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Iraq Red Team
A year and a half before the surge, a secret review group in Baghdad
recommended a drastic change in U.S. strategy. If that advice had been
heeded, might the war have turned out differently? An exclusive excerpt from
The Endgame, a new book on America's final days in Iraq.
BY MICHAEL R. GORDON | SEPTEMBER 25, 2012
Seventeen months before George W. Bush announced that he was sending five
additional brigades to Iraq for the 2007 "surge," a team of officers and
civilian analysts gathered in Baghdad to conduct a classified review of
America's military strategy in Iraq.
In a June 2005 speech at Fort Bragg, President Bush had told the nation that
the Iraq war was difficult, but winnable. "Our strategy can be summed up
this way: As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," Bush said. "We have
made progress, but we have a lot more work to do."
But when it convened in August, the Red Team, as the review group was known,
came to a very different conclusion. "The perception of many Iraqis is that
their government, and by implication, the Coalition has failed the Iraqi
people," the report noted. (Read exclusive excerpts from the report.) Not
only that, but the strategy Bush so confidently endorsed, the team asserted,
would merely burden the Iraqis with a problem they could not handle. Iraqi
forces might end up ceding ground to the insurgency in central and western
Iraq, and perhaps even in Baghdad. A new counterinsurgency strategy -- one
that, in concept though not in resources, bore a striking resemblance to the
approach Gen. David Petraeus would oversee two years later -- was needed.
The team's diagnosis and its remedy were both ignored. It was one of the
most important -- and until now, unknown -- missed opportunities of the war.
The annals of military history are replete with intelligence failures --
debacles that were not foreseen as a result of cultural ignorance, wishful
thinking, or a lack of sources. But what is striking about the early years
of the American war in Iraq are those episodes in which dedicated officials
correctly discerned the problem and suggested new strategies -- only to be
ignored by generals and Bush administration aides who were wedded to their
faltering plan.
These missed turning points might have shortened the conflict and provided
more breathing room to establish a more inclusive Iraqi government at a time
when the United States had maximum leverage in the country. Nobody can say
for certain what might have happened, but it is instructive that some of the
spurned recommendations were very effective when belatedly implemented years
later.
To this day, some of the missed opportunities are not widely known. For all
the partisan debate over the Iraq conflict in Washington, only a handful of
insiders seem to know what happened during some of its most fateful moments.
As the insurgency began to develop in 2003, for example, a group of officers
in the U.S. military's intelligence cell in Baghdad developed a plan to work
with the Sunni tribes in the western province of Anbar that was never
carried out. Col. Carol Stewart had met with a group of Anbari sheiks and
devised a plan to bring them into the fold. The strife-ridden Ramadi and
Fallujah areas would be designated a "tribal security zone." Tribal leaders
would be authorized to police their own areas and given vehicles,
ammunition, and money to pay their men, who would be dubbed the "Anbar
Rangers." The entire program would have cost $3 million for six months, a
tiny sliver of the multibillion-dollar reconstruction fund for Iraq,
officials said.
But when Stewart briefed the idea to an aide at L. Paul Bremer's Coalition
Provisional Authority, she was told that CPA did not plan to make the tribes
a formal part of Iraq's security structure. Leaving one meeting in
frustration, Stewart muttered, "If the United States was not going to be
working with the tribes in the new Iraq, where was this new Iraq going to
be? On Mars?" Stewart had no more luck with more senior civilian and
military officials in Iraq, and the idea was shelved -- only to be revived
when the Anbar Awakening emerged three years later.
The Red Team
But first came the buried Red Team report, in which a select group of
mid-level officers and officials who challenged the prevailing orthodoxy
were ignored. This account is based on interviews with current and former
American and allied officials and military officers -- and access to the
74-page classified report.
The origins of the Red Team go back to the appointment of Zalmay Khalilzad
as the United States ambassador to Iraq. A former Pentagon official who was
coming to Baghdad from a tour as the American ambassador in Kabul, Khalilzad
began to think anew about the military situation in Iraq. Canvassing the
experts, he pondered the work of Andrew Krepinevich, who had written a book
about the Army's experience in Vietnam and was a proponent of
population-centric counterinsurgency.
