Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War
398
Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War
398eBook
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Overview
Finalist for the 2013 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History
Surge is an insider’s view of the most decisive phase of the Iraq War. After exploring the dynamics of the war during its first three years, the book takes the reader on a journey to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where the controversial new US Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency doctrine was developed; to Washington, DC, and the halls of the Pentagon, where the joint chiefs of staff struggled to understand the conflict; to the streets of Baghdad, where soldiers worked to implement the surge and reenergize the flagging war effort before the Iraqi state splintered; and to the halls of Congress, where Amb. Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus testified in some of the most contentious hearings in recent history.
Using newly declassified documents, unpublished manuscripts, interviews, author notes, and published sources, Surge explains how President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Ambassador Crocker, General Petraeus, and other US and Iraqi political and military leaders shaped the surge from the center of the maelstrom in Baghdad and Washington.
“This is one of the best books to emerge from the Iraq War. I expect it will be remembered as one of the most insightful accounts from an insider of the key ‘surge’ phase of that conflict. The chapter on the Sunni Awakening especially stands out as a terrific overview of that critical development.” —Thomas E. Ricks, author of Fiasco
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300199161 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/18/2019 |
| Series: | The Yale Library of Military History |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 398 |
| Sales rank: | 550,419 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A War Almost Lost
The first, the supreme, the 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.
— Carl von Clausewitz
By the end of 2006, the United States, its coalition partners, and its indigenous allies were well on their way to losing the war in Iraq. By December of that year, more than three thousand Iraqis were dying violently every month. Terror gripped the Iraqi people, many of whom suffered from a lack of basic services and employment. The fabric of Iraqi society had been torn by a nascent civil war that featured ethnosectarian struggles for control over state power and resources. Sunni insurgents attacked U.S., coalition, and Iraqi security forces with roadside bombs, mortar and sniper fire, and occasionally direct assaults on isolated positions. Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists preyed on Shi'a Iraqis by using massive car bombs and suicide bombers that killed dozens and sometimes hundreds of people with each explosion. In return, Shi'a militias roamed into religiously mixed communities in Baghdad and elsewhere to cleanse them of their Sunni inhabitants. The bound-and-gagged bodies of young Sunni males turned up on Baghdad's streets each morning, often displaying such grisly signs of torture as holes drilled into their skulls. To make matters worse, local security forces, particularly the Iraqi National Police, were implicated in this sectarian violence. Sunni communities under violent siege rallied around their defenders of last re-sort — insurgents and al-Qaeda operatives who intimidated the local inhabitants, preyed upon them for sustenance, and brutalized those who failed to provide support. By the end of 2006 more than 1.6 million Iraqi Sunnis had fled the country, largely emigrating to Syria and Jordan, and an additional 1.5 million — 70 percent of whom originated from Baghdad — were internally displaced within Iraq. Iraq was coming apart at the seams, beginning with its capital city, Baghdad.
This dire situation had been building ever since the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. The rapid victory of U.S. forces in toppling Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime masked fundamental issues that haunted the subsequent occupation of the country. Absence of planning for the aftermath of major combat operations — a shortfall in large part predicated on the assumption that Iraqis would view American troops as liberators and would cooperate to quickly take charge of their own destiny — resulted in a chaotic occupation that failed to deliver enough security, jobs, and essential services to instill hope in the Iraqi people that a better life lay ahead. To the Iraqi people, the 2003 war was a continuation of the war that began in 1991 and continued via the United Nations sanctions regime. The sanctions depleted Iraq's resources, deeply frayed the social fabric of the country, and all but destroyed the welfare state that had been able to care for Iraq's citizens (at least those who did not cross Saddam Hussein) before the Gulf War. The Iraqi people needed a great deal more help than U.S. planners envisaged.
What was supposed to be a difficult stability operation in postconflict Iraq instead turned into a vicious counterinsurgency fight in an environment in which the Iraqi government and law and order had completely collapsed and the Iraqi economy at first sputtered, then stalled. When the rosy assumptions that underpinned the invasion proved flawed, there was no branch plan to fall back upon, and the hoped-for liberation soon turned into an arduous occupation governed by a series of improvisations. Despite widespread relief at Saddam Hussein's downfall, the majority of the Iraqi people were unwilling to risk their lives by cooperating with coalition forces for the sake of an uncertain future.
