“Chaos in the Green Zone”: From AFA instructor to Iraq war strategist ...Middle East

Editor’s note: In August 2004, Major Tom Mowle volunteered to leave his teaching position at the Air Force Academy to serve at the headquarters of the Multinational Force-Iraq (MNF-I) in Baghdad, Iraq. After three weeks working on militia demobilization in the Policy Division, he is transferred to work in Strategy.

Other than perhaps the two-star himself, the Colonel in charge of Strategy was the most intimidating of the senior officers: big, bald, bad-tempered. Blessed as I was to be assigned the desk closest to his, I noticed he almost never smiled, never greeted anyone, never left his desk in the corner except to criticize. He dropped F-bombs like Curtis LeMay over Tokyo.

The work was also a bit intimidating, but it seemed more interesting and relevant than militias had been. First, the Colonel told me to look at how the upcoming Iraqi election might go so we could prepare for different outcomes. But the next day, he told me he had a “PhD Challenge” for me. He said I had twenty-four hours to answer three questions and thus, I guess, establish once and for all whether I was pretty fucking smart.

The first question was a ridiculous example of bureaucracy. Our victory conditions, our “desired end state” were: “Iraq would be peaceful, united, stable, and secure, well integrated into the international community, a full partner in the global war on terrorism, democratic, and an engine for regional economic growth.” This was classified, perhaps to leave us room to alter the goals and declare victory without anyone knowing about it.

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Recently, however, someone in Washington had substituted “ally” for “partner.” The Colonel’s first question was: What (if anything) did this mean for our strategy in Iraq? I was supposed to answer without asking someone in the Bush administration what it meant.

Why not ask them?

Asking for clarification might suggest we were too stupid to understand. Asking for clarification might result in an answer we might not want to hear: “Yes, our new goal is a formal treaty negotiated with Iraq and confirmed by the Senate.”

Not asking for clarification—giving the question to the guy who’d been in the office for two days—meant we could develop an interpretation we could live with.

How was an ally different from a mere partner? Formal allies, such as Japan, Australia, South Korea, and the members of NATO, were ones with which we had a mutual defense agreement. There was also a category in US law called “major non-NATO allies,” which included friendly countries like Israel and some less consistently friendly ones, such as Egypt, Jordan, and Argentina. Bush had recently declared Pakistan to be such an ally, though it wasn’t cooperating much in the Global War on Terror—some wondered if Pakistan might be sheltering Osama bin Laden. The primary effect of being an ally rather than a mere partner was to allow some of Congress’s rules on arms transfers to be waived.

A treaty would require Senate approval, but the lesser designation could be announced at the president’s discretion. Neither required Iraq to adopt any particular policies. Most importantly, they did not require us in Headquarters MNF-I to do anything at all.

The Colonel told me this was a pretty fucking good answer, but half the day was gone and I had only answered one of the questions in his challenge.

“Chaos in the Green Zone: My Time as an Iraq War Strategist”

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The second question was: What would happen if Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani died? This was far more challenging. For starters, I knew next to nothing about Shia Islam or its leaders, other than that people called ayatollahs were behind the Iranian Revolution, embassy takeovers, and chants of “Death to America.” They usually had long white beards, turbans, and glowering expressions. Sistani seemed a bit different. He had the beard and the black hat and the stern mug, but he primarily used his power in ways that supported, or at least didn’t impede, our desired outcomes.

Unlike anyone else in Iraq, his power came from morals rather than mortars. Sistani had demonstrated his power ten days earlier when he ended the standoff with Moqtada al-Sadr at the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf simply by showing up. He was the “object of emulation” for most Shia Arabs in Iraq—the senior religious figure whose guidance they would try to follow. Sistani advocated for patience among the Shia Arabs, telling them to stand down in their resistance and trust the process he had engineered. It was difficult to imagine how we could manage the war without his calming influence on about half the population. If he called for solidarity with other Iraqis, the people would act accordingly. If he called for mass protests against an American proposal, the streets would fill with demonstrators—who would then go home when he said his point had been made.

What would happen if Sistani died? This wasn’t a random concern, after all: No one knew why he had needed medical treatment in London. Furthermore, though he may have talked Sadr out of Najaf, Moqtada probably wasn’t very happy about it. The young radical was generally believed to have been responsible for the murder of Grand Ayatollah Abdul Majid al-Khoei in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. Khoei would have been a strong advocate for a democratic Iraq, one more assertive than Sistani. I could hardly imagine how things might have been different if he had lived. If one grand ayatollah could be killed in Najaf, so could another old man who lived off an alley in the same city. In whatever manner Sistani might die, what would happen next? How would a new spiritual leader be selected? Who would it be? What impact would this have on our campaign?

