"Russia is fighting a war with us in our own territory," Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili announced today.

Reuters reported today that the Russian military has entered into territory claimed by the Republic of Georgia - what is currently a breakaway region known as South Ossetia. Russian tanks are currently clashing with Georgian forces in South Ossetia and the Russian airforce is striking targets in Georgia proper.

Russia's decision to use force stemmed most immediately from Georgia's attack on the Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali yesterday. Conflict over spy drones, mutual sniper attacks, and artillery shelling has marred Russian-Georgian relations in the preceding weeks and months.

Russia claims that Georgia is to blame for the fighting:

Meanwhile, the Georgian president accuses Russian forces of intentionally targeting civilians and dismisses the Russian claims.

For those not familiar with politics of the south Caucasus, Georgia is an independent nation that borders Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. The nation is known for its excellent wines (like kindzmarauli and kvanchkara), spicy cuisine, and being the birthplace of Iosif Dzhugashvili - better known as Stalin. The landscape of Georgia is beautiful and it is home to four UNESCO cultural heritage sites. The population of Georgia is overwhelmingly Eastern Orthodox and has been Christian since Roman times. It is also the home to 12 different living languages (plus Russian and Armenian) and at least 18 distinct ethnic groups.

Russian-Georgian relations date back to the early 1860s, when King Herekle asked for Russian aid (as a fellow Orthodox nation) to secure their independence against both the Ottoman Turks and the Qajar Persians who competed for dominance of the Caucasus. Russia, under Catherine the Great, repeatedly failed to honor military obligations to Herekle but due to court intrigue, the aging monarch feared for the survival of his dynasty. Consequently, he signed the Treaty of Georgievsk in 1873, making Russia the protector of the eastern half of modern Georgia. Under Paul I, Russia formally annexed eastern Georgia in 1801 and conquered the rest within 10 years. The nation remained part of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union (with the exception of a brief independence following the collapse of the Romanov dynasty) until 1991, when Georgia declared its independence.

Things were not rosy* for post-independence Georgia, however, as even the former Soviet dissident and human rights activist Zviad Gamsakhurdia ruled in an authoritarian manner (even accusing his enemies of "sabotage" and treason). After his ouster by a violent coup, the opposition forces appointed Eduard Shevardnadze as president of the nation. His rule was likewise characterized by corruption and nepotism, leading to his peaceful ouster in the Rose Revolution of 2003. Russian Foreign Minister Ivanov negotiated the resignation of Gamsakhurdia in a summit meeting with the Georgian president and the opposition (including pro-Western and American-educated current president Mikheil Saakashvili).

While political representation has taken a turn for the better in the past five years in Georgia, the country is plagued with problems. Almost half of the population lives beneath the poverty line. Corruption and crime are rampant. More importantly - two regions of Georgia broke away after the 1991 independence: South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Following Saakashvili's campaign promises to clamp down on separatism, the leader of the autonomous region of Adjara also threatened to secede, leading to another crisis. While Georgia resolved the Adjara crisis peacefully, it was defeated militarily in its campaigns in both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Georgia cannot exert military control over either region, largely due to Russian support of the separatists. Both of these conflicts led to slaughter of innocent civilians by all sides and ended in ethnic cleansing of the Georgian population in the breakaway regions.

South Ossetia continues to be a problem for Russian-Georgian relations. The UN, EU, and NATO refuse to recognize South Ossetia as an independent nation, while Russia extends visas to the population. Georgia hopes to suppress the Ossetian de facto independence and Saakashvili is under pressure from the public to do so. Meanwhile, Russia backs South Ossetia as a means of exerting power over Georgia and countering American influence in the region.

America, in fact, is deeply involved in the Russian-Georgian conflict at least in the eyes of the two players. Following George W. Bush's visit to Tbilisi in 2005, the Georgians renamed the street by their airport to "George W. Bush avenue." As a Reuters article notes, the United States has 120 soldiers in Georgia. President Saakashvili asserts that the influence of the US is even deeper, though. According to him, the latest Russian-Georgian conflict:

He continued to say:

Meanwhile, the NY Times reports that:

The United States will have difficulty remaining uninvolved, especially given Georgia's immediate decision to pull these troops out of Iraq.

US Presidential candidate John McCain has called on Russia to withdraw from Georgia and asks for an emergency UN Security Council meeting (Note: one already took place 12 hours before he called for it). Some bloggers are already claiming that this event will increase McCain's rating in polls because of his hawkish stance.

*Yeah, that's a pun on Georgia's Rose Revolution...

Normally when you hear the term "Arms Race", the first thing that comes to mind is Nuclear Missiles and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. For me, the idea of the movie War Games comes to mind. One country fires missiles, another country counters those missiles by firing more missiles and eventually we all live in a nuclear winter, fighting off the mutated undead and eating cockroaches to stay alive.

But according to Professor Noel Sharkey, from the Royal United Services Institute Department of Computer Science, there is a new arms race underway, killer military robots.

Robots are not new to war, as far back as World War II the Goliath Tracked Mine was developed by Germany, and used to blow up tanks and large infantry lines. The Goliath was radio controlled, it was operated by a human being.

In more current times, the United States uses Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and still under some development Unmanned Aerial Combat Vehicles (UACV). Both of these robots are basically run by an operator, miles from where it is actually being used, through very advanced radio controls and displays.

They may not have operators aboard them, but they always have a human being, a living person at the controls and making the ultimate decision.

The difference with this arms race, is that current technology is removing the human element.

Autonomous. Think Optimus Prime, Starscream and all the other Transformers.

The United States isn't the only country that is developing robots of this nature. Many of our Allies have joined in the aid to advance this technology. On the other side of that, countries that we hold strained relationships with are also developing the technology as fast as we are.

China, whose infrastructure is quickly growing stronger, has the ability to keep up with the United States and it's allies in this war.

The only advantage we have with Chinese made military robots is, if they are anything like other products developed and sold from China, the robots will break the instant they hit U.S. soil. That may be one saving grace.

Believe it or not, there are Laws of War that require collateral damage to be kept to a minimum. The robots are being developed so that they will have the ability to decide whether or not a human is considered a hostile or an innocent. The robot will make the decision, there will be no human interaction. The Terminator movies and I, Robot don't seem so futuristic anymore.

The idea came to me, that this must cost millions if not billions of dollars to develop. That third world countries would never be able to keep up. But it is not so.

What this basically means is that the United States and other countries, friend or foe, could spend millions of dollars to make highly advanced robot soldiers, while terrorists could create and develop a basic robot, that could detonate without having to sacrifice their lives.

Unfortunately for $200, any terrorist could design, develop and build a robot. Anymore, parts for robots are pre-made and sold on the internet, very easily attainable. A terrorist could arm this robot and basically program it where to go, and when to detonate, without the loss of his own life. This makes this new technology extremely frightening.

This is an incredible time to be alive. We are about to reach an age where the human race can develop and implement robots to pretty much do anything we want. What saddens me is that we aren't developing robots to aid human beings and other countries, or to explore regions where humans can not yet go, we are developing a technology to eliminate and harm other human beings and countries. We are creating a technology to fight amongst each other with.

This also worries me for another reason. One of the hindering points of a war is the loss of human life, and the long term injuries of the human soldiers. This technology eliminates that point. My concern is that the decision to go to war will be made with less concern, due to there being no long term affects to human life, at least our soldiers.

It also bothers me that the conscience of a human entity is being taken out of war. Some human beings are bad enough, a non feeling robot would be worse, possibly. If a a military robot atrociously kills hundreds of innocent people, who is held accountable? Will that responsibility be passed off because it was a robot? Will a blanket pardon be given to the robots and the creators?

I am not a big fan of war. I sincerely wish that global science and technology would develop a cure for war, rather than implement new tools of destruction for war. Global science and technology has the ability to help so many in need, and we concentrate on showing dominance, not the desire to help. Unfortunately with the world that we live in today, everyone seems to be focusing on conquering rather than working together.

If you see DevilsReject building a bunker and storing canned foods, water and weapons in it, that means he read about the government implementing Skynet

Last week, Sally Field won an Emmy for something. I don’t know what and I really don’t care. What happened after she took the stage to accept her award is what caught my attention.

On behalf of half of the human race, I’d like to say, “Fuck off, Sally Field.” What an insulting, arrogant, untruthful load of shit. This is something I’ve heard for years from a few women, who have apparently never opened a history book. The idea that war is exclusive to males is ridiculous. Leaders are generally narcissistic assholes, whether male or female. The same crazy desire that makes someone want to actually run a country also makes one want to go to war. It’s about power and ladies throughout history have been drunk on it for hundreds of years.

But we can start right here in American, in this century, to prove Sally wrong. Here’s a list of female Senators who authorized the use of force against Iraq.

Blanche Lincoln
Dianne Feinstein
Mary Landrieu
Olympia Snowe
Susan Collins
Jean Carnahan
Hillary Clinton
Kay Bailey Hutchison
Maria Cantwell

Why do you hate Sally, ladies? And love war? But, hey, they are just carrying on the tradition of women and war.

Russia has seen its share of women who carry on wars. In 1736 Anna Ioannovna declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Next up came Elizabeth, who led her country into the Seven Years War. (Maria Theresa of Austria also jumped in on that one.) In 1762 Catherine the Great took over Russia and went right to work expanding the Russian empire. She conquered Crimea, the Northern Caucasus and Ukraine for mother Russian, all through bloody conflicts.

How about England?

Queen Elizabeth I was a great mom. She also had Mary, Queen of Scots beheaded and fought a war against Spain. Later came Queen Anne who started a war that came to be known as Queen Anne’s War. The war was fought in North America, between France and Britain in North America. Spain and American Indian tribes were also involved. Next up was Queen Victoria, who was constantly at war, including the Crimean War, The Indian Mutiny, campaigns on North-west Frontier of India, campaigns in Africa including the Zulu War, the Boer War, and campaigns in Egypt and Sudan. And she was a mommy! Recently Margaret Thatcher went to war with Argentina over the tiny, useless Falkland Islands. Bad mommy!

What about Asia?

The Empress Dowager Cixi of China came to power in a bloody coup in 1861. In 1864 she sent her army to crush the Taiping Army and won! Her son must have been so proud! Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, must have been a man because she went to war with Pakistan in 1971. Later, she ordered an attack on the holiest Sikh shrine in India, the Golden Temple, which led to the death of 450 people. Oh, and she accelerated India’s nuclear program, which resulted in India becoming the world's youngest nuclear power. She was also a mommy of two!

And we can’t forget about Israel and their hateful neighbors. Golda Meir, Foreign Minister and Prime Minister of Israel, also oversaw her countries nuclear weapons development program. I guess it was a present for her kids. In 1956, Golda helped to plan an Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt. Later, in 1973, she was forced to defend Israel against six Arab states.

On the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are female suicide bombers. Is this the kind of mommy Sally was talking about?

What about this grandmommy?

Most importantly, we cannot forget about Admiral Helena Cain Pegasus, who attacked the Battlestar Galactica. That was fucking bullshit.

So, shut the fuck up Sally and all you other ladies who say that women wouldn’t start wars. It's insulting and it’s a load of horse shit. (And that includes my wife.)

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.”

My Dad once told me that making a deal with the devil is like owning a Rolex clock radio -- sure, it sounds like a great idea... but its something that you can never really show off to your friends or family, and the few people who see the damn thing will never appreciate it.

So when I read about how the U.S. was giving money to insurgents in order to "protect" shipments, it raised an eyebrow.

Okay. Sometimes you have to pay the devil his due. But unfortunately, we (the American taxpayers) are the ones who are going to be paying.

With events like this taking place, it seems a moot point to urge others to end terrorist financing. Between the payoff of insurgents, the loss of weapons in Iraq, and inevitable reduction of U.S. troops in Iraq I am lead to believe that someone is definitely fucked.

