... In Washington, however, it's 1971 all over again--after support for the war in Vietnam collapsed and not long before America's efforts to salvage it did. Neatly summarizing prevailing wisdom, Democratic campaign adviser Robert Shrum recently told The Washington Post, "The war in Iraq is over except for the dying." For all its testimonials to American resolve, the Bush administration can barely wait to devise the fig leaf that will permit the United States to withdraw...
So how do the Armed Forces feel about fighting a war that is "over except for the dying"? Responding to strategic rather than political imperatives, they operate at the same frenetic pace they always have. Anything less, commanders say, and the country would collapse around them. In a fine bit of solidarity with the soldiers dying there, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid calls Iraq "George Bush's war." Actually, it's now the U.S. Army's war. As its sense of ownership grows deeper with each year it spends here, the Army has created its own universe in Iraq--an ecosystem with its own values, requirements, and purposes. The din of politicians speechifying about the war, the faux moral posturing of opinion-makers who claim to speak in the name of "the troops," everything that Iraq has come to represent in the American imagination--it all melts away in the 115-degree heat...
Nowhere can the distance between Iraq the place and Iraq the abstraction be felt more keenly than in the Army's combat brigades. A conventional wisdom has emerged in Washington, arguing that U.S. forces have been "hunkering down"--the title of a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly--and patrolling less. Indeed, the president himself has pledged "less U.S. patrols, less U.S. presence." But this does not make it true...
The most important thing to understand about the way maneuver units fight the war is that no two of them fight the same way. 1-10 Mtn patrols constantly, but officers who served alongside it claim the National Guard brigade that preceded 1-10 Mtn rarely left the gate at all... So they fight their own wars, blanketing their sectors with troops and funds right up until the day the Pentagon orders them to let go...
The one barometer of progress in Iraq that truly progresses is the training of Iraqi security forces, on which America's hopes for an orderly withdrawal depend. Yet even this proceeds unevenly, with the Iraqi army making genuine strides and the Iraqi police making very few. The administration describes this as "the year of the police," but American officers predict they will need at least twice that long...
Slowly, fitfully, but progressively, the Americans are transforming Iraq's army into a professional force. It fields 117,000 men, 86 percent of its authorized strength, and it has rapidly expanded the amount of territory under its control. The army no longer melts away in combat, nor does it suffer from mass desertions, as it did during its first battles. Mostly, it fights.
The officers who lead Iraqi army patrols bring with them a local's sense of where to look for hidden weapons and who has told the truth and who has not. On a joint patrol, American officers hang back as the Iraqi platoon under their watch conducts house searches. As Iraqi soldiers fan out across the street and take up firing positions in the dirt, others peel off to search a nearby house, which they do from top to bottom..
When the U.S. Army trains foreign forces, it trains them to operate, equip, and acquit themselves along American lines. It trains them, in short, to emulate. Iraqi soldiers have taken the art to levels that would have made their South Vietnamese predecessors blush. Some even don the unit patches of their American counterparts. At the brigade headquarters of the Iraqi unit that conducted the sweep, the emulation extends to an after-action briefing where Iraqi officers summarize the day's tally (five detainees) for Colonel Muhammad Rao'of, whose richly appointed office is festooned with certificates of appreciation from various U.S. units that partnered with him...
Armed Forces in Iraq may view the war through a different prism than policymakers at home, but even 7,000 miles cannot measure their remove from American society. Unlike in Vietnam, where the cultural and political turmoil of the home front spilled over into rear areas late in the war, the Army in Iraq operates in a tightly sealed universe...
Nor, with the exception of its senior leaders, does the officer corps seem that much more attuned to debates at home. The borders of the sectors where they work 20-hour days define their horizons. Even the brightest among them, explains one company commander, avoid broader discussions about the war--in many cases a conscious choice, he adds, for even to entertain doubts risks "taking a step into nowhere." Having bled so much here, the officer corps has very little use for the suggestion it did so in vain. Tellingly, a Pew Research Center survey last year found that 64 percent of the military was confident of success in Iraq, a higher percentage than the public at large and roughly twice the percentage of civilian elites.
The two universes meet in Tall Afar... It makes for an uneasy coexistence. That's because Tall Afar, which the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment (3rd ACR) pacified last year, has become a metaphor in Washington for how things should be done. So much so that, in March, the president devoted an entire address to the remote outpost's lessons. 3rd ACR's commander, H.R. McMaster--a brilliant and profane officer who, but for the fact of his existence, only a fiction writer could invent--opened 29 patrol bases in the city, establishing the Americans as an essential part of its landscape...
With the exception of Tall Afar's mayor--who implored the president to keep McMaster in Tall Afar and who, I'm told on arriving, has flown to Colorado to be with him--the town's residents could have done without the publicity. Earlier in the week, a truck bomb killed 17 people here. Tall Afar's police chief, General Sabah Mohammed, explains the carnage the same way many officers do. "After President Bush speaks," he tells me, "the terrorists want to disprove him, so they start coming here." The First Armored Division's First Brigade Combat Team (1-1 AD) has battled back aggressively, launching foot patrols, establishing even more patrol bases, and--with the gruesome exception of the truck bomb--reducing the number of attacks to what they were before the speech.
With such assertiveness come casualties, and with casualties comes public scrutiny, which, in turn, generates demands to bring the troops home. Some officers complain that the American public advertises its fears as if they were virtues. But 1-1 AD's Colonel Sean MacFarland, a humble man with an engineering degree, approaches the civil-military gap like a diplomatic translator. "If we didn't want to accept risk, we wouldn't leave FOBs," he explains. Pointing to intelligence tips generated by the foot patrols that 1-1 AD sends into Tall Afar daily, MacFarland says, "If you isolate yourself from people here, you've already lost." His officers echo the point. "There's this British instructor at Taji," one captain says, referring to the counterinsurgency school that junior officers attend when they arrive in Iraq. "And he makes the point this way: If someone's beating you over the head with a stick, do you cover your head or do you take the stick and beat him back?"
Army officers would choose the latter option. But it's not so clear the American public wants them to. With the advent of an all-volunteer force, a mountain of survey data shows public tolerance for casualties has diminished to lows seldom recorded during the era of universal conscription. Lately, the paradox has expressed itself in a tendency to infantilize American soldiers, particularly with recommendations about how they ought to protect themselves. The impulse can have unintended consequences: "Up-armored" Humvees constantly roll over under the additional weight, something that accounts for nearly three-quarters of Humvee-accident deaths. "It's always the people who aren't in our positions who make decisions about armor," says 1-1 AD turret gunner PFC Anthony Stangle. In Mosul, armor now encases the entire bodies of turret gunners, who resemble heavily armed Michelin Men. In a convoy that makes its way along dirt roads from the town of Sinjar to Tall Afar, they choke in the heat. The politicians who demand more layers of body armor seem not to recognize that temperatures here reach 120 degrees in the summer. "I think they're really going overboard," says 1-1 AD gunner Lucciarini. "It's unbearable."...
The Army may have created its own universe in Iraq, but the outside world does intrude. The one arena where Washington does so regularly is the numbers game. In fairness, the Bush administration has only bad options: It can either maintain force levels in Iraq and face political ruination at home, or it can bring the troops home and watch Iraq burn. Most officers have resigned themselves to drawdowns proceeding without condition and regardless of consequence. "No one's going to 'pull' brigades out of Iraq," says one field grade officer. "It'll be over when they leave but don't get replaced." In the Pentagon's desire to hold up the deployment of additional brigades, he says, one may glimpse the future of the country the Army now calls home. There is none.
At the End of the War, the Army Digs In
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