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Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Iraq Heads in the Sand

An interesting article from Vanity Fair showing that the political dynamics underlying the "surge" in Iraq were in play as early as 2004.


Iraq
Heads in the Sand
The so-called Sunni Awakening, in which American forces formed tactical alliances with local sheikhs, has been credited with dampening the insurgency in much of Iraq. But new evidence suggests that the Sunnis were offering the same deal as early as 2004—one that was eagerly embraced by commanders on the ground, but rejected out of hand at the highest levels of the Bush administration.
by David Rose WEB EXCLUSIVE May 12, 2009

The history books will record that the so-called Sunni Awakening—when many of Iraq’s Sunni tribes, in return for money and other considerations, began cutting deals with American forces and turned away from their nationalist insurgency—got under way in late 2006. The Sunni tribes, concentrated in Anbar province, had long been the backbone of the insurgency. In the Iraq of Saddam Hussein, Sunni Arabs had exercised a domination far out of proportion to their numbers (some 20 percent of the population), and after the American-led invasion, suddenly excluded from power and influence, they exacted a bloody revenge. After the Awakening, the Sunnis helped obliterate al-Qaeda’s networks in most of Sunni Iraq, a development that many believe did more to dampen the violence than the subsequent “surge” in American troop numbers. Having reached a peak in 2006 and early 2007, the casualty rates for combatants and civilians quickly plummeted.

What the history books should also record, revealed here for the first time, is that the Sunni insurgents had offered to come to terms with the Americans 30 months earlier, in the summer of 2004, during secret talks with senior U.S. officials and military commanders. The Sunnis were gathered by an Iraqi named Talal al-Gaaod, a Sunni sheikh and wealthy businessman based in the Jordanian capital, Amman. The American officials included Jerry H. Jones, then a special assistant to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and later serving as an expert on transitional government to Rumsfeld’s successor, Robert Gates; the late ambassador Evan Galbraith, Rumsfeld’s special envoy to Europe; Colonel Mike Walker, the head of civil affairs for the Marine Corps in Iraq; and James Clad, then a counselor to the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (which was seeking to foster economic development in Iraq) and later the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary for South and Southeast Asia. These men were desperate to pursue the Sunni contacts, and took serious risks with their own careers in order to do so. They were supported by officers close to the top of the U.S. military, including Lieutenant General James T. Conway, then the Marine Corps commander in Iraq and today the commandant of the Corps. For a variety of reasons, some of them petty, some of them ideological, and some of them still obscure, these men were blocked by superiors in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House.

The Sunni Awakening, when it did finally come, provided welcome relief, says Jerry Jones. But the cost of delay is quantifiable. “From July ’04 to mid-’07,” he points out, “you can directly attribute almost all those K.I.A. [killed in action] in the Sunni regions of Iraq to this fatal error, and if we hadn’t been fighting the Sunni, we’d have had a lot more resources for dealing with Shia militia leaders like Moqtada al-Sadr in places such as Baghdad. It didn’t have to happen. Those lives did not have to be lost.” To put the matter concretely: if the compromises accepted later by the Bush administration had been accepted when a rapprochement was first broached by the Sunnis, in 2004, some 2,000 Americans and thousands more Iraqis might not have died.

It is no longer possible to hear Talal al-Gaaod’s account of these events firsthand: he died three years ago of a heart condition, at age 46. Rich, urbane, and fluent in English, al-Gaaod moved easily between Western and Arab societies. He had a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Southern California and traveled the world for his family’s agriculture and construction business. Though he made his home in Amman, Talal maintained extensive interests in Iraq and was counted among the country’s most important Sunni tribal sheikhs. In November 2008, in Amman, in their office tower opposite the Marriott hotel, I met Talal’s brothers, Hameed and Jalal. “Historically, our family has been very significant,” Jalal explained. Its base was Anbar, Iraq’s biggest province, a mainly Sunni region that includes cities such as Fallujah and Ramadi, and was for years notorious as a killing ground for American troops.
Talal al-Gaaod

Talal al-Gaaod in his office in Amman, Jordan, 2005. By Ali Jarekji/Reuters/epa/Corbis.