MUSHADAH, IRAQ – “Al Qaeda terrifies locals,” said Major Mike Garcia from Canyon, Texas, before he put me in a convoy of Humvees with 18 American Military Police on their way to the small town of Mushadah just north of Baghdad. “The only people Iraqis may be more afraid of is their mothers. When we arrest or detain people and threaten to call up their mom, they completely freak out. Please, no, don’t tell my mother they say. Women are quiet outside the house, but they severely smack down their bad kids inside the house. When your Iraqi mother tells you to knock something off, you knock it off.”



The American military has slowly figured out how to leverage Iraq’s culture to its advantage, but it only works to an extent. Locating, killing, capturing, and interrogating terrorists and insurgents is the easy part. The hard part is training Iraqis to do it themselves.

Our destination in Mushadah was the local police station where American Military Police train and equip Iraqi Police, and where it’s still too dangerous for either Iraqis or Americans to walk the streets.

“I am not trying to scare you,” said Captain Maryanne Naro, from Fort Drum, New York. “But don’t get out of your vehicle unless something catastrophic has happened to it.”

I walked the streets of Baghdad every day with soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, but that clearly wasn’t going to happen in Mushadah.

“It’s pretty bad up there,” she added. “AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] is all over the area because they’ve been pushed out of Baghdad, Ramadi, and Fallujah.”

Just driving to Mushadah from the base at Camp Taji was dangerous in a weird sort of way.

“Our convoys are hit with IEDs every day on the road,” she said.

I swallowed hard. “Should I really be going up there?” I said.

“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “It’s fine.”

I laughed. It’s fine? How is that fine? Nothing, except perhaps kidnappers, is scarier in Iraq than IEDs, especially now that Iranian-manufactured armor-piercing EFPs – Explosively Formed Penetrators – are deployed by Shia militias.

“None of us have been hurt,” she said. “They’re just small harassment attacks. Most of the IEDs are mortar rounds, and the Humvees are armored. They usually just pop tires and blow off our mirrors. They do it to piss us off.”

“The route clearance team is out there right now,” said mission leader Sergeant James Babcock, from Adams, New York, as he showed me which of the five Humvees I was to ride in.

Mine was in the middle of the convoy. The Humvee behind mine was recently hit with an IED.



“That shrapnel can’t go through the armor,” Sergeant Babcock said when he saw me taking a photograph of the damage. “The doors are armored and the windows are bulletproof. All that shrapnel did was tear holes in the trunk and rip through cases of Gatorade. It was kind of annoying.”

“No one fires off EFPs in the area?” I said, referring to the unstoppable molten copper penetrators.

“Nah,” he said. “It’s just Al Qaeda here.” Sunni insurgents and terrorists don't have access to the Iranian-made weapons.

“There’s a lot of harassment,” Captain Naro said, “and not a lot of competence.”

We saddled up and left Camp Taji to the north. Everyone locked and loaded their weapons on the way out the gate.

“Hopefully we won’t have any fireworks for you today,” my driver said.

Well, I thought, it certainly would be interesting if there are some fireworks for me today. Not every Humvee in Iraq is up-armored, and not every IED-laced road in Iraq is free of those terrifying EFPs. And so, I figured, if I’m ever going to be hit with an IED, let it be today.

It was a strange feeling, a bit like being in a shark cage – inches away from mortal peril, but kinda sorta okay…as long as an IED didn't explode under the vehicle.

“AQI always puts the IEDs in the same places on this road, in culverts and holes they already dug,” Captain Naro said. “We just swerve around them.”

“Are they stupid?” I said.

She gave me a look, as if the question was a little too cocky, that it was dangerous to dismiss Al Qaeda as stupid. I agree, of course, in general, but I can’t help but think putting IEDs in the same places over and over again isn’t too bright.

Getting into a Humvee with the Army in a war zone all by itself can be a little bit stressful. The ranking officer inside often reminds everyone else of the safety procedures – which are not at all like the safety procedures you’ll hear from a stewardess on United Airlines just before take off.

“Combat lock!” he might yell, which means everyone must lock their door so no one can open it from the outside and shoot people inside.

“Everybody remember what to do if someone throws a grenade in the truck?”

No, I did not remember. It is not something anyone ever taught me.

“Yell grenade grenade grenade and get the hell out as quickly as possible. If you don’t have time to get out, turn your back to the blast and hope for the best.”

The drive from Camp Taji to Mushadah only took 20 minutes, and our Humvee drivers swerved suddenly and dramatically 8 or 9 times to avoid possible IEDs. They also drove the Humvees about as fast as they could. The assumption was that the IEDs on this road were manually detonated by a trigger man. There are many places to hide.



Fast moving targets are harder to hit. And because the IEDs don’t explode on their own, the odds of any Humvee in particular being hit were no greater or less than the odds of any other Humvee being hit. Riding in the front of the convoy was no more dangerous than riding anywhere else. And riding in the middle or in the rear wasn’t safer. Of course that didn’t stop me from trying to convince myself that I rode in the lucky Humvee that wouldn’t be hit for some reason. Everyone does it.



There weren’t any fireworks that day, at least not against my convoy. But we still weren’t quite safe once we reached the police station.

“Get inside,” Sergeant Anthnoy Doucet, from Lake Charles, Louisiana, said to me when we stepped out of the Humvees. “This place is a mortar magnet.”

*

Every place in Iraq is hot during the summer, but the Mushadah police station was merciless. Only two rooms had air conditioning. The rest were miserable sweat boxes.

Captain Maryanne Naro was supposed to join us, but she had to remain at Camp Taji. That was too bad. I was hoping to see how the Iraqi Police interacted in person with an American woman who outranked almost all of them.

“The police won’t leave the station,” Major Garcia said, “unless Americans are there to protect them. They wouldn’t leave under any circumstances until Captain Naro showed up and was willing to go out on patrol. They were ashamed that a woman had more guts than they did.”



“They will go out alone now for something real basic,” she said. “Otherwise if Americans aren’t with them they’ll hide in the station. They’re hard to work with at times, like they’re kids.”

Incompetence, though, is the least of their problems.

“About half of them are corrupted,” she said, “and it’s hard to get the bad ones out. Some of the higher ups are corrupted too, but it’s hard to prove. They help AQI, they set up illegal checkpoints, and they raid civilian houses so they can steal stuff.”

Not surprisingly then, local civilians are just as afraid of the police as the uncorrupted police are afraid of the neighborhood.

“Locals come in here all the time and talk to Americans,” she told me. “They’re afraid to give intel to the Iraqi Police.”

Mushadah is a bad area with bad police and a bad police station. The building itself is filthy and ramshackle. The stairs to the second floor are murderously uneven, not because they’ve been damaged but because they were built by incompetents. I’ve seen dodgy construction in Iraq – even at Saddam’s palaces, believe it or not – but this station was the worst. I’ll spare you a description of the bathroom.

There was a protective wall in front of the station, but it had recently been destroyed by a mortar round.



Another wall on the south side of the building was blown over during a spring wind storm.

The whole place was almost destroyed not long ago. An Al Qaeda suicide bomber filled a dump truck with explosives and tried to ram it into the building, but he drove too fast around a corner and the whole thing tipped over. Everyone would have been killed had he succeeded.

Sergeant Doucet led me to the front door from the inside so I could photograph some of the Iraqi Police standing at attention.



“How many of these guys do you suppose are Al Qaeda infiltrators?” I said. I just couldn’t look at them without wondering.

“I don’t know,” he said. “We speculate about it. We don’t investigate them or anything like that.”

“You don’t?” I said. “Why not?”

“We aren’t passive about it,” he said. “If we suspect someone has gone over the edge, he’ll raise a red flag and we’ll deal with it.”

“How much support do you get from local civilians?” I said.

“Locals bring in tips against bad guys all the time,” he said. “Several times a week. What they tell us is not very tangible though. Sometimes it’s useless. Someone will come in here and scream There’s bad guys out there! We’ll ask where. To the west! they’ll say. Well, no crap.”



“Residents are still afraid to give intel on bad guys,” he continued. “Insurgents will kill them if they do. The area is totally unsecured. Even if we question people who live right in front of an IED trigger point they won’t say anything. But, look, forget what you see on the news. People in this community are just like people in any other community. This guy is pissed off at that guy, and you have to deal with it.”

I’ve been in parts of Iraq where local civilians cooperate with the army and police and where they do not. Civilians cooperate as much as security on the streets will permit them. The dynamic here isn’t all that hard to understand, or even that foreign. If you want to see how this has played out in America, watch Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, the classic film from 1954 starring Marlon Brando about the mafia’s infiltration of a longshoreman’s union. No one in that story wanted to cooperate with the police in their murder investigations against the mob because they were terrified of being “next” if they did.

“We have a medical facility here,” Sergeant Doucet said. “Local civilians can come here and use it, and they do.”

They did while I was there. A three year old boy was badly burned at his house – how, I don’t know – and he was brought in to be treated by a medic.



I let the medic tend to the boy and stepped into the Tactical Operations Center, one of only two rooms in the station that had air conditioning.

“Hello again, sir,” Sergeant Babcock said and pulled up a chair for me. He then gave me more background and asked me not to take pictures of anything in that room.

“Lots of Iraqi Police here had orders to work in Baghdad,” he said, “but they refused. They are Sunnis. This is a Sunni area. Baghdad, as you know, is mostly Shia. Their names and license plates mark them for death. They work here but are counted as AWOL and are not being paid.”

Some of the Iraqi police are honorable men. (And they are all men.) I don’t want to leave you with the impression that all of them are terrorist infiltrators. They aren’t.

“Because of logistics problems we have to go to Baghdad for fuel,” Sergeant Babcock said, “and we have to go to a Shia area. It’s very dangerous for them and they ask us to go with them. They have problems getting ammo as well. There are always problems with ammo.”

And there are severe problems with other stations.

“The Taramiyah station was hit by insurgents earlier this spring,” he said. “It was completely destroyed. Only six officers from that station are brave enough to come to work here.”



He introduced me to the man in charge of the station, Captain J. Dow Covey from New York City.

“Do you know the Weekly Standard magazine?” Captain Covey asked me.

“Of course,” I said.

“My buddy Tom Cotton was just written up there,” he said. “It was pretty cool seeing him in that magazine.”

“What did he do to get in the magazine?” I said.

“He’s like me,” he said. “He’s a Harvard Law grad who joined the Army after 9/11. I’m an attorney.”

“You’re an attorney?” I said. “What are you doing out here in Iraq?”

“I practiced law for three years,” he said, “then got into investment banking. When 9/11 happened I just had to sign up with the Army. Investment banking is a lot more stressful than this.”

“You’re kidding, right?” I said.

“No,” he said and laughed. “I am totally serious.”

If he was deployed in, say, Kurdistan I could see it. But Mushadah was stressful. Less stressful than investment banking? Investment banking in New York must really be something.

*

Not much happened the first half of my day at the station, so I lounged with the MPs in their broiling quarters.





None of them had anything positive to say about the Iraqi Police they were training.

“What can you really ask for in a lazy society? You go in their houses and the floors and covered in pillows.”

“You can tell who is corrupt because their convoys never get hit.”

“This place wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t so fucking hot. I can deal with being shot at and blown up, but 150 degrees is a bit much.”

“Some Iraqi Police recently left the station, we got hit with a bunch of mortars, then they came right back inside. This sort of thing happens a lot. It makes us suspicious.”

“We’re giving them 50,000 dollar Chevy trucks and it’s like a junkyard out back. It’s like Sanford and Son out there. They drive stuff better than we can afford, and they don’t even take care of it.”

“I miss Baghdad. One day we’d be walking out on the street buying sandwiches and playing soccer with kids. The next day we’d get in a firefight with burning tires and RPGs and shit. The next day we’d be hanging out and chilling like normal again. It’s a weird place, and really keeps you on your toes.”

“It’s not like Germany or Japan where people wanted a change. The Kurds up north wanted a change, so they got one. The Arabs don’t, so they aren’t. They hardly change even with us here.”

The Iraqi Army in the area isn’t faring much better.

“They are severely infiltrated by Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army,” Colonel John Steele, from Dover, New Hampshire, told me back at Camp Taji.

The Iraqi Army soldiers who aren’t double agents are still nowhere near ready to defend their own country.

