I don’t know if you’ve been reading the news lately, but we’ve basically won the war in Iraq. Yep, the surge has worked, Iraqi refugees are returning home in droves and all is well. So, I thought I should bring you up to date on some of the awesome news.

First, let’s start with the refugees returning. According to the Iraqi and US governments, 1,600 refugees are returning to Baghdad each day. Fucking sweet! We are winning!

Boo. Liberal press, Democrats hate the troops, etc. You get what I’m trying to say.

Okay, so the number is apparently less than the reported 1,600 per day. And the government is not really keeping track of who the people are, so some of the returnees are actually terrorists, blah, blah, blah. The numbers a little off, right? I’m sure not by much.

Well, shit at least people are coming back, right? No matter how small the number, at least it’s positive!

Yeah, but, but..people are still living in Iraq. They are still there, you liberal fucks!

I’m just going to move on because naysayers and America haters have attacked this topic. The surge is working, which means Iraqi politicians can to come together and start hammering out solutions.

Well, who cares about the Sunnis? They are only like 2% of the population or something. At least now that the surge has worked, people can return to their normal lives.

Honestly, why can’t we just focus on the surge and how great it is going? After four years of war, the sewer system is a bit fucked up, yes. Only 30 to 40 percent of Baghdad sewage pumps are working, which is better than zero. Come on, the glass is half full. Or 40% full.

Yes, but now we can actually fix the fucking problem, right?

Yes, yes, fine. But the surge is working and now we can fix everything. We just need the money to get the repairs done.

Granted that sounds bad, but less people are dying from bullets and bombs. How about somebody throw a smiley face around? Or put a fucking gold star on top of a report? Instead of all this dark cloud bullshit.

Hello? Surge? Working?

So, now you are mad at some guy because he learned to be an entrepreneur? Really? That is pretty anti-American. Let’s just focus on one word: Surge. Okay? Good?

Oh, fuck off. Liberal asshole reporters.

Fine, you hate America. I get it. Anything else you want to throw in before you lose the war?

Blow me.

FearTheReaper is excited that Bush finally got around to doing what he should have done the first week. But four years is too late.

On Monday General Petraeus, commander of forces in Iraq, testified before congress. He gave his assessment of conditions in Iraq and of the progress Bush's surge plan has made. He prefaced his report by saying

He then went on to say that the surge has, militarily, been successful. You may have heard about the poor marks the surge received from the GAO which reported that the Iraqi government had not met 13 of 18 benchmarks. Fortunately, Petraeus's assessment is based on first hand knowledge and intelligence of the improvements US forces are making and are not based on political benchmarks created to judge the Iraqi government. And despite some very visible attacks in northern Iraq and even on the Iraqi parliament, civilian casualties are down.

The general thinks things are going so well, in fact, that he thinks that troop levels should be decreased.

Now obviously things are not hunky dory in Iraq. The war is losing popularity in America as well as among Iraqis. US soldiers are still losing their lives, Iraqi citizens face violence from insurgents and al Qaeda-Iraq along with shortages in food, electricity, gas, and most of the other things you and I would consider basic necessities. So simply comparing life in Iraq to the pre-surge peak of violence is sort of just saying that things aren't as bad as they possibly could be. But these are moves in the right direction. Security forces are slowly but surely becoming more self sufficient, civilian deaths are down, al Qaeda-Iraq has been pushed out of Baghdad and is severely limited in it's ability to conduct attacks, security in Anbar Province has dramatically increased, and in short, strides are being made. Polls and benchmarks which show that life in Iraq is getting worse all seem evidence to me, that US involvement in Iraq should be extended. Hopefully, Petraeus's assessment and vision forward are correct.

RAMADI, IRAQ – After spending some time in and around Baghdad with the United States military I visited the city of Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s notoriously convulsive and violent Anbar Province, and breathed an unlikely sigh of relief. Only a few months ago Ramadi was one of the most dangerous cities in the world. It was another “Fallujah,” and certainly the most dangerous place in Iraq. Today, to the astonishment of everyone – especially the United States Army and Marines – it is perhaps the safest city in all of Iraq outside of Kurdistan.

In August 2006 the Marine Corps, arguably the least defeatist institution in all of America, wrote off Ramadi as irretrievably lost. They weren’t crazy for thinking it. Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq had moved in to fight the Americans, and they were welcomed as liberators by a substantial portion of the local population.

I wrote recently that Baghdad, while dangerous and mind-bogglingly dysfunctional, isn’t as bad as it looks on TV. Almost everywhere I have been in the Middle East is more “normal” than it appears in the media. Nowhere is this more true than in Beirut, but it is true to a lesser extent in Baghdad as well. Baghdad isn’t a normal city, but it appears normal in most places most of the time. Ramadi, in my experience, is the great exception. Ramadi was worse than it appeared in the media.

Baghdad suffers from political paralysis, a low-grade counterinsurgency, and a very slow-motion civil war. It doesn’t look or feel like a war most of the time, although it does sometimes. What happened in Ramadi wasn’t like that. It wasn’t the surreal sort-of war that still simmers in Baghdad. Two American colonels in charge of the area compared the battle of Ramadi to Stalingrad.

“We were engaged in hours-long full-contact kinetic warfare with enemies in fixed positions,” said Army Major Lee Peters.

“There were areas where our odds of being attacked were 100 percent,” Army Captain Jay McGee told me. “Literally hundreds of IEDs created virtual minefields.”

“The whole area was enemy controlled,” said Marine Lieutenant Jonathan Welch. “If we went out for even a half-hour we were shot at, and we were shot at accurately. Sometimes we took casualties and were not able to inflict casualties. We didn’t know where they were shooting from.”



Anbar Province is the heart of Iraq’s Sunni Triangle, and Ramadi is its capital. Iraq has 18 provinces, but until recently almost a third of all U.S. casualties were in Anbar alone.1.3 million people live there, mostly along the Euphrates River, and roughly a third live in Ramadi. Most of the rest live in the also notorious and now largely secured cities of Haditha, Hit, and Fallujah.

I haven’t visited the other cities yet because I wanted to begin in the province’s largest and most important city. Ramadi isn’t the most important solely because it’s the capital or because it’s the largest. It is also the most important because Al Qaeda declared it “The Capital of the Islamic State of Iraq.”

“You have to understand what every side’s end state is in Iraq to really understand what’s going on,” said Captain McGee in his Military Intelligence headquarters at the Blue Diamond base just north of the city. An enormous satellite photo of Ramadi and the surrounding area that functioned as a map took up a whole wall. Local streets were relabeled by the military and given very American names: White Sox Road, Eisenhower Road, and Pool Hall Street for example.

“The ideology of AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] is to establish the Islamic Caliphate in Iraq,” he said. “In order for them to be successful they must control the Iraqi population through either support or coercion.”


Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq

Some in the United States are unconvinced that Al Qaeda was really at the center of the conflict in Anbar. So I asked Colonel John Charlton how the Army knows Al Qaeda is really who they have been dealing with. He was supremely annoyed by the question.

“We know it’s Al Qaeda,” he said. There is no controversy whatsoever about this in Iraq. My question seemed to him as if it had come from another planet. “They self-identify as Al Qaeda. We didn’t give them that name. That’s what they call themselves. We have their propaganda CDs which have Al Qaeda written all over them.”

