Dexter Filkins: The Forever War

Dexter Filkins: The Forever War (2008, Knopf)

Filkins covered Afghanistan from 1998 and Iraq from the 2003 invasion and occupation for the New York Times. I mostly bumped into him as an occasional reporter for PBS, and didn't think much of him. He could always be counted on to stick to whatever line the US occupation was spinning, even if now and then he slipped an aside that suggested he had more perception about what was going on. His book got a lot of rave reviews, and they're mostly merited. He writes vividly, and he compresses a lot of telling detail into his pages. But he has no analysis, no sense of history or context. He doesn't even have much grasp of chronology. He can't help you understand what happened, most likely because he doesn't care himself. He never makes a case for his title. He just sort of assumes that war is forever, and can't see any reason why this one should be an exception. The book is very personal. Unable to see the big picture, he focuses on his own experience, his own bonds. The latter include Iraqis he worked with, and at least some Iraqis he dealt with -- not least, Ahmad Chalabi, who gets a nod in the acknowledgments. The book seems to go up to about 2006, although it gets light along the way, especially as his access declines. He spends a lot of time with US soldiers, but he has no real interest in strategy, either military or political. (For example, Paul Bremer finally shows up on pp. 136-143, touring a hospital. His successors, Negroponte and Khalilzad, and top generals like Sanchez, Casey, and Petraeus do not appear at all -- Odierno does make a brief appearance, issuing an order to "increase lethality.") He gives you a sense of the war, but doesn't try to make sense of it. Most of all, he never states the obvious: that all this tragedy is the result of the US presuming a right to invade and occupy Iraq.

Prologue: Hells Bells: Falluja, Iraq, November 2004 (p. 3):

The Marines were pressed flat on a rooftop when the dialogue began to unfold. It was 2 a.m. The minarets were flashing by the light of airstrikes and rockets were sailing on trails of sparks. First came the voices from the mosques, rising above the thundery guns.

"The Americans are here!" howled a voice from a loudspeaker in a minaret. "The Holy War, the Holy War! Get up and fight for the city of mosques!"

Bullets poured without direction and without end. No one lifted his head.

"This is crazy," one of the marines yelled to his buddy over the noise.

"Yeah," the buddy yelled back, "and we've only taken one house."

And then, as if from the depths, came a new sound: violent, menacing and dire. I looked back over my shoulder to where we had come from, into the vacant field at Falluja's northern edge. A group of marines were standing at the foot of a gigantic loudspeaker, the kind used at rock concerts.

It was AC/DC, the Australian heavy metal band, pouring out its unbridled sounds. I recognized the song immediately: "Hells Bells," the band's celebration of satanic power, had come to us on the battlefield. Behind the strains of its guitars, a church bell tolled thirteen times.

Part One: Kabul, Afghanistan, September 1998

1. Only This: (pp. 17-18):

Kabul was full of orphans like Nasir, woebegone children who peddled little labors and fantastic tales of grief. You'd seem them in packs of fifty and sometimes even a hundred, skittering in mismatched shoes and muddy faces. They'd thunder up to you like a herd of wild horses; you could hear the padding of so many tiny feet. [ . . . ]

If a war went on long enough the men always died, and someone had to take their place. Once I found seven boy soldiers fighting for the Northern Alliance on a hilltop in a place called Bangi. The Taliban positions were just in view, a minefield in between. The boys were wolflike, monosyllabic with no attention spans. Eyes always darting. Laughing the whole time. Dark fuzz instead of beards. They wore oddly matched apparel like high-top tennis shoes and hammer-and-sickle belts, embroidered hajj caps and Russian rifles.

(p. 21):

There were hospitals in Afghanistan filled with patients, burned and twisted; they just didn't have any medicine or any doctors. There were schools, plenty of them, at least in the cities, only they were empty. Kabul University, on the edge of town, looked like one of those old black-and-white photos of Dresden in 1945, blasted and razed and deserted. There was music, wonderful, rising stuff. You could see the music, even if you weren't allowed to listen to it, long streams of torn-up cassette tape ripped out and strung up on telephone poles, heaps of it, like the discarded guts of some animal. All the accoutrements of a functioning society had been in place once, and now they were gone.