“We assess, train, and help provide logistical support to prevent catastrophic failure,” he said. “Their logistics are very immature. They are always short on ammo. And we have to hold their hands and make sure they don’t kill themselves and others. We still do some unilateral U.S. actions even though we want to become partnered with the Iraqi Army in all our operations. But we first want to make sure they have all the skills they need to survive in combat.”

Most American soldiers I spoke to about the Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police, not just in Mushadah but also in Baghdad, have a dim view of their local counterparts. (The situation is strikingly different in Anbar Province, and I’ll get to that in future articles.) I wanted to know what the colonel thought.

“Do you trust them?” I said.

He paused for a long time and answered very carefully.

“We won’t tell them about sensitive operations until the last second,” he said. “I trust some individuals, though, because I know them. I’d share a foxhole with them as far as ideology goes, but I’m not sure how good their skills are when they are shot.”

Pride is much more important in Arab culture than it is in the West. Humiliation is therefore more painful. I wondered if this created problems when Americans train Iraqi soldiers and police officers. What must it feel like for local men to be yelled at by foreigners who showed up uninvited and knew their job better than they did?

Colonel Steele insists it isn’t a problem.

“They don’t want to be babied,” he said. “They want to be treated as equals and adults. Their shame culture actually helps. Our new recruits recently complained about having sore feet during a march. When they noticed our female soldiers are in better shape than they are, they never complained again. Also, when we first had them try on our body armor, it nearly broke their spines. They want to be physically capable of wearing it, too.”

It’s at least possible that some of the infiltrators may be turned over time. Some former insurgents elsewhere in Iraq are now openly siding with the Americans.

There also is this: “We give them rudimentary skills and a work ethic,” he told me. “They attend the same classes on character and honor and professional conduct becoming a soldier that our own people attend.”

Is he optimistic?

“I am optimistic,” he said. “But only for one single reason. Because I talk to the average Joe in Iraq. I meet the children and parents. Iraqi parents love their children as much as I love mine.”

I knew what he meant. Counterintuitive and contradictory as it may seem, I never felt more optimistic in Iraq than I did when I walked the streets and interacted with average Iraqis. Iraq looks more doomed from inside the base than it does outside on the street, and it looks more doomed from across the Atlantic than it does from inside the base.

Major Mike Garcia said this view of Iraq is typical. “Soldiers who don’t leave the FOB [Forward Operating Base] are more likely to be pessimistic than those who go out on patrol. They’re less aware of what’s actually happening and have fewer reality checks on their gloom.”

*

Sergeant Babcock invited me to a meeting with Iraqi Police Colonel Hameed, the man who was responsible for the station on the Iraqi side. Sergeant Babcock, Sergeant Doucet, an interpreter, the colonel, and I sat together in the only other room at the station that had air conditioning.

“You are most welcome,” the colonel said to me in a noticeably insincere tone of voice. Some of the MPs think he’s corrupt. I don’t know if that means they think he works with Al Qaeda.

“Thank you,” I said. “May I take your picture?”

“No,” he said, “please don’t.” It didn’t sound like he actually cared though, as if he was just going through the motions of needing protection from terrorists.

He and the American MPs discussed fuel logistics.

“The only reason the Iraqi Police got fuel on the last mission,” he said, “is because you were with us. Otherwise they wouldn’t have given us anything.”

Suddenly Captain Covey, the New York City attorney, nearly broke down the door as he barged into the room.

“Hey!” he screamed at the colonel. “I’m tired of you motherfuckers stealing our fuel cans. I’m going to kick all you motherfuckers out of here. I’m sorry for interrupting your little meeting, but at noon I want every single one of you people off this post.” He stared at the interpreter. “Translate that!” he said.

He slammed the door behind him. Everyone just looked at each other. A quietly horrified expression washed over the face of the colonel when he saw me taking notes.

The meeting was over, obviously. I stepped into the hallway and asked the nearest MP what was going on.

“61 fuel cans have been stolen over the last week by Iraqi police officers here,” he said. “Three more were stolen today. These are fuel cans that Iraqis and Americans risk their lives to go get.”

The tension in the hallway was palpable. None of the Iraqi Police could look me in the eye.

“Can the captain really kick the Iraqis out of here?” I asked Sergeant Babcock.

“Actually, he can,” he said. He sounded mortified at the idea.

Colonel Hameed walked up to Sergeant Babcock. He was furious.

“Your captain offended us by coming in here and yelling like that,” he said. “I need you to find a solution.”

“I’m a staff sergeant,” Sergeant Babcock said. “He’s a captain. I’m also an MP and he’s Infantry. I have to obey him whether I like it or not.”

“This station does not belong to his family,” the colonel said curtly. “This is unacceptable. The building is ours, and he is our guest. A guest cannot fire the owner of the house.”

“We’ll go talk to him and come back,” Sergeant Babcock said.

As it turned out, the whole thing was a screw up. Somebody forgot to update the board and account for three fuel cans that were taken legitimately.

Captain Covey was embarrassed.

“Would you really have kicked them all out of here?” I said.

“In the state of mind I was in then, yes,” he said. “I was ready to do it. But I calmed down and would have gotten in trouble anyway. So no, I wouldn’t have actually done it.”

61 fuel cans really had been stolen that week, however. The Iraqi Police were in serious trouble.

Another Iraqi Police colonel, whose name I did not catch and whom no one thinks is corrupt, arrived on the scene and screamed himself hoarse at his deputies.

“Coalition Forces are screaming at us!” he hollered. “Screaming at us because you keep stealing fuel!”



He kicked an empty metal garbage can and clangingly knocked it over. The Iraqi Police glowered at him as if they wanted to scream back and were trying mightily to restrain themselves.

An American MP walked past me. “That’s the first time I’ve seen those guys yelled at,” he said and grinned with satisfaction.

*

Shortly after noon an International Police Advisor from Michigan named Paul taught an hour-long class to the Iraqi Police officers about taking weapons from potentially dangerous people who are under arrest. The officers seemed to learn as much sitting through that course as I did. Apparently they had never gone over the procedures before.

I couldn’t help wondering as I watched the Iraqis…which of you work for Al Qaeda?



Maybe no one in the photo works for Al Qaeda. I don’t have a sense of how many infiltrators there actually are, although Captain Naro thinks the number could be as high as 50 percent.

Is it really a good idea to train these men with that in mind?

“Please don’t publish my picture,” Paul said to me after the class. “And use only my first name. Only my wife knows I’m in Iraq.”

I wanted to know what he thought of the trainees. He has trained police officers all over the world, not just in Iraq and the United States. He could, perhaps, see them through more worldly eyes than the American MPs who had a narrower range of experience.

“They’ve made leaps and bounds in the past two months,” he said. “Every day they make progress. Today they made progress.”

“Are you optimistic about them?” I said.

“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “The Iraqi Police are like sponges. It’s all new to them.”

“Lots of American soldiers I’ve talked to about the Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police don’t think very highly of them,” I said.

“Look,” he said. “The other contractors I know who train the police are also optimistic. Many file extensions to stay longer because they feel like they’re making a difference. I never hear anything negative from any of them. We watch the Iraqis progress over time because we work with them daily. Most American soldiers don’t see the progress because they observe the Iraqis from more of a distance. You yourself are only seeing a snapshot in time. If you think it looks bad now, you should have been here two months ago.”

It was time to head back to Camp Taji. The MPs and I saddled up in our Humvees while, in front of us, Iraqi Police piled into their trucks. We would escort them out of the station, then they would be on their own. They were going out alone, apparently for something “real basic,” as Captain Naro had told me.

The Iraqi Police truck in front of my Humvee had an office chair crazily bolted into the flatbed. A policeman strapped himself into that and manned a mounted machine gun. .



“Is he really going out all exposed like that?” I said.

“He is,” Sergeant Babcock said. “I can’t quite decide if that’s pathetic or if it’s a testament to the human spirit. Maybe it’s a little of both.”

We drove back down IED Alley to Camp Taji. It was 4:00 in the afternoon, and so unbearably hot. The air conditioner in the Humvee hardly did anything. I desperately wanted a shower so I could wash Iraq off my skin.

Nothing exploded on our way back.

Major Garcia wanted to know what I thought. I didn’t know what to say.

“Whether we like it or not,” he said, “and whether we like them or not, they are the future of this country.”

BAGHDAD – American soldiers arrived in Iraq in 2003 with not much of a plan and little idea what to expect. The Iraqi government, military, and police were overthrown and disbanded under de-Baathification. Most Iraqis who knew how to run the country were either sent home or imprisoned. Americans were in charge of just about everything even though they had no experience running even their own country let alone a traumatized and suspicious Arab society. They were confounded by its exotic and dysfunctional ways. When Sunni and Shia militias launched wars against each other and against the Americans, confusion turned to bewilderment.

General David Petraeus fared better than other American commanders in cracking the code of Iraqi society and reducing the insurgency in Mosul from an explosion to a simmer. I saw some of the results of his strategy’s expansion to Baghdad with troops in the 82nd Airborne Division. Instead of staying on base and training Iraqis while security disintegrated outside the wire, they moved into a neighborhood in Baghdad where they now live and work among the civilian population 24 hours a day.

Clear, hold, and build is the strategy now. The Graya’at neighborhood has been cleared of active insurgents, although there still are dormant cells in the area. The Army is working on several modest community and urban renewal projects and is planning larger ones in the near future. Constant patrols and intelligence gathering are the two crucial pieces of the hold part of the strategy.

I went out one night with Lieutenant Larry Pitts and his men one of their intel gathering missions.

“We’ll collect info on Shias in Sunni areas and Sunnis in Shia areas,” he told me. “We make the best of it by going out and meeting the local people. It works because we have a decent reputation around here that we’ve been cultivating for a long time. Reporters would get it more if they were with us from the beginning.”

We saddled up in Humvees, drove down quiet residential streets, and dismounted on a street near a palm grove.

Children came out of their houses to meet us.



We walked, and kept walking, so the parked Humvees would give no indication whose house we were going to visit. When we eventually reached our destination, some of the soldiers dispersed and set up checkpoints several blocks away in each direction.

“We’re trying to make it slightly less obvious that we’re having a meeting here,” Lieutenant Pitts said.

Two families of men, women, and children met us on the lawn inside the gate. Hugs and formal greetings in Arabic were exchanged. Everyone seemed happy to see everyone else. The soldiers had been to this house before. No one but me was a stranger. I was instantly made to feel welcome, however. No people in the world are more hospitable than Arabs, and that includes Iraqis in war time.

A handful of soldiers went inside and made their way to the roof. There they could watch the entire street with their night vision goggles and take out anyone stupid enough to mount an attack on the house. Soldiers are killed in Iraq every day, but it’s still hard to feel nervous even in Baghdad when you’re surrounded by these guys.

The night was reasonably cool for Baghdad in the summer. The temperature rarely drops below 100 degrees Fahrenheit before midnight, but this night it felt like a cool 90 by ten p.m.

Plastic lawn chairs were arranged in a circle on the grass. I expected a relaxing evening of important conversation in comfort. The lawn chairs, though, were not for us. The owner of the house said we should have our meeting inside.

“He owns a store,” Lieutenant Pitts said to me on the way in. “He sells us phone cards and stuff at the right price, not at a jacked up rate. We call his store Wal-Mart.”

Inside the house was brutally hot. The lights were on, but the air conditioner was off. The fierce heat of the day couldn’t escape into the atmosphere like it could in the yard. If we were in the U.S. I would have suggested we sit outside, but I was the stranger and a mere observer in a foreign land and was not about to complain.

The home owner turned on the air conditioner, but it would take a long time for the room to cool down.

“Can I take pictures?” I asked him.

“Of course, of course,” he said. “Just please don’t publish pictures of our faces in Iraq.”

Publishing pictures on the Internet is the same as publishing pictures in Iraq. So I have to be careful about what I let you see. I can't show you the faces of any Iraqis.

The living room, or salon, was bigger than the entire downstairs of my house in the United States. Most Iraqis live in large houses, but this one was also lavishly decorated with plush couches, nice oak cabinets, and tasteful decorations. The occupants had a much better sense of aesthetics than Saddam Hussein’s family, who decorated their tacky palaces as though they were the Beverly Hillbillies of the Arabs.

