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2 US MILITARY BREAKS RANKS,
Part 1 A salvo at the White
House By Mark Perry
For
military officers in the Pentagon's E-Ring (where
the most important defense issues are decided),
the shift in the public mood has been nearly
miraculous: last September, on the eve of General
David Petraeus' Congressional testimony on the
George W Bush administration's 'surge' strategy,
the American electorate was consumed by the war in
Iraq.
Now, just four months later, that
same electorate has shifted its attention to the
2008 elections. Public polls reflect the shift.
Iraq no longer tops the list of issues of concern
to Americans - its
place having been usurped
over worries about the economy - and is competing
for attention with healthcare and immigration.
(The "war on terror" is a poor seventh - a
stunning turnabout from the two years following
September 11, 2001.) But the perceptible fall-off
in public attention from foreign policy to
domestic issues is hardly a palliative for Defense
Secretary Robert Gates, the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
or America's highest-ranking combatant commanders,
all of whom continue to deal with the continuing
uncertain military situation Iraq.
The
fact that the Iraq war has been pushed off the
front pages of America's newspapers has given the
US military a seeming respite from the almost
endless spate of disastrous stories coming out of
the Middle East, as well as the almost endless
round of embarrassing questions from the press
about what they intend to do about it.
But
military officers say that the American public
should not be fooled: the relative quiet in Iraq -
and it is, after all, only a "relative quiet" -
does not mean the "surge" has worked, or that the
problems facing the US military have somehow
magically gone away. Quite the opposite. For while
the American public is consumed by the campaign
for the presidency, the American military is not.
Instead, they are as obsessed now, in January of
2008, with the war in Iraq as they were then, in
2003 - except that now, many military officers
admit, the host of problems they face may, in
fact, be much more intractable.
First
contact "Don't let the quiet fool you," a
senior defense official says. "There's still a
huge chasm between how the White House views Iraq
and how we [in the Pentagon] view Iraq. The White
House would like to have you believe the 'surge'
has worked, that we somehow defeated the
insurgency. That's just ludicrous. There's
increasing quiet in Iraq, but that's happened
because of our shift in strategy - the 'surge' had
nothing to do with it."
In part, the roots
of the disagreement between the Pentagon and White
House over what is really happening in Iraq is
historical. Senior military officers contend that
the seeming fall-off in in-country violence not
only has nothing to do with the increase in US
force levels, but that the dampening of the
insurgency that took hold last summer could have
and would have taken place much earlier, within
months of America's April 2003 occupation of
Baghdad.
Moreover, these officers contend,
the insurgency might not have put down roots in
the country after the fall of Baghdad if it had
not been for the White House and State Department
- which undermined military efforts to strike
deals with a number of Iraq's most disaffected
tribal leaders. These officers point out that the
first contact between high-level Pentagon
officials and the nascent insurgency took place in
Amman, Jordan, in August of 2003 - but senior Bush
administration officials killed the talks.
A second round of meetings, this time with
leaders of some of al-Anbar province's tribal
chiefs, took place in November of 2004, but again
senior administration officials refused to build
on the contacts that were made. "We made the right
contacts, we said the right things, we listened
closely, we put a plan in place that would have
saved a lot of time and trouble," a senior
Pentagon official says. "And every time we were
ready to go forward, the White House said 'no'."
At the center of these early talks was a
group of Iraqis led by Sheikh Talal al-Gaood, a
Sunni businessman with close ties to Anbar's
tribal leaders. Gaood, who died of a heart ailment
in March of 2006, was a passionate Iraqi patriot
who feared growing al-Qaeda influence in his
country. Speaking over coffee from his office in
Amman in 2005, Gaood was enraged by the "endless
mistakes" of the US leadership. "You [Americans]
face a Wahhabi threat that you cannot even begin
to fathom," he said at the time, and he derided
White House "propaganda" about the role of Syria
in fueling the insurgency.
Gaood, looking
every bit the former Ba'athist - complete with
suspenders and Saddam Hussein-like mustache was
particularly critical of what he called "the
so-called counter-insurgency experts among
Washington policymakers who think they know Iraq
but don't." As he argued: "The guys who come
through here, very educated, come in their brown
robes and say they are going to Iraq to kill the
Americans. They are not Syrians. They are
Wahhabis. They are from Saudi Arabia. But if you
talk to American officials, it is like they don't
exist."