(p. 27):

The old men, the leaders, were walking junkyards, metal and bullets and shrapnel, heaped over with holes and scar tissue. They'd walk in on peglegs with ill-fitting plastic arms, and when they plunked down in their chairs it was like watching the frame of an old car collapse. They had these handsome oversize features, jutting chins and enormous hands. They'd pour their tea from the cup and slurp it from the saucer, loud, because it was cooler that way. They'd look at you and you'd think, Jesus, they are not killable. They're from another world. They beat the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union fell apart.

People loved them -- a lot of people did, anyway, at least at first. You'd ask someone about the Talibs and the first thing they'd say is they tamed the warlords. You couldn't drive across town, they'd say. The warlords would be fighting it out in the middle of the city, slugging it out for turf, like gangsters do, for the right to tax and steal. Massoud's men would defeat Dostum's men, set up their rackets and take their revenge. Then Hekmatyar and Sayyaf and Khalili and only the Holy Prophet knew who else.

2. Forebodings

3. Jang: (pp. 50-51):

People fought in Afghanistan, and people died, but not always in the obvious way. They had been fighting for so long, twenty-three years then, that by the time the Americans arrived the Afghans had developed an elaborate set of rules designed to spare as many fighters as they could. So the war could go on forever. Men fought, men switched sides, men lined up and fought again. War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pickup basketball, a contest among friends, a tournament where you never knew which team you'd be on when the next game got under way. Shirts today, skins tomorrow. On Tuesday, you might be part of a fearsome Taliban regiment, running into a minefield. And on Wednesday you might be manning a checkpoint for some gang of the Northern Alliance. By Thursday you could be back with the Talibs again, holding up your Kalashnikov and promising to wage jihad forever. War was serious in Afghanistan, but not that serious. It was part of everyday life.l It was a job. Only the civilians seemed to lose.

Battles were often decided this way, not by actual fighting, but by flipping gangs of soldiers. One day, the Taliban might have four thousand soldiers, and the next, only half that, with the warlords of the Northern Alliance suddenly larger by a similar amount. The fighting began when the bargaining stopped, and the bargaining went right up until the end. The losers were the ones who were too stubborn, too stupid or too fanatical to make a deal. Suddenly, they would find themselves outnumbered, and then they would die. It was a kind of natural selection.

Part Two: Baghdad, Iraq, March 2003-

4. Land of Hope and Sorrow: (p. 76):

One of the most popular people after the invasion was Khalid al-Ani, the keeper of the files. Ani had been the superintendent of the secret cemetery at Abu Ghraib. The cemetery was surrounded by a fence. The guards would bring the bodies out at night. Always at night. Ani kept the death certificates.

When Saddam's regime fell, Ani took all of the death certificates, hundreds and hundreds of them, to his home on Haifa Street in central Baghdad. And there, for many months after the invasion, Iraqis whose sons and daughters had disappeared lined up outside Ani's house to see if there was something he could tell them.

(p. 79):

The Americans were pouring into the town, in trucks and tanks and troop carriers, young and overfed and heavily armed. They were kids mostly, nineteen-year-olds from Kansas and North Dakota. It was the first day of the invasion, and they were having a good time. They used their Ka-Bark knives to slash the canvas Saddam posters, and they tied ropes around his statues and used their Humvees to pull them down. "Feels good," said Oscar Guerrero, nineteen, from San Antonio, running his blade through a canvas likeness of the Iraqi leader. "I wish he were here in person."

The Iraqis stood by watching in their dumbfounded way as the Americans tore up the Saddams. Not one stepped forward to help. They looked more like children then, standing back and watching the teenagers have their fun, enjoying the spectacle but preserving their deniability should their parents come home. "How would you like it if I were to cut up a poster of President Bush?" one of the villagers asked me, but he was drowned out by catcalls.

(p. 81):

In the 1990s, [Wijdan al-]Khuzai founded her own aid organization, a center for widows and mothers in Hillah, a Shiite city south of Baghdad. It was a brazen act; Khuzai neither asked for the government's permission nor received it. And sure enough, Saddam's men visited Khuzai after not very long and suggested with kind faces that she become a government informant. Khuzai could hardly have refused, so she fled to Kurdistan instead, which was by then under American protection. There she waited, for eight years, busying herself with her five children, until April 2003, when Saddam's regime came crashing down. Khuzai returned to Baghdad and, like many Iraqis, took up the promise of liberation. She wasn't alone; 7,471 Iraqis signed up to run for the 275 seats in the new parliament. Not many of them, though, were brave enough to campaign openly, like Khuzai, or to travel without armed guards. It wasn't like she didn't know what she was up against. "These people," she told her family, "I am their worst enemy."