We all took our seats on the large billowing sofas. An eleven year old boy placed a small wooden table in front of each of us and served soft drinks and tea.



The soldiers and the Iraqis discussed the rather mundane minutiae of joint community projects. I wrote down much of the dialogue, but it is not terribly interesting and, besides, I wouldn’t want to reveal too much about who these Iraqis are and what they do. Everyone in the community knows they work with Americans. What they don’t know is that they also pass on reliable and actionable intelligence to the military about the identities and whereabouts of terrorists and insurgents.

Lieutenant Pitts passed around a bag of salted American peanuts. Each Iraqi took a handful and wasn’t sure what to do with them.

“They’re peanuts,” he said. “Just like the peanuts you eat, only they’re still in the shell.”

The owner of the house broke open a peanut with his hands.

“No,” Lieutenant Pitts said. “You need to put it in your mouth and suck the salt off it first.”

The children in the room smiled at me and asked me over and over again to please take their picture. I can’t show you their faces, though, because I do not want to put them in danger.

“We brought toys for the kids,” Lieutenant Pitts said. Sergeant Roma and another soldier whose name I didn’t catch handed out Beanie Babies, toy trucks, and coloring books as though they were Christmas presents. One of the boys sprawled on the floor and “drove” his toy truck across the carpet while making loud “vroom” noises.

“Everyone working on the [omitted] project should be paid by the end of the week,” Lieutenant Pitts said.

“Thank you, Captain,” said the man who owned the house. It was the second time he referred to Pitts as a captain.

“I’m a lieutenant, not a captain,” Lieutenant Pitts said. “So please don’t call me captain. If one of my superior officers were sitting here and heard you call me a captain he might get mad at me and think I’m misrepresenting myself.”


Lieutenant Larry Pitts

I leaned over and whispered to the lieutenant. “You didn’t come here to talk about community projects, did you?”

“Of course not,” he said. “We’re fishing for something else. It’s a process. Some new lieutenants don’t get the culture, and the locals won’t give them the time of day. How many times have you let total strangers in your house and given them everything they wanted right away?”

The air conditioning was on, I had taken off my body armor and helmet, but I was still roasting. The couch seat and cushions radiated an extraordinary amount of heat that had built up all day. Almost every damn thing in Iraq is hot to the touch, even cushions. I felt as though I was standing too close to a campfire, but I could not step away.

Lieutenant Pitts’ radio squawked. He answered and grinned as the soldier on the other end of the conversation gave him the humorous news.

“They just caught a DUI at the checkpoint outside,” he said.

The soldiers all laughed. Our interpreter Nathan translated, and the Iraqis laughed too.

“What do you do with a DUI?” I said.

Lieutenant Pitts shrugged and shook his head. American soldiers in areas cleared of insurgents act like police officers in many ways – Baghdad P.D. as one soldier put it – but they can’t be bothered with trivial matters like these. That’s for the Iraqi Police who probably don’t care much about drunk drivers either. There are so many more critical problems in Baghdad.

For hours we lounged on the sofas and discussed minor community matters and touched on subjects that were utterly trivial.

Nathan asked our host for a cigarette. He was given a long brown “More” brand menthol.

“Nathan is smoking!” said Sergeant Roma.

“Since when do you smoke?” said the soldier at the far end of the room whose name and rank I didn’t catch.

“It’s my first cigarette ever,” Nathan said.

It was hard to believe Nathan had never once smoked a cigarette. He grew up in Sadr City. Almost everyone in Iraq seems to smoke.

I took a picture of the occasion. Nathan didn’t mind.


Interpreter Nathan smokes his first cigarette

Lieutenant Pitts wiped the sweat off his forehead.

“You Iraqis have the right idea wearing dishdashas,” he said. The dishdasha is the loose-fitting white “robe” worn by many Arab men in hot regions. “They’re a lot more comfortable in this heat than our uniforms. I asked the colonel if I started wearing a dishdasha around the base in my off time if he would think I was crazy. He said he would send me away.”

Everyone laughed. If the Iraqis were offended – and Pitts did not mean his comment that way – they didn’t show it.

“The soccer field you’re building,” said our host to the lieutenant, “is great for the kids, but it also helps with security. Insurgents were using that area as a base. Thank you, thank you.” He put his hand on his heart.

“Listen,” said another Iraqi, who wore a long black beard as well as a dishdasha. “I have something to tell you, but it has to be away from the children.”

He said this in English so the children would not understand. A young man led them outside and suggested they play with their new toys on the lawn.

“When you came and liberated this country,” he continued, “Iraq had 25 million Saddams. America is turning us back into human beings. That soccer field is not for a specific person. It is for everybody. We appreciate that. We believe that if Americans have something that is ours, they will return it to us. If the Iraqi government has something that is ours, we forget it.”

Our host for the evening nodded in agreement.

“We support you,” the man continued. “You support our back, we support your back. But you must understand: If you pull back, we will pull back. I will have no choice but to pull back if I can’t depend on you. It will be much harder for us to stand together. But as long as you stand firmly behind us we will support you against Moqtada al Sadr and the other bastards in the area.”

“Are they Sunnis?” I said to Lieutenant Pitts. Moqtada al Sadr leads the radical Shia Mahdi Army militia.

“No,” he said. “They are Shias. But they don’t like any of the idiot groups, regardless of sect. They want peace.”

It was late at night, but the Iraqis said we needed to eat. I had no idea, but in hindsight I should have known. It seems no Arab is happy if I’m in his house and he isn’t feeding me.

“Come to the table,” said our host. “Let’s have some chicken.”

The soldiers and I walked to the table in the next room and found an enormous spread of barbecued chicken, lamb kebabs, vegetables, and tearable flat bread. The Iraqis deferred to the soldiers, and the soldiers deferred to me. I was the lone foreign civilian, so I was expected to go first. There were no chairs at the table.

“Just stand and eat at the table,” Lieutenant Pitts whispered to me.

There was also no silverware. Iraqis eat with their hands.

I tore off a hunk of barbecued chicken and rolled it into some bread. The spices tasted vaguely of lime.

“This is delicious,” I said. And it was. This was the soldiers’ cue that they could now eat.

“This is some really good chicken,” said Sergeant Roma. He wasn’t just being polite. “It’s much better than the chicken we have at the D-FAC [military dining facility].”

This is how soldiers spend most of their time when they gather intelligence on terrorists and insurgents in Iraq. Not until the very end of the meeting, which is almost strictly social and takes many hours, does anyone get down to business. Jumping right in with a list of intelligence questions is considered the height or rudeness except in extreme or unusual circumstances.

“Would you like a glass of arak?” our host graciously asked me.

Arak is the Arabic version of ouzo, the milky white liquor that tastes of licorice.

“I would love some,” I said. “But I am not allowed to drink alcohol while embedded with the military.”

“Go ahead, it’s okay,” Lieutenant Pitts said.

“I should probably follow the rules,” I said. I hadn’t been embedded long enough to feel like flouting rules yet, but in hindsight I hope I didn’t offend him by turning him down.

After eating we returned, stuffed, to the couches. Nathan, our interpreter, was needed outside. To my surprise, Lieutenant Pitts continued his conversation with our Iraqi hosts, unaided, in Arabic.

“How long did you study Arabic?” I said to him during a lull in the conversation.

“I haven’t studied it,” he told me.

He hadn’t? Most non-native speakers can’t hold down a conversation until they have studied Arabic formally for several years.

“I just listen very carefully before our interpreters translate,” he continued, “and I’ve been picking it up. I still need Nathan to help with the nuances and specifics, but I understand basically what they are saying. And they understand me even though I am not speaking correctly.”

The Army has come a long way since they first arrived in Iraq, and Lieutenant Pitts was shaping up to be a real American Arabist.

We still hadn’t done anything, though, except hang out and socialize with Iraqis. I knew the drill, however. I often work the same way in the Middle East as a reporter when I’m not embedded.

Much of what I do in the Middle East is have dinner and tea, and sometimes alcohol, with Middle Easterners and learn how their culture works and what they think. Most Arabs will tell you far more and answer more honestly over food and drinks than they will if you rattle off a list of pre-packaged questions like you’re pumping them for information. Government officials usually skip the formalities and the socializing, but few others do.

Sergeant Roma, who sat to my left, also speaks Arabic.


Sergeant Roma

“They think that makes me a spy,” he said, “and that I must be from Jerusalem. They don’t mind, though.”

This was typical of the Arab world, but also a bit odd. They think he’s a spy? What did they think we were doing there in their house? This was an intelligence gathering operation. It was, more or less, spying. The only difference is that the soldiers were up front about it, even though (and this is not contradictory) no one said anything about intelligence gathering yet. Nobody had to. Everyone knew what was up. The United States military has better things to do in Iraq than socialize just for the sake of socializing.

That doesn’t mean the food and gifts and chit chat were a sham. The friendship and affection between these Americans and Iraqis is real. Several soldiers and officers told me that what surprises them most about their time in Iraq is how emotionally attached they’ve become to Iraqis in general and to specific individuals in particular. They didn’t expect it, but that’s what happened. And it’s considered a waste of that friendship to talk strictly business. The business wouldn’t be possible anyway if the friendship and trust weren’t there first.

“Some people around here think anyone who talks to Americans is a spy,” said the Iraqi man with the beard.

I have been suspected and accused of being a spy in every Arab country I’ve been to. The accusation is usually not serious, rarely feels threatening, and is usually humorous or annoying, depending on the context and who said it. But the truth is that huge numbers of Iraqis who talk to Americans really do supply actionable intelligence on terrorists and insurgents. They risk retaliation, but if they don’t take that risk they risk getting ethnically cleansed or car bombed at the market instead. Iraq is an extreme country in a state of emergency. Spies – and I’m using the term loosely here, not referring to James Bond type characters – are literally everywhere.

The only areas of Iraq where the locals won’t provide much intelligence is where the American presence is thin on the ground. It’s not worth risking reprisals if no one is around to provide security. This is one of the major reasons Iraq spiraled out of control for several years. American troops did not provide security for civilians. Today, though, they are.

“We’ve been getting to know these people for months,” Lieutenant Pitts told me before we arrived at the house. “We thought if we got to know them as people and promised to protect them from violence that they would help us win the war against the insurgents. And it works.”

“Some people complain about Iraqis working with Americans,” said the man with the beard. “But then many of them work for Americans as soon as they are offered a job. When they complain they are just jealous. Give people jobs. That is the key.”

“In the four years you have been here,” our host said, “only lately have you finally come around and talked to us about what we want and need.”

“Hopefully in the last six months we’ve been able to improve your area,” Lieutenant Pitts said.

“Yes,” said the host. “Yes! And what about big projects like hospitals?”

“Soon, in the future,” said the lieutenant. “We do have some big projects coming up.”

One of those big projects is the installation of 1,500 solar-powered street lights in the neighborhood. Most sectors of Baghdad only get one hour of electricity every day. And the Iraqi sun is so fierce, solar powered lights are almost a no-brainer. Insurgents sabotage the electrical grid and make it all but irreparable, but there’s no grid for decentralized solar lights to attack.

“Right now you’re light,” our host said. “If you do big projects people will really love you. People see we’re working with you. Support all of us more and it will be okay. They will love you. They will even give you their shoes.”

“What about the big fight at the mayor’s house?” Lieutenant Pitts said. He was referring to the mayor of the neighborhood of Graya’at, not the mayor of the entire city of Baghdad.

“The mayor works for himself,” said the host. “His son, though, was listening to music in his parked car. Mahdi Army men came up and threw sandals at him and beat him up. They fired warning shots in the air. The shots were a way of saying We have weapons.”

“A big problem is that lots of displaced people are coming back into this area,” said the man with the beard.

“And what about the illegal checkpoint that we busted up?” said the lieutenant. “I need to know the fallout.”

We weren’t quite getting down to brass tacks yet, but were close.

“What you need to do,” said the host, “is bust up two or three of the other checkpoints so people don’t think you’re taking sides. They are checking ID cards to find out if people are Sunni or Shia.”

