The Iraq War: Implementation

In the next stage of the war -- the plan is implemented, we go to war, and one of the startling revelations in your book is the soldiers on the ground, especially the Fifth Corps commander, saw pretty quickly that the war plan that we had wasn't going to work. What was the response that you reveal in the book by the higher echelons, the civilian echelons, in the Pentagon?

The concept of the enemy that they had at CENTCOM (General Franks' command) and in the Pentagon was basically a replay of the last war. You're going to fight the Republican Guard, you defeat them, you take Baghdad, war's over. And the intelligence on the situation in southern Iraq was also very deficient. But when the forces crossed into southern Iraq, they were soon involved in fierce battles in Nasiriya, Osamawa, and Najaf. I don't think the American public appreciates just how tough some of those fights were. They seem to have the notion that they just drove to Baghdad and then had a battle for a couple days and the war ended. It wasn't that way at all.

All the principal field commanders understood that this was a different situation, and also a different enemy, than they had been led to expect. This was not the Republican Guard. It wasn't even the regular army. This was a paramilitary force called the Saddam Fedayeen, established by Saddam primarily to suppress the Shia and prevent an uprising. [They] didn't wear uniforms, were equipped at RPGs -- small arms, thousands of them, huge caches of arms in these towns. And fanatical, prepared to fight to the end.

General Wallace, the Fifth Corps commander, General Conway, the Marine commander, and General McKiernan, the overall Allied Land War Commander had a meeting in Jalaba Air Base, and they decided among themselves that, "Look, we can't just continue to march to Baghdad, we're getting hit in our supply lines, these guys are coming out to threaten our logistics, we've got to deal with this. We've got to pause this attack to Baghdad for a few days and just cope with these Fedayeen." There was no disagreement there. There was some "how long?," maybe some differences, but on the principle that you had to pause and deal with it, everybody agreed at that level, this three-star level.

But General Franks back in Qatar (not Iraq!), where his command was headquartered, didn't see it that way, and neither did Secretary Rumsfeld, in my judgment. They were unhappy with this pause and they discounted the Fedayeen threat. They basically considered the Fedayeen a distraction or a speed bump on the way to Baghdad. They wanted to press onwards.

General Wallace began to talk somewhat publicly about this decision, and he gave a pretty famous interview to a reporter from the New York Times and the Washington Post. He said, "We're going to pause, we're going to deal with this threat that we hadn't anticipated, and then we'll continue. " When I heard General Wallace make those remarks, I thought, "Well, nothing surprising there." But General Franks' reaction was that he threatened to fire General Wallace and had to be talked out of it. This was an important moment, because in my judgment, had General Franks and Secretary Rumsfeld correctly read the developments on the battlefield, they would have come to the conclusion that there was an enemy out there that was not likely to go away with the fall of Baghdad, that would at a minimum be a thorn in our side and perhaps more than that, and therefore we need to prepare to deal with this. And they would've continued to send reinforcements.

What they did was, as the forces continued to get to Baghdad, they stopped sending the reinforcements and began to pocket their victory. If they had paid attention to this Fedayeen force, they would've said, "Don't know what's going to happen, don't know where these people are going to be exactly after Baghdad falls, but we'd better send some more troops, and the right type of troops, to deal with it."

This is one of the pitfalls of transformation [to] Rumsfeld's emphasis on a high-tech military, which has many positive elements. But they look on a -- literally look on a computer screen. I've seen them. We're the blue guys, "blue team," which is always the good guys, the blue force; the enemy's the red force. The Republican Guard divisions get an icon on that computer screen. There's something for the Medina division, the Hamurabi division, the al Nidal division, the regular army division, the Tenth and the Sixth, they have red icons. You look on that screen and you think, we've got to get those guys. Well, paramilitary guys driving around in pickup trucks, they don't get an icon. And so, if you're sitting back in Qatar like General Franks was, or at the Pentagon like Secretary Rumsfeld was, and if you're relying on this computer representation of the battlefield, you're missing what's happening on the battlefield. When the blue icons don't move, you may come to the conclusion that they're not fighting. Well, they are fighting. They're fighting these other guys who don't even have an icon.

So you don't get the information about what is going on, on the ground, which is what information systems are supposed to make possible under the "revolution in military affairs."

And if your mentality, as Secretary Rumsfeld's mentality was, is that the Army's too "Cold War," too cautious, they're ponderous, they always want more troops, and then your generals start talking about pausing, you're inclined to say, "Aw, this is another example of how the U.S. Army is risk averse!" instead of saying, "Wait a second, we hadn't thought of this, we need to adapt."