Saddam Hussein knew instinctively that to govern Iraq without the help of the tribal sheikhs was impossible, and like other leading families, the al-Gaaod clan had high-level links with the Ba’thist regime. The 2004 final report of the Iraq Survey Group, which had led the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, describes Talal’s cousin Sattam Hamid Farhan al-Gaaod as “one of Saddam’s most trusted confidants” and states that the family’s commercial network helped to import items banned under U.N. sanctions. Talal’s network of friends and contacts extended throughout Iraq and the Middle East.

After the invasion, in 2003, the al-Gaaods were convinced that the Americans would have the sense to work with Iraq’s existing elites. “Because we’d been educated in the States, people looked to us for help in dealing with the Americans,” Jalal al-Gaaod recalls. The Americans, however, “didn’t even have translators, and, mostly from ignorance, they were treating the sheikhs with huge disrespect. That’s when things started falling apart, because when someone disrespects the sheikhs, they will fight for their honor.”

In December 2003, as insurgency spread and killings climbed, Talal al-Gaaod met for the first time with a Texas businessman named Ken Wischkaemper. As the chief executive of Agricultural Development International, a company that sells seeds and agricultural equipment and services, Wischkaemper had been subcontracted on behalf of Iraq’s Coalition Provisional Authority to contain an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease in Anbar province. “I called Talal because I’d heard he might be interested in a tractor franchise,” Wischkaemper says. “On my way back from Iraq through Amman, he invited me and my business partner, Bob Teweles, to dinner. Talal said, ‘We are totally disenfranchised, and we have no contact with the Americans. The country is being turned topsy-turvy and we have no voice. We have no connections in Washington. Will you help us?’”

The men talked late into the night. “Afterward I wondered, How do I handle this? Is this guy for real?” Wischkaemper had no political or military experience, but he thought himself a good judge of character. In the end, “I just decided I had to go back and measure this guy because, you know, things in Iraq were deteriorating.” He returned to Amman in March 2004. In the al-Gaaods’ offices he could see firsthand the influence the family wielded: “There was an endless procession of Sunni luminaries coming in and out of there, like some kind of shadow government: military officers, sheikhs, and businessmen. I decided these folks were legit, and they needed help.”

Wischkaemper’s first attempt to foster high-level U.S. contacts fell on barren ground. Unschooled in the neoconservative ideology that dominated the civilian side of the Pentagon, he approached the Jerusalem-based attorney Marc Zell and asked Zell to arrange a meeting with his former law partner, Douglas J. Feith, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy. Feith, like his immediate boss, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, had no desire to reach out to the Sunnis. He blamed them for keeping Saddam in power, and considered one of the occupation’s goals to be reducing their influence. (Feith says today that he cannot recollect an approach on behalf of Wischkaemper.) The neoconservatives, together with President Bush, were convinced that empowering the Shiites at the Sunnis’ expense would help pacify not only Iraq but also the entire Arab world. “In their view,” says James Clad, “the Shia could lead the way toward an ‘Islamic reformation’ that would finally separate religion from politics.”

On the ground, reality was colliding with this argument. Saddam’s capture, in December 2003, had done nothing to cool the insurgency. In April 2004, after the lynching of four Blackwater contractors in Fallujah, Anbar’s second largest city, the American military death toll reached a monthly high of 135, almost double the level of the previous year, the month of the battle for Baghdad. It was in April that Wischkaemper met Jerry Jones for the first time. Strangely enough, later meetings would sometimes take place in a Pentagon conference room borrowed from Wolfowitz. Jones is tall and slim, a former athlete, successful in business, and a Beltway insider who worked in the White House during the Nixon and Ford administrations. He had been sent by Rumsfeld to Iraq at the head of a 20-person mission earlier that year. “Rumsfeld feared that things may not be going smoothly,” Jones says, “and he wanted me to come back with an unvarnished account of what I saw.” Jones’s central finding was that the mainly Sunni secular elites from business, government, the professions, and the tribes—“the people who had been running the country”—could and should have been harnessed to support the American effort. Instead, they had been excluded, a catastrophic error that had led them into the arms of the insurgency.