It’s not a dumb question, though, if a substantial number of Americans aren’t sure what’s going on in a bottomlessly complicated country eight or more times zones away. And not everyone who underestimated Al Qaeda’s presence is a fool.

I briefly met Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonel Eric Holmes from Dallas, Texas, while he was on his way home after volunteering to serve in Ramadi for six months. “I didn’t realize until I got here that the problem in Anbar Province was 100 percent Al Qaeda,” he said. “The old Baath Party insurgency here is completely finished. That war was won and Americans, including me, had no idea it even happened.”

Al Qaeda was initially welcomed by many Iraqis in Ramadi because they said they were there to fight the Americans. The spirit of resistance against foreign occupiers was strong. But the Iraqis got a lot more in the bargain than simply resistance.

“Al Qaeda came in and just seized people’s houses,” said Army Captain Phil Messer from Nashville, Tennessee. “They said we’re taking your house to use it against the Americans. Get out.”

“Every mosque in the city was anti-American,” Captain McGee said. “They were against us, but Al Qaeda made it even worse by ordering them to broadcast anti-American propaganda at gunpoint.”


A U.S. Army armored personnel carrier on Market Street

“Market Street [the main street downtown] was completely controlled by Al Qaeda,” Lieutenant Welch said. “They rolled down the streets, pointed guns at people, and said we are in charge. They had crazy requirements for the locals. They weren’t allowed to cut their hair. Girls were banned from going to school. They couldn’t shave or smoke. One guy defiantly lit a cigarette and they shot him four times.”

*

Sergeant Kenneth Hicks from Portland, Oregon, took me on my first foot patrol in the city. We dismounted our Humvees near Market Street in the center of one of Al Qaeda’s old strongholds.

“This is an infamous sniper corner,” he said before we had even walked twenty feet.


An infamous sniper corner

“A few months ago we would be dead standing here,” he said. “But there were so many IEDs on this street, and so much piled up garbage, that we could only go out on foot.”

After Al Qaeda took over Ramadi, the local government was replaced with terrorists who only cared about fighting Americans and violently suppressing Iraqis. Al Qaeda was in charge, but it wouldn’t be accurate to say they were the new government. None of the basic city government services functioned. There was no electricity, no running water, no telephone service, and no garbage collection. Every single local business closed down. The city could not have been any more broken.



“Ramadi didn’t even have a city government until April,” said Colonel Charlton. “They couldn’t come to work because of security. And the city was down to zero electricity just three months ago.”

“I’m sure it looks to you like there’s lots of trash all over the place,” Sergeant Hicks said. “But there is massive cleanup going on. There really is a lot less of it now than there was a few months ago.”

We walked a block or so and came to a series of concrete barriers blocking vehicle traffic.



“We put up those walls to keep the rat line [enemy logistics route] out in the open desert from coming into the city,” he said.

Kids saw us and scattered. Nobody needed to tell me that was bad.

“Look out,” Sergeant Hicks said in case I didn’t know. “It’s not a good sign when kids run.”

Children who run at the sight of American soldiers often know something the soldiers do not. They may know an explosion or an insurgent attack of some other kind is imminent.

The same is true in Afghanistan. Soldiers know they can gauge the friendliness of an area by the response to their presence of its children. When kids run up and greet them, the area is friendly. When children just stand there and watch, the area is neutral or possibly hostile. When they flee it usually means the area is violently hostile and the kids need to get out of the way of the fighting that may be coming.

Sergeant Hicks raised his weapon and pointed it across the street.



I suspect he was more worried than I was. Ramadi is a friendly city that has been cleared and pacified. The children were most likely running out of sheer habit. They lived right in the heart of what was recently Al Qaeda’s main stronghold.

Nothing exploded and nobody shot at us. The first kids I ever saw in Ramadi ran from us, but it never once happened again. Only two or three minutes later, children excitedly greeted us as they did every other time I stepped out into the streets of the city and the surrounding countryside.





“Three months ago people turned their backs to us,” Sergeant Hicks said. “They refused to even smile. They were like beaten dogs.”

We walked down Market Street.

Small shops had re-opened since the war ended, but there was still a substantial amount of visible damage.



“That pile of rubble at the end of the streets was an observation post,” he said.


Anbar’s Most Wanted

“Those posters work,” Sergeant Hicks said when he saw me taking a photo of one of Anbar’s Most Wanted posters. “People are giving us information. And, you know, these people really open up to you, automatically, when you’re in their houses. They’ll just start telling you what it was like living under Saddam – the most unbelievable things.” And this is a part of Iraq that was favored by Saddam Hussein. It was much worse in the Shia and Kurdish parts of the country.

*

I also went on patrol with Captain Phil Messer. He was the most hospitable officer I met in Iraq. He and his men lived in a large rented house about the size of a university co-op in the Hay al Adel neighborhood. He gave me his private room next to the Tactical Operations Center and slept in a crowded room with some of the other soldiers so I would be as comfortable as possible. “I’ve been immersed in this culture a long time,” he said. “The Arab code of hospitality is starting to wear off on me.” I don’t think he was sucking up for good press. He is just a nice guy.


Captain Phil Messer

“What do you want to see in Ramadi?” he said.

“Destruction,” I said. “I need to photograph what the war did to this place.”

So he took me out to see the destruction. He did not ask me why or what I would do with the pictures.

We headed out to “Route Michigan” in Humvees.



“When we first started using this road,” he said, “we thought it was a dirt road. Then we cleaned it up and, sure enough, there was asphalt under it. Route Michigan was hit by IEDs and gunfire every single time a convoy went down it. There was a foot and a half of water on it because the IEDs shattered so many water mains. Our vehicles were not allowed to travel on it unless they were specifically on a combat mission.”

Most of the city’s buildings and houses are more or less intact, but some areas have been completely destroyed. I toured the destruction in South Lebanon at the end of last year, but I didn’t see anything there on the scale of what happened in Ramadi. Nor did I see anything even remotely like this in Baghdad.



“We took the gloves off,” said Captain Dennison from where he described as Middle of Nowhere, Kentucky. “We had to.”



I saw dozens of buildings that look like those pictured above, and this was after the majority of the wreckage had been cleared.

At least it did not all go to waste. The twisted rebar was saved, and a young man amazingly was able to straighten it out with a tool made just for that purpose.



It looks bad, and it is bad. It’s worse than it looks, actually, because the destruction goes on and on and on in large swaths. Areas where rubble has been cleared look like parking lots, and there are literally miles of such areas in Ramadi along the main streets.


Cleared rubble, Ramadi


The large blank area in this picture was once dense with buildings

But just around the corner from the picture above is a bustling market that looks totally normal, as if nothing eventful ever happened there.


A bustling market right next to a scene of vast devastation

*

I spent the next day at a Joint Security Station (JSS), a tiny outpost in a rented house where American soldiers and Marines live with Iraqi soldiers in the heart of the city.

Army Lieutenant Markham from Shreveport, Louisiana, met me first thing in the morning at Camp Corregidor and drove me over there.

“What’s the plan today?” I said.

“There’s this thing – I don’t know if you’ve heard of it – called the GWOT,” he said jokingly. “The Global War on Terrorism. We have to win it.”

“And what about me?” I said.

“I’ll be taking you over to the JSS and leaving you with Lieutenant Hightower,” he said. “Think of it as me dropping you off at school.”

“Ok, Dad,” I said. “Which truck am I riding in?”