Temporal and conceptual shortfalls hampered postwar planning. Bush administration officials viewed the takeover of Iraq in much the same light as the Allied occupation of Germany or Japan after World War II, an analogy that was both inaccurate and inappropriate. To begin with, General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff in World War II, began preparation for the occupation of Germany on January 6, 1942, only one month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when he authorized the creation of a school to train officers in military government functions. By the end of 1943, the foundation had been laid for a military government in Germany, nearly eighteen months before this goal became reality. Serious planning for the occupation of Iraq, on the other hand, did not begin until January 20, 2003, only two months before the beginning of the invasion, when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tasked retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner with establishing the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs (ORHA). The amount of time devoted to planning for regime replacement was woefully insufficient given the huge task ahead. Much of the substantive planning that was accomplished focused on humanitarian issues, and indeed these efforts helped to forestall a humanitarian crisis in Iraq in the spring of 2003. Planning for regime replacement, on the other hand, was disjointed, fragmented, chaotic, and riven with bureaucratic rivalries that dissipated the U.S. effort to create a stable Iraq following the conclusion of major combat operations. The result was a catastrophic failure of American policy and strategy, the results of which still resonate to this day.
Ironically, the Allied experience in liberating and occupying nations during World War II was applicable, but the Bush administration chose the wrong examples. Instead of Germany or Japan, the occupations of Italy in 1943 and Korea in 1945 were better guides to the liberation of Iraq in 2003. The Allied treatment of Italian fascists was both pragmatic and reasonable, compared to punitive deNazification efforts in Germany. The experience of controlling Korea from 1945 to 1950 with a corps headquarters instead of a larger and more capable army headquarters provides a useful lesson in how not to manage a military occupation. Had Department of Defense and other interagency officials understood and learned from the history of the U.S. armed forces in occupation duties, they could have avoided many of the mistakes that soon turned the Iraq War into a strategic nightmare.
The efforts of Garner and his team to stabilize Iraq after the fall of Baghdad were well intentioned but dysfunctional. Inadequate communications, poor coordination, and personal rivalries hampered the best efforts of those involved in the process. In response, on May 11, 2003, Rumsfeld established a new headquarters, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), to govern Iraq. The ensuing transition between ORHA and CPA created even more turmoil. When Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III arrived in Baghdad to assume duties as the head of CPA, he largely ignored the advice and understanding of Iraqi institutions offered by Garner and his team. Bremer had served as ambassador to the Netherlands in the 1980s, but he had little experience in the Middle East, did not speak Arabic, and lacked a thorough knowledge of the history, politics, social composition, and psyche of the Iraqi people. His decision making and handling of the transition in just his first three weeks in Baghdad arguably set the stage for a lengthy and virulent insurgency.
Bremer's first major decision was to de-Ba'athify Iraqi society. Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party had controlled Iraq for more than three decades with an iron fist and brutal resolve. By 2003 Iraqi society was highly traumatized, with sectarian and ethnic tensions lingering just below the surface. Senior Ba'athist leaders had to be removed from their positions and those implicated in criminal activity put in prison to await trial for their misdeeds. How deep to extend de-Ba'athification, however, was an open question.