An American patrol found her body on Christmas Eve 2004, on the road to Baghdad International Airport. Khuzai had been shot five times, once in the face. Her shoulder blades had been broken, and her hands had been cuffed behind her back to sightly that her wrists had bled.

5. I Love You: (pp. 92-93):

The Marines had smeared war paint on their faces, flat black and olive green. They had given their daggers a last lethal edge. And by the time they crossed the Diyala River they had left nothing untouched. The landscape was littered with smoldering Iraqi bodies. The air stank from the smell of so many things afire. Only the stray dogs, nosing around the flesh and flames, appeared to be alive.

My truck crept down a narrow lane marked by little flags, a path through a minefield. Shards of metal and bullet cases cracked under the wheels. On the left, the bottom half of a corpse lay in the dirt; a few feet away, a human head. It was twilight.

The bodies of three Iraqi soldiers lay at the foot of a stone wall. They were pressed tight against it, cheeks and arms in a tangle together. They had been running when the bullets found them, and as they went down they had kept moving forward. Pressed against the wall, the three men looked as if they had been trying to crawl inside of it, to become one with the stone.

6. Gone Forever: (pp. 102-103):

"This is our American liberation!" said Khedairy, seventy, as she waded through the half-burned books of her second-story library. "I never thought you would do it. I went to the American School. I believed in your moral values. And every night you bombed. Every night, I ran through the streets, an old woman in my nightgown. Look at my library!" [ . . . ]

Khedairy's house sat just across the Tigris from the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret police, and this was her misfortune. Night and day for weeks the bombs fell there, most of them finding their target, some of them not. At least one had missed; the back end of Khedairy's house was splayed open to the world. The windows were shattered, the rain had come in and the LPs and the books had been blown apart and scattered. [ . . . ]

For all the bombs, Khedairy's house -- and Khedairy's neighborhood -- had not yet been looted. But the thieves were coming closer. For the past two weeks a group of her neighbors, armed with guns, had stood guard over their houses. But Khedairy believed that her home would not e safe for much longer. In recent days, she said, American soldiers had moved closer to her neighborhood, and Khedairy was convinced that they would allow the looters to roam freely through her home.

"They follow the tanks," Khedairy said. "The Americans come in,and they let the looters do as they wish. That is what they did at the museum. That is what they did at my institute. My neighborhood is next."

7. A Hand in the Air: (pp. 114-115):

I found myself riding along the banks of the Euphrates with Lieutenant Christopher Rauch, a twenty-two-year-old army reservists with a drawl nurtured on the chicken farm where he'd grown up in Lexington, South Carolina. Only four months before, Rauch had been working as a clerk for the state government, processing applications for unemployment insurance. Now he was overseeing the reconstruction of a half-dozen dams on the Euphrates.

Rauch wanted me to know right off that he didn't know much about dams themselves. But as the holder of a bachelor's degree in agriculture, he was, he said, the closest thing his unit had to an expert. [ . . . ] In the few months since Rauch had taken over, he'd developed a solid rapport with his Iraqi counterpart, Hussein Alawi, the provincial minister for dams. [ . . . ]

We pulled up to the Habbaniya Dam, got out of the Humvee and walked out along the top. Alawi, riding in his own car, came out to meet us. "We need two generators," Alawi said, standing atop the dam and pointing down at the broken gates. The Euphrates ran below. "We don't have spare parts." Rauch rubbed his chin through the strap on his helmet. "What do you think that will cost?" Rauch asked. "I'm thinking $7,000 each."

I knelt down and read the inscription on one of the copper plates, green from years of oxidation. "Royal Air Force Cantonment. June 1947." A British-made dam. Rauch shook hands with Alawi and a couple of his assistants and walked back to the riverbank. I stayed behind and asked Alawi what he thought of the Americans in Iraq. He didn't hesitate to answer.

"I take their money but I hate them," Alawi said. "I am cooperating with the Americans for the sake of my country. The Americans are occupiers. We are trying to evict them."

Rauch was motioning to me from his Humvee.

"No one likes to be told what to do," Alawi said. "You just saw that right now."