Lieutenant Markham says hello to Ramadi’s children

When we arrived at the JSS I was horrified. The building had sustained battle damage from the war. Everything was hot and filthy. The stairs were broken. The bathroom was covered in spider webs and dried mud left over from the last time it had rained. Aside from a few select rooms, there was no air conditioning. It’s hard to describe how awful that is in Iraq in August. Somebody told me it was 138 degrees that day. It’s hotter in Ramadi than even in Baghdad, and it’s made worse by the fact that the JSS didn’t have showers. “I once went three months without a shower,” a soldier told me outside. Amazingly, the place didn’t smell bad.

The toilets didn’t work and there were no porta-johns, so everyone had to use plastic bags and wash up with bottled water. “If you let the water from the sink get on your skin,” a soldier told me, “there’s a ten percent chance you’ll get a horrible rash.”

American and Iraqi soldiers live in this place. “Most Americans have no idea how bad we have it here,” someone told me, and I’m certain he’s right. But most of them didn’t complain. Life is a lot better in Ramadi now that the war is over, regardless of the heat and living conditions.

“Can I take pictures of this place?” I said to Sergeant Hicks. Only in the rarest of circumstances does the military object to journalists taking pictures, and even then only when the photographs might help the other side plan attacks.

“Hmm,” Sergeant Hicks said.

“Uh,” Lieutenant Markham said.

“It’s not that important,” I said.

“Just make sure there aren’t any full-page spreads showing the layout of this place so suicide bombers would know how to hit us,” Sergeant Hicks said.

“Yeah, Mike,” Lieutenant Markham said. “What are you trying to pull here?” He didn’t sound like he was joking, but he probably was. He’s just a dead-pan kind of guy who could have rubbed me the wrong way, but didn’t.

He introduced me to Marine Lieutenant Andrew Hightower from Houston, Texas. Hightower had recently returned from three months on medical leave.

“What happened?” I said.

“I got blown up,” he said.

“You don’t look blown up,” I said.

“I got hit with a 120 mortar round IED,” he said. “Near Market Street. I got shrapnel all in my leg.”

“How did that feel?” I said. Sometimes people don’t feel pain even when they are shot, so I didn’t know.

“It felt like someone was pushing a hot iron onto my skin,” he said. “Then I felt the blood running down my leg.” The doctors gave him the pieces of shrapnel which he now keeps in a jar.

“Lieutenant Hightower is a terrific Marine officer,” Lieutenant Markham said. “He gives me hope for the future of the Marine Corps.”

He said that so seriously I thought he might not be joking this time.

“Did you actually worry about the future of the Marine Corps before you met him?” I said.

“Well, yes kind of,” he said. “The Marines are just…really different from the Army.” He said it with such gravity and disappointment and concern and shook his head.

I couldn’t possibly care less about the rivalry between the Army and the Marines, although I was occasionally asked by members of each which branch I preferred.

One Marine tried to get an Iraqi Army soldier to take sides.

“Which do you think is better?” he said to the Iraqi soldier. “Army or Marines?”

“The Navy is best,” said the Iraqi.

The Marine was taken aback. “The Navy?” he said.

“Yes, Navy,” said the Iraqi.

The Marine looked slightly annoyed when I laughed.

Lieutenant Markham handed me over to Lieutenant Hightower who was supposed to take me out on a patrol. But a dust storm blew in from the desert and we were grounded. Soldiers and Marines aren’t allowed to go on patrols when the air is “condition red” because medi-vac helicopters have a hard time evacuating anyone who gets wounded. So I was stranded and spent as much of the day as I could talking to those who fought and survived the battle of Ramadi.

*

“We have genuinely good relations with the Iraqi Army here,” Lieutenant Hightower said. “We live in the same rooms. They are almost like my own soldiers. We go to their funerals.”

Every soldier and Marine I met in Anbar Province spoke highly of and with great admiration for their Iraqi counterparts. It was a completely different world from the Baghdad area where so many Americans hold the Iraqis in contempt as corrupt incompetents who let themselves be infiltrated by terrorists and insurgents.

“Some of the Iraqi Police here were insurgents, though,” he said. “We sent them to Jordan for training and when they got there they had serious background checks. Some of them were yanked out of the IP and sent to prison.”

So there has been a weeding out process, unlike in many parts of Iraq. And some of the police were insurgents who switched sides when they realized Al Qaeda, and not the Americans, were the real enemy.

“The Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police here are amazing,” Lieutenant Hightower said. “For a long time they weren’t being paid, but they risked their lives every day and did their jobs anyway.”

They are being paid now, but not very much. Iraqi Police officers only earn 300 or so dollars per month.

“What are you doing here anyway?” he said. “Not much happens in Ramadi anymore. Nothing blows up anymore. There’s no blood and guts here.”

There certainly was blood and guts, though. Just a few blocks from the station is a soccer stadium that was used during the war as a mass grave site.

“We found bodies buried in the middle of the soccer field by insurgents,” Lieutenant Hightower said. “After the war ended the Iraqis had to unearth the bodies. They called it Operation Graveyard.”


The Ramadi soccer field, formerly a mass grave site, now a sports venue again

“That was its official name?” I said.

“That was its official name,” he said. “Now there’s a soccer game there every night at 5:00.” I had plans to attend the game that night myself, but it was cancelled.


Lieutenant Hightower

“There was another soccer field north of the city in the ‘Sofia’ area,” he said, “a kids’ soccer field. It was also used as a dump site. AQI killed civilians by castrating them, stuffing their genitals in their mouths, and cutting off their heads. Al Qaeda killed a lot more civilians than they ever killed soldiers.”

Captain Jay McGee concurred. “Suicide car bombers rarely attacked the coalition,” he said, meaning Americans. “They almost always attacked Iraqi security forces and civilians. They know the U.S. will leave eventually, but AQI ultimately must fight Iraqis and destroy Iraqi institutions in order to prevail.”



They did kill Americans, though, certainly. And they recruited and paid willing local Iraqis to help them.

“To get paid by AQI for killing Americans,” Lieutenant Hightower said, “the attack must be videotaped. They often used tracer rounds so they could prove it was real. We found whole piles of these tapes when we cleaned the city out. We found and killed a sniper just northeast of the city. He had all kinds of video tapes of himself shooting and killing American soldiers.”

Snipers were everywhere in Ramadi. Some were committed Al Qaeda fighters, and others were just paid to help out.

“One of my soldiers was shot in the head through his helmet by a sniper,” he said. High powered bullets will pierce helmets if they hit at a head-on angle. “The sniper was shooting from behind a curtain in a van. He was a teacher at a women’s vocational school by day and a sniper for extra money at night. AQI just recruits people who need money and hires them as insurgents as if it were a regular job.”



Conveniently for Al Qaeda, the economy in Ramadi utterly disintegrated during the war. Almost everybody needed money, and even those who did have money had a hard time buying anything since all the stores had closed down.

Mortars were a big problem, too, and they came from random directions.

“AQI would launch three mortars from a truck,” Lieutenant Hightower said, “then drive off. We usually couldn’t shoot back fast enough before they had scurried off somewhere else.”

The worst, though, were the IEDs. It’s the same everywhere in Iraq.