The lieutenant and our interpreter Nathan whispered conspiratorially. Pitts nodded. They clearly worked well together.

“Tell them they are only allowed two checkpoints,” the host said, “one at each end of the market. None in the middle. They are taking 5,000 dinars from each vehicle. They use that money to buy weapons for the Mahdi Army.”

“Have you heard about anyone storing weapons?” said Lieutenant Pitts. “Not in these houses but in [omitted]?”

“No,” said the man with the beard.

“We got a report that there are caches there,” said the lieutenant.

“We’ll keep our eyes open,” said our host. “We will [omitted] and get back to you.”

I’m leaving out certain details by choice to protect these Iraqis, but I still want to give you an idea about what was said.

They have clever ways of keeping their eyes on the neighborhood. Their methods have always been used in the alleyways of Arab societies. Insurgents can possibly guess what those methods are, but they will not learn it from me.

Lieutenant Pitts pulled a color print picture out of his pocket. “Do you recognize this man?” he said.

He passed the picture around.

“This guy is bad guy,” he said. “He’s done some bad things to Shias. I was hoping to catch him these evening.”

It was news to me that I might be along for the ride during a night raid. But no one seemed to recognize him, so it looked like that wasn’t happening.

“We have some Sunni friends in [omitted],” Lieutenant Pitts said. “But they’re afraid to tell us about bad Sunnis. We know [omitted] lives in this area. There are no Sunnis here. I just want to sit down and talk to [omitted]. I think he’s the final piece to this puzzle. Then we’ll be able to roll these guys up. We’ve tried to get this guy before, but some other Sunnis in the area warned him in advance that we were after him.”

“I am sorry, my friend,” said the man with the beard and shook his head.

“If you can provide even a small piece of information,” said the lieutenant. “The fuel station we’re building will be open soon. The swing gates and security checkpoints at the market are already in place. The solar lights will be installed shortly.”

The Iraqis shook their heads. I doubt Pitts needed to remind them of what the Army had done for them lately. They seemed plenty motivated already, as Shias, to get Shia-murdering Sunni thugs off the streets.

It was time to move on to the next house. We said our goodbyes and I sincerely thanked the generous Iraqis for their hospitality. When the soldiers rose from the couch the kids ran up and gave them high-fives.

“One last thing,” Lieutenant Pitts said. “If you come back from your vacation in [omitted] and you don’t bring us pictures, we are taking over your store.”

Everyone laughed at the obvious joke.

“We will bring you a gift from outside,” said the man with the beard.

“A real live woman?” said the lieutenant. “Will you bring me a second wife?”

More big laughs all around.

I strapped on my body armor.

“Do you want to stay a while longer and take a nap?” said our host.

“Thank you,” Lieutenant Pitts said. “But we have work to do tonight.”

They’ll have work to do for years.

*

Those men were Shias who lived among Sunnis. Next we would meet with a Sunni who lived among Shias.

We drove for five minutes, parked the Humvees, and quietly, casually, walked to a different part of the neighborhood.



I had no idea where we were going, and we seemed to take random turns to disguise our intent and direction in case anyone watched.

Then, out of the blue, Lieutenant Pitts tried not to look obvious as he rang somebody’s doorbell.

The city was dark, quiet, and still, and not in an ominous way. It may not have been tranquil, but it felt like it was. As was often the case, I was surprised how relaxed I felt in Baghdad. Suddenly two feral cats screeched and fought tooth and claw in the street.

A man came out the front door and opened the gate leading into the courtyard. He saw me and several soldiers and quietly beckoned us in. We did not go in the house, though. We crouched next to the wall just inside the courtyard where no one could see us. Someone could have heard our conversation if they were standing just on the other side of the wall, but several soldiers spread out on the streets and made sure nobody did.

“Hello,” the man said in English. “I was wondering when you would show up.”

The man had briefly approached Lieutenant Pitts in public a few weeks before and said he had some information to give him. Not wanting to appear obvious, Pitts asked the man where he lived and said he would pay him a visit at some unknown time in the future.

This was that time.

“Do you mind if I take your picture?” I said. I was almost certain he would say no, but thought I would ask.

He laughed. “No, no please don’t,” he said.

“It’s amazing that you asked,” said Sergeant Roma, who crouched next to me. “Most reporters just take the picture.”

“Of course I asked,” I said. “I am not going to risk getting him killed for a picture.”

Sergeant Roma nodded and rolled his eyes at the behavior of some reporters who had embedded with him in the past.

The Iraqi man works for the Baghdad government at a ministry I will not identify in the Green Zone. He showed us his card. “I would never show this card outside the gate in this neighborhood,” he told me.

The cats continued fighting in the street, loud enough to wake people up. Still, we did not go inside. Everyone just lowered their voices.

“Jaysh al Mahdi [Moqtada al Sadr’s radical Shia Mahdi Army militia] may want to attack this area,” the man said. “Mostly Sunnis live here. We don’t cause problems for anyone. This area is totally quiet.”

I can vouch for that. No violence erupted anywhere near me at any time during my stay. I wasn’t just lucky. The U.S. Army soldiers based in the area haven’t suffered a single casualty since they arrived in early 2007.

I had thought, though, that we were going to meet with a Sunni who lived among Shias. I asked the lieutenant what happened to the plan. He said he changed it at the last minute when he remembered he needed to meet with this man.

“The American military needs to make sure no one has weapons but you,” the man said. “We are suffering from bandits and thieves. I am Sunni, but I don’t pray any more.”

“Why not?” I said, expecting him to say he was disgruntled with his religion for some reason.

“So Jaysh al Mahdi doesn’t know I am Sunni,” he said. “So many Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police belong to the Mahdi Army.”

It was the middle of the night and we had awoken the man from his bed. The usual Arab formalities and socialization ritual therefore was skipped. Sometimes it’s okay to get right down to business in Baghdad.

“Jaysh al Mahdi kidnapped eleven people from this area, killed them, and left their bodies in the dump,” the man said. “I can provide you with the names of the people who did this.”

Considering where the man worked, I believed his information was credible. So did Lieutenant Pitts.

“Colonel [omitted] in the Iraqi Army works with intel files,” the man said. “He pulls files on individual Sunnis and has them assassinated one by one. I know someone who killed 25 people. I reported him to the Iraqi Army and they reported him to the U.S. Army. He was detained for two days and let go. What the hell is going on?”

Lieutenant Pitts shook his head. “I will take care of it,” he said.

“I told this to a different Iraqi Army Colonel,” the informant said, “a man who I thought could be trusted. He said he would help, but he didn’t do anything. You know, Iran is providing weapons to these people. The same guy who killed all these people wants to operate in the [omitted] area. I would give you chai [tea], but it’s the middle of the night.”

“Of course,” Lieutenant Pitts said. “It’s not a problem, and I am sorry for waking you. Listen, would you rather we meet in person or speak on the phone? I don’t want to put you in danger.”

“It is better if we speak on the phone,” the man said.

“Okay,” Lieutenant Pitts said. “We’ll get out of here and let you get back to sleep.”

The man gave the lieutenant his phone number.

“I will not share this number with anyone,” Lieutenant Pitts said. “You gave this number to me, and it will stay only with me. You do not need to worry about who else might get it.”

“Thank you, lieutenant,” the man said.

“And from now on we will only speak on the phone. For your protection. If I see you on the street I will just casually say Salam Aleikum and walk right on past.

“Please, sir, can you help me? I must work with Americans, because my psychology is demolished by Saddam Hussein. Not just me. All Iraqis. Psychological demolition.” – Iraqi woman to New Yorker reporter George Packer.


“The Hammer,” Titan Company Badge # S-10296

Iraqis who are not American citizens and who work as interpreters for the American military cover their faces when they work outside the wire. Mahdi Army militiamen and Al Qaeda terrorists accuse of them of collaboration with the enemy. They and their families are targeted for destruction.

Here is an interview with one such interpreter who works with the 82nd Airborne Division in Baghdad conducted by Michael Totten. The interpreter calls himself “Hammer.”

MJT: Why do you work with Americans?

Hammer: When I was 14 years old all I liked was American cars and American movies. America was my dream. It was a dream come true when the United States Army came to Iraq. It was a nightmare in 1991 when they left again.
Maybe someone will think I’m lying, that I’m just saying this. If my friends say something like Russian weapons are the best or German cars are the best I say, no, Americans are. Everyone who knows me knows this about me.
If anyone says Arabs will win against the U.S. they are wrong. The leaders don’t want to be like Saddam. But if the US leaves Iraq it will be a big failure, especially for me. I don’t want to see this. Never.

MJT: Do you like working with Americans?

Hammer: A lot. Especially when I go outside the wire. I feel like a stranger here. When I go back inside I’m home. I have no friends outside, only family. When I go home I stay in my house. I don’t go out on the streets.

MJT: Why don’t you have any friends?

Hammer: I don’t feel like I belong to this society. They think like each other, but they don’t think like me. I can’t continue with them.
I like to know something about everything, to learn as much as I can. In Iraq if you know too much they will laugh and call you a liar.
When I was 20 I liked American music. They don’t like it. (Laughs.)
I don’t like Saddam. I hate his family.

MJT: Why do you have to cover your face?

Hammer: To protect my family. My family lives in Iraq. If they go to the U.S. I won’t have to do it. But I don’t want anyone to know me, to follow me and see where I live and kill my wife and son.

MJT: How did you feel when the U.S. invaded Iraq?

Hammer: Happy. It was like I was living in a jail and somebody set me free. I don’t want Saddam ruling me. Never. I was just waiting and waiting for this moment.

MJT: What do you think about the possibility of Americans leaving?

Hammer: It is like bad dream. Very bad dream. A nightmare. Worse than that. Like sending me back to jail. Like they set me free for four years then sent me back to jail or gave me a death sentence.

MJT: Tell us about living under Saddam Hussein.

Hammer: It was crazy life, like feeling safe inside a jail. If they sent you to an actual jail nothing changed. They arrested everyone, literally everyone, for no reason and sent them to jail for two weeks just so they could see the jail.
I went there three times. The first time because I worked for a movie company. They sent all of us to jail. It had nothing to do with me.
I was given a three year sentence. My family has money, so I paid the judge 50,000 dollars. I gave it directly to the judge, plus four new tires for his car and a satellite TV. He gave me a three month sentence instead of a three year sentence. He scratched “3 years” off my sentence and wrote “3 months” in by hand.
They sent me to Abu Ghraib. I saw so many things. If you want me to talk about that I would need a whole newspaper.

MJT: Tell us a little about Abu Ghraib.

Hammer: On the bus to the jail I didn’t have handcuffs. I asked why. The guard said “Look behind you.”
The first guy behind me got a 600 year sentence.
The next guy got six hanging sentences.
The third guy was sentenced to be thrown blindfolded out of a second story window. Twice.
Another guy f*cked his mother and sisters three times. He was freed on Saddam’s birthday.
Another guy had his hand cut off.
There was this last guy. He went to the market with his wife. She waited in the car when he went to buy something. When he came back to the car his wife was screaming. Two guys were in the car with her. One held her arms and the other was raping her. He grabbed his AK-47 and chased them away. They ran to their car and he shot them. Their car blew up. They were mukhabarat [Saddam’s secret police]. He got a death sentence. On his second day in Abu Ghraib they killed him and sent the mother- and sister-f*cker free for the fourth time.
The guards who ran Abu Ghraib sold hallucinogenic drugs to prisoners for money. They forced me to take them.
You need protection in there. You find someone and give him drugs and cigarettes. You pay off the guards to just punch you in the face or move you to a different cell instead of kill you.
I was freed 26 days after I arrived, on Saddam’s birthday before I finished the three months.
I can’t live with this nightmare anymore.

MJT: What’s it like out there now for the average Iraqi?