There were always two conversations in Iraq, the one the Iraqis were having with the Americans and the one they were having among themselves. The one the Iraqis were having with us -- that was positive and predictable and boring,a nd it made the Americans happy because it made them think they were winning. And the Iraqis kept it up because it kept the money flowing, or because it bought them a little peace. The conversation they were having with each other was the one that really mattered, of course. That conversation was the chatter of a whole other world, a parallel reality, which sometimes unfolded right next to the Americans, even right in front of them. And we almost never saw it.

(p. 116):

The most basic barrier was language itself. Very few of the Americans in Iraq, whether soldiers or diplomats or newspaper reporters, could speak more than a few words of Arabic. A remarkable number of them didn't even have translators. That meant that for many Iraqis, the typical nineteen-year-old army corporal from South Dakota was not a youthful innocent carrying America's goodwill; he was a terrifying combination of firepower and ignorance.

(p. 118):

I didn't speak Arabic myself. Once, while I sent to interview a powerful Sunni sheikh of uncertain allegiance, he launched into a long conversation with my translator, Warzer Jaff, before he said a word to me. Jaff was Kurdish, a former guerrilla fighter, and his English and Arabic were perfect. He'd already saved my life many times, and I trusted him completely. The two talked in Arabic for many minutes as I sat quietly by, not two feet away. I had no idea what they were saying, though at one point the conversation grew tense. After a while they quieted down, and Jaff turned to me and said, "Okay, ask your question." And so I did. The rest of the interview proceeded smoothly.

During the ride back in the car, still puzzled, I asked Jaff what he and the sheikh had been talking about before the interview got going.

"He wanted to kidnap you," Jaff said, allowing, as he usually did, an unlit cigarette to dangle from his lips. "He was proposing that both of us kidnap you and hold you for ransom, and split the money."

(p. 120):

When the Americans began their crash effort to train and equip the Iraqi security forces, they set up a constellation of armed groups: army divisions, police forces and a hybrid corps of gunmen known as "police commandos." The commandos were heavily armed, mounted on trucks and almost entirely Shiite. It wasn't long after the Americans set up these units that I started hearing reports that they were swooping into Sunni neighborhoods and killing civilians and kidnapping them. Every morning, more and more young Sunni men were turning up dead, in ditches and trash dumps, handcuffed, drilled with holes, burned with acid, shot in the back of the head.

8. A Disease: (pp. 139-140):

A few days later, I went back to Mubarqa by myself. Romaing its halls, I stepped into a bare room where I found Hassan Naji, the hospital record keeper. The room was dark from the lack of electricity. Naji was seated at a metal desk, surrounded by piles of paper. A file cabinet stood behind him, all of its drawers opened. I asked him about infant deaths.

"Yes, yes, babies are dying," he said, looking up. Naji's face was drawn but his eyes locked on me in a flash. "Under Saddam, this did not happen. Not like this."

I asked Naji if he could be more specific -- if he could show me statistics on recent infant deaths.

Najo dropped whatever it was he had been working on and began sifting through the piles on his desk. It was covered with stray notes, jottings and calculations. He produced a gigantic ledger, an ancient thing filled with numbers and names. He got up and walked to the file cabinet and rifled through it but found nothing. This, too, was different from Saddam's time, Naji said.

"Democracy has ruined this hospital," Naji said. "Democracy has made everyone incompetent. We used to have standards here. In the past, people really worked at their jobs, if only because they were terrified by their supervisors. They worked late. We kept the most accurate records. We had weekly meetings on the worst cases. When a child died, we had a meeting and we really studied it.

"Now, with all this freedom, no one cares anymore," Naji said. "We don't keep records anymore. We don't even have death certificates. We don't have birth certificates. Look at the files: elementary statistics we don't have. The department's work is not getting done. Files and paper are piling up. The whole hospital is this way."

9. The Man Within: (p. 150):

In the fall of 2003, [Colonel] Nathan Sassaman, then forty, was the most impressive American field commander in Iraq. He was witty, bright and relentless, the embodiment of the best that America could offer. He was the son of a Methodist minister and a garduate of West Point; as the quarterback for Army's football team, he had led the school to its first bowl victory. When I met him, Sassaman was working day and night to make the American project in Iraq succeed, inspiring the eight hundred young men under his command to do the same. He slept in his boots. [ . . . ]

At first, the colonel revealed is disillusionment only briefly, usually at the end of a very long day. Once, as I was sitting in his barracks with him near midnight, Sassaman said that he and his men had come to Iraq trained to fight a big battle against a big, uniformed army, something out of World War II. They hadn't received any instruction on holding elections or setting up police departments. No one in his unit spoke more than a few words of Arabic. The men made do. One of the reservists under Sassaman's command happened to have carried with him an operations manual from the Tiverton, Rhode Island, police department, where he worked. And soon enough, the Balad police department was functioning remarkably like its New England counterpart. "Sometimes I wish there were more people who knew more about nation building."