“They used acid to liquefy the asphalt and bury the IEDs under the road,” he said. “Then they would push the liquid asphalt back into the hole. Their work looked almost perfect. You could tell where they had buried the IEDs if you looked closely enough, but the roads are filthy and the evidence was barely detectable when we were driving. We found a lot of them with slow-moving road clearance vehicles that use metal detector arms.”

He had to take a phone call, so I walked around the station and noticed that the filthy place was suddenly cleaner than it was when I arrived just a few hours before. The Iraqis were hard at work fixing the place up since they couldn’t go on patrols while the dusty air was still at condition red. Cases of MREs and bottled water were more organized. The floors had been swept clear of dust. Soon the station might actually be suitable for people to live in.

“Al Qaeda hit a six month old baby with a mortar when they were trying to hit us,” Lieutenant Hightower said when he got off the phone. “They also hit a six year old girl. We went in and medi-vacced the victims, and we made lots of friends that day. It was a clarifying experience for the Iraqis.”

It was a clarifying experience for the Iraqis because they had been raised on virulent anti-American conspiracy theories and propaganda from Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party. They truly believed the Army and Marines were there to steal their oil and women. Americans saving the lives of children wounded by fellow Sunni Arabs who passed themselves off as liberators was not what many Iraqis ever expected to see.

“The six month baby had shrapnel in his head,” Lieutenant Hightower said. “The six year old girl had shrapnel in her leg. It was the most disturbing thing I’ve seen since I got here.” This from a man who saw one of his own men shot in the head by a sniper.

Ramadi is in terrible shape even now. If it were an American city it would be declared in a state of emergency. Months of accumulated garbage is still piled up everywhere. The electricity still isn’t on for even twelve hours a day – although the eight of hours the city does get – because, as Colonel Charlton says, Al Qaeda no longer blows up the electrical towers – certainly beats the one hour of electricity they get each day in Baghdad. Sewage flows in the street. The economy has a pulse, but four months ago it was at zero.



“The city completely bottomed out,” Colonel Holmes told me. “It hit absolute rock bottom.”

Ramadi was in worse shape even than Gaza. And Ramadi was once one of the loveliest cities in all of Iraq.

*

Nineteen Arab tribes led by sheikhs live in Anbar Province. In June of 2006, nine of those tribal sheikhs cooperated with the Americans, three were neutral, and seven were hostile.

In October of last year the tribal leaders in the province, including some who previously were against the Americans, formed a movement to reject the savagery Al Qaeda had brought to their region. Some of them were supremely unhappy with the American presence since fighting exploded in the province’s second largest city of Fallujah, but Al Qaeda proved to be even more sinister from their point of view. Al Qaeda did not come as advertised. They were militarily incapable of expelling the American Army and Marines. And they were worse oppressors than even Saddam Hussein. The leaders of Anbar Province saw little choice but to openly declare them enemies and do whatever it took to expunge them. They called their new movement Sahawa al Anbar, or the Anbar Awakening.

Sheikh Sattar is its leader. Al Qaeda murdered his father and three of his brothers and he was not going to put up with them any longer. None of the sheikhs were willing to put up with them any longer. By April of 2007, every single tribal leader in all of Anbar was cooperating with the Americans.

“AQI announced the Islamic State of Iraq in a parade downtown on October 15, 2006,” said Captain McGee. “This was their response to Sahawa al Anbar. They were threatened by the tribal movement so they accelerated their attacks against tribal leaders. They ramped up the murder and intimidation. It was basically a hostile fascist takeover of the city."

Sheikh Jassim’s experience was typical.

“Jassim was pissed off because American artillery fire was landing in his area,” Colonel Holmes said. “But he wasn’t pissed off at us. He was pissed off at Al Qaeda because he knew they always shot first and we were just shooting back.”

“He said he would prevent Al Qaeda from firing mortars from his area if we would help him,” Lieutenant Hightower said. “Al Qaeda said they would mess him up if he got in their way. He called their bluff and they seriously fucked him up. They launched a massive attack on his area. All hell broke loose. They set houses on fire. They dragged people through the streets behind pickup trucks. A kid from his area went into town and Al Qaeda kidnapped him, tortured him, and delivered his head to the outpost in a box. The dead kid was only sixteen years old. The Iraqis then sent out even nine year old kids to act as neighborhood watchmen. They painted their faces and everything.”

“Sheikh Jassim came to us after that,” Colonel Holmes told me, “and said I need your help.”

“One night,” Lieutenant Markham said, “after several young people were beheaded by Al Qaeda, the mosques in the city went crazy. The imams screamed jihad from the loudspeakers. We went to the roof of the outpost and braced for a major assault. Our interpreter joined us. Hold on, he said. They aren’t screaming jihad against us. They are screaming jihad against the insurgents."

*

“A massive anti-Al Qaeda convulsion ripped through the city,” said Captain McGee. “The locals rose up and began killing the terrorists on their own. They reached the tipping point where they just could not take any more. They told us where the weapon caches were. They pointed out IEDs under the road.”

“In mid-March,” Lieutenant Hightower said, “a sniper operating out of a house was shooting Americans and Iraqis. Civilians broke into his house, beat the hell out of him, and turned him over to us.”

“There were IEDs all over this area,” Lieutenant Welch said. “On every single street corner, buried under the road. They were so big they could take out tanks. When we came through we cleared the whole area on foot. The civilians told us where the IEDs were. I was with one group where a guy opened his gate just a crack and pointed out where one was. It was right in front of his house. Later we went back and had tea. He was so happy to see us.”

“One day,” Lieutenant Hightower said, “some Al Qaeda guys on a bike showed up and asked where they could plant an IED against Americans. They asked a random civilian because they just assumed the city was still friendly to them. They had no idea what was happening. The random civilian held him at gunpoint and called us to come get him.”

“People here tacitly supported Al Qaeda,” Captain McGee said, “because Al Qaeda was attacking us. But they took control of the city. They forced girls to stay home from school. They dragged people outside the city and shot them in the head. They broke people’s fingers if they were seen smoking a cigarette. They forced men to grow beards. Once they started acting like that they could only establish a safe haven by using terrorism against the local civilians.”

“Al Qaeda struck out three times,” said Major Peters. “Strike One: They killed a Sheikh and held his body for four days. Strike Two: They executed young people in public. Strike Three: They attacked the compound of another sheikh. The people here said enough. They aligned with us because they realized Al Qaeda was the real enemy. They didn’t like Al Qaeda’s version of Islam at all.”

Credit for purging Ramadi of Al Qaeda must go to Iraqis themselves at least as much as to the American military. The Americans wouldn’t have been able to do it without the cooperation of the people who live there, and the Iraqis wouldn’t have been able to do it, at least not so easily, without help from the American military.


This drawing by an Iraqi child depicts the American-Iraqi alliance against Al Qaeda. Notice the sword is Iraqi and the muscle is American.

Not only did Iraqi soldiers, police, and civilians join the fight, but also the lesser known local security force fielded by the Anbar tribal authorities.

“The previous battalion saw men on corners wearing cammies,” said Captain McGee. “They were legacy forces still around from the old days, the Provincial Security Forces (PSF). They had been operating as a critical reserve and a mobile strike force. They helped clear the area of AQI on their own. They are as well disciplined, if not more so, than the Iraqi Army. They’ve been working with us, too.”

I said it sounded to me like they were just another Iraqi militia, and he understood what I meant. That’s what they look like, and he had heard that criticism before.

