Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda by Eric Schmitt & Thom Shanker

Author:Eric Schmitt & Thom Shanker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: 21st Century, United States, Political Science, Military, Terrorism, History
ISBN: 9780805091038
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

Striking back at the Al Qaeda message sometimes required American combat skills. One of the most successful efforts was undertaken on the ground in Iraq, in advance of the November 2004 offensive to retake Fallujah, effectively Al Qaeda’s capital in western Anbar Province. The American military was fighting two wars, really, in Iraq: one to tamp down the roiling Sunni-Shia rivalry that risked civil war, the other a terrorist conflict inspired by Al Qaeda. “Fallujah was a festering cancer that was going to have to be dealt with,” said Lieutenant General Thomas F. Metz, who spent fifteen months in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 as the commander in charge of the day-to-day fight across the country.

Metz is a mechanized infantry officer who rose to lead the Army’s III Corps based at Fort Hood, Texas, where the multiple armored divisions under his command would have been the first sent to the Korean Peninsula in the event of a North Korean invasion. Hardly the most opportune training for the new kind of counterinsurgency and terror war under way in Iraq, but Metz had learned as a young man to be resourceful and agile when dealing with adversity. Metz tells a story about his having to find the cash for his first-year uniforms after his acceptance to West Point. (At the time, that was the only cost to entering cadets, since the Army did not want to be in the hole for outfitting those who wash out in the early months under academy pressure.) He won the money in a card game with other would-be cadets.

Metz never doubted that the American, Allied, and Iraqi forces could push Al Qaeda fighters from Fallujah and that civilian casualties could at least be minimized by an information campaign in advance to tell noncombatants to leave the city, which they did by the thousands. But the terrorist media cell run by the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had routinely hammered out a successful narrative that American troops were killing and maiming civilians in Fallujah, in particular women and children. The terror media packages always had graphic images said to have been taken at the hospital in Fallujah. Metz had to silence that narrative before launching his offensive.

“There was an Al Qaeda guy who was always at the hospital showing these wounded children and females that were a result of the attack,” Metz said. “We knew it wasn’t the result of the attack because those kinds of attacks were launched with such precision—somebody has been constantly staring at these targets for a long time, and we knew the target enters that house alone or he is just with bad people. There are no family around, there are no children.” You never get a second chance to tell your story first, Metz knew; no American military spokesman could push back. “You can prove all the facts wrong but it is over with: The perception is all that matters,” he said. “If you are going to make the final assault on Fallujah, you want to ensure that they didn’t have that platform.

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