The struggle inside of Sassaman intensified with the insurgency itself, which, in the fall of 2003, was expanding across the Sunni Triangle, the vast area north and west of Baghdad. One night, as we sat inside a darkened chow hall eating dinner, he spoke in despair. "Sometimes I think they just want us to leave," he said. His face was invisible in the blackened tent. "I am getting tired of telling mothers and fathers that they have lost their song."

(p. 153):

At dawn the morning after the council meeting, [Nathan] Sassaman led his 1-8 battalion on a series of house-to-house searches in Abu Shakur, a Sunni village outside Balad. Sassaman's men had been taking mortar fire from the palm groves near the town, and the colonel was determined to stop it.

That morning, the battalion's men swept into Abu Shakur and, without warning, began to kick down doors. House after house, the soldiers poured in with their rifles ready to shoot. They rousted men from their beds and pulled them outside, many of them still in their pajamas and underwear, their wives and children looking on in horror. "Get down and don't move," one of the soldiers growled at an Iraqi man.

In a raid on a particularly large house, the soldiers dashed inside, pulling mattresses off bedframes and clothing from closets, throwing lamps and cushions onto the floor. The soldiers pulled eleven Iraqi men outside, forcing them to sit on their haunches with their hands behind their heads. As they crashed through the house, a young woman stood with three small girls, probably her daughters, each with her hands high in the air. The Americans found no weapons. The Iraqi men squatted outside for half an hour, the unhappiness etched on their faces. "I feel bad for these people, I really do," Sergeant Eric Brown said to me, standing over the Iraqi men. "It's so hard to separate the good from the bad."

By midmorning, Sassaman's battalion had searched seventy homes in Abu Shakur and questioned dozens of men, but netted not a single gun nor a single suspect. If you multiplied the raid on Abu Shakur a thousand times, it was not difficult to conclude that the war was being lost: however many Iraqis opposed them before the Americans came into the village, dozens and dozens more did by the time they left. The Americans were making enemies faster than they could kill them.

(pp. 160-161):

Only eight months had passed since Saddam's regime fell, but it seemed a lifetime away. Later that day, I asked Sassaman if he wasn't alienating anyone in Abu Hishma who might have been willing to help. To the contrary, he said. "I think we are close," he said. "With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them."

I asked him if he really meant that. Fear and violence?

"The good people we can bring around," Sassaman said. "But the bad guys -- they have to be convinced that there is a price to pay for opposing us."

Some of Sassaman's soldiers had begun throwing around a phrase, "the Arab mind," which they had picked up from a pseudoscientific book by the same name that was popular among American officers. One of them was Captain Brown. In the raids on Abu Shakur two months before, I had watched as Brown had stopped to give an ad hoc English lesson to a group of Iraqi schoolgirls. The girls had looked at him as if he were some great god. "You've got to understand the Arab mind," Brown told me outside the gates of Abu Hishma. "The only thing they understand is force -- force, pride and saving face."

(pp. 163-165):

By the time he ended his tour in Iraq, the insurgents had come to fear Sassaman more than anyone else. Whenever he left Balad, even for a couple of days, the insurgents would step up their attacks. When he returned, they would back off. Once, after Sassaman returned from a mission in Samarra, insurgents fired a single mortar round into his compound, as if to welcome him back. He responded by firing twenty-eight 155-millimeter artillery shells and forty-two mortar rounds. He called in two airstrikes, one with a 500-pound bomb and the other with a 2,000-pound bomb. Later on, his men found a crater as deep as a swimming pool.

"You know what?" Sassaman told me at the Starbucks. "We just didn't get hit after that."

But for all of that, Sassaman told me, the situation in the Sunni villages kept getting worse. One day, during the middle of his tour, his commander, Major General Raymond Odierno, flew to the local HQ and gave Sassaman a direct but curiously vague order: "Increase lethality." Kill more people, the general told him. Odierno didn't tell Sassaman how; he just wanted higher body counts. So Sassaman's men started experimenting -- sometimes with the colonel's approval, sometimes not. [ . . . ]

In the end, two of Sassaman's soldiers went to jail. Not for drowning Zaydoon -- nobody could prove that -- but for pushing him and Marwan into the Tigris. For getting them wet. The irony was not lost on Sassaman, who received a written reprimand, effectively ending his career. "You know what's strange?" Sassaman said at the Chipotle. "Two Iraqis out after curfew, in a town like Samarra? They could have killed those guys, and they would have gotten medals."