So, what you're saying is that the conduct of the war that led to military victory in the third phase created the situation for a stalemate in the fourth phase, when stabilization occurs. Now another element in this that you emphasize that becomes very important is Bremmer's decision to abolish the Iraqi army. Talk about that, because then you couldn't turn to those forces to use them in the post-conflict stabilization effort.

I don't think there's any one factor that led to the insurgency. The misreading of the battlefield was one, because it led Secretary Rumsfeld and General Franks to cancel the deployment of a division that was otherwise due to go to Iraq, and left General McKiernan without the First Cavalry division. They didn't even send all the divisions allocated under the plan because they discounted the strat on the battlefield. I think that's a factor.

The aversion to nation building -- that it created unhealthy dependencies by the host population on the intervening force -- Rumsfeld gave a speech on this in New York one month before the war, "Beyond Nation-Building." We didn't want to provide the police. This is not a sin of omission, this is a sin of commission. We didn't want to provide the police. We weren't prepared to deal with the electrical grid. They were going to do this based on the export of the oil. Fine. That's plan A, but if plan A doesn't work out, what's plan B? They didn't have a plan B. But then Ambassador Bremmer came in, and as an extension of his de-Ba'athification policy, he promulgated an edict to disestablish the Iraqi army. I have to tell you, the American military was against this, especially the way Bremmer did it. They were counting on using the Iraqi army as an ally in trying to establish control, because they knew they didn't have enough troops.

So, now Secretary Rumsfeld has limited the number of American troops by canceling the First Cavalry division and misreading the battlefield, and General Franks acquiesced in that; the Iraqi population is becoming a bit alienated because we can't meet their needs in terms of basic services; and Bremmer's essentially limiting the number of Iraqi troops. This is creating a security vacuum, and also in which an insurgency gradually began to take hold.

Now in all of this, in addition to the failure of the plan, the willful blindness, I will call it, of the civilian leadership, another problem that you give a very sharp picture of is the failure of intelligence. You're suggesting that the reliance on technology did not have what you quote one officer as saying, "a granular feel on the ground." This failure was not just the weapons of mass destruction failure, but a failure to know everything, from what Saddam's plan was in response to our attack, to not knowing physically where he was, to not knowing what the state of the infrastructure was, and on and on.

Yes. The intelligence performance was just abysmal, and it cost American lives. WMD was only a part of it. People often say there's a failure by analysts to connect the dots. Well, in Iraq the problem was, we just didn't have enough dots. We didn't have enough operatives or agents in Iraq to provide credible information about WMD . It's emerged that the CIA didn't have a single agent with direct access to Saddam's WMD efforts. They also didn't have reliable agents in the south, despite the many millions of dollars they threw around.

In Afghanistan they had such people, because there was a long history of [intelligence gathering]. The Russians invaded, the CIA worked with the Mujahadeen to fight them and provide them with stinger missiles, they had a whole host of relationships. Well, they didn't have these relationships in Iraq, they had to create them.

They were reporting back to the military that the south was ours, that there would be anti-Saddam tribes that would assist in seizing objectives, that units would capitulate en masse and surrender to the Americans. They even had a plan which actually didn't get implemented, but it was a serious plan in the eyes of the CIA, to distribute American flags in these towns so that people could wave them at the American forces as they went in, and pictures could be taken of this. In fact, one of the memorable moments comes when the 337 Cavalry squadron, who had an excellent commander, Terry Farrell, was approaching Osamawa. They're encountering Fedayeen, and they're trying to sort out what this is all about, and he gets on the radio and he said, "There's no parade; people are trying to shoot us. " Well, why did they think there might be a parade in the first place? Because this was an intelligence failure on the part of the CIA. That was a big part of it. And the U.S. forces who go into Nasariya and all these towns, they're learning as they go because they had very poor intelligence to prepare them for what they encountered.

Saddam himself was focused on rebellion in the south, hence the need for the Fedayeen. He was focused on the potential threat from Iran. And we totally misread all of that.

Well, for all the American miscalculations, Saddam's miscalculations were far worse. What you have here are two sides that utterly misread the other side's political and military strategy, and now have an outcome that neither side anticipated. Saddam's view was that the Americans would never go to Baghdad. He simply thought the United States didn't have the will to do it. This was his reading of the debacle in Somalia and even Kosovo, where the U.S. waged an air war but didn't want to get in on the ground. And he was concerned, first and foremost, about the Shia -- quite reasonable. They rose up in '91. He thought the Americans could attack but it would be air strikes, they might intervene in the southern part of his country, and the Shia would use this as an opportunity to rise up.

