historian with no experience or specialization in the Middle East; the latter an imposing and intimidating retired general with a forceful personality. But they were effective because they provided a public voice arguing that a troop surge could work. While working on this book I met American officials who loved them or hated them, who attributed the whole surge to them or denied they had any significant role. “Success has many fathers,” one lieutenant colonel explained, and the surge was the only positive development anyone could point to in America’s catastrophic occupation of Iraq.
In 2006 there were many voices calling for either an American withdrawal or an increase in American troops. Colin Kahl of Georgetown University and then the Center for New American Security visited Iraq in the summer of that year. Based on his experience he called for more troops or for a withdrawal, but he was ignored as an outsider and a Democratic partisan. (President Obama would later install him as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East.) There was a joint push for more troops coming from the NSC and the Keane/Kagan duo. Keane, who looked at Iraq from a purely military view, was the most consistent and longstanding advocate of a troop increase. “He was always poking,” one NSC member told me. J.D. Crouch, the deputy national security adviser, hosted an Iraq review in December 2006. He convened small groups in which he appeared neutral, but he steered skeptics to the surge—and then convinced his boss, Stephen Hadley. One lieutenant colonel involved in the surge described Kagan as “just a blowhard who could be counted on to give the party line in print when he returned from each of his Petraeus-sponsored trips.” But another lieutenant colonel described him as a brilliant and rigorous thinker. “Kagan is the main guy behind the push for more troops, and Keane is an idiot,” he told me, adding, for good measure, that Casey and Fil were also idiots. Although neoconservatives have traditionally been advocates of increased reliance on airpower, Kagan broke with this neoconservative predilection for “shock and awe” tactics. Instead he believed that war was about influencing people on the ground, and thus required more troops. Kagan provided Bush with an alternative to the Senate’s Iraq Study Group report, which advocated a reduction in troops.
An internal NSC review and Keane’s force of will persuaded the president to change course in Iraq. The push out of Washington for more troops was then utilized by Multi-National Division-Baghdad, with some oversight from General Casey, to secure Baghdad. General Odierno had a very different concept, his critics told me. “He wanted to use the troops out in the ‘Baghdad belts’ to go kill Sunnis,” one senior American officer said. Odierno’s role was “totally blown out of proportion,” according to one of the architects of the surge in Baghdad, “and I don’t think he really figures in the picture.” Major Morgado strongly disagrees: “Though Baghdad was a large problem set, it was not the only problem set,” he said.
There was a serious and heated internal debate among the Americans in Baghdad, both between different headquarters and within them, over whether they should focus on population security or continue to capture and kill. Advocates of the latter approach, of which Odierno apparently was the champion, saw which way the wind was blowing, aped the new COIN language, and called their method “clearing,” as in “clear, hold, and build” or “clear, control, and retain.”
But Morgado disagreed with this description of Odierno’s philosophy. “Maliki wanted to go and kill Sunnis,” he told me. “By putting a larger American presence in the belts, it stopped Maliki from pursuing this aim, and it allowed Americans to effectively interdict lines of communication and thereby stop accelerants of the violence. The Awakening would have been hard-pressed to happen if Maliki was allowed to unleash a one-sided assault on the Sunnis in the belts.”
General Petraeus and the bulk of MND-B were focused on providing security to the Iraqi population. Odierno and some other elements—most notably the Third Stryker Brigade combat team, Second Infantry Division, under the command of Steve Townsend—wanted to keep “clearing,” the most violent part of the “clear, hold, and build” process. Odierno tasked the Third Infantry Division to lead the organization of Multi-National Division-Central and facilitate the fight in the belts outside Baghdad. As airpower advocates have noted, more bombs were dropped in 2007 in MND-C’s area of operations than at any time earlier in the war. While Baghdad was focused on population security (despite some internal dissidents and occasional lapses), MND-C was still killing and capturing until much later, when the Awakening groups were established there too.
Odierno wanted to reduce the influence of MND-B (the major institutional proponent of executing the surge) and transfer terrain to the other units that shared his focus on killing and capturing. Odierno could never directly say, “Don’t secure the population,” since Petraeus would overturn that, but he could nibble away at MND-B’s influence. (Morgado denied that his old boss had any obsession with killing. “I believe General Odierno sensed weakness in General Fil,” he said. “Odierno used to talk about reconciling with various parties back in 2003 to 2004. This was not a new concept for him.”)