The Iraqi Ba'ath Party was a hierarchical organization with a half-dozen layers. At the top were Saddam Hussein, his immediate family, and his closest advisers; just beneath them were other key regime officials, and so on. Had Bremer decided to disenfranchise the top three levels of the Ba'ath Party — perhaps one thousand or so of the highest-ranking Ba'athists — few Iraqis would have objected. But such action was not decisive enough for the America's new viceroy in Iraq. Influenced by Douglas Feith and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, Bremer decided that de-Ba'athification would extend to the fourth, or firqah, level. This decision put out of work not just Saddam Hussein, his immediate family, and their closest compatriots, but tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqis — most but not all Sunni — who had joined the party in order to obtain better jobs (Ba'ath Party membership being a requirement for the best positions in Iraqi society). These were professionals, doctors, engineers, university professors, and civil servants — many of them the same people that U.S. war plans had assumed would remain in their positions to enable Iraq to function after regime change occurred. Instead, CPA Order Number 1 (May 16, 2003) put these Iraqis out of work, denied them their livelihood and pensions, and removed any chance of a political future. In short, de-Ba'athification took hope away from much of Iraq's Sunni elite class, which viewed de-Ba'athification as de facto "de-Sunnification" of Iraq. One could hardly fault the Sunnis for rejecting the future vision of Iraq put forward by America and its allies. For all of its faults, and they were many, the Ba'ath Party was an equal-opportunity oppressor. U.S. policy opened the door to a sectarian Iraq. ORHA administrator Jay Garner later told journalist George Packer that he woke up the day after Bremer issued the de-Ba'athification decree to discover "three or four hundred thousand enemies and no Iraqi face on the government." In a single stroke of the pen, Bremer had created the political basis for the Iraqi insurgency.
Bremer's second major decision compounded the errors of his first. CPA Order 2, again influenced by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, disbanded all Iraqi government departments that had a role in security or intelligence — the Republican Guard, the Special Republican Guard, paramilitary organizations created by Saddam Hussein as instruments of regime control, and, most critically, the Iraqi Army, Air Force, Navy, Air Defense Force, and other regular military services. Clearly, CPA had to dissolve those entities developed by Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party for regime control, many of which were implicated in horrific acts of violence against the Iraqi people. The decision to disestablish the regular armed forces of Iraq was much more troubling and harder to justify. The U.S. military's own war plans called for using the Iraqi Army to help stabilize postwar Iraq. While the Republican Guard and other instruments of regime control were understandably unpopular, the Iraqi people viewed their armed forces as national institutions, which "generated considerable sympathy and respect throughout Iraq." With the exception of the Kurds, most Iraqis wanted the armed forces retained intact, albeit shorn of their Ba'athist ideology.
In his memoirs, Bremer insists that recalling the Iraqi Army would have been logistically difficult since the Iraqi soldiers had fled home, their barracks and camps thoroughly looted and uninhabitable. He also equates the regular Iraqi Army with the worst of abuses committed largely by other security organizations during Saddam's regime. His arguments ignore several basic facts. Iraqi soldiers may have gone home, but they had also taken their weapons with them. It would have been possible to call them back to the colors (jobs, after all, were scarce) and reform units under new senior leadership. The reformed Iraqi Army would have been capable of helping to stabilize Iraq. When CPA later offered the soldiers back pay to soften the blow to the Iraqi economy, hundreds of thousands showed up to collect. It would have been easy enough to find tens of thousands of volunteers to reform the ranks under new leadership, and put them to work on Iraq's streets to reduce looting and violence. Instead, CPA Order Number 2 put out of work hundreds of thousands of armed young men, and even more critically, tens of thousands of officers — mostly Sunni — who were stripped of their rank and denied their livelihoods, their pensions, any hope of a political future, and perhaps most important in Iraqi society, deprived of their honor. Many of these men, willing enough at first to cooperate with American forces and their allies, took their not inconsiderable military skills with them into what they viewed as honorable resistance to the occupation of their homeland. In a second stroke of the pen, Bremer had created the military basis for the insurgency.
The isolation of the Sunni elite from Iraq's political future deepened when Bremer formed the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) in July. Politicians who had spent much of the past three decades in exile, some of them highly sectarian in outlook, dominated the body. The Sunni elite were largely shut out of the council, as were the Shi'a underclass, whose champion was the fiery cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The twenty-five members of the council lacked any real authority, other than to parcel out jobs in the ministries they dominated. In fact, the council members could not agree at first as to how to allocate the twenty-one ministries among themselves, so they created four new ministries to allow each council member to select one minister. The council members did not even hide their agenda, telling Bremer the apportionment was simply designed to create "jobs for the boys." Government services, already critically degraded by the loss of expertise due to de-Ba'athification, suffered even further when technocratic managers were replaced by political hacks in many of the key ministries. The creation of the IGC began the polarization of Iraqi politics based on sect — an outcome that was not necessarily a given after the fall of the Ba'athist regime. Furthermore, the IGC neither convinced the Arab "street" that Iraqis were in charge of their own destiny nor served to increase the legitimacy of the occupation authority among Iraqis. CPA and the IGC would clash on a number of issues in the months ahead, and their tenuous relationship would reach a breaking point during the crisis brought about by the uprisings of April 2004.
