Related Resources

Ambassador Chamberlin, Ambassador Mack, Generals, ladies and gentlemen. What I’d like to do is go through ten slides very quickly to establish my frame of reference, and then let’s just talk. So let’s just go through these in about seven minutes and that’s it.

My basic hypothesis is that the war changed due to our troops rather than any other single variable. Let’s face it, starting in 2004 the Sunnis perceived that they had been disenfranchised, they rebelled as an entire population, and they welcomed al-Qaeda. So by mid 2004 we had a war on two fronts. And that really hasn’t been focused on enough. You had Anbar Province, which was about 1 million restive Sunnis, who were totally pissed off and quite capable of fighting, and so you had about twenty or thirty disparate groups at any particular time taking up arms at any given time for a while, then stopping while somebody else took up arms, but they welcomed among them al-Qaeda — and so that was all going on out to the west, and then you had the eastern front centered around Baghdad.

I took this picture in the second battle of Fallujah on maybe my sixth or eighth trip, I spent 18 to 20 months out there, with about sixty or seventy battalions. And the Marines were walking up the street, that city, you don’t tell Marines to take a city without knowing what’s going to happen, but some people really didn’t understand what happens when you let loose 10,000 Marines who believed they had been pushed out, and they were, because of political reasons six months earlier and now were given the chance to go back, and so I said to this Iraqi colonel who was standing besides me, I said, “Where is Zarqawi?” because the Marines were just ripping buildings apart looking for that son of a bitch. And he said “He put on a woman’s dress and he’s left town,” and I said, “well what about all this stuff about fighting to the death?” and he pointed at these guys and he said, “You’ve got to be kidding” — he didn’t say those words, he simply said, “That’s the strongest tribe.” And so that stuck with me, because in the end, that’s what we were dealing with, tribal warfare.

In 2005, and I think General Casey, to his credit, always basically said that he was not out there to win the war. All he wanted to do — all the military wanted to do, was simply turn the war over to the Iraqis to win or lose. And the more and more angry Casey and many of our soldiers and Generals became towards the Shi‘ites who had been placed in power by us, the more they said, “Hey, we’re just going to hand you this.” As someone explained to me, it’s a five pound bag of you-know- what that you’re handing to somebody and saying, “Here, here’s your strategy. You’re responsible for it.” What Casey kept consistently saying was “I’m not out here to win this. I’m going to hand this to the Iraqis and they’re going to figure it out themselves.” The White House wasn’t listening. It was extraordinary no matter how many times he said this, people somehow were disconnected and believed that our military was there to win it — our military never had any intentions of winning it. And it finally all came apart, of course, in early 2006, when the entire population was hostile towards us. Al-Qaeda had succeeded by their murderous campaign in getting that civil war going, and Washington really believed the war was lost. In fact, in the Baghdad front you could make a pretty good case [that] the war was lost.

But at the same time on the other front, on the western front, in Anbar, the interesting thing that was happening was that the Marines were on a different rotation base than the Army. I mean I really felt sorry for the Army, when you’re out there for 12 months; then they tell you 13 months, and then they said 15 months, the same guys, that really gets to you psychologically. You don’t patrol; you don’t do a lot of things the same way when you know you’re there for 15 months. The Marines were sending them in for seven months, and then out again. I could never understand why the Army didn’t just go over to that system. The Marine reenlistment rates were going up while they’re going down in the Army. Because you’re one month snapping in and one month pulling out, so you’re over there only for five months, and as a result you go at a much different pace than you if think you’re going to be there for 15 months.

They had been going back to the same cities, and I had written a few books, and I spent a lot of time with these units, and one of the things that I noticed all the time was that they had been rebuffed consistently for three or four years when they tried to have a loya jirga with the tribes, and the tribes would always come forward, the sheikhs, and say, “We can take care of this,” and then Marines would try something and they’d get slapped down again, saying, “You’re out of your league.” And they persisted and persisted, and one of them was classic, with a Marine colonel by the name of Nicholson who had been almost killed, his neck was all scarred, he was sitting there with the city council of Fallujah, and the mayor got up and began to give this speech, saying, “I am the resistance. I am with the resistance.” And Nicholson, being the terrific diplomat that only a Marine could be, he threw up his hands and said, “Terrific! So what are you resisting? Are you resisting the fact that I’m sitting here with you and that I’m paying you guys to be here? Are you resisting the fact that I’m trying to get clean water for your children? Are you resisting the fact that I rebuilt these schools? Are you resisting the fact that I’m the guy who argues with Baghdad for you? And what are you doing when my Marines are getting killed? Smarten up, we want out of here, and one day we’re going to be out of here, and you’re going to be here with your best friend!” — and then he gave the name of Jinabi and a few of the others hanging around with al-Qaeda gang.