On this, Wischkaemper, Jones, and al-Gaaod were in obvious agreement. That spring, the three men e-mailed back and forth, and so devised the beginnings of a possible remedy—a high-level conference where, says Jones, “Iraq’s governing elites could talk about how to fix their country with Americans.” With al-Gaaod picking up the tab, it opened at the Sheraton hotel in Amman on July 18, 2004.

The Americans who attended still speak of what they call the “Amman surprise” with something approaching wonder. Besides Jones and Wischkaemper, the American group included James Clad; Evan Galbraith; one official from the U.S. Embassy in Jordan; and, perhaps most important of all, a clutch of senior American officers serving in Iraq, all from the Marine Corps, including Mike Walker, the civil-affairs chief. Among the 71 Iraqis were sheikhs, businessmen, and academics. There were also several former senior officials in Saddam Hussein’s government and four generals who had served in his military. Most of the Iraqis were Sunni.

The conference began with a series of personal statements from the Iraqis. They did not hide their dismay at the conduct of the occupation, and at the deepening peril created by America’s missteps. “I have never heard such denunciations, such anger,” says Clad. “We sat there looking at our shoes and took it, allowed them to have their say.” The pivotal moment came when al-Gaaod introduced a dapper, balding Iraqi with a goatee and a Saddam-style mustache. He was Raad al-Hamdani, formerly a lieutenant general and corps commander of Saddam’s Republican Guard, and a veteran of every war that Iraq had fought since 1970.

In March 2003, as the American-led coalition invaded Iraq, Saddam had given al-Hamdani command of six divisions, with orders to hold a 130-mile-wide swath of territory south of Baghdad. America’s command of the air made this impossible, and his forces were cut to pieces. Al-Hamdani had expected that arrangements would be made for the Iraqi Army’s formal surrender—and then, as the Americans had promised during the campaign, for its reconstitution as a mainstay of the post-Saddam era. In the days that followed, he was kept informed of the progress of talks between Iraqi generals and the U.S. Army’s Colonel Paul Hughes, who had been given the job of restoring the country’s military. These talks were rendered moot when the American viceroy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, announced “C.P.A. Order No. 1” on May 16, 2003, which simply disbanded the Iraqi Army altogether. That decision, Hughes says now, did more to fuel the insurgency than any other single factor: “We disregarded a cardinal principle of military thinking: we lost contact with the enemy. There were thousands of soldiers with families to feed who weren’t getting paid—and, meanwhile, new employers were offering them $100 for killing an American.”
Raad al-Hamdani

Raad al-Hamdani. By Zahran Zahran/rapportpress.com.

For al-Hamdani, worse was to come. In his speech at the Amman conference, he said that the Americans had arrested and detained him in June 2003. Three months later he had been freed, only to see his Baghdad home come under U.S. attack: “There were eight persons in the house, four of them children. My family was terrified. I had no idea why they were shooting.” He says he gave himself up willingly, but a U.S. soldier pushed him to the ground, handcuffed him, then stood with a boot on his neck.

Al-Hamdani’s anger as he related these experiences was palpable, yet he remained, he insisted, willing to work with the Americans. “The impact was visceral,” says Clad. “The way he put it was that people treated the way he had been ‘had died in the eyes of their families.’ Raad had tears in his eyes, remembering the humiliation. Respect and honor are a crucial part of Arab culture, and here he was, reminding us that we had taken this away from him and his family.”

In front of the conference, Clad stood up and walked across to al-Hamdani. “What we did was shameful, it should never have happened, and we apologize unreservedly,” he said. “There was no intention to bring dishonor on your family.” All the other Americans present followed suit. Talal al-Gaaod had been telling his Sunni friends that the Americans, improbable as it might seem, could well be responsive to an overture. The apology to al-Hamdani looked like evidence he was right. “Word soon got round about this,” says Jones. “It definitely had an impact.”