“The PSF looks like a militia,” he said, “but it isn’t. It’s legal and more of a ‘national guard’ like the [Kurdish] Peshmerga. They are authorized and paid by the Ministry of the Interior in Baghdad. Even the Iraqi Army here doesn’t have as good equipment as they have.”

Another difference between the Provincial Security Forces and the militias, which he didn’t mention, is that all the militias to one extent or another are sectarian creatures. There are Sunni militias and Shia militias, and they often fight each other. The PSF is Sunni, but that’s because Anbar Province is Sunni. The PSF isn’t Sunni per se. Its Sunni character is incidental. There are hardly any Shias in Anbar Province who could join the PSF, and the PSF doesn’t fight Shias anywhere in Iraq. They fight Al Qaeda, which also is Sunni. And they cooperate with the Iraqi Army, which even in Anbar is mostly Shia. There is nothing remotely sectarian about them.

“Al Qaeda had dug in the northeastern and southern parts of the city,” Captain McGee told me. “The coalition walled off areas and fought block to block, house to house. Then the Provincial Security Forces went in and recleared it. There was an immediate decrease in attacks.”


Inside a burned house

He was referring Operation Murphy’s Burrow, which brought about a dramatic change in offensive tactics.

“For a long time,” Colonel Holmes said, “they were driving away from the base in Humvees down a street that was infested with Al Qaeda forces. The gunners spun their turrets in circles and just shot at everything, thinking they could provide cover for themselves so they could drive without being shot at.”

“Didn’t that violate the rules of engagement?” I said.

He froze for a second and answered that question very carefully.

“That was the wrong way to do it,” he said. “And they knew it. So they slowly cleared one block at a time, house by house, and kept the supply lines open to the base in the area that was already cleared. Everything behind them got cleared and stayed cleared, so their safe area got gradually larger. We don’t want to hurt civilians. Our job here is to protect Iraqi civilians.”



He’s right. It is the job of the United States military to protect the people of Iraq even before protecting themselves. It is always the job of (American) soldiers to protect civilians before protecting themselves. In doing so they protect themselves better than if they did not. It may be counter-intuitive, but it’s straight-forward, by-the-book counterinsurgency.

Here is the relevant passage from the book. (Thanks to Michael Yon for publishing this for us.)

“As soon as we were on Easy Street running through the Malaab area every day, 24/7, it got quiet,” said Private First Class Baringhouse from Indiana. “We sealed off the entire area with barricades and blocked all vehicle traffic. Then they couldn’t get weapons and IEDs in. It calmed the place down fast.”

Vehicle traffic is still banned in most of Ramadi. The streets are dead quiet. No one drives but the American military, the Iraqi Army and Police, and a few select taxis.

How well is that going over, I asked Lieutenant Welch.


Lieutenant Welch

“Civilians complain about lots of things,” he said. “But they never complain about this. They are so terrified of car bombs they don’t want any car traffic in this city at all. If we could shut down all vehicle traffic everywhere in Iraq, the war would be practically over.”


Car traffic is banned, but mopeds are okay


A motorcycle taxi

There were more than just IEDs and car bombs. There also were house bombs.

“The house across the street was rigged to blow,” he said. “Four Syrians were living in it. Now it’s a pile of rubble. This building,” meaning the Joint Security Station, “was rigged to blow, too, but they hadn’t quite finished the rigging. They hadn’t put the detonator equipment in yet.”

Some of the blown up buildings in Ramadi can be partially blamed on American screw ups.

“Did you see that flattened parking lot looking area out front?” Lieutenant Welch said.

I did.



“It was a bunch of shops in the last area we cleared,” he said. “We busted the locks and opened the doors. Everyone had to stay in their houses then. We found tons of weapons and IEDs. Just as we were finishing up some of the military dogs refused to sit on the flour bags. We opened up the bags and it felt like soap. We tested it. We didn’t think it was an explosive, but an accelerant. We took everything, put it into piles, and blew it up without warning anybody. It was a much bigger explosion than we expected. Urea-nitrate was in the bags. It’s an explosive made from fertilizer. That blast was so big that people at Camp Ramadi, all the way on the other side of the city and outside the city, thought it was a nearby car bomb. People at Camp Corregidor thought they were being mortared. Windows blew out for blocks and blocks in every direction. It destroyed the whole block. Civil affairs officers paid compensation to locals for injuries and property damage. Thank God no one was killed. The media reported it as a car bomb at the soccer stadium. Reporters in the Green Zone have no idea what goes on out here.”

Here is a graph that I asked Military Intelligence to reproduce for me that shows the dramatic decrease in violence in the Topeka Area of Operations in Northern Ramadi from January 1, 2007, to July 28, 2007.


Source: U.S. Army Military Intelligence

The graph is for internal use by the Army. It is not intended for public consumption or as propaganda. If it were, what it reveals would be even more dramatic. Most of the tiny number of “attacks” that appear after the middle of May weren’t really even attacks.

“Most of those litle blips represent old IEDs we found that were ineffective,” Captain McGee said. “One was a car bomb by perps who came into Ramadi from outside the city. There was only one other attack against us in our area of operations in July, and it was ineffective. As soon as we came in here to stay the civilians felt free enough to inform on them. Al Qaeda can’t come back now because the locals will report them instantly. Ramadi is a conservative Muslim city, but it’s a completely hostile environment for Islamists.”

The area just north of Ramadi was cleared even before the city itself was.

“On April 7 the entire area of operations [just north of the city] was cleared except for sporadic attacks from twelve people,” Major Lee Peters said. “There was no head to cut off. It was like a hydra. We didn’t win by killing their leaders. We won by eroding their support base. These people hate Al Qaeda much more than they ever hated us.”

The tribes of Anbar are turning their Sahawa al Anbar movement into a formal political party that will run in elections. They also hope to spread it to the rest of Iraq under the name Sahawa al Iraq. It is already taking root in the provinces of Diyala and Salah a Din.

Some have misunderstood this movement and dismissed it as “the insurgency.” Captain McGee provided me with the eleven points of their political platform, for the record.

Ramadi isn’t completely safe yet. Al Qaeda wants to take back their “Capital of the Islamic State of Iraq," and they have tried unsuccessfully to attack it from outside on a couple of occasions since they lost it. (They also tried to move their “Capital of the Islamic State of Iraq” to Baqubah in Diyala Province, but they lost that too in Operation Arrowhead Ripper this summer.) Also, Colonel Charlton said, “there may still be one small cell remnant here.” But the war in Ramadi is effectively over. “It’s boring here now,” Private First Class Baringhouse said. “It’s like we’re babysitting the Iraqis. But it’s weird and amazing to be bored here.”

This now “boring” city, which is just barely beginning to recover from utter catastrophe, is a different cultural and political environment than it once was.

“The mosques in Ramadi all have pro-coalition messages now,” Captain McGee said.

“How do you know this?” I said. “Do you actually attend Friday services?”

“We have relationships with the imams,” he said. “We have very good relations with all of them.”

“The Abdullah Mosque next to our outpost was hit by insurgent fire,” Captain Messer said. “The Marines are giving them money to fix it.”

Another mosque, just north of the city in the area known as Jazeera, wasn’t hit by Al Qaeda. It was used as a terrorist base by Al Qaeda.

“It’s blackened,” Captain Dennison told me, “and abandoned. Insurgents used it, so the locals consider it desecrated. No one is willing to set foot in it now.”