Hammer: If you give average Iraqis electricity right now it will be enough. This is the most important thing. Give them power for seven days in a row and there will be no fights.
After the US came and Saddam fell they earned 3 dollars a month. Now they earn between 100 and 700 dollars a month.
Giving them electricity would reduce violence. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself what would happen to this Army base if the power was cut off forever and the soldiers had to spend the rest of their lives in Iraq. Do you think these soldiers would still behave normally?
Iraqis are paid to set up IEDs. They do it so they can buy gas for their generator and cool off their house or leave the country. Their hands do this, not their minds.
TV is the most interesting thing to Iraqis. They learn everything from the TV. Right now they only have one hour of electricity every day. Do you know what they watch? Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera pushes them to fight. If they got TV the whole day they would watch many things. Their minds would be influenced by something other than terrorist propaganda.
Right now they have no electricity. They have no dreams. Nothing. And Saddam messed with their minds. For more than 30 years he poisoned their minds.
You can’t understand Iraq because you can’t get inside their mind. When you get inside their mind…it is a crazy mind.

MJT: Why is Iraq such a mess? Is it the Americans’ fault?

Hammer: No. You can’t blame it on the Americans. Iraqis are number one at fault for this mess. They are greedy and will do anything for money. They are like people who were in jail for 30 years, were suddenly set free, were given money, then had their money taken away. What will they do next? They will kill for money. They are selfish.
They got selfish from Saddam. Iraqi people used to be different. I am the same person I always was, but most Iraqi people are different now. They feel that no one will help them so they help themselves.

MJT: Is there a solution to the problem in this country?

Hammer: Nuke Iraq.

MJT: Be serious.

Hammer: I am serious. If you screen all Iraqis, 5 million of them would be good people. Clear them out, then kill everyone else. Syria and Iran would surrender. [Laughs.]
Right now they see 100 corpses every day in the streets. It’s not okay to kill the bad people who do that?
Ok, if you want a serious solution try this:
Charge money to the families of insurgents. Fine them huge amounts of money if anyone in their family is captured or killed and identified as an insurgent. Make them pay. You can put it into law. Within one week they won’t do anything wrong because they want money. Their families will make them stop.
The militias pay them 100 dollars to set up IEDs. Fine them thousands of dollars if they are caught and their families will make them stop. Give them that law. Go ahead. Try it.

MJT: What will happen if the Americans leave next year?

Hammer: Rivers of blood everywhere. Syria and Iran will take pieces of Iraq. Anti-American governments will laugh. You will be a joke of a country that no one will take seriously.
I will kill myself if it happens. I am completely serious. The militias will hunt down and kill me and my family. I will beat them to it by killing myself.
I worked for the U.S. government for four years. Everyone who works as an interpreter for four years and gets a signature from a General or a Senator gets a Green Card. My hope is to get this somehow. I will do anything for this.
I am doing this for my son. Everything for my son. I don’t want my son living here getting into religion and militias and Al Qaeda. I want my son to be free, to have a girlfriend, to get married, and to be a good citizen.

MJT: How often do you get to see him?

Hammer: Two days a month. Sometimes two days every two months. I leave this base without my uniform and dress like them, wearing filthy jeans and a t-shirt, so they don’t know I work here. Then drive to my house and hug my wife and son.

MJT: What does he want to do when he grows up?

Hammer: He wants to be an American soldier. He has his chair in his room with an American flag on it. Has a toy M-4. He has a little uniform that I got at the P/X.
When he sees Saddam he curses Saddam. I never told him to do that. He does this himself. When he holds his toy gun he says he will kill the insurgents. He wants to go to Disneyland. His hero is Arnold Schwarzenegger – not the Terminator, but Arnold Schwarzenegger. He has all his movies.
Bill Gates is my hero. [Laughs.]

MJT: Do you ever get death threats?

Hammer: Seven times. Once I had to sell my car because of it. Some come from Shia militias, others from Al Qaeda. I had two IEDs in front of my car and was shot at with an RPG when I was working in Kirkuk for Bechtel at an oil plant.

MJT: Why is there peace in Kurdistan but not in this part of Iraq?

Hammer: The Kurds got rid of Saddam earlier. They fought against Saddam just like the Shia fought against Saddam, but the Kurds won their war and the Shia lost. In 1991 the Americans were heroes to the Kurds, but they disappointed the Shia and left them to Saddam. They were not reliable. So the next time, in 2003, some Shia thought they should get help from Iran. They know Iran is not going anywhere. Iran is a more reliable ally than the Americans.
The Shia never forgot being abandoned by the Americans. They talk about this all the time, still. They know the U.S. will leave Iraq and they will face Al Qaeda alone.
Shia people here are very simple, very easy. They are easy to control. They don’t need too many things. Just electricity, rights, a decent life, a good opportunity to get a job.

MJT: Would it be possible to flip the Shia supporters of Moqtada al Sadr into supporting Americans instead?

Hammer: Yeah, it’s easy. Just give them those things. You will push away all the reasons for this trouble. 16 percent of the Shia support Moqtada al Sadr. They have no education. They don’t know what to do. I know how these people think. Give them a good reason to join your side and they will do it.

MJT: What is the worst thing you have ever seen in this country.

Hammer: 60 guys from Al Qaeda kidnapped an interpreter’s sister. She had a baby boy, six months old. They raped her, all 60 guys. Then they cut her to pieces and threw her in the river. They left the six month baby boy to sleep in her blood.
We found him on a big farm south of Baghdad. All that was left was his legs and his shoes. The dogs ate him.
I don’t want this for my family.
These people are like animals who came from another planet.

MJT: What is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen in this country?

Hammer: In all my life? When I was seven years old I heard the sound of wild pigeons every morning. Then something happened and I never heard them again.
Then, on the morning of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I heard the pigeons again.
Really, I am not joking. I can see you don’t believe me, but I am not faking it.

MJT: What is the most important thing about Iraq that the Americans don’t understand?

Hammer: Don’t just open the jail after 25 years. Let people out step by step. Iraqis need rehab. Give them instant direct freedom and they are going to go crazy. That’s what the U.S. did.

MJT: Will the Americans win this war?

Hammer: I hope it’s going to happen. But it’s not going to happen if the Americans keep doing what they are doing unless they are a lot more patient.

MJT: Anything you want to say that I didn’t ask you about?

Hammer: Because of the few bad Iraqis who work as interpreters for the U.S., no one trusts us. But if you give me a gun I will fight harder than the Americans. You can go home. I can’t. I have to live in this country. If the Americans don’t give a Green Card to me and my family, I have to stay in this prison.
At Camp Taji the First Cavalry Division thinks interpreters are the enemy. They decided that interpreters who aren’t American citizens have to take the American flag off their uniforms before they are allowed to enter the dining facility.
I cried that day.
I wasn’t supposed to, but I complained. I said It’s okay for me to die outside wearing the American flag, but I can’t eat wearing the American flag with Americans? That was the worst day of my life with the American Army.
I’ll tell you what I tell my family. If I die here, wrap me in the American flag when you bury me. I don’t want to be wrapped in the flag of Iraq.

Hammer is looking for employment in and permanent relocation to the United States for himself, his wife, and his son. If you can sponsor him for a Green Card and help save his family, email him at superlink_par@yahoo.com and superlink_70@yahoo.com.

July 30, 2007
Baghdad Raid Night
By Michael J. Totten



BAGHDAD – “We want to use you as bait,” Sergeant Eduardo Ojeda from Los Angeles, California, told me before I embedded with his unit on what was shaping up to be a night raid.

“Excellent,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

This is what passes for black Army humor in Baghdad.

“Our TST [time-sensitive target] blew up a vehicle and killed four soldiers and an interpreter in the next AO [area of operations],” he said. “He’s somewhere in our AO now.”

He could tell by the frozen and dubious look on my face that I wasn’t sure I wanted to go on the mission.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “These guys hardly ever fight back when we nail them. And they always lose when they do. Come on. Let’s go f*ck ‘em up.”

I donned my body armor and helmet, strapped my Nikon around my neck, and jumped in the back of one of the Humvees.

“I need your full name and blood type,” said First Sergeant Ray Fisher, from Keokuk, Iowa. “In case something happens.”

Everywhere in Baghdad is dangerous – even the Green Zone – but danger is relative. Not every place in the Red Zone is the same shade of crimson. The 82nd Airborne company I embedded with hasn’t suffered a single casualty since they arrived in Iraq in January even though they patrol their part of the city – the neighborhood of Graya’at, just north of the Adhamiyah wall – 24 hours a day. I comforted myself with the idea that if I’m the first to be shot here, God apparently hates me.

“Stay close to me,” said Sergeant Ojeda as he plugged his mouth with tobacco. “In the dark just look for the short guy. And call me Eddie.”

The military intelligence officers at Coalition Outpost War Eagle knew the target was somewhere in their area, but they didn’t know precisely where or for how long. My unit’s job was to go out and patrol the neighborhood known as Tunis until they could pinpoint his exact location.

We drove in the dark. The soldiers used night vision goggles. I had to rely on my eyes.

“How long are you in Iraq, sir?” Sergeant Fisher asked me.

“As long as I feel like it,” I said. “A month and a half maybe.”

“You’re lucky, sir” he said. “We’re here for 18. I just got back from leave and missed the birth of my baby boy by two days. At least I got to see him.”

“You don’t have to call me sir,” I said.

“Ok, sir,” he said and laughed.

“What’s the situation in Tunis?” I said.

“It’s not too bad anymore,” said Lieutenant Evan Wolf from Omaha, Nebraska. “It’s a rich neighborhood. Lots of educated and cultured people live there, doctors and lawyers, people like that. It was infested with Al Qaeda a while ago, so the neighborhood formed a protectionist militia. They set up road blocks, gates around the mosque, and they drove Al Qaeda out. But now the militia harasses and extorts the residents. They follow us from house to house and intimidate whoever we talk to.”

Our convoy of Humvees crossed an overpass above the Iraqi equivalent of an Interstate freeway and stopped on a dark road among trees just outside the neighborhood. Half the soldiers dismounted the vehicles and set out to patrol the streets on foot. The other half stayed with the Humvees.

“How long will we be out?” I said to Eddy.

“Could be a while,” he said and plugged his mouth with more smokeless tobacco. “Last time we had a raid night we were we out for more than twelve hours.” He spit on the sidewalk. “We chased a guy from house to house to house. Didn’t catch him that night, but he was caught somewhere else three days later.”

I could barely see anything, but the soldiers could see everything. It was next to impossible to tell who was who in the dark.



Eddy was obvious, though. He was the short guy. He told me to stay next to him, so I did.

“This country would be beautiful if it were not for the invention of the plastic bag,” somebody said. “That bag is everywhere – in the trees, stuck in barbed wire, on the sidewalks, crammed in every corner. Man, when this war is over I’m coming back to open a recycling factory. I’ll be raking it in.”

The area did appear to be nice, billowing plastic bags notwithstanding. Every house was considerably larger than the average American home and seemed to be well-maintained. I wouldn’t mind living in a neighborhood like it myself if it weren’t in Iraq.

“I suppose I shouldn’t smoke,” I said to Eddy.

“You got that right,” Eddy said. “Snipers wearing night vision can see the tip of your cigarette from a mile away. They’ll watch as you lift the cigarette to your mouth and figure out where your head is. Then BLAMMO. They’re really good shots.”

I kept the cigarettes in my pocket.

“We’re being followed,” said Sergeant Fisher.

Eddy, the rest of the soldiers, and I turned around.

“Four of ‘em,” Eddy said.

I couldn’t see anyone but the soldiers standing right next to me without night vision goggles.

“Where are they?” I said.

“In the shadows two blocks behind us,” Eddy said. “There weren’t there a minute ago.”

Curfew enforcement in Tunis was total. In some areas of Baghdad only military aged males driving cars are stopped by Army patrols after 10:00 p.m. But Tunis is infested with a militia. No one is allowed on the streets after dark except licensed generator repairmen.

We kept walking. Half the soldiers walked backwards so they could keep an eye on the men following us.

Some of the soldiers stood in the light from a storefront lit by generator power.



I tried to stick to the shadows. Presumably the men following us were militia. If they didn’t have night vision goggles – and they probably didn’t – they wouldn’t be able to see me any better than I could see them. And I couldn’t see them.

“Five of ‘em now,” somebody said. “They’re still following.”