Later that day, al-Gaaod asked Jones to arrange a private meeting. “He said, ‘There’s a fellow here who wants to talk to you,’” Jones recalls. A little later, Jones, Clad, Walker, and Colonel Roy David Harlan, the U.S. military attaché in Amman, gathered in Jones’s suite. With al-Gaaod was a man known as “the Messenger,” also called “Dr. Ismail,” a medical doctor and lawyer who had come to Amman from Fallujah. He was, al-Gaaod said, the designated representative of 16 Sunni insurgency groups. Walker had by now grown accustomed to frustrating meetings with people who claimed to be close to the insurgency’s leadership. In April of that year, after the Fallujah lynchings, says Walker, “there were no less than seven lines of negotiations going on with all manner of reputed ‘leaders,’” none of whom turned out to be real.

The Messenger, he says, was different. Walker had been studying Iraq’s tribal structures on the ground for months. As he told the Marines’ commander, Lieutenant General Conway, in an e-mailed report after the meeting, the Sunnis who had come to Amman “can roughly be likened to the Sinn Fein and the I.R.A. [in Northern Ireland] … One is attempting to work within the system and the other is fighting us on the battlefield.” In other words, says Walker, if Talal was the insurgency’s political face, the Messenger, in contrast, was its military face, “by far the most credible and important contact with the insurgency we had.” Jones agrees. “There was just no question that he wanted to make a deal with us. The insurgents had seen when we went into Fallujah in April what we could do, and they wanted to put a stop to this before any more of their cities were destroyed.” The Messenger, Walker says, told the Americans, “We are not your enemy. Al-Qaeda is your enemy,” and the U.S. and the Sunnis should be working together to defeat it.

The Messenger, says Jones, stayed at the conference after the meeting and showed up the next day with two men Talal identified as insurgency colleagues. They had brought a list of conditions the insurgents were demanding in return for ending the killing of Americans, written in the name of something called the Iraq National Resistance Council. The original document’s English was poor. Working through a translator, Clad and the Messenger produced an improved version. It began with three “non-negotiable points”—that Iraq “should be viewed as one united country”; that the occupation must end, “even if that has to happen in stages”; and that “the wealth of Iraq should be used for the benefit of Iraqis and should not be siphoned off by others.” To this was added a significant rider: “We don’t mind participation by American companies. As a matter of fact, we encourage their participation.”

The document continued with eight “urgent immediate demands.” These were: the establishment of a new Iraqi Army; the disbanding of sectarian militias; the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the cities; the release of political prisoners; an end to interference in Iraqi affairs by neighboring countries; pressure on the Kurds to “cease the rhetoric of separation from Iraq”; a promise that the U.S. would stop describing insurgents as “terrorists”; and, finally, a pledge to “continue political dialogue between Iraqis and Americans.”

As Jones observes, the demands were “really quite benign.” Many of them were effectively American policy. Read now, in 2009, the price being asked for ending the bloodshed looks astonishingly low. The Messenger said he could prove he really did represent the insurgency leadership by organizing a “stand-down”—a pause in attacks on Americans for a fixed period, on the condition that U.S. forces cease “hostile operations” for the same period.

In the days after the Amman conference ended, on July 22, both sides strove to put a deal together. At a safe house in Fallujah, Walker met with another insurgent leader nominated by the Messenger. But in the end the efforts foundered. Part of the problem was the U.S. military leadership’s difficulty in accepting that the offer might be serious: “A lot of coalition people were concerned that Talal was just another distraction,” Walker says. “Maybe it was too far out of the box, too far out of left field at that time.” Meanwhile, the insurgents made a demand that seemed unacceptable—that for the duration of the stand-down U.S. forces should cease their regular patrols. But, according to Jones, there were more important reasons why the initiative failed. In the higher reaches of the Bush administration, the notion of coming to an arrangement with the insurgents was simply anathema. The result, Jones recalls, was that “it stopped. Bang. The whole outreach, starting with the effort to test the Messenger’s command and control.” “Many people in our system knew this approach had been made,” says Clad. “They made sure it was slapped down.”