Marwan and Zaydoon were two Iraqis caught by Sassaman's men, then pushed into the Tigris River, evidently drowning Zaydoon. Their family complained and got an investigation. Sassaman ordered his soldiers to lie to the investigators. The cover-up fell apart. Filkins moves on to Ralph Logan, described as "the only American who acted with unquestioned honor" in this event. (p. 167):

Two years later, after I returned to the United States, I decided to track Logan down. I had some difficulty at first. It turned out he had left Colorado Springs and gone back to his boyhood home in Indian Lake. His grandmother was dying, and Logan wanted to spend the last weeks with her. On the night of September 10, 2006, Logan walked into the lobby of the Comfort Inn motel and robbed the attendant at knifepoint. Then Logan drove to his mother's home. He left the $4,000 he got from the hotel in a bag in the car. He didn't try to flee. He didn't hide the money. Three days later, a police officer came to the house; he and Logan had gone to the same high school. Logan had been waiting for him. He confessed on the spot. He got two years in prison. His mother, Nancy, visits him twice a month. He is hoping to be a truck driver when he gets out, she said. She told me she'd never heard about Marwan and Zaydoon.

"I wonder every day if something happened while he was over there," she said.

10. Kill Yourself: (p. 172):

The craziest thing about the suicide bombings were the heads -- how the head of the bomber often remained intact after the explosion. It was the result of some weird law that only a physicist could explain: the force of the blast would detach the bomber's head and throw it up and away, too fast for the blast to destroy it. So there it would be, the head, sitting on a pile of bricks or underneath a telephone pole.

(p. 174):

They started to come in waves. Four a day. Ten a day. Twelve a day. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Sometimes, all of them before breakfast. One morning, my colleague Ian Fisher was driving to Abu Ghraib to interview some Iraqi prisoners who were being released from American custody, when he came upon the scene of a suicide bombing just seconds after it had occurred. The victim had been Ezzedine Salim, the president of the Iraqi Governing Council. Ian stopped, stepped amid the bodies, did some reporting and climbed back in his car. A few more miles down the road, he came across another suicide bombing, the bomber's body in pieces on the roadside. He never made it to Abu Ghraib. "This place is crazy," he said, walking in the door.

No one wanted to stand in a crowd anymore. No one wanted to stand in line. Every morning the Iraqis who worked for the Americans in the Green Zone lined up for security checks before they were allowed inside, and the lines stretched for hundreds of yards into the streets, sometimes for hours. The same at police recruiting stations. One after the other, the car bombs flew into the lines. One after another, men wearing puffy jackets wandered into the lines, sweaty and nervous, mumbling to themselves, then exploding.

After a while, everything started to sound like a bomb. A door slamming in the house sounded like a bomb. A car backfiring sounded like a bomb. Sometimes it felt like the sounds of bombs and the call to prayer were the only sounds the country could produce, its own strange national anthem. The silence was creepy, too. One day there would be ten bombs and then the next day none. Twelve bombs and then no bombs. And I'd task myself: Are they giving up? Or just reloading?

I think it was like porn for them. I think they got off on it. The insurgents made videos of their suicide bombings, like they were making an amateur sex tape. In the summer of 2005, one of the insurgent groups posted a "top ten" video on the Internet. It contained video snatches of their bloodiest bombings. When you watched teh video, you could see that someone had arrived at the site beforehand to get a good view. It was usually someone in a car with his window rolled down, this kafiya half covering the lens. "God is great." They always said that when the bomb went off.

11. Pearland: In Falluja (p. 196):

Then there was the matter of going to the bathroom. This was no small ting for six thousand marines moving through a city on foot. You couldn't exactly crap in a field somewhere; even at night, as the insurgents had snipers with very good aim. The toilets didn't work because the water had been cut off. At the Grand Mosque, one of the places we stopped for a day, the marines used the storage room for the Korans, not out of disrespect for the Korans but for the privacy of the room. The marines put down a bunch of cardboard boxes in there, which were the toilets, and hauled them out when they were overflowing. Enormous, dripping cardboard boxes filled with human shit. Most days, though, traveling through the city, we just used somebody's bathroom. We'd break into their house and shit in their toilet until it overflowed and then we just used the floor. There'd be piles and piles of the stuff by the time we got going again. Shitting in the house of a person I'd never met -- there were worse things that happened in Iraq every day. Still I didn't feel very good about it.