He was so concerned about this that he wouldn't let his generals destroy bridges without his explicit authority. Why? Because he needed to use the bridges to rush forces south to fight the Shia. Well, it was a great benefit to the advancing American army because they used these same bridges to go to Baghdad. And in terms of an external enemy, his primary enemy that he saw, ironically, is the very same one that the White House now sees: Iran, which does have WMD programs.

This is very important. One reason Saddam was not willing to come completely clean on his absence of his WMD was he didn't want to reveal his weakness to the Iranians with whom he had fought an eight-year war. So, his policy was to comply with the UN inspections, let them go wherever they want to go, but never really come clean. A Republican Guard commander, Raad al-Hamdani, called this strategy "deterrence by doubt." Hans Blix, the UN weapons inspector, later had a phrase for it. He said, "You don't have to have a dog to hang a sign outside your house that says, 'Beware of Dog.'" That's what Saddam was doing, but it backfired on him in Washington, because his efforts to preserve some ambiguity over his non-existent holdings of WMD were perceived by the CIA and by the White House as proof that he was hiding something.

The neoconservatives don't play much of a role in this account, which is a military history and a fair reflection of what were the forces that led us to this outcome, but one place where [they do] is almost like a Marx Brothers movie in the middle of this great story of the war. That is, the decision at the last minute to bring in a small number of Chalabi's soldiers so there could be an Iraqi face to the invasion. Then at the last minute, without anyone's knowledge -- not our own military commanders, apparently -- Chalabi himself was flown in. Talk a little about that, because he was an embodiment of the neoconservative idea, that this would become a transformation of Iraq.

Well, it's a really odd episode that I was able to report on the record, because I interviewed the American military officer who was the liaison with Chalabi. An American Army colonel, Ted Seal, was assigned to be with Chalabi and his fighters as a liaison officer, and every day he would get on the phone and report back to CENTCOM the status of Chalabi's fighters, unvetted. A lot of them were from Iran, by the way -- Iraqis who had fled to Iran. One day he gets an instruction to call General Abaziad, who is now the central commander, but he was then General Franks' deputy. General Abaziad says, "How many fighters does Chalabi have?," and this was at the time when we were coming up against the Fedayeen, it was getting a little tougher, the fall was going on, people were getting a little nervous about how this is going. Colonel Seal said, "Well, I'll ask him, he's standing right next to me." He said, "Ahmed, how many fighters do you have?" He said, "I have a thousand." So, Seal gets on the phone, "Uh, seven hundred." And they said, "Well, we'll fly them down there."

And so, it was agreed that they would be flown down to Talil and they would be kind of an Iraqi "Free French"-type force, you know, the Iraqi freedom fighters, and they would join us and they would speak the language at least, and they would be Iraqis, and forces that were reluctant to surrender to the Americans might surrender to them. Well, it emerged during this that Chalabi also wanted to go, and General Abaziad hadn't bargained for that. There was a discussion between [Abaziad] and Paul Wolfowitz; he didn't want to introduce a would-be politician into Iraq and take sides, but Wolfowitz's point was basically, "You're the guy that asked for his fighters and the fighters want their leader." So, they all do go down to Talil, they end up playing no constructive role in the war whatsoever, and Chalabi uses the opportunity to go to Nasariya and start making speeches. It's one of the little known but very interesting sub-themes in this war.

What do you think this experience, this history, the telling of all these elements? What will be the consequences for the American military? Will there be a new version of the "lessons of Vietnam"?

Because this war is still going on, and will go on for years, the American military has studied many of these lessons and absorbed them, and is trying to apply them. They've taken a crash course in counter-insurgency operations and civil affairs. After Bremmer's ill-advised decision to dissolve the Iraqi military, building up the Iraqi military is now top priority. They're spending vast sums on trying to do this. The people we have in Iraq now -- General Casey and Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador -- would've been there earlier, except Gerry Bremmer didn't want him there. I think they have a good relationship where their predecessors didn't. A lot of lessons have been learned and are being applied.

But the objective -- victory -- has been redefined in this war. Victory initially was, we go in, we take out Saddam, a new government is established out of the rubble, they carry the main burden, allies come in to do the main peacekeeping, we keep maybe a division there (General Franks' plan was to try to get it down to one American division by September 2003), our forces are withdrawn, refit, we've taught an object lesson to the Iranians and the Syrians. That was the original goal.

The second goal became, okay, there's an insurgency that we didn't anticipate, so now the second definition of victory [is] we defeat this insurgency and then we get back with the plan.

At this stage, the definition of victory has changed yet again. And it is: well, the insurgency is held at bay and we transfer the primary role of fighting this insurgency to a newly established Iraqi military that we support, but we gradually reduce our force presence in Iraq. But this insurgency goes on for years, and yet somehow the government holds. That's the new definition of victory in this war.

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