The soldiers took up positions, crouched on one knee, and pointed their rifles down the street in the direction of our stalkers. I ducked behind a wall separating two driveways and checked the windows and the roofs of the houses to make sure nobody saw me.

“Why don’t you send the Humvees after them?” I said to the nearest soldier.

“We’re sending them now,” he said.

“More are out now,” said another. “Seven or eight of them.”

No one knew how many were coming out of their houses on side streets. No one knew who they were, either. They could have been local militia thugs, or they could have been the point men of the Al Qaeda leader the Army was trying to home in on. They knew he was somewhere in the area. Maybe he found us before we found him. “We want to use you as bait” no longer sounded so funny.

An old man speaking on a cell phone walked toward us from the direction of our stalkers.

“Turn that phone off right now!” yelled one of the soldiers. “Right now!” He ran toward the man. “You turn it off now!” The man kept talking in Arabic.

Our interpreter told him to shut it off. He shut it off. Perhaps he was giving information to the militia. Perhaps he was talking to his wife. Nobody knew. Either way he was violating the curfew.

“Go home,” somebody told him.

Suddenly the soldiers started walking back in the direction we came from – toward the men who were following us and who hid in the shadows.

“We’re walking toward them?” I said to the soldier next to me. I still couldn’t tell who was who. “Are they still there?” I still couldn’t see them.

“They’re still there,” he said. “We’re pushing back to see what they do.”

For the first time since I arrive in Iraq, I wished I had a weapon myself. When I couldn’t stay in the shadows, I zigzagged at random to make myself a much more difficult target.

Eddie sidled up beside me.

“Stay right next to me,” he said. “If there’s shooting I’ll get you in the safest possible place.” The safest possible place, I thought, was outside Iraq. “If it escalates…” He trailed off.

“If it escalates…what?” I said.

“If it escalates we’ll deal with it,” he said.

“Four more to west,” said a soldier. “They’re running.”

This time I could see them – four men rounding a corner and running away down a street. They were more afraid of us than we were of them.

“Does this kind of thing happen around here a lot?” I said to Eddy.

“It happens,” he said.

The Humvees finally pulled up to the area where the Iraqi men lurked in the shadows. When our foot patrol caught up with them I saw that two of our stalkers had been caught.

The rule for properly building suspense in horror movies is based on how fear works in real life. Faceless and invisible enemies are scary. Real human beings with faces and fears of their own aren’t so much.

Our two busted stalkers looked a lot less intimidating in person. They seemed rather pathetic, actually, and they were not armed.

“My air conditioner is broken,” said the first through our interpreter. “I was just going to a friend’s house to get another one. I can show you the broken one now.”

I’ve been on patrol with soldiers after curfew many times. Most Iraqis out after dark don’t appear to be threatening or up to no good. This guy stood out, though. I didn’t believe he was only trying to borrow an air conditioner. He was twitchy and much more nervous than anyone I had seen captured before.



And anyway, aside from the twitchiness, why was he stalking Army soldiers in the dark with other military aged men?

Our Iraqi interpreter – who wore a mask over his face to avoid being recognized by the locals – checked the suspect’s identification.



He did live in the area. ID cards, though, don’t say “militia man” on them.

Two soldiers guarded the second suspect while the rest of us walked to the first suspect’s house and knocked hard on the door.



No one came to the door. A soldier kept knocking. “Open up!” he yelled.

The residents of the house finally stirred.

“There are lots of people in there,” someone said.

I stepped back, having no idea what to expect.

A large man wearing shorts and no shirt opened the door. An old man in a dishdasha stood behind him. They weren’t armed and didn’t seem threatening.



“Salam aleikum,” said the shirtless man.

“Can we come in?” said the soldier who knocked.

Shirtless beckoned us in, and so we went in.

Soldiers dispersed throughout the house and rounded everyone – four men, three women, and two children – into one room. Everyone, soldiers and Iraqis alike, were mellow and cool. No one seemed to be angry at anyone. Shirtless seemed to be the head of the household, so the soldiers spoke mainly to him instead of to the young man they had captured outside.

“You’re right, he was bad,” Shirtless said.

“The curfew is for your safety,” said a soldier through the interpreter. “We’re hot, too, okay? Finding an air conditioner isn’t a good enough reason to go outside after dark.”

“Sorry,” Shirtless said. “Please forgive us. Anything you want, we are with you.”

“There are bad guys out after dark.”

“I understand, very sorry.”

We said goodnight and left the house. There was no interrogation. All the soldiers did was drop the guy off at home to get him off the street. Whether he really was trying to borrow an air conditioner, or whether he belonged to the neighborhood militia, I’ll never know.

The second captured man was still being detained.

“I work at the mosque,” he said through our masked interpreter. “I work there at night. I was just out getting some dinner.”



We had walked past the neighborhood mosque earlier and there were no lights on inside. It didn’t seem that anyone worked there at night, at least not in any normal capacity.

All of us started walking toward the mosque.

“What are you going to do with him?” I said to Eddy.

“We’re going to take him to the mosque and see if he really works there,” he said.

When we arrived outside the mosque, some of the soldiers squatted in driveways across the street and scanned the roof. I joined them as Eddy and the others took the suspect to the gate.

I crouched near the ground.

“There are four men on the roof,” a soldier said. “You can’t see them anymore. They just ducked away as we got here.”



“They have a little bunker up there,” he continued. “You can’t see it from here, but it has sand bags and sniper netting around it.”

“What are you going to do?” I said.

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s a mosque.”

“They’re violating curfew,” I said, “and stalking us in the dark from a militarized mosque. And you aren’t going to do anything?”

“Our rules of engagement say we can’t interfere in any way with a mosque unless they are shooting at us,” he said.

We left our stalker with his “co-workers” and walked away.

*
While waiting for the call from Military Intelligence at the outpost, we walked the streets of Baghdad at midnight. If they could determine which exact house the Al Qaeda target was in, the soldiers I patrolled with would be the first on the scene. Our local infamous insurgent commander would be quietly surrounded by two dozen elite infantry soldiers, and myself with my notepad and camera, before he had any idea he what was happening.



In the meantime we chased shadows and silhouettes and dark vehicles on blacked out streets without any headlights.

We chased a car so far from our starting point I wondered if the soldiers still knew where we were. Eventually the driver pulled his car over and parked on his own. I got out of my Humvee and followed Eddy to the stopped car. Vicious dogs snarled at us from behind a gate.

Three men were inside. All were told to get out of the vehicle and were questioned and patted down.



It’s possible the three young men in the car didn’t even know we were trying to catch them. Humvees are driven in Iraq in the dark without headlights, and they don’t go very fast.

None of the young men were armed. The vehicle was searched and nothing was found. They were sent home and told to stay indoors after curfew.



This is what it is like most nights during counter-insurgency warfare. “It’s like we’re Baghdad PD,” one soldier put it. It isn’t always open war and explosions and bang-bang. Much of it entails patient police work and the chasing of ghosts.

We never did get the call from Military Intelligence. The insurgent commander, whose name I know but cannot reveal, was almost, but not quite, captured that night. His capture would have saved lives, and it would have been something to see.

This isn’t the movies, however. The Iraqi counter-insurgency would be a hard war to film accurately. Most of the time it’s so quiet. But it’s the quiet of an Alfred Hitchcock movie, not of rural Middle America. Explosions, mortars, bullets, rockets…these things can come flying at you at any time.

I watched the dark city of Baghdad through bullet-proof glass. Most homes were blacked out – the electrical grid supplies only one hour of power each day. A few families stayed up late and ran their generators past midnight. Most Iraqis, I knew without seeing, slept on the roofs of their houses where it’s cooler at night.

The palm trees somehow looked both menacing and benign at the same time. They looked slightly more ominous we drove into a dense grove bathed in an eerie glow from starlight shining through dust.



What may have been waiting for us on the road up ahead? Who may have been watching, perhaps even with the same night vision goggles the soldiers themselves wore?



Suddenly the trees were gone and the sky opened up. I couldn’t see anything.

“We’re in the slum now,” Lieutenant Evan Wolf said. “It’s a nasty one, too. Some houses are literally made out of cardboard. I would kill myself before I lived here.”

I have no idea how these people survive without air conditioning and clean water. The environment here in the summer is unrelentingly hostile.

“How did you get into this job?” Eddy said.

“I was in the high tech industry a few years ago,” I told him. “I got bored of the cubicle farm and needed to get out of the office.”

“You’re way out now,” Eddy said and laughed.

“I can’t wait to get in the office,” Lieutenant Wolf said.

“Do you like your job?” Eddy said.

“I love my job,” I said. “It’s the best I’ve ever had. Do you like yours?”

“I wouldn’t say it’s the worst decision I ever made,” he said. “It’s hard for soldiers. We all want to go home, of course. But we also want to stay and make sure our buddies did not die for nothing.”

There were no street lights. All I could see was absolute darkness and the faint outlines of hovels against a backdrop of stars.

“It’s always interesting, though,” Eddy said. “No one gets to see places like this. Only Iraqis. And you. And us.”

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.”

Welcome to Baghdad

By Michael J. Totten

BAGHDAD -- Never again will I complain about the inconvenience and discomfort of airports and civilian airline travel delays. You won't either if make your way from Kuwait to Baghdad in July during a war.

Military planes leave Kuwait every couple of hours for Baghdad International Airport (or BIAP, pronounced BIE-op). The United States Army's media liaison in Kuwait dropped me off at the airfield so I could take a flight "up."

I waited twelve hours in a metal folding chair in a room full of soldiers who, for obvious reasons, had priority over me for available seats.

At least I had a meal. On the other side of the base a McDonalds and Pizza Hut were tucked inside trailers supplied by Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR). KBR seems to have built almost everything here that the military uses as housing and storage. Out of plywood, plastic, and sheet metal they construct instant aesthetically brutal outposts of America, which somehow look and feel specifically like outposts of Texas.

I ordered a pizza from a Pakistani employee at the Pizza Hut trailer and paid with American dollars. They don't use coins on the base. They don't even have coins on the base. If your food costs, say, $5.75 and you pay with six dollars, you'll get a small round cardboard disk or chit that says "25 cent gift certificate" on it as change.

All night I waited for a flight and was bumped again and again by soldiers on their way to places like War Eagle, Victory, and Fallujah. Finally I got on a manifest and gathered around a gruff barking sergeant with everyone else.

"I want you all back here in 20 minutes," he bellowed. "First, I want you to go to the bathroom. Then I want to see you standing in front of me with a bottle of water."

I went to the bathroom even though I didn't have to. Then, as ordered, I pulled a cold bottle of water out of the fridge. We lined up with our gear and marched single file into the plane. I felt awkwardly out of place and also like I was in the army myself at the same time.

The plane was windowless and loud as 100 lawnmowers. I crammed pink foam plugs into my ears, strapped on my body armor, and seat belted myself into the side of the plane.

"Hang your bags on the hooks!" barked the sarge. "Hang them all the way up!"

"Don't fall asleep," said the soldier next to me. "When you see the rest of us grab our helmets, put yours on, too. We'll be beginning the spiral dive into Baghdad."

"To avoid flying low over hostiles?" I said.

"Something like that," he said.

This was not United Airlines.

The funny thing about the steep corkscrew dive is that I couldn't feel it. Anyone who says it is scary, as some journalists do, is talking b.s. If you can't look out the window or see the instruments in the cockpit, you'll have no idea if the plane is right-side up, flying in a straight line, upside down, sideways, or even spinning into a death spiral. I'm not sure how the others knew when to put on their helmets. Perhaps someone signaled. No one could hear anything over the roar of the plane through their ear plugs.

The landing was smooth and felt no different from an American Airlines touch down in Los Angeles. The back of the plane opened up onto the tarmac. Light like a hundred suns blinded my darkness-adjusted and dilated eyes. I could barely make out the dim shape of military aircraft behind us amidst the pure stunning brilliance. My first view of Baghdad looked exactly as I expected it would – like another world.

We dismounted the plane and I stepped into harsh blazing sunshine.