And it finally got through, and I believe, I really believe, that in insurgencies, particularly in Iraq, that Tolstoy had it right, and this theory that we had as Americans, in the press, is just whacky. When you’re fighting this kind of war, the notion of the great leader view of history; that of a Lincoln, a Washington, or whomever you want to name, a Petraeus, and others follow him and he changes the direction — that’s nonsense. That’s not what happens. Tolstoy had it right when he said at the Battle of Bordino, in War and Peace, Napoleon didn’t have a clue what was going on, and every single order that he gave was not carried out, and that the battle, as he explained his theory of history, really had to do with the movement of the French and their feeling that this was their time, smacking right up with the Russian’s belief that they could prevail, and the battle went on independent of what the generals were saying, and that a truly great leader knows that he has to seize the opportunity when there is a movement of the people — and that is what creates a great leader.

And certainly what happened out here in Anbar was that gradually on a local, very local level, every American battalion was getting to know all the players in each city, and by late 2006, you could see significant changes happening in terms of the attitude of the Sunnis about where they were headed. And out of that group there came this man that I considered to be — if I had to use one word about changing things from the top, and he didn’t do it from the top, I’d say look at Sattar; before you look at Petreaus or anyone else. Abu Risha Sattar was a mid-level, just a mid- level sheikh, but he had the guts to basically say after his father was killed, and the sheikhs had tried to rebel two or three times against al-Qaeda in late 2005, beginning of 2006, and they were just cut down, and he had lost his brother and his father. And he basically said, “I’m going to try again,” and then he got a few tribes going, and then he got a few more going.

The interesting thing is, at this point, if you went to Haditha, if you went to Kaldia, if you went to al Habbaniyah, you discovered that there was this movement. For instance when I was in al-Habbaniyah, tough place between Ramadi and Fallujah — along the river, so as a result you have so much cover, concealment, it was very difficult to see where the various gangs you were fighting were. And this other sheikh came in, by the name of Abbas, and he said, “Sattar, all he ever does is talk,” — They always say that, just like us — and he said, I can really do something, so he went to the mosque and handed a list to the imam of about 120 people. He said, “I want every single one of these to sign a declaration within the next two weeks against al-Qaeda, or I’m coming hunting for them. Now the local battalion commander, Muhammad, had lost twelve soldiers there over the prior year. He was ticked, he didn’t like that fact that this snippety sheikh drives into town in his couple of trucks and says that he’s going to do this that and the other thing, but his battalion advisers said, “Cool it colonel; why don’t we see if we can’t use this guy?” Abbas came back, and within two weeks, he had about 90 names, dossiers that people had signed and swore to never go with al-Qaeda again, and the Marines found about seven bodies of people who hadn’t turned. And that was the beginning; you could see what was happening. I use that as an illustration, I could go place by place. It wasn’t just Sattar; it was this spirit that he gave to the sheikhs that they could really do something, and when that got going from the ground up, the division commander, the Iraqi division commander Tariq, and the American division commander Zilmer, were flabbergasted, they didn’t know what this was all about — it hadn’t begun at the top, it began on the bottom. And Colonel McFarland, who was in charge of the unit Ramadi, he got it right away.

But the people at the top, it took more time to get it. But by the time Petraeus took over, I hitched a ride out with a general by the name of “Mad Dog Mattis,” who is really the best fighting general we have. He was in charge, I guess he’s a four star now, so that’s a good way to travel — you get where you want to go in a hurry. We were out in Anbar, when you listen to some of these stories — he was going to the change in command where Petraeus was taking over, and he turned to the soldiers and marines as he was leaving and said, “You’ve already won the war,” because Mattis got it, he understood the Sunnis had switched sides: they were now with the Americans. Petraeus’ brilliance, when he took office, was he immediately, about a week after taking office, he talked to Mattis, and he flew out to Ramadi, saw what was happening, and talking about riding the wave, turned around to all his battalion commanders: “Wherever you are in country, if the Sunnis want to come over, let them come over. Organize them any way you want, and we’ll pay them 300 dollars a month each, and I’ll pay for it, out of our hide,” because there was no way Maliki and the government were going to pay for it.

Within six months, everything had changed, even the eastern front had changed as well. And the reason that the casualties went up during the summer of 2007 was very simple — we were going into areas where Americans hadn’t been for quite some time. You know, most Iraqis cannot read a map. The al-Qaeda types generally have run away; we haven’t had a firefight in Iraq in years — I mean a real firefight — not since Fallujah. But they had had years to put in IEDs. They had put IEDs in all over the damn place, and they didn’t even know where they were, and the local farmers didn’t know where they were, so a lot of the reason that our casualties went up was you just banged into these damn things all over the place no matter how careful you were, until you had finally systematically gotten them all out of there. Petraeus had one sentence that summed up everything he was doing: “Don’t commute to work.” And once he persuaded — ordered — the American soldiers to get back out into the neighborhoods, they’re in the neighborhoods, the local Sunnis — we didn’t go out into the Shi‘a neighborhoods that much — the local Sunnis began coming up and [they would] say, “Hey for 300 bucks, I’ll join up!” It totally changed the attitude, so now wherever you go in Iraq, wherever you go, you bump into these guys. As far is America is concerned, bygones are bygones. I’ll get to the problem in a minute. But now there are about 100,000 of them, and al-Qaeda has no place to hide.