Most interlocutors I dealt with from the military and National Security Council agreed that Odierno was neither a visionary nor a strategist. “Petraeus is an A who hires A-pluses,” one American intelligence analyst dealing with Iraq told me. “Odierno is a B who hires Cs.” Petraeus also had the star power to handpick whomever he wanted, which led to the creation of a coterie of West Point graduates and within that a smaller group of graduates from West Point’s social sciences department. Petraeus made COIN the universal policy, and thanks to his status he was able to sell an increase in troops to the American people and Congress despite their growing antiwar mood.
Though the surge was Baghdad-oriented, the increased troop numbers also allowed the Americans to operate in the “belts” that surrounded the city. Odierno’s role in the belts was a key element. He took the concept of the surge and decided where to put troops. “He is not a bright guy, and he didn’t have bright guys around him, but he figured out how to fight the battle of Baghdad,” one insider told me. If Doug Ollivant and others at First Cav were the architects of the surge, Odierno was the builder, the operational realizer. Morgado served in Balad, north of Baghdad, between July and November 2007. “Al Qaeda in Iraq had freedom of maneuver in the belts,” he explained. “This gave them unlimited opportunities to marshal resources in the hinterlands, use multiple avenues to infiltrate supplies and weapons into Baghdad, and conduct attacks. Al Qaeda, with this latitude, was free to conduct attacks on Shiites and act as an accelerant for retribution by the Mahdi Army or other Shiites.
“While U.S. and Iraqi forces kept the Shiites under control in Baghdad, U.S.-led efforts in the belts kept the Sunnis/Al Qaeda off-balance. Both efforts depended on the other, but the belts clearly supported the efforts within Baghdad. I thought it was critical for U.S. forces to lead in the belts. We stood up the Sons of Iraq and brought the Sunnis into the ‘good guy’ side of the ledger. I don’t think this was feasible or desirable by a Maliki-led effort. His solution to the Sunni problem would have been ‘Kill them all’ and only would have exacerbated the problem. Though the Sons of Iraq pose a political problem now and in the future, these are much better conditions.”
Balad is a Shiite-dominated town surrounded by rural Sunni communities. By the time Morgado arrived in Balad, the Mahdi Army had been largely put down, while most Sunnis within the town had been chased out or killed. Morgado’s principal threat remained Al Qaeda in Iraq and associated groups. “We were tight along the Salahaddin/Diyala fault line,” he said. “Their lines of communication ran from Samarra and Anbar in the west, from Baquba in the east, and Mosul to the north. In turn, they would use the Balad area to stage attacks in Baghdad/Taji area in the south.”
The first Sons of Iraq group was “stood up” in Balad in August 2007. Morgado’s battalion cultivated six of these groups, putting about 200 individuals on the payroll. “They were extremely effective. Once these groups stood up, Al Qaeda went after them hard, but they remained resilient. With largely Sons of Iraq influence, we began capturing or killing every major high-value target we had, and attacks in our zone decreased dramatically. It was clear with the Sons of Iraq that part of their motivation was monetary, but largely they were tired of the violence. Their allegiance with Al Qaeda only brought them death and instability. By working with us, they realized they could stabilize the community. Knowing that we were providing support to these groups, monetarily and operationally, gave them a lot of confidence.”
When Bush announced his surge in January 2007, I thought it was too late for the Americans to make a difference. I had spent four years writing about the oppressive nature of the American occupation, and I didn’t see how enlarging it could make things better. General Petraeus himself asserted that military gains would be ephemeral if Iraq’s factions did not reach political deals. It seemed as if more troops might only provoke further resistance, or if not, that a few thousand more troops couldn’t possibly halt the civil war and affect the situation in Iraq strategically. But the addition of more American troops also forced other armed factions in Iraq to change their plans and actions.
According to Lieutenant Colonel Miska, the introduction of combat outposts, smaller bases inside neighborhoods, and joint security stations where Americans lived and worked with Iraqi security forces allowed the