I had concluded that though the State Department might have answers to questions about the future, they seemed reluctant to share such answers with me. I decided to talk to the guy in the Political-Military Section who had shared ideas about funneling development money directly to Iraqis rather than American corporations. He wasn’t an FSO; rather, he worked for one of the OGA, the “other government agencies.” These might be CIA, DIA, NSA, who knew? If anyone could help, he could.

To get to the OGA suite I walked north from the rotunda, past the chapel, along a cluttered but otherwise vacant corridor, and finally up the stairs to a dim landing with a well-locked door. Stepping into the OGA lobby was like stepping into another building in another place. There was real furniture, along with tasteful art on the walls and carpet on the floor. There were plants, probably fake, but maybe not.

The OGA man gave me enough information to put together a report for the boss.

Before turning in my answer, I had to take another step. This man had a reputation for speaking his mind at meetings. I didn’t know the details firsthand, but apparently he would embarrass people by pointing out something everyone was trying to ignore or by correcting their facts. The two-star had had enough of this and warned his people against communicating with this loose cannon. He would press about whether information was from him.

This approach did not encourage truth telling, especially among those who had a career they were looking forward to.

To evade this restriction, I took my report over to the Embassy and laundered it through one of the senior foreign service officers. State Department people wouldn’t volunteer any ideas about what might happen, but they were willing to review finished products and confirm their reasonableness. Then I could say one of them was my source.

My conclusion: Sistani’s view of mosque and state was not exactly Jeffersonian, but he sharply disagreed with the Iranian model of “rule of the jurisprudent.” He believed clerical rule would lead people away from their faith. Politics corrupts, so people inevitably become cynical about politicians. If the politicians are clerics, people will transfer that contempt to religious leaders in general, and ultimately to Islam itself. Rather than risk this, lay leaders should rule in accordance with Islamic principles. If they rule badly, the clerical leadership could remove their blessing from them without Islam itself being tainted by association.

Sistani’s successor would be chosen after a period of mostly intellectual rivalry among the other grand ayatollahs, only some of whom agreed with him. Sistani’s particular moral authority was not transferable. Shia Arabs could choose their own spiritual model, so his followers would most likely split their emulation among several options. We had no idea how this would develop, but no one would have Sistani’s influence, so a greater proportion of Shia Arabs would likely be drawn toward grand ayatollahs who more strongly opposed the American occupation and its democratic goals. Or toward people like Sadr.

Tue 7 Sep: So scary that my input on something like Sistani—or even more importantly Fallujah—may be taken seriously. I knew nothing about the Najaf clerics 36 hours ago, now I have an official assessment. I know almost nothing about Fallujah now; will have an assessment seriously under consideration this time tomorrow.

Tuesday morning, the Colonel told me I had failed his challenge: “Good work on Sistani, Tom, but your time is up. What fucking happened? Why didn’t you get it done?”

I replied, “Sir, this shit takes time if you want it done right.” He smiled and gave me a two-day extension.

The third element of the Colonel’s PhD Challenge was much more difficult and serious than the other two. Command wanted to know: Where would it be most useful for us to seize the initiative and launch a major kinetic operation (military jargon for shoot, bomb, and kill) to improve the security situation before the Iraqi election, which was expected to occur around the end of the year?

The options under consideration were the northern cities of Baqubah, Samarra, Mosul, Tikrit, Ramadi, and Fallujah, as well as Baghdad itself. Cities were the focus because small-scale efforts like those ongoing in towns and rural areas of northern Babil Province and in parts of Nineveh near the Syrian border would not have a dramatic effect either way.

This question had already been addressed by two others in Strategy: one of the regular US army officers and a British army officer. I was to take a third crack at it without knowing their conclusions. My first step was to get a map and find these cities. I had not been much concerned with Iraqi geography during my first three weeks in Baghdad.

To answer this question, I inverted my training in risk analysis as a safety engineer. Rather than calculating the chance of failure in an aircraft part and the severity of the damage that would result, I focused on the probability of success of a kinetic operation in each city and on how much security would be improved if the mission were successful.

I based the expected gain in security on how much violence could be reduced and how many people would benefit as a result. In places that were relatively quiet, like Tikrit and Mosul, the capitals of Salah ad-Din and Nineveh Provinces on the upper Tigris, a kinetic action could not gain us much. These cities hosted much of the secular armed opposition—the former Ba’athists loyal to the old regime—but they rather sensibly kept their own backyards peaceful.

Among more violent places, the gains from a successful operation would be greater if they were achieved in a larger city. This argued against Fallujah and Samarra, which were much smaller than the other options, and even Baqubah, despite being the capital of Diyala Province.