That might have been true for
civilian policymakers, but it wasn't true for the
military - who were beginning to take heavy
casualties from armed insurgents in Sunni areas.
Throughout 2004 and 2005, a group of senior US
military officers, including high-ranking US
Marine Corps commanders, attempted to expand their
ties in western Iraq through Gaood and the network
of leaders he provided them.
But these
commanders continued to run into opposition to
their program from then-National Security Council
director Condoleezza Rice, who maintained her
opposition to their program after she became
secretary of state. L Paul Bremer, the head of the
Coalition Provisional Authority, who had suspended
the Ba'ath army and was intent to cleanse Iraq of
its Ba'athist influence, also opposed the program
through all of 2004. "Bremer was just nuts about
any meetings with any insurgents, any Ba'athists,
anyone he didn't approve," a Pentagon official
notes, "and Condi backed him up".
By the
end of 2005, Rice's opposition to any opening to
the Sunni leadership in Iraq became almost
obsessive, according to currently serving senior
military officers. In one incident, now notorious
in military circles, Rice "just went completely
crazy" when she learned that a marine colonel had
dispatched combat helicopters to help a "a Sunni
sheikh" in Fallujah fight what the sheikh called
an "imminent al-Qaeda threat".
As a senior
Pentagon official now relates: "The Sunni leader
literally picked up the telephone one day and
called the ranking colonel at the 1st Marine
Expeditionary Force (MEF)and pleaded with him, 'I
need help and I need it now. Al-Qaeda is killing
my tribe'." The marine colonel in question was
John Coleman, the chief of staff to the same unit
that had gone into Fallujah to fight the
insurgency after the killing of four US security
contractors in April of 2004.
"Rice was
just enraged with Coleman and with the marines," a
senior Pentagon officials say. "She said, 'you
have to stop all of that right now and you can't
do it unless you have State Department permission
and the permission of the Iraqi government'. Well,
the marines weren't about to do that. They were
taking a lot of casualties and they were fed up.
And they just concluded that it was their war and
not hers," a senior Pentagon civilian recently
noted. "So they just ignored her and went ahead
anyway."
In
the wake of his marines-to-the-rescue efforts,
Coleman and the 1st MEF began a program of
cooperation with Fallujah's leaders, making a
broad range of contacts with local officials who
were fearful of al-Qaeda's influence in their
city. The marine commanders in the 1st MEF were
under no illusions, a Pentagon official now says -
they were "engaged in talks with the insurgents,
people who had been killing American soldiers
since the fall of Baghdad".
The tipping point Coleman's action
might well have ended his career, if it had not
been for then-secretary of defense Donald
Rumsfeld, whose lack of respect for Rice bordered
on the neurotic, and Coleman's commanding officer,
Marine Lieutenant General James T Conway. Conway,
an oversize Arkansan who sports a carpet of combat
ribbons, was not only a Coleman partisan, he had
been angered by orders to send his marines into
Fallujah in April of 2004 to take on the city's
insurgents, a point he made clear to the
Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran, five
months after the attack: "When we were told to
attack Fallujah, I think we certainly increased
the level of animosity that existed," Conway said.
Conway told Chandrasekaran he preferred
engagement with Fallujah's leaders to
confrontation, but that he was bound to follow
orders - which had come down to his superior, army
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, from the White
House. Conway protested to Sanchez that going into
Fallujah "with guns blazing" was the worst thing
his marines could do, but Sanchez would hear none
of it. "I have my orders, and now you have yours,"
Sanchez pointedly said.
Months later,
Conway was still seething: "We felt like we had a
method that we wanted to apply to Fallujah: that
we ought to probably let the situation settle
before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge.
Would our system have been better? Would we have
been able to bring over the people of Fallujah
with our methods? You'll never know that for sure,
but at the time we certainly thought so."
The tight circle of Pentagon civilians
around Rumsfeld (inherited and largely kept intact
by Robert Gates), which had been pushing for an
opening to Anbar's tribal leaders (who had been
talking to Gaood in Amman, and through him to some
of Anbar's tribal leaders) now cite the Coleman
incident as perhaps the key "tipping point" in the
military's shift in strategy in Iraq.
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