In the Wake of the Surge
By Michael J. Totten



BAGHDAD – 82nd Airborne’s Lieutenant William H. Lord from Foxborough, Massachusetts, prepared his company for a dismounted foot patrol in the Graya’at neighborhood of Northern Baghdad’s predominantly Sunni Arab district of Adhamiyah.

“While we’re out here saying hi to the locals and everyone seems to be getting along great,” he said, “remember to keep up your military bearing. Someone could try to kill you at any moment.”



I donned my helmet and vest, hopped into the backseat of a Humvee, and headed into the streets of the city with two dozen of the first infantry soldiers deployed to Iraq for the surge. The 82nd Airborne Division is famous for being ready to roll within 24 hours of call up, so they were sent first.

The surge started with these guys. Its progress here is therefore more measurable than it is anywhere else.

Darkness fell almost immediately after sunset. Microscopic dust particles hung in the air like a fog and trapped the day’s savage heat in the atmosphere.

Our convoy of Humvees passed through a dense jungular grove of palm and deciduous trees between Forward Operating Base War Eagle and the market district of Graya’at. The drivers switched off their headlights so insurgents and terrorists could not see us coming. They drove using night vision goggles as eyes.



Just to the right of my knees were the feet of the gunner. He stood in the middle of the Humvee and manned a machine gun in a turret sticking out of the top. I could hear him swiveling his cannon from side to side and pointing it into the trees as we approached the urban sector in their area of operations.

This was all purely defensive. The battalion I’m embedded with here in Baghdad hasn’t suffered a single casualty – not even one soldier wounded – since they arrived in the Red Zone in January. The surge in this part of the city could not possibly be going better than it already is. Most of Graya’at’s insurgents and terrorists who haven’t yet fled are either captured, dormant, or dead.

A car approached our Humvee with its lights on.

“I can’t see, I can’t see,” said the driver. Bright lights are blinding with night vision goggles. “Flash him with the laser,” he said to the gunner. “Flash him with the laser!”

A green laser beam shot out from the gunner’s turret toward the windshield of the oncoming car. The headlights went out.

“What was that about?” I said.

“It’s part of our rules of engagement,” the driver said. “They all know that. The green laser is a warning, and it’s a little bit scary because it looks like a weapon is being pointed at them.”

We slowly rolled into the market area. Smiling children ran up to and alongside the convoy and excitedly waved hello. It felt like I was riding with a liberating army.

Graya’at’s streets are quiet and safe. It doesn’t look or feel like war zone at all. American soldiers just a few miles away are still engaged in almost daily firefights with insurgents and terrorists, but this part of the city has been cleared by the surge.

Before the surge started the neighborhood was much more dangerous than it is now.

“We were on base at Camp Taji [north of the city] and commuting to work,” Major Jazdyk told me earlier. “The problem with that was that the only space we dominated was inside our Humvees. So we moved into the neighborhoods and live there now with the locals. We know them and they know us.”

Lieutenant Lawrence Pitts from Fayetteville, North Carolina, elaborated. “We patrol the streets of this neighborhood 24/7,” he said. “We knock on doors, ask people what they need help with. We really do what we can to help them out. We let them know that we’re here to work with them to make their city safe in the hopes that they’ll give us the intel we need on the bad guys. And it worked.”

The area of Baghdad just to the south of us, which the locals think of as downtown Adhamiyah, is surrounded by a wall recently built by the Army. It is not like the wall that divides Israel from the West Bank. Pedestrians can cross it at will. Only the roads are blocked off. Vehicles are routed through two very strict checkpoints. Weapons transporters and car bombers can’t get in or out.

The area inside the wall is mostly Sunni. The areas outside the wall are mostly Shia. Violence has been drastically reduced on both sides because Sunni militias – including Al Qaeda – are kept in, and Shia militias – including Moqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army, are kept out.

Graya’at is a mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhood immediately to the north of the wall.

We dismounted our Humvees and set up a vehicle checkpoint on the far side of the market area. Curfew was going into effect. Anyone trying to drive into the area would be searched.

Dozens of Iraqi civilians milled about on the streets.

“Salam Aleikum,” said the soldiers and I as we walked past.

“Aleikum as Salam,” said each in return.

They really did seem happy to see us.





Children ran up to me.

“Mister, mister, mister!” they said and pantomimed the snapping of photos. I lifted my camera to my face and they nodded excitedly.



A large group of men gathered around a juice vendor and greeted us warmly as we approached. A large man in a flowing dishdasha spoke English and, judging by the deference showed to him by the others, seemed to be a community leader of some sort.



Kids pulled on my shirt as Lieutenant Lord spoke to the group about a gas station the Army is helping set up in the neighborhood. Gasoline is more important to Iraqis than it is to even Americans. Baghdad is as much an automobile-based city as Los Angeles. They also need fuel for electric generators. Baghdad’s electrical grid only supplies one hour of electricity every day. It is ancient, overloaded, in severe disrepair, and is sabotaged by the insurgents. The outside temperature rarely drops below 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, even at night. Air conditioners aren’t luxuries here. They are requirements. No gasoline? No air conditioner.

“The gas station on the corner should be opening soon,” the lieutenant said to the group of men. “Do you think the prices are fair?”

The fat man understood the question. Our young interpreter from Beirut, Lebanon, who calls herself “Shine,” translated for everyone else.



Most gasoline in Iraq has to be purchased on the black market for four times the commercial and government rate partly because there is an acute lack of proper places to sell it. A new gas station in this country is actually a big deal.

The men thought the price of gasoline at the station was reasonable. The conversation continued mundanely and I quickly grew bored.

Everyone was friendly. No one shot at us or even looked at us funny. Infrastructure problems, not security, were the biggest concerns at the moment. I felt like I was in Iraqi Kurdistan – where the war is already over – not in Baghdad.

It was an edgy “Kurdistan,” though. Every now and then someone drove down the street in a vehicle. If any military-aged males (MAMs as the Army guys call them) were in the car, the soldiers stopped it and made everybody get out. The vehicle and the men were then searched.



Everyone who was searched took it in stride. Some of the Iraqi men smirked slightly, as if the whole thing were a minor joke and a non-threatening routine annoyance that they had been through before. The procedure looked and felt more like airport security in the United States than, say, the more severe Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza.



“What are you guys doing out after curfew?” said Sergeant Lizanne.

“I’m sorry, sorry,” said a young Iraqi man in a striped blue and tan t-shirt.

“There is no sorry,” said Sergeant Lizanne. “I don’t give a shit. The curfew is at the same time every night. I don’t want to have to start arresting you.”

“Why are you stopping these guys,” I said to Lieutenant Lord, “when there are so many other people milling around on the streets?”

“Because they’re MAMs who are driving,” he said. “We’re going easy on everyone else. We’ve already oppressed these people enough. They have a night culture in the summer, so if they aren’t military aged males driving cars we leave them alone. We were very heavy-handed in 2003. Now we’re trying to move forward together. At least 90 percent of them are normal fun-loving people.”

“Do they ever get pissed off when you search them?” I said.

“Not very often,” he said. “They understand we’re trying to protect them.”



“This is not what I expected in Baghdad,” I said.