You know how it feels when you get into a black car in the afternoon with the windows rolled up in July? It's an inferno outside, but inside the car it's even hotter? That's how Iraq feels in the shade. Sunlight burns like a blowtorch. If you don't wear a helmet or soft cap the sun will cook your brain. First you get headaches. Then you end up in the hospital.

Getting from BIAP to the IZ (the International Zone, aka the Green Zone) is an adventure all by itself. First you haul your gear to a bus stop that feels like Crematoria. Then you get on the bus and ride for 45 minutes to an army base. Then you get off that bus and wait an hour to catch another bus. Then you get off that bus and wait for an hour to catch yet another bus to yet another base. Then you wait in the sun yet again – and by this time you're totally fragged from the heat – and take another damn bus to a helipad.

All this takes hours. You will be no closer to Baghdad than you were when you started. There are no short cuts.

Once you make your way to the helipad you will wait for a flight on a Blackhawk or a Chinook. If you're a civilian like me, you will fly last.

I waited for my helicopter flight with two other civilians – Willie from Texas and Larry from Florida.

Willie and Larry work construction for private companies in harsh places like Iraq and Afghanistan. They are both well-rounded individuals with Red State tastes and political views and a worldliness and cosmopolitanism that surpasses that of most people who live in the Blue States. They aren't allowed to tell me how much money they make, but it is many hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

"You get hooked on making money," Willie said. "You think you can do it for one year or two, then quit, but it's like a drug. Or like when you get one tattoo – all of a sudden you want two tattoos. My wife keeps saying, come on, you can do it for just one more year."

"My wife would hate it if I was out here for years," I said.

"You get vacation," Larry said. "You get more vacation than French people. 21 days every four months. And you don't have to pay taxes if you take your vacation outside the U.S. Your wife can meet you in the Bahamas."

A KBR employee who coordinates the Blackhawk flights called our names on the manifest.

"Get your gear, let's go, let's go, let's go!"

Military rules require all Blackhawk passengers to wear long-sleeved shirts. This was the first I'd heard of it, and I hadn't brought any long-sleeved shirts with me to Iraq. Why would I? It's 120 degrees in the shade.

Willie let me borrow an extra sweatshirt. I put that on, then my body armor, then my helmet, then my sunglasses which double as ballistic eye protection. Then hauled my 100 pounds of gear out onto the landing zone and lined up with the soldiers. KBR and the army made all of us stand there in line, waiting and broiling in the sun. We waited. And waited. And waited. My clothes were as drenched as if I had fallen into a pool. This is the army. Comfort is not a factor. None of the soldiers complain about heat. They just take it, and they get much hotter than me. They wear not only Kevlar like I do, but full kit body armor with SAPI plates.

Our Blackhawk helicopter was ready.

"Move out!" bellowed the KBR flight coordinator.

Larry, Willie, and I ran behind a line of soldiers toward the Blackhawk.

"Hold up!" said the coordinator.

The Blackhawk pilot lifted off without picking up one single passenger.

"Man," said the coordinator as he shook his head. The roar of the chopper rotors quickly receded. "No one was mission critical so they didn't want to give anybody a ride. I do not know what to tell you."

"F*ck!" Willie screamed.

We hauled our gear back to the waiting area and sat. I drank a bottle of water in seconds. It disappeared inside me. I couldn't even tell I had drank it.

"Last year in Afghanistan," Larry said, "I waited a week for a flight. Choppers flew in and out all day every day. I showed up on the LZ for every flight, had my gear ready, and kept getting bumped. A whole week, just to fly one from place to another. At least I was on the clock. We might be here a while."

We were there for a while. Not for a week, but for 12 hours. We kept getting bumped by new soldiers who showed up with places to go. A second time the pilot took off without picking anyone up. I couldn't figure out why he even bothered to land. Dozens of people needed a ride. On another occasion Larry, Willie, and I made it all the way to the helicopter itself before we got kicked for some reason.

I tried to embrace the suck. Willie got increasingly agitated.

"Good thing I don't have my glock with me!" he yelled after we got bumped for the sixth time. "I ought to pour a bottle of water on that electrical board over there and short out the whole frigging place."

After the sun went down the air mercifully cooled, down to 100 degrees or so – which is lovely after 120, especially when there is no longer burning sunlight. Tiny bats flew over the base from the direction of a reedy lake a few hundred meters away. There were no bugs.

I watched helicopters fly over the city in the distance and launch burning white countermeasure flares to confuse heat-seeking missiles as the pilots flew over hostile parts of the city. This was the only evidence I saw that I was in a war zone. I heard no shots fired, and I heard no explosions.

After having spent several days Baghdad's Green Zone and Red Zone, I still haven't heard or seen any explosions. It's a peculiar war. It is almost a not-war. Last July's war in Northern Israel and Southern Lebanon was hundreds of times more violent and terrifying than this one. Explosions on both sides of the Lebanese-Israeli border were constant when I was there.

You'd think explosions and gunfire define Iraq if you look at this country from far away on the news. They do not. The media is a total distortion machine. Certain areas are still extremely violent, but the country as a whole is defined by heat, not war, at least in the summer. It is Iraq's most singular characteristic. I dread going outside because it's hot, not because I'm afraid I will get hurt.

"I read on the Internet that the war costs 60 billion dollars a year," Larry said.

"Well, if it's on the Internet it must be true," I said jokingly.

A soldier heard me and swiveled his head.

"Did you just say that?" he said incredulously. "You're with the media and you just said that? Man, we ought to throw your ass right out of here."

I laughed, but he was only barely just kidding.

Most soldiers and officers I've casually met so far are not hostile. Most ignore me unless I say hi to them first. Others say hello or good morning first and call me "sir." Some are eager to chat. They all seem to want to know where I'm from. Lots of them are from Georgia and Texas.

Larry, Willie, and I finally got on a Blackhawk at 2:00 in the morning (oh two hundred in milspeak.) We strapped ourselves in our seats and piled our hundreds of pounds of luggage on top of us.

Blackhawk helicopters don't have windows. The sides are open to the air. Fierce hot blasts of wind distorted the shape of my face as we flew fast and low over the roof tops and street lights and palm trees and backyards of the city.

Baghdad is gigantic and sprawling. It looks much less ramshackle from the air than I expected. Individual cities-within-a-city are home to millions of people all by themselves. The sheer enormity of the place puts the almost daily car bomb attacks into perspective. The odds that you personally will be anywhere near the next car bomb or IED are microscopic.

A few minutes after takeoff from the helipad we landed on a runway in the IZ, or the Green Zone. The soldiers left in Humvees. Willie, Larry, and I were left at the airbase alone. My two traveling buddies had rides picking them up, but no one was waiting for me, nor would someone show up. I was expected to make my way to CPIC, the press credentialing center, but how could I do that at 2:30 in the morning? There were no taxis or busses to take.

"You can sleep tonight at our compound," Larry said, "and find your way to the press office tomorrow when it's open."

I would have been in trouble if I hadn't met these two guys. I may have been deposited in the reasonably safe Green Zone, but wandering around loose on my own in Baghdad, in the middle of the night, hauling 100 pounds of luggage, sleep-deprived, in extreme heat, and with nowhere to sleep does not put me in my happy place.

Mike Woodley showed up in an SUV to give Larry a ride. He said he could get me a bed at their compound before he realized I did not yet have a badge.

"They won't let you in," he said.

"Can't we just tell them I'm on my way to CPIC to pick up my badge?" I said.

"Doesn't matter," he said. "If you don't have it, the guards will not let you in."

"Is there a hotel I can check into?" I said. "What about the Al Rashid?"

"Al Rashid is in the Red Zone," he said. "And you can't get in there without a badge either."

Actually, the Al Rashid is in the Green Zone, right on the edge of it. But Mike was right about the hotel guards not letting me in without a badge. And I needed to get to the press office during business hours to get it.

"What should I do?" I said. I did not want to sleep on the sidewalk in Baghdad.

Mike pondered my options. And he came up with a great one.

"I can get into the embassy with my badge," he said, "and I can get you a temporary badge and a bed."

That's exactly what he did. He got me a temporary badge into the embassy annex, and he got me a bed with a pillow and fresh linens. For only the second time in a week, I got to sleep in a bed. And I was one lucky bastard. The embassy annex, and the bed I got to sleep in, was at the grandest downtown palace built by Saddam Hussein. The tyrant is dead, and I got to sleep at his house on my very first night in his capital. What better welcome to Baghdad could anyone possibly ask for?

In an effort to force feed the president and show him what his country actually wants the house has sent a bill calling for troop withdrawals to congress. The 218-208 victory came as the top US commander in Iraq told lawmakers that that despite people killing and bombing each other all over the country things are improving. I am paraphrasing by the way.
The bill which the president said he would veto will be on his desk within a couple weeks. And by politician time that more then likely means he will see it next year.

The $124 million dollar bill continues to fund the war but requires troops to begin withdrawals by October 1st of this year.

Non combat missions such as attacking terrorists? Huh. Moving on.

After Bush veto's the bill the Democrats and the two republicans that voted yes will have to convince two thirds of the house in order to veto his veto and to tell Bush to stick it where the sun doesn't shine.

You mean we in war we win some battles and loose others?? No way.

In response to talk of the bill the president had this to say.

Because an army that is actually controlled by its people would be just a horrible idea right? Why again did anyone vote for this guy?

Remember the nonbinding resolution Congress approved that lightly chastised Bush as command in chief of the armed forces for the continuing failure in Iraq? No one else does either. That's the problem with nonbinding resolutions, they don't actually do anything but express disapproval without any consequences. It seems that senate Democrats have decided to give the Iraq question another go, only this time the resolution may actually mean something.

As of right now the resolution seems to consist of little more than bullet points, some of which are of the "We Support Our Troops" ilk. Clearly this thing needs to be fleshed out a little more completely before it's brought up for a vote, otherwise if it's passed Democrats could bear the political burden of having passed a resolution that amounts to little more than a mission statement. Bush has remained intransigent on the issue, saying little other than threatening a veto of any Congressional directive to set a hard deadline to withdraw troops. To date Bush has vetoed only a single bill, one seeking to expand research for embryonic stem cells.

Few would argue at this point that Iraq is not a mess, and even General Petraeus, the current commanding officer of US troops in Iraq, suggests that non-military methods may be a better way to improve the situation.

He's obviously not agreeing with the Democrats that it's time to start pulling out US troops, but if even the recently appointed (by Bush) military commander thinks that shifting the focus towards political solutions is the way to go, it should be a sign that the military option really hasn't worked so far.

It remains to be seen whether Iraq will stabilize in the absence of an overwhelming US military presence, but with more training of Iraqi soldiers and police as an ongoing project, presumably there will come a point in the not-so-distant future when control of the country will have to be handed off to its people. Maybe setting a deadline will light fires under the asses of those in training positions to make sure that gets done properly.

Today marks the 3000th American military casualty in Iraq.

Happy fucking New Year.

Forget what Karl Rove or any other GOP strategist says about the 2006 midterm elections. They were a referendum on the Iraq war, and the answer was clear: people are not happy with the way Bush and the Republican Congress handled it, nor are they happy with where it's going. Public opinion is a malleable thing though, and is often fickle and given to quick changes based more on mass media memes than any actual, factual analysis of what is good or bad about a given situation. Which makes the result of this poll that much more surprising; one might expect that active members of the military would necessarily take a more positive view on how the Iraq war is progressing, since they're the ones involved in it and get to see all the positive things Laura Bush knows are happening there without having to view it through the "liberal media filter."

So maybe it's just the new recruits who are the nay-sayers, since they've spent the most time recently with civilians and hearing how popular opinion has shifted against Iraq? Not so, in fact the opposite appears to be the case.

So the people who think the war is going badly and that Bush and the Republican congress in particular screwed things up are the ones with the most experience and are more likely to be officers and career military, to be on active duty and to have served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. If these people can't be trusted to give an honest report of how things are going on the ground, then really no one should be. The fact is that they are the most qualified people to discuss the matter, so when a large majority of them are saying that adding more troops is not only a bad idea but is not possible, and that the civilian leadership has royally screwed up the war, policymakers should listen.