De-Ba'athification, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, and the creation of the sectarian Iraqi Governing Council were disastrous decisions that would lead to years — and perhaps generations — of bloodshed in Iraq. These decisions turned what would probably have been a minor Ba'athist guerrilla movement into a widespread Sunni nationalist insurgency. Historian Andrew Terrill, who has written perhaps the best analysis of de-Ba'athification to date, writes, "In particular, it is now understood that loyalty commissions led by politicians and set up to identify internal enemies can take on a life of their own and become part of a nation's power structure. Once this occurs, such organizations are exceedingly difficult to disestablish. Likewise, the basic unfairness of collective punishment has again been underscored as an engine of anger, resentment, and backlash. Conversely, the importance of honest and objective judicial institutions has also been underscored, as has the importance of maintaining a distinction between revenge and justice." According to historian Mark Moyar, Bremer and other leaders who made these decisions "lacked empathy and judgment, as well as historical knowl-edge" In Moyar's view, reconstruction in the South after the American Civil War was a much closer analogue to Iraq in 2003 than Germany after World War II. Had American leaders possessed better historical sense, they would have realized "that disfranchising entrenched elites and transferring political power to a new group of uncertain character via elections would drive the old elites into rebellion." Indeed, according to historian Mark Grimsley, radical reconstruction in the American South led to a protracted war that pitted "the forces of white supremacy against the forces of black liberation" and took nearly a century to resolve.
(Continues…)
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Copyright © 2013 Peter R. Mansoor.
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Table of Contents
Foreword by David Petraeus,
Preface,
Acknowledgments,
List of Abbreviations,
Maps,
Prologue: Baghdad, February 11, 2007,
1. A War Almost Lost,
2. Designing the Surge,
3. Fardh al-Qanoon,
4. Tower,
5. The Awakening,
6. Turning the Tide,
7. Testimony,
8. Power Politics,
9. Charge of the Knights,
10. The Surge in Retrospect,
Appendix 1 Report to Congress on the Situation in Iraq,
Appendix 2 Multi-National Force-Iraq Commander's Counterinsurgency Guidance,
Appendix 3 Anaconda Strategy versus al-Qaeda in Iraq,
Appendix 4 Security Incidents in Iraq,
Notes,
Index,
Illustrations follow page 152,
Interviews
Praise for Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War
“Surge is an extraordinary account of a decisive campaign in the Iraq War by one who is uniquely qualified to write it. Colonel (Ret.) Pete Mansoor not only is a history professor, he also was a brigade commander in Iraq during our first year there and then was my executive officer for the first fifteen months of the surge. I am confident that his firsthand account of that chapter of our involvement in Iraq will contribute enormously to the understanding of what our military men and women—and their coalition, Iraqi, and civilian partners—accomplished in 2007 and 2008. It is gratifying to see their exceptional work recounted by one who was there and who has the academic expertise and military understanding to provide context to their achievements and depth of understanding to their sacrifices. This superb account of a critical period will inform scholarship on the Iraq War for years to come.”—General (Ret.) David H. Petraeus
Praise for Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq
"Unflinching. . . . [Mansoor] tells the story of that fateful first year in Iraq from the point of view of one who saw decisions being made at the highest echelons, yet led soldiers in executing those orders day by day."—Bill Murphy, Washington Post
"Colonel Mansoor displays the knowledge of a soldier alongside the narrative gifts of a true historian, weaving dramatic events together, capturing the thoughts and emotions of street-level fighters, and describing Iraqi society as it tries to emerge from the maelstrom of war."—Mark Moyar, Wall Street Journal
“Destined to be studied in war colleges for generations. . . . A far better guide to counterinsurgency warfare than the official manual published by the Army and Marines."—Ralph Peters, New York Post