I was talking to some people in Habbaniyah at their police academy, and of course, the average age is about forty, because if you’re looking for a good job, it goes by your seniority in the tribe, so the twenty-year-olds wait — that’s a good way of doing things now that I get a little bit older; you think of how they do it. So [I said to them], “You know you guys could get your heads knocked off when the Marines begin to pull back,” and they shook their heads, and [I asked] why, and of course every Iraqi likes to talk to you, so there is no such thing as a short conversation, so they began to tell, but one of them said something that I understood right away, he said, “They have no houses.” And I realized, ok, when I fought in Vietnam, in my village, I could go anywhere in that village during the daytime, because the Viet Cong weren’t there during the daytime, they were out living in the bush during the daytime, which is the semi-jungle, and then they’d come in at night. But the weather pattern in Vietnam facilitated [this], and the [Viet Cong] are tough people; they’re the best light infantry I’ve ever seen; they could have jungle camps 12 months a year. Al-Qaeda can’t do that; they don’t have that kind of training. They need houses — we all know how terrible the weather is and the extremes in the weather. They need houses, so for a long while they had the houses any place they wanted, no one asked any questions. The minute the organization of the tribes got going [and] they said, “We don’t who this guy is in this house,” their cover was blown. So because the tribes have swung, al-Qaeda has no place to hide, except up in Mosul, because the Sunnis are still being mistreated by the system up there.

But there is this great dilemma I see on our side, and that is, while the war turned around in ’08, public opinion hadn’t turned. The average, something like 50% of the American public do not believe there has been any military progress in Iraq, which basically says facts don’t change attitudes. Once you’ve made up your mind at some particular point, you hang in there. The question is we may be looking at Iraq no matter how it turns out as being the “forever lost war.” In summary — and then we’ll just chat — I make these points. The Sunni war changed, essentially, because the tribes changed on a local basis, the Tolstoy view of history, and they tied in to the Americans on a local level, and that began in 2006 when we thought the war was lost. The other two variables that made a huge difference, the surge strategy, in my book I try to explain, was Hadley. Hadley finally did what a National Security Council Advisor should do. I mean he did a brilliant job, behind the scenes, of gradually orchestrating a change in strategy that led to the President’s speech in January; that was all Hadley. But I am pretty critical of this administration; I think the President did fail for two reasons: He failed to keep the American public behind the war, which is the first duty of the Commander-in-Chief, and he failed to really understand the war. And even in ’06 it shouldn’t have taken from June of ’06 to January of ’07 to change a strategy that you knew was failing. The other variable that made a big difference was Petraeus was his leadership, with Odierno, who is taking over — just as good as Petraeus. Odierno was the one who said, “Ok you’re giving me 30,000 troops — five brigades.” Hadley was the one who insisted at least one go to Anbar, because he had flown out to Anbar in November of ’06, and the marines told him we were winning, and he said, “Everyone in Washington thinks you’ve lost.” And the marines said, “We don’t care what they’re saying back there, we’re winning, give us a brigade, and we’ll wrap it up out here.” So he insisted one brigade be sent to Anbar. Hadley did that, wrote it into his speech. Odierno said, “You’re giving me all the brigades — good.” He took half of them and put them in Baghdad and took the other half and put them in the belts around Baghdad. So while Washington is talking about a surge into Baghdad, Odierno, as the core commander, is using them outside of Baghdad. So Odierno, in my judgement, deserves as much credit at Petraeus. Those are the things on the Sunni side.

What happened on the Shi‘a side? Maliki, as we all know, is a highly erratic vacillating character. And in mid-‘07, in August, when Sadr’s people in Karbala began to kill some of the pilgrims, because they were in firefights with some of the locals in order to gain control, to his credit, Maliki did rush down there, and he actually did take a pistol and point it at one of the Sadrists and arrest him, and he broke the group there then, but then he sat back again, which he often does. And then there was that weird thing, and the rumors are all over the place: “Why did he rush down to Basra?” You hear weird things, like there were people who were plotting to have some of the Sadrists fire rockets against the Green Zone, which would indicate that [Maliki] was lacking in power, and then they would remove him; they would vote him out. Who knows why he did it, but he rushed down to Basra, picked a fight, gave no warning to Petraeus, who was highly incensed, gave no warning to the President, got in over his head. And Petraeus — God bless him — said, “Let’s help him out.”

