
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Citation: Tom Bissell. "Improvised, Explosive, and Divisive," Harper's Magazine, January 2006.
Original URL: http://www.harpers.org
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