A lot of gritty fighting stuff here, taking Falluja one building at a time, the incredible firepower of the AC-130 gunships leading the way, the snipers picking off isolated Iraqis; a soldier named Miller from Pearland, TX, getting killed real close to Filkins.

12. The Vanishing World: (pp. 219-220):

It was the spring of 2004 when we lost the country -- as a place to go, I mean. For a month Iraq was engulfed by uprisings. Sunni and Shai, full-blown rebellions in every city outside of Kurdistan. Iraq disappeared for us then, and it never came back. I was in Falluja a couple of days before the uprising. The Marines had just arrived in Iraq, all pumped up and determined to take over for the Army, and they'd gotten into a firefight on their first day. They'd killed some civilians and shot up a neighborhood called Al-Askari. Jaff and I had spent the day trying to figure out what had happened, and at lunchtime we drove into the downtown and pulled into Hajji Hussein's, Falluja's best kabob house. The place was jammed, a hundred tables, all the clamor of lunchtime, when I stepped through the door, and all the noise stopped. It was like a scene from one of those westerns when the sheriff walks into the saloon through the swinging doors and everyone stops talking. "Be calm," Jaff said under his breath. Jaff, a former guerrilla fighter, was always cool. We sat down. We were careful not to show any fear. It took a few minutes before everybody started carrying on again. I never went back to Hajji Hussein's after that. Never went back to Falluja after that, except with the invading marines.

A few days after that, a group of four American security guards, Blackwater guys, were attacked and killed. A crowd of frenzied Fallujans dragged their bodies through the streets and hung two of the black and toasted carcasses from the city's main bridge over the Euphrates. The images were beamed around the world. The seven-month-long siege of Falluja began. A few months later, Hajji Hussein's kebab house was destroyed in an airstrike. The Americans said it was a terrorist "safehouse," from which "innocent civilians knowingly stayed away," but I always wondered about that.

(pp. 223-224):

The bureau became a fortress, a high-walled castle from another century. We blocked off Abu Nawas Street, one of the city's main thoroughfares, which ran along the front of the house. We brought in a crane to erect concrete blast walls, a foot thick and twenty feet high. We strung coils of razor wire across the top. We hired armed guards, twenty of them, then thirty, then forty. After a time, armed guards became our single largest expense. We gave each of them a Kalashnikov, and some of them kept grenades in their lockers in the basement. We put searchlights on the roof, then machine-guns, 7.62 mm, belt-fed. The French Embassy was around the corner, and we determined at one point that the bullets from our machine guns intersected with the bullets of the French guns in the area behind our houses. We liked that, the interlocking fields of fire.

We hired a security adviser, a former soldier, for near $1,000 a day, making him the highest-paid member of our staff. We bought three armored cars, including a BMW once owned by the German diplomatic service, for $250,000. Not long afterward, the BMW stopped a Kalashnikov bullet fired into its roof. Then there was the life insurance the newspaper took out for us, about $14,000 per month each, an amount we figured indicated that the insurance company had determined that at least one of us was not going to live. The electricity in Baghdad usually lasted for only about four hours, so we generated most of our own. For $60,000, we imported a generator the size of a toolshed from the United Kingdom. We trucked it overland across Europe and then through Turkey and across the Iraqi border. Some of the Iraqis working for us went up to the border to bring it down, and on the way south they were stopped by insurgents. [ . . . ]

Plus, the Iraqis who worked with us were getting killed. We Americans might have been cowering behind the blast walls, but our Iraqi employees had to go home at night. Fakher Haider, our stringer in Basra, was a man of few words and a large mustache. He'd fought against Saddam in the uprising in 1991, and in Basra's murky byways he could still make out the good guys from the bad. One night, a group of armed men who said they were police officers came to his house and took him away. Fakher told his wife not to worry, that he'd be back soon. He was found a few hours later in a deserted area outside the city, with his hands bound behind him and a bag over his head. There were bruises on his body and a bullet in his head. Fakher had been reporting a story about the infiltration of Basra's security forces by sectarian militias. He was our first, but not our last.