“Most of what we’re doing doesn’t get reported in the media,” he said. “We’re not fighting a war here anymore, not in this area. We’ve moved way beyond that stage. We built a soccer field for the kids, bought all kinds of equipment, bought them school books and even chalk. Soon we’re installing 1,500 solar street lamps so they have light at night and can take some of the load off the power grid. The media only covers the gruesome stuff. We go to the sheiks and say hey man, what kind of projects do you want in this area? They give us a list and we submit the paperwork. When the projects get approved, we give them the money and help them buy stuff.”

Not everything they do is humanitarian work, unless you consider counter-terrorism humanitarian work. In my view, you should. Few Westerners think of personal security as a human right, but if you show up in Baghdad I’ll bet you will. Personal security may, in fact, be the most important human right. Without it the others mean little. People aren’t free if they have to hide in their homes from death squads and car bombs.

In another part of Graya’at is an area called the Fish Market. Gates were installed at each entrance so terrorists can’t drive car bombs inside. The people here are extraordinarily grateful for this. Businesses, not cars, are booming now at the market. Residents feel free and safe enough to go out.



“The kids here do seem to like you,” I said to Lieutenant Lord.

“They do,” he said. “In Sadr City, though, they throw rocks and flip us off.”

The American military is staying out of Sadr City for now. The surge hasn’t even begun there, and I don’t know if it will.

I wandered over to the man selling juice at a stand. An American soldier bought a glass from him.



“Have you tried this juice?” the soldier said to me. “It’s really good stuff. Here have a sip.”

He handed me the glass. It was an excellent mixture of freshly squeezed orange juice and something else. Pineapple, I think.

The kids kept pulling my shirt.

“Mister, mister!” they said, wanting me to take their picture.



The same kids kept pestering the soldiers, as well. They seemed to get a big kick out of it.



A small group of soldiers continued talking to the locals about community projects they’re helping out with.



I tried to listen in but the kids wouldn’t leave me alone. Finally one of the adults took mercy on me and shooed the children away so I could listen and talk to the grownups. The conversation, though, was mundane. The soldiers were talking and acting like aid workers, not warriors from the elite 82nd Airborne Division.

“Man, this is boring,” one of them said to me later. “I’m an adrenaline junky. There’s no fight here. It won’t surprise me if we start handing out speeding tickets.” So it goes in at least this part of Baghdad that has been cleared by the surge.

“When we first got here,” said another and laughed, “shit hit the fan.”

It was all a bit boring, but blessedly so. I knew already that not everyone in Baghdad was hostile. But it was slightly surprising to see that entire areas in the Red Zone are not hostile.

Anything can happen in Baghdad, even so. The convulsive, violent, and overtly hostile Sadr City is only a few minutes drive to the southeast.

“Want to walk past your favorite house?” Lieutenant Lord said to Sergeant Lizanne.

“Let’s do it,” said Sergeant Lizanne.

“What’s your favorite house?” I said.

“It’s a house we walked past one night,” said Sergeant Lizanne. “Some guys on the roof locked and loaded on us.”

Gun shots rang out in the far distance. None of the Iraqis paid much attention but the soldiers perked up and stiffened their posture like hunting dogs.

“Gun shots,” Lieutenant Lord said.

“I heard,” I said. “You going to do anything about it?”

“Nah,” he said and shrugged. “They were far away and could be anything, even shots fired in the air at a wedding. A lot of these guys are stereotypical Arabs.”

The gun shots were a part of the general ambience.

*
We walked along a narrow path along the banks of the Tigris River in darkness. “The house,” as they called it, where someone locked and loaded a rifle, was a quarter mile or so up ahead.

“What will you do when you get to the house?” I asked Lieutenant Lord.

“We’ll do a soft-knock,” he said. “We’re not going to be dicks about it.”

I couldn’t see well, but I could see. Even my camera could see if I held it steady enough.

The soldiers had night vision goggles. They could see perfectly, if “green” counts as perfect. One of them let me borrow his for a few minutes.



Putting on the goggles was like stepping into another world. The soldiers’ rifles come with a laser that shoots a light visible only to those wearing the goggles. It helps soldiers zero in on their target. It also lets them “point” at things in the terrain when they talk to each other. Some used the green rifle laser to point out locations in the area the way a professor points at a chalk board with a stick.



We walked in silence and darkness toward “the house.” I could just barely make out the silhouettes of the soldiers’ helmets and rifles and body armor in front of me.

“Where should I be when this goes down?” I quietly said to the lieutenant.

“Just stay next to me,” he whispered back.

We stopped in front of the house. It was shrouded in total darkness on the bank of the river.



Lieutenant Lord quietly signaled for half his platoon to go around to the other side of the house. I scanned the roof looking for snipers or gunmen, but didn’t see anyone. Still, I still decided to step up to the outer wall of the house so no one could shoot me from the roof.

We waited in silence for ten minutes. The area was absolutely quiet and still. The curfew was in effect and we were away from the main market area where pedestrians were allowed out after dark.

Feeling more relaxed, I stepped away from the house and toward the river. Once again I checked the roof for snipers or gun men. This time I saw the black outlines of two soldiers standing up there and motioning to us below.

It was time to walk around to the other side, to the front door, and go in. I stayed close to the lieutenant.

The other side of the house, the front side of the house, was lit by street lights. Children laughed and kicked around a soccer ball.

Gun shots rang out in the night, closer this time.

“Take a knee,” Lieutenant Lord said to one of his men.

The soldier got down on one knee and pointed his weapon down the street in the direction of the gunfire. The children kept playing soccer as though nothing had happened. I casually leaned against the wall of the house in case something nasty came down the street.

We heard no more shots. It could have been anything.

A soldier pushed open the gate and moved up the stairs toward the front door. I followed cautiously behind the lieutenant to make sure I wouldn’t get hit if something happened.

Up the stairs was an open area in the house that hadn’t yet been finished by the construction workers.



Lieutenant Lord had gotten far ahead of me. I found him speaking to an old man and his family. He, his military age son, his wife, and some children were herded into a single small room where everyone could be watched at the same time.



“We’re not going to be dicks about it,” he had said, and he lived up to his promise. The family was treated with utmost respect. The old woman blew kisses at us. The children smiled. This was not a raid.

I stepped into the room and noticed a picture of the moderate Shia cleric Ayatollah Sistani on the wall. It suddenly seemed unlikely that this family was hostile. Still, someone in the house had locked and loaded on patrolling American soldiers.

“We have tight relationships with some of the people whose sons are detainees,” Lieutenant Colonel Wilson A. Shoffner had told me earlier. “They don’t approve of their children joining Al Qaeda or the Mahdi Army. The support for these groups really isn’t that high.”

Perhaps the man’s son was the one who had locked and loaded.

The old man handed Lieutenant Lord an AK-47. The lieutenant pulled out the clip.

“Do you have any more guns,” he said. Our Lebanese interpreter translated.

“I have only one gun,” he said. “I am an old man.”

“I have a pistol,” said the man’s son.

“If you go down into Adhamiyah do you take your pistol with you?” said the lieutenant. Adhamiyah is a Sunni-majority area, and this family was Shia.

“No,” he said. “Of course not.”



“Someone here locked and loaded on me when we did a foot patrol along the river a while ago,” Lieutenant Lord said. “Who was it?”

The old man laughed. “It was me!” he said and laughed again. He couldn’t stop laughing. He even seemed slightly relieved. “I thought it might have been insurgents! It was dark. I couldn’t see who it was. All Americans are my sons.”