The deal offered by the Messenger was only part one of the program envisioned by al-Gaaod. Part two was unveiled in an e-mail from al-Gaaod to Wischkaemper on August 14, followed three days later by a memo from al-Hamdani. It proposed the creation of what the general called an Auxiliary Security Force, to be commanded by ex-officers from the old Iraqi Army. The force would initially have 5,000 soldiers and 100 commanders, American-supplied weapons, and a budget of $108 million. Its personnel would be drawn from “carefully chosen resident men working under the sponsorship and support of the U.S. marines … The resulting security force will be of Al Anbar origin, of tribal consent, supported and sponsored by U.S. marines but not of U.S. marines, and thus, acceptable to Al Anbar citizens.” Its mission, the paper went on, would be to “clear the Al Anbar province of mobs and insurgents,” thereby re-establishing the security essential for economic development. It would not, al-Hamdani stressed, be a private militia, but a formation fully accountable to the U.S. and the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. Once its initial work of pacification had been achieved, its units would be absorbed into the regular army and police.

“We could have solved several problems at once,” al-Hamdani told me when I met him last November in Amman. “Many of the security problems America faced would never have existed if they had listened to us in 2004.” Besides fighting al-Qaeda, the force would starve the insurgency of recruits, many of whom had been driven to fight for lack of better options. “The people from the old army were without any job, any control,” al-Hamdani says. “The insurgency was paying them, and there were guns everywhere.”

Al-Hamdani’s paper was received by the Marines with enthusiasm, and with the blessing of Lieutenant General Conway, Walker went to Amman at the end of August for a two-day “security conference” to discuss the proposal. Accompanying him was Colonel John Coleman, Conway’s chief of staff. Wischkaemper was also in attendance.

The Marines arrived at the Sheraton on August 29. Talal took them to a conference room where “there were 22 men around a boardroom table,” Coleman recalls. Al-Hamdani made a presentation, using charts and diagrams, saying his plan could “close down the insurgency.” The next day Coleman flew to Washington, where he briefed the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, and also met with Jerry Jones. Jones himself wrote a memo to Rumsfeld, strongly recommending that the security force be stood up. Imagining that the force would surely be approved, al-Hamdani and his colleagues vetted the first 700 potential recruits. But then, Jones says, in early September, the proposal was killed. There was no disguising al-Gaaod’s despair. “I think we are back in square one,” al-Gaaod told Wischkaemper by e-mail after al-Hamdani’s security force was vetoed. “There is simply no solution out of this. Things will be more complicated and bloody.”

Why did these two promising initiatives die in the cradle? In retrospect, the lost opportunity is made at once more haunting and more ironic by the fact that the idea behind the initiatives was once regarded favorably by Donald Rumsfeld himself. The historian Mark Perry has obtained access to internal Pentagon documents that chart the progress of earlier proposals for curbing the insurgency by working with the Sunni tribes. One is a classified memo to Rumsfeld that advocated a policy of rapprochement as early as October 2003. It was written by Major General Ronald L. Burgess, the intelligence director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Rumsfeld was reportedly sympathetic to the concept. But according to a Pentagon official who has reviewed the documentary record, the U.S. military and civilian leadership in Baghdad ignored the memo entirely, while a copy sent to Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, was returned to Burgess with a handwritten comment: “They are Nazis!” Wolfowitz says today that, while he often did refer to ideological Ba’thists as Nazis, he cannot recall this particular incident.

