State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration by James Risen

Author:James Risen [Risen, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780743270670
Amazon: 0743270673
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2006-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

SPINNING WAR AND

PEACE

THE POST-INVASION period in Iraq proved to be far more

difficult than anyone had hoped. Unfortunately, the Bush ad-

ministration and the CIA were still so deeply politicized that the truth took a long time to sink in.

The Third Armored Cavalry Regiment of the United States

Army has a long and proud history, a tradition dating back to the Indian wars of the American West. First organized in the 1840s as the Regiment of Mounted Riflemen, it was renamed

the Third United States Cavalry in the Civil War, the Third

Cavalry Group Mechanized in World War Two, and finally

the Third Armored. The regiment was born as a frontier unit, forged in the heat and dust of Texas, and it has been fighting native insurgencies in remote and godforsaken places since the days of Geronimo.

By fall 2003, the Third Armored Cavalry, now equipped with

Apache attack helicopters and Bradley fighting vehicles rather than horses and carbines, was in western Iraq, trying to seal the porous Syrian border and prevent foreign jihadists from

flooding in from around the Arab world. The regiment’s First 126

SPINNING WAR AND PEACE

Squadron was guarding the key border town of al Qa’im, about 200 miles northwest of Baghdad, and had settled into Tiger

Forward Operating Base in an old train station on the out-

skirts of al Qa’im.

In early November, the CIA’s Baghdad station chief came to

Tiger FOB as part of a tour of outlying U.S. military units in order to get a better feel for conditions around the increasingly restive country.

In the al Qa’im train station that day, a young commander said something foreboding to the CIA station chief that brought

clarity out of the noise and confusion of the looting and violence that had marked the early months of the American oc-

cupation of Iraq. The army officer looked at the CIA station chief and said, matter-of-factly: ”The war is about to begin.”

The officer explained that over the last four to six weeks, something new had been happening in his area of responsibility.

The Iraqi insurgents were coalescing, exhibiting in their tactics and methods greater command, control, and sophistica-

tion. The insurgents were getting betterand more deadly. It

was obvious to the officer that the rebels were gearing up for something bigger, and that the Third Armored Cavalry, and

the rest of the American Army, was on the verge of a new war for Iraq.

The officer’s observations confirmed what the CIA station chief had begun to piece together himself from intelligence reports and his travels around Iraq. There had been intermittent attacks on American and international targets and a steady, but still modest, stream of casualties since U.S. troops entered Baghdad in April. Now the violence was evolving into something much worse. The relative quiet and broad popular sup-

port that the Americans had enjoyed in the first days of the occupation following the ouster of Saddam Hussein had proven to be a false dawn. Now, the U.S. military was starting to face a well-armed guerrilla force with nearly unlimited resources, and the rebels were dedicated to throwing the Americans and

127

their provisional government out of Iraq.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.