Lieutenant Lord looked at him dubiously.

“What did you see?” he said. “Tell me the story of what you saw.”

“I heard people walking,” said the old man. “I did not see Americans. I looked over the roof and heard who I guess was your interpreter speaking Arabic.”

“Sergeant Miller,” Lieutenant Lord said.

“Sir,” Sergeant Miller said.

“Does that sound right to you?”

“Sounds right to me, LT,” he said.

“If this is a nice neighborhood,” Lieutenant Lord said, “why did you lock and load?”

“I thought maybe there were insurgents down there,” the old man said.

“Are there insurgents here?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t think here, no.”

“Then why lock and load?”

The old man mumbled something.

“Sergeant Miller, I want to separate the old man from his family,” Lieutenant Lord said. “Keep an eye on them.”

The lieutenant walked the old man to the roof. I followed.

“I’m very concerned about what you’re telling me,” he said. “Who is making you live in fear?”

“I’m a good guy,” said the old man.

“I’m not saying you aren’t,” said the lieutenant. “I’m just very concerned that you are afraid of somebody here.”

“It was the first time. It was dark. I couldn’t see. I’m very sorry.”

“It’s okay,” said the lieutenant. “You don’t need to be sorry. You have the right to defend yourself and your home. Just be sure if you have to shoot someone that you know who you’re shooting at. Thank you for your help, and I am sorry for waking you up.”

The old man hugged the lieutenant and kissed him on his both cheeks.

The family waved us goodbye.

“Ma Salema,” I said and felt slightly guilty for being there.

We walked back to the Humvees.

“Do you believe him?” I said to the lieutenant. I have no idea how to tell when an Iraqi is lying.

“I do,” he said. “I think he’s a good guy. His story matched what happened.”

“He didn’t want to answer your question, though,” I said, “about who he is afraid of.”

There are terrible stories around here about the masked men of the death squads. Sometimes they break into people’s houses and asking the children who they’re afraid of. If they name the enemies of the death squad, they are spared. If they name the death squad itself, they and their families are killed. It’s a wicked interrogation because it cannot be beaten – the children don’t know which death squad has broken into the house.

“He didn’t want to say who he’s afraid of because he’s afraid,” Lieutenant Lord said. “If the insurgents find out he gave information to us, or that he helped us, he’s dead.”

Turns out President Bush may be lying about the number of troops to be used in his “surge.” For a month Bush and company have been saying an additional 21,500 troops would be needed in Baghdad and Anbar Province to stop the runaway violence. Unfortunately for Bush, the Congressional Budget Office just released a study, which says the surge could be 48,000 troops. For those of you who don’t get math, that is more than twice 21,500.

What is the reason behind the massive difference in numbers? The units Bush wants to send into hostile areas need support troops.

In recent times, for every 4,000 combat troops there have been around 5,500 supporting troops. The Department of Defense has indicated it will send less support troops than they have in the past but still a large number will be needed. The CBO has drawn up two estimates: The first using the current support troops vs. combat troops in Iraq, which is 48,000. The second is a much smaller amount of support troops, which bring the number of forced to 35,000.

This news means the cost of the surge will then increase greatly. Bush has said the surge would cost $5.6 billion for 2007. But Bush completely underestimated the cost of the war during the build up, so why stop now? The CBO believes the cost of the surge…

Meanwhile, General George Casey is currently testifying before the
Senate Armed Services Committee on his nomination to be Army chief of staff. During his testimony, Casey told Congress he asked for half the number of troops that Bush is sending.

Nice to see that years of failure don’t change a man.

George W. Bush's iconoclastic strategy for military success in Iraq (even more of the same!) garnered more than its fair share of media attention over the past month and a half, eventually resulting in the recent deployment of more troops in Iraq and the public realization that "surge" is far more popular as a euphemism for "desperate military escalation" than it ever was as a carbonated beverage. But once again, lost amongst the Iraq shuffle, is poor old Afghanistan, the neglected front in the "war on terror," where "defeated" Talbani fighters are gearing up for a major 2007 offensive. During her trip to Afghanistan to survey the situation there, Nancy Pelosi encountered a startlingly obvious, but hitherto unasked question from beleaguered Afghani president Hamid Karzai: Where is our troop surge?

What's really sad about the situation in Afghanistan is that if Bush had decided to exclusively focus on rebuilding the country there and actually defeating the Taliban (Mullah Omar still remains at large) rather than venturing off into Iraq for no particular reason, he almost certainly would have kept much of the international support for the "war on terror" that the US had after 9/11, his approval rating very likely wouldn't be at its lowest point ever and by all rights the Republicans may very well have kept control of both houses of Congress. Live and learn. Unfortunately the Afghanis cannot afford to be quite so glib about the situation, being the focal point of a wave of Taliban inspired violence threatening the existence of Karzai's shaky government.

And while Iraq, which by all accounts remains a clusterfuck, is getting an additional twenty-one thousand troops, Afghanistan, where they would more likely be happily greeted and are clearly also necessary, is only getting a very slight boost in troop deployment and a minor fraction of the financial support. Seems like a fair enough question, president Karzai. So how about it? Where's the Afghanistan surge?

Despite the fact that no one seems to want this idiotic "troop surge" that Bush has already begun, not the Congress, not the military, not Republican senators, and certainly not the American people, it's happening anyway. But when has Bush ever paid attention to popular support, intelligent advice, political allies or reason? Undoubtedly some Democrats are already busting out the lube and buttering up their backsides in anticipation, but others are gearing up for a fight, already trying to figure out ways to stymie Bush's plans.

Calling a nonbinding resolution a "bold plan" is perhaps overstating the matter somewhat, since it would literally mean nothing and carry no weight. Bush already is politically isolated, even much of his own party isn't supporting him any more, particularly in this most recent endeavor, and the public certainly isn't either. There are other options, however, for dealing with this rogue president.

The Democrats are playing a dangerous political game here. Even though it's highly inaccurate, Democrats were broadly and unfairly stuck with the stigma of not "supporting the troops" during the elections of 2004 and 2006, so if Bush suddenly sends tens of thousands of other troops into the fray and the Democrats are seen as the ones withholding the funds necessary to keep them equipped and alive it won't take long before those accusations resurface.

On the other hand, the Democrats have to do something. Iraq was the centerpiece of their platform that gave them back the house and the senate this past November. If they simply roll over and die on an issue where they clearly have this much popular support they will lose any and all political momentum that they've gained, and will be lame ducks just weeks into their newfound majority.

But what can they do? Like it or not, the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces, and congress authorized the use of military force in Iraq already, right? The resolution in 2002 granting the president military authority in Iraq states:

Clearly Iraq never posed a threat to US security, and does even less so now. Most of the UN resolutions that the US was nominally invading to enforce no longer apply either, however resolution 1483 calls on the US and Britain to "improve security and stability in Iraq," which could be used for justification of sending in more troops, and if push came to shove team Bush would almost certainly argue that it, and other resolutions, do so.

Of course, congress could always repeal the resolution and pass a more restrictive one that forces Bush to acknowledge specific milestones and goals that will allow for phased withdrawal from Iraq. This seems to be the best approach for dealing with a recalcitrant president pushing the limits of his authority. Cutting off funding to the new troops and the ones already there is a political minefield that the Democrats would do well to avoid.