In public, Rumsfeld espoused administration orthodoxy: that the insurgency could and would be destroyed. However, Perry uncovered two memos written by Rumsfeld himself, in December 2003 and April 2004, advocating a different approach. The second memo, to the military commanders in Iraq and to viceroy Bremer, could not have been plainer: the U.S. should “elicit help from Sunni tribal leaders” and “probe an opening” to reduce the violence. He also sent the memo to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, hoping that Armitage would support him. Bremer did not reply. Armitage rejected the idea in sweeping terms, saying any attempt to recruit Sunni leaders would be “a colossal miscalculation.” According to Perry, “Rumsfeld was also opposed by his own Iraq commander, George Casey, who told him he supported ‘a more kinetic plan’—military-speak for ending the insurgency by force.”

The Marine Corps backed the proposals from the top. In an e-mail written on August 30, after Walker and Coleman had met al-Hamdani, Lieutenant General Conway wrote that he “had advised our higher headquarters as to the contacts and [was] encouraged to continue the dialogue. Our objective remains to reduce attacks and get at the essence of the insurgency in Al Anbar. I consider the discussions a non-kinetic approach to a military objective and believe we should pursue that option.… We consider the effort one of the more successful engagement programs that we have and are looking to ‘operationalize’ the effort as we work to reduce the intimidation and murder campaign.” Conway also noted that he did not believe “the discussions rise to the level of political issues or run counter to P[rime] M[inisterial] or ambassadorial objectives.”

But others sharply disagreed. Timing was a factor: in June 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority had transferred sovereignty to Iyad Allawi’s Iraqi government. Although the State Department, represented by its huge Baghdad mission, continued to play a central role in Iraqi politics, officially the Pentagon was now supposed to be concerned only with security. “For State, it became a turf war, and they saw it as the military trying to get round their policy,” says Clad. “At the same time, Rumsfeld saw himself as this full-spectrum secretary of defense who was trying to reform the entire D.O.D., and as far as he could, he tried to hand off Iraq onto Wolfowitz and Feith. The result was that the opposition became insuperable.”

Allawi, according to the Pentagon official who has reviewed all the documents, “really did not want any Sunni militias stood up: he was dead against the idea,” an observation equally true of his Shiite successors, Ibrahim al-Jafaari and Nouri al-Maliki. General Casey, who remained America’s commanding general in Iraq until February 2007, was also strongly opposed, the official says.

Until the full documentary record becomes publicly available, the exact process by which the initiatives were vetoed will remain obscure. But there is no doubting the deeply rooted opposition in influential quarters. “What I remember is that I didn’t like the idea of people [i.e., Jones] from Rumsfeld’s office who had no role in the chain of command in Iraq getting involved in something that should have been handled through different channels,” says Wolfowitz—a statement that suggests he may have forgotten the support of Lieutenant General Conway. Wolfowitz was, he says, in favor of reaching out to the Sunnis in principle, but “it had to be done through the appropriate channels, not by freelancing through the secretary of defense’s office. There were ways to do this. I wanted those guys out of it.” The danger, he adds, is that without proper evaluation a deal might not have pacified Anbar but handed it over to the insurgency.

In hindsight, Jones says, Rumsfeld was “too easily discouraged.” The events of 2006–8 were eventually to demonstrate that the White House’s unwillingness to deal with the Sunnis could indeed be overcome. But back in 2004, says Jones, “I guess he felt it was too much of a hornet’s nest. If you’ve got your theater commander, your deputy, and, as far as you know, the president all against you, maybe you’d think it was just a bridge too far.”

Those who supported the proposals were soon reprimanded. Before the July conference, Jones had not only informed the State Department’s Baghdad deputy chief of mission, Ambassador James F. Jeffrey, about the meeting but had invited him to chair it. Returning to Washington, Jones discovered that a State Department official had told a reporter from The Washington Post that the Pentagon was mounting a “rogue operation” to negotiate with terrorists, without State’s knowledge. Jones had the documents to prove this wasn’t true, and the story did not run. Meanwhile, Wolfowitz summoned Jones to his office and berated him, stating again that Americans could never do business with Sunni tribal “Nazis” and ordering Jones to “cease and desist.” Wolfowitz today will not comment on Jones’s account.