To estimate the probability of success, I looked at the size of a city and the depth of hostility within it. A kinetic action in a large city like Baghdad or Mosul would be more difficult, more time-consuming, more costly in lives and matériel, and at greater risk of going wrong than one in a small city. Moderating this, some cities, like Ramadi, the capital of al-Anbar Province, were nearly universally hostile to the occupation; more diverse cities like Baqubah and Baghdad were less so.

None of the options were very good. We could either execute a relatively low-risk operation that would produce little gain (in Samarra, for example) or a high-risk operation that might produce a bit more gain. I suggested the best answer was: “Don’t attack any of these cities,” but I acknowledged the Commander had asked “where” to take action, not “whether.”

The best bet, in my opinion, was to focus on Baghdad itself: Security would be improved for the greatest number, we knew the city well, forces were already nearby, and we believed a decent proportion of its people were not yet in violent opposition to our presence.

I argued the worst choice for military action was Fallujah, along the Euphrates in al-Anbar Province. It had a lot of violence, but it was the smallest of these cities, so success there would not improve security for very many people. Furthermore, the operation would be very difficult. Even under Saddam, as I understood it, the city had not been fully under government control.

Although I hadn’t been asked, I added that if we were going to do this, we should do it soon so it would be over before the start of Ramadan on 15 October. Starting an operation during the Islamic holy month would probably go over poorly among the Iraqi people. Waiting until after Ramadan ended, after the feast of Eid al-Fitr in mid-November, would push us close to the Iraqi elections, which might happen as early as December. There was no concrete policy against starting a major kinetic action just before the election, but it seemed best to leave time for some reconstruction and pacification.

When I delivered this answer, I learned I had reached the same conclusion as my colleagues. This, the Colonel told me, was the wrong fucking answer. Fallujah would be the target, and it would happen soon. I pushed back on this, but that only evoked more vulgar sarcasm from the Colonel about how useless education and academics and social scientists were. Air force pukes like me were especially useless. We had no understanding of what war was all about or how to win.

I resented being treated like this. After all, I had reached the same conclusion as the regular army officer. Why, I seethed to myself, did you ask me if you think I’m so fucking ignorant? Would you have valued my opinion if I’d given you the answer you wanted, you big jackass?

I saw a bit of sympathy from my colleagues as I got back to my desk—there was no privacy, everyone heard everything—but I had to admit it hadn’t helped my credibility as a legitimate military officer when I had managed to take a bite out of the base of my thumb a few days before while I was racking the slide on my weapon. Painful, bloody, and a good lesson in taking care to do things the right way. The Colonel never said anything, but I’m sure he saw Mike Lewis, an attorney who had recently arrived from the Academy, trying to help me stop the bleeding during one of his team meetings.

In any case, this wasn’t about me. The decision to take kinetic action in Fallujah had been preordained. I—and the others—had been supposed to find a better reason to do it than the lingering resentment about what had happened there earlier in the year.

At the end of March, the enemy had ambushed four Blackwater contractors, killed them, mutilated their bodies, and strung them up on a bridge over the Euphrates. We responded by assaulting the city five days later.

Invading a city as retribution for killing four of our guys, stretching the meaning of “our” guys to include hired guns? This was like a rash, disproportionate action out of a different era, one undertaken to teach the whole city a lesson for atrocities committed by a few.

That April offensive did not go smoothly. Civilian deaths created a backlash throughout Iraq, as Shia Arab leaders like Sadr and Sistani stood in solidarity with the Sunni Arabs in Fallujah.

Then something truly remarkable happened. CPA Commissioner Bremer’s handpicked Governing Council asked us to stop. And we did. This showed the Iraqis they had influence and perhaps planted in them a seed of hope that they really would be able to regain sovereignty. It also reinforced hope among other Iraqis that resistance might not be futile.

US forces withdrew, and security in Fallujah was turned over to a local Iraqi force, one of the militias whose status had been uncertain in the TRIC process. This First Fallujah Brigade failed to keep the peace, the city continued to be a stronghold of opposition, and American military leaders yearned to redeem this defeat at the hands of weak, back-stabbing civilians.

Thus passed my first five days in Strategy. I was exhausted, I was scared of my own conclusions, and I was thrilled. This was the kind of thing I had only imagined working on: real-time, real-world contingent assessments. I may not have known what I was doing, but as I looked around, it didn’t seem like anyone else did either.

Tom Mowle is a retired Air Force officer who earned his PhD in Political Science with a focus on political psychology from The Ohio State University in 1996. Tom has taught undergraduate cadets at the Air Force Academy and in the graduate program at Saint Mary’s University, San Antonio. He is the author of “Allies at Odds? The United States and the European Union,” the editor of “Hope is Not a Plan: The War in Iraq from Inside the Green Zone” and the coauthor of “The Unipolar World: An Unbalanced Future.” He is the owner of Rampart Professional Solutions, a manuscript coaching and editing service in Divide, Colorado.

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