During Khalilzad's Senate confirmation hearings on June 7, 2005, a skeptical
junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, asked Khalilzad if it might take
10 or 20 years to defeat the insurgency. It could be done in much less than
that, he responded reassuringly.
After arriving in Baghdad in July, Khalilzad and Gen. George Casey, the
commander of multinational forces in Iraq, commissioned an internal review
-- one that was to be carried out by an eight-person team of military and
civilian officials. Col. Bruce Reider, a strategist who was working on
governance issues for General Casey, co-chaired the effort on behalf of the
military. Other members of his military team included a British intelligence
officer, an Australian officer, and one of General Casey's planners. Marin
Strmecki, a conservative defense consultant and an advisor to Khalilzad, led
the civilian side of the review. A CIA analyst was part of the team as well.
Khalilzad met with the group and outlined the questions they were to
consider, the most important being: What would it take to "break the back"
of the insurgency in one year and "defeat" it in three years? The entire
review was to be done in 30 days.
Although Casey had signed off on doing the study, the four-star general was
convinced his plan was generally on track and not in need of a major
overhaul. He was supporting troop-intensive counterinsurgency efforts in the
northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar and the border town of Al Qaim in western
Anbar as a way of interrupting the flow of foreign fighters from Syria. But
they were the exceptions to his broader approach to gradually withdraw
American forces and hand the fight over to the Iraqis. It was more than an
exit strategy for Casey; it was a means to reward, encourage, and prod the
Iraqis to step up. The paradox, as Casey sometimes put it, was that the
United States had to draw down to win.
As Reider and the rest of the Red Team worked on their assessment in August,
they sensed that the general had a different view of the problem. "There is
a fundamental issue over what we are trying to achieve," the colonel wrote
in his diary. "Gen. Casey believes we are trying to develop ISF so we can
hand the fight to Iraqis. The ambassador believes we are here to defeat the
insurgency."
The Red Team's diagnosis of the war was, indeed, a far cry from Casey's. The
effort to disrupt the insurgents' planning had not been decisive, it
concluded, and the enemy had been able to retain freedom of movement. Many
Iraqis had no faith in their leaders. What's more, the Iraqi troops who were
being trained were not schooled in counterinsurgency. "Iraqi Security Forces
have been stood up at great speed," the review noted. "This tremendous
achievement to get them 'in the fight' has not yet delivered sustainable
forces with robust leadership." American aid programs were not reaching
Sunni areas.
More importantly, the team did not see how the plan could work. "The current
plan hinges on an ability to suppress the insurgency to levels that the ISF
[Iraqi Security Force] can handle on its own, which implies that the threat
will be reduced before the transition," it notes. "Current operations have
not succeeded in suppressing the level of the insurgency, and the campaign
plan does not provide new or different approaches that offer greater promise
in this regard."
And if the Americans were making little headway, the Iraqi security forces
would fare worse. "The planned size of the ISF is likely to prove
insufficient based on historical cases. The ISF, still an immature force,
will be taking on the burden of security in 2006 and 2007 with inadequate
funding and less experience, training and equipment than MNF-I," it added,
using the acronym for Casey's multinational command.
The political ramifications of a failing strategy, the report concluded,
were enormous. The hydra-headed insurgency might be emboldened is it thought
that the main American goal was to disengage from Iraq. As a result, the
insurgents could be "less likely to cut the political deals that would be
needed to shore up the new Iraq."
Iraqis who had stood by the Americans might also lose confidence in their
ally. "The fears of abandonment might lead the Iraqis to hedge their bets by
developing greater reliance on Iran," the report continued. "If the
transition to self-reliance takes place before the defeat of the insurgency,
the Iraqi government and the insurgents could seek external support from
neighboring states (e.g., Syria and Iran) in order to fight on, potentially
leading to civil war along the lines of the one in Afghanistan in the
1990s."
Public support in the United States might be another casualty. "The American
public might question whether a muddled outcome was worth the cost,
especially since victory was not the goal."