And so, what the Sadrist made the huge mistake of, is the last thing you do in combat against Americans is take weapons and fight during the day time. And that is just suicide, because with the overhead surveillance we now have, I can see anybody, anywhere and I can tell you what kind of weapon he has in his hands, as some of you know who have been out there. And every single battalion has a video screen about this size [pointing to the screen in front of him] where they can watch this. And they can say, “well, he has an AK-47; he has a RPG [rocket propelled grenade], kill the guy with the RPG first.” You cannot survive on the battlefield against America today if you go outdoors during the daytime, and you’d have a very difficult time at night because the targets are better at night. So as a result, the amount of damage done to the Sadrists down in Basra and then in Baghdad was never reported to the extent it should have been. About a thousand were killed very quickly in Sadr City. American fire teams were just sitting back there and thinking, “Look at all these targets,” and taking them out systematically. After about a week, the Sadrists fell apart. That nobody expected, because they had been burrowed in for so long in Kaldia, and Kadhimiya and Amiriyah, and in Sadr City, people thought their roots were very deep — we all believed that. It turned out their roots were very shallow, and about 500 of them are now in Iran getting training from Hezbollah and the Iranians. The dilemma they have with getting back in country is that Petraeus has deployed an American division and an Iraqi division whose only job it is to hunt these guys down when they get back, and they have their pictures, so its kind of tough for these guys to come back. As a result, they’ve been making excuses that they’re not trained enough to come back, in other words they’re scared to come back. And especially since Maliki has said about the Sadrists: “Go after them.”

The persistent errors that I’ve seen, and I’m flabbergasted, even today — and I’m speaking about both Afghanistan and Iraq — we’ve never taken a census. Hello! In the history of every insurgency that I know of, you started by getting a picture of the population by a census. We have the biometric systems and we use it in order to identify the police and the army. What’s that all about? We have never systematically taken the time to fingerprint people, so that no matter where you find them, take their finger print, just like Chicago police do, send it in and get the entire record back like that. We, on average, have stopped every Sunni male twice a year for four years, and have yet to institute a widespread system, haven’t done it in Afghanistan either. The other persistent error that I’m just flabbergasted by is the refusal to have insisted at the time we gave sovereignty back, in both countries, that the one thing we wouldn’t do is have Americans die because of incompetent or corrupt or evil leaders in the host nation that couldn’t provide for itself. And that therefore, we would insist on joint boards that when we really had a complaint against somebody, it would go before a joint board of the host country and Americans and say, “That guy is no good, get him out.” We did in Vietnam, where the popular forces I was with, if you had someone you didn’t like, you went before the district chief and said, “That guy is gone.” — he was gone.

Looking at Afghanistan, it’s pretty clear, there are two ways you can look at it. If you fundamentally look at Afghanistan using lessons you learned in Iraq, if you fundamentally look at Afghanistan and believe that the issue is counter force, that is that the Taliban is unwelcome and has a sanctuary in Pakistan, then the key is relatively simple. You simply must train an Afghani army that is twice as large and twice as well equipped as you have today, but you can let that army fight the counter force battle. If you believe it’s a counter insurgency battle, and that the Taliban actually have the support of the Pashtun tribes, then you’re back to this notion of Tolstoy, and I think that is highly discomforting. And by that I mean, my theory of what happened in Iraq… it wasn’t us. I said to Sattar once before he was assassinated by al-Qaeda, “Could we have done this earlier and spared ourselves and you a lot of pain?” And he thought about, and he said “I really don’t think so. We Sunnis had to convince ourselves; you Americans couldn’t do it.” It was kind of interesting, and what he was saying is that it has to come from the people themselves. In Afghanistan, I’ve only been there twice, I have no idea of knowing whether those Pashtun tribes are hostile to the Taliban or hostile to the government, and if it’s a counter insurgency fight, and you look at the terrain in Afghanistan and the number of people you need… Holy smokes.

The Iraqi issue, about where Iraq is going comes down to word — the Iraq issue is Maliki. Period. At this particular point he’s feeling very over confident, very cocky, and he’s feeling pretty disdainful towards the Bush Administration and towards Americans. So he feels he has the upper hand and that he can do whatever he wants, and the flashpoint that really worries our military are the Sunnis.

We are paying 100,000 Sons of Iraq. Maliki is now trying to pluck off their leaders by saying [that they have] killed Shi‘a, they’ve killed Americans, therefore I’m going to arrest them. Well yeah they have; you bet they have; they were on the other side. But if you use that attitude, you’d never have any [Sunnis]. And that’s exactly where Maliki would like to go if he can: “Well the war is over; I’m not going to take those Sunnis.” So this is an issue where the American’s ability to have leverage against Maliki is going to be absolutely critical. And lastly, you get to this public perception of, in America itself, are we going to look at this as the ever lost war.