Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks

Author:Thomas E. Ricks [Ricks, Thomas E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, General, United States, 21st Century, Iraq War (2003-), Iraq War; 2003, United States - History; Military - 21st Century
ISBN: 9780143038917
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2006-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

The decentralization under Lt. Gen. Sanchez sometimes extended even further down, to the levels of brigades and battalions. In the 4th Infantry Division in particular, noticed an Army intelligence officer, there were two brigade commanders whose sectors were side by side in the Sunni Triangle yet used vastly different approaches. On the west bank of the river, around Samarra and Balad, was Col. Frederick Rudesheim. "Rudesheim said, 'I really want to support civil affairs.' He gave them augmentation [additional troops], security. He said that civil affairs was his bread and butter." Meanwhile, on the east side of the Tigris River, around Baqubah, Col. David Hogg was operating on a war footing that focused much more on action against the insurgents and intimidation of others. Targeting insurgent mortar positions, he said, "Hogg was firing H&I every night, and he didn't have a lot of time for civil affairs." (Hogg confirmed that during July 2003, he had fired some 160 rounds of 155 millimeter high-explosive artillery shells and 40 heavy 120 millimeter mortar rounds, but didn't respond to requests for a follow-up interview.)

Hogg said that his forces were there to "kill the enemy, not to win their hearts or minds," recalled Maj. Christopher Varhola, an Army Reserve specialist in civil affairs who worked in a large swath of Iraq.

Bombs vs. sweeps in the Sunni Triangle

The insurgency remained all but invisible except during its attacks. It issued no statements. Unlike other insurgencies, such as in Algeria in the 1950s, it had no visible leaders or spokesmen, no diplomatic offices operating in friendly Arab capitals. All that was really known of it was its location and tactics. Most of the insurgency was in the Sunni Triangle, the area dominated by Sunni Muslims—who were a minority in Iraq but had ruled the country for decades—that extended west of Baghdad to Ramadi and then up the Euphrates River, north from the capital along the Tigris to Samarra and Bayji, and northeast to Baqubah. Tactically, the insurgency was generally low tech.

The U.S. wasn't a colonial power in Iraq, seeking to hold on to a restive province, but it sometimes acted like one. "This is the way an administration caught with its plans down habitually reacts under such circumstances," Alistair Home wrote in A Savage War of Peace, the classic history of the French war in Algeria in the 1950s. "Whether it be the British in Palestine, Cyprus or Northern Ireland, the Portuguese in Mozambique, or the French in Indo-China. First comes the mass indiscriminate round-up of suspects, most of them innocent but converted into ardent militants by the fact of their imprisonment."

Compare Home's words to those of the International Committee of the Red Cross in describing the way U.S. troops conducted cordon and sweep operations in Iraq.

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