In September, after his talks with al-Hamdani, Walker returned to Baghdad and was ordered to see Ambassador Jeffrey immediately. “He didn’t have any interest in what the Iraqis had been saying,” Walker says. “All he wanted to know about was what the Office of the Secretary of Defense was up to. It was plain that this was a turf war.” Returning from Washington to Jordan, Colonel Coleman was told that the State Department had declared him persona non grata in Jordan, and he was not allowed to enter the country. Colonel Harlan, who had taken notes of the meeting with the Messenger, was unexpectedly re-deployed from his job in the Amman embassy to Iraq.

The proponents of a rapprochement did not give up. In the months that followed, Wischkaemper made further visits to Amman and communicated frequently with al-Gaaod by phone and e-mail. “I was sending Rumsfeld a memo based on Talal’s information, relayed via Wischkaemper, almost every week,” Jones says. “I don’t know how Talal was getting his intelligence, but it was amazingly accurate, not just on the Sunni and al-Anbar but about the Shia leaders like al-Sadr and the rest of Iraq. He was the first to say the Iranians were taking over the South, and that the Brits were letting them do it.”

In the fall of 2004, Jones and Clad wrote a memo to C.I.A. director Porter Goss on the advantages of working with al-Gaaod. It made no apparent impact. In November 2004, the Jordanian government helped sponsor another summit in Amman, in the futile hope that talks might somehow avert a second battle for Fallujah, known to be imminent. The following June, Clad spent three days in Amman with al-Gaaod, afterward writing a memo on the proposed security force for the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad. Khalilzad met al-Gaaod, and on his return to Baghdad, the ambassador organized a Sunni-outreach task force. “He was very active in trying to get the Sunni to see that America was not the enemy,” says an official who was close to him. It would still take more than a year to overcome the resistance in Iraq and America to a deal with the Sunnis.

Not long after Khalilzad’s meeting with al-Gaaod an event occurred that both highlighted the possibilities of U.S.-Sunni collaboration and demonstrated how far outside the mainstream the Sunnis remained. In July 2005, the Sunni sheikhs of al-Qaim, a town near the Syrian border in Iraq’s Euphrates Valley, rose up against the local al-Qaeda jihadis, with whom they had long been in alliance. The jihadis gained the upper hand in the fighting, and a band of approximately 350 Sunnis were driven into the desert, facing annihilation. In desperation Talal called his closest American contact, Ken Wischkaemper. It was a Saturday morning, and Wischkaemper was at his ranch in Texas. He immediately called Jones, who in turn called John Coleman, who in turn called the Marine commander at Camp Fallujah. Within two hours a formation of Cobra ground-attack helicopters came to the rescue and routed the jihadis.

In retrospect, the air strike at al-Qaim in July 2005 was an important turning point. It was the first time that the Sunnis found themselves in open combat with al-Qaeda, and the first time America used its military might to support them. When the first agreements behind the Sunni Awakening were eventually concluded, more than a year later, the memory of that air strike helped persuade the Sunnis that the new deals would actually amount to something. But Talal al-Gaaod would not see that day. He collapsed and died in a hotel room in Paris after heart failure.

Looking back on the calamity of Iraq since 2003, James Clad identifies “points of divergence”—critical junctures where the road not taken might have produced a better outcome. The failure to stop the looting after Saddam’s fall and the disbanding of the army are two obvious points of divergence. Those who attended the Amman summit in 2004 believe the rebuffs to General al-Hamdani and the Messenger were another. Clad has no doubt about the importance of this lost opportunity. “Nothing else,” he says, “had the elements this did. It was head and shoulders above every other idea that emerged to stop the insurgency, and it could have been achieved.” Colonel Coleman says, “I would very much like to believe that, had we played the card General Raad dealt that night, a lot of lives might have been saved.” Colonel Walker adds, “In my mind, the meeting with the Messenger and the rest of the events on 19 July were the dawning of the Sunni Awakening. It turned out to be the awakening of a comatose patient, but it need not have been so.” “The key,” says Clad, “was there, right there in our hands, had we moved to use it.”

David Rose is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It really happened. Lions were led by Lambs.