Ink spots
Having assessed the problem, the group proposed an "ink spot" approach in
areas that would be secured and developed politically until a patchwork of
safe zones was extended across the country. The notion of separating the
population from the insurgency was classic counterinsurgency doctrine, the
kind Petraeus would later espouse, and ran counter to a Casey strategy that
focused on border control and transition to the Iraqis.
The Red Team assumed that the only U.S. forces available were the ones that
were already on hand, which meant that there was no way to blanket the
country. So it proposed the concentration of forces in specific areas to
effect a mini-surge. The command, for example, could use the beefed-up
security for the upcoming December elections to establish an initial ink
spot, perhaps in Baquba or in the Fallujah-Ramadi corridor. As more ink
spots were created in 2006, they would be linked in a "Two Rivers campaign"
to control the population centers along the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Without reinforcements from the United States, it would have been an
enormously ambitious undertaking. But one of the main obstacles was
bureaucratic. Casey had sponsored previous Red Team efforts and saw the
report as a means to draw the embassy more into the war effort. But when the
Red Team suggested wholesale changes to his military strategy, it was more
than Casey had bargained for, one of his former aides said.
The Red Team approach posited a three-year campaign to defeat the insurgents
and advanced a plan for concentrating American forces in insurgent-infested
areas, which was inconsistent with Casey's vision of progressively handing
over the fight to the Iraqis and making troop cuts in 2006 and 2007.
When it came time for the team to brief some of its conclusions on Aug. 23,
Casey made it clear that he did not accept the rationale behind much of the
report. The team never even got around to presenting its PowerPoint slides.
Two weeks later, one of Casey's senior officers approached Reider and said
that the general had heard that the Red Team had been pressured to go along
with the ink-spot approach by Strmecki. Reider denied it.
In his own post-mortem on the war, which is to be published by National
Defense University, it is clear that Casey did not give the Red Team report
much weight: he noted only that it made some useful suggestions on how to
better integrate the coalition's economic, political, and military efforts.
In December 2005, Casey would hold his own Campaign Progress Review, which
concluded that for all the challenges, there were "clear grounds for
optimism." (When President Bush opted for a five-brigade "surge" in 2007,
Casey still insisted that not all of the forces were needed.)
Still, Khalilzad brought a copy of the Red Team report to Washington and
mentioned it to Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security advisor, who
suggested that it might be submitted through military channels, a former
official recalled. But with Casey opposed to the concept, that was unlikely.
A member of the British team passed a copy up his chain of command and it
eventually made its way to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. By and large,
however, the report vanished from sight.
Too little, too late?
The failure to confront the inconvenient facts about America's faltering
strategy in Iraq in 2005 had significant consequences. Bush's eventual
decision to begin a military surge in Iraq in 2007 and to appoint Petraeus
as commander pulled Iraq out of a worsening civil war. The surge strategy
succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation in diminishing Al Qaeda in Iraq
and tamping down the sectarian violence. It also served as a catalyst for
the Sunni Awakening, which would make its way from Anbar to the area
surrounding Baghdad and, finally, to the Iraqi capital itself.
But if the strategy change had come earlier, a longer surge might have led
to more progress in establishing a more inclusive Iraqi government and
improving the poor performance of Iraq's ministries -- issues that still
bedevil Iraq today. Those questions might have been tackled sooner in an
improved security environment and when American influence was at its height.
An earlier surge might have saved treasure and, more importantly, lives.
The episode also raises some pertinent questions about the Obama
administration's strategy today in Afghanistan, where the United States
military mounted a surge that ended last week. The transition to an Afghan
lead and the closing of American bases is being executed with all of the
mechanistic rigidity of the United States' initial Iraq strategy.
I tracked down Reider, who has retired from the Army and teaches at the
Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. What
lessons, I asked, did he draw from the episode?
"You always hear senior leaders talking about the need to adapt," he said.
"The plan we had in Iraq was not working and people who had worked on that
plan did not want to accept that. This was an opportunity to adapt, and we
did not take that opportunity."
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Received on Tue Sep 25 2012 - 17:49:15 EDT