(pp. 230-231):

It was in the Green Zone that I would think the war was lost. I didn't think about losing when I was outside -- when I was in Iraq. There was too much reality pressing in, too many things changing, too much in play. No: it was when I was waiting for the bus outside the Rashid Hotel, watching the overweight American contractors, making more money than they'd ever dreamed of, saunter into the restaurant for dinner at 5 p.m. It was when one of the American generals in charge of Baghdad, in his office in Camp Victory, pronounced the name of the Iraqi prime minister three different ways in a half an hour, "Molokai," "Maleeki," "Malaaki," each time as if he were speaking of some sort of exotic plant.

13. Just Talking: (pp. 143-144):

Why vote at all? I asked [Bushra] Saadi. Why not just stay home?

She shot me a withering look.

"I voted in order to prevent my country from being destroyed by its enemies," she said. She spoke English without an accent.

What enemies? I asked Saadi. What enemies are you referring to?

She began to tremble.

"You -- you destroyed our country," Saadi said. "The Americans, the British. I am sorry to be impolite. But you destroyed our country, and you called it democracy."

"Democracy," she said. "It is just talking."

14. The Mahdi: (pp. 245-246):

The men would gather at the Mohsin Mosque, ten thousand of them even in the heat of summer. They were the downtrodden of Sadr City, the Shiite slum that took up most of eastern Baghdad. At the edges of the crowd, confident young men with guns but no uniforms searched those coming in. Among the supplicants, each carried his own prayer mat to cushion his knees from the street. The sermon was outdoors. The imam would exit the mosque and climb a ladder to a raised wooden platform and look out on the assembled men on their knees. [ . . . ]

I went to the Mohsin Mosque to remind myself of what I didn't know. As the months wore on I went there more and more. I'd stand at the front of the crowd, at the foot of the platform, underneath the imam, just to take it in, to feel the power. The Mohsin Mosque was a corrective: I'd gotten caught up in the trappings and the pronouncements of officialdom, Iraqi and American. I'd believed there was a center. I'd thought the maneuverings of the Iraqi leaders, the exiles from the West, had been unfolding toward some greater purpose. Perhaps in the beginning they had been: Allawi, Chalabi, Hakim, Jafaari -- men who'd lived their adulthoods in London and Tehran. They'd taken me in, served me tea in their drawing rooms and showed me the black-and-white photos of their childhoods. They wore suits and spoke English. Some of them were serious. They worked hard, worked until they were red in the eyes.

(pp. 246-247):

In the beginning, the American-backed political project had a plausible structure. It had a coherence, even if it was a shaky coherence. Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, the supreme Shiite religious authority, sat at the center. He was the man who would deliver the Shiite majority to the dominance in Iraq that it had been so long denied. To do this, Sistani had endorsed the American-backed project -- never explicitly, but just enough so that Iraq's exiles could feel secure in joining in. In the new structure, Sistani was like a sun, with the exiles orbiting around him like planets, sustaining themselves on his nurturing rays. Meet with Sistani. Speak of Sistani. Echo Sistani. Agree with Sistani. It was in this way the exiles would become legitimate, become real Iraqis again. And it was in this way that they would win elections and take hold of the broken country.

Then came Muqtada al-Sadr. He was the antithesis of the pampered exile: black-eyed and glowering, a man of the streets, with a black beard and turban. He'd never left Iraq. He was only in his early thirties. Muqtada rarely showed his face, but when he did, he gave wild sermons about the Shia messiah, the Mahdi, revealing himself to a world torn by war. The prevailing wisdom was that Muqtada was a nuisance, that he was cashing in on the reputation of his father, the ayatollah for whom Sadr City had been named. He'd been murdered by Saddam in 1999, and his face still adorned tea shops throughout the Shiite slums. [ . . . ]

Then it happened: almost a year to the day after the Americans arrived, Muqtada called for an uprising to throw the occupiers out. With that,t he Shiite underclass that he commanded seized Sadr City and provincial capitals across southern Iraq. They took the holy shrines in Najaf and Karbala, too. The Iraqi police and the army, trained and armed by the Americans -- the very backbone of the new Iraqi state -- melted away. The Americans and the British had to shoot their way back in so the exiles could have their chairs back. And Muqtada skittered back into the shadows.

15. Proteus: (p. 258):

I asked Chalabi about the negotiations on the Iraqi constitution. It was the summer of 2005 and the deadline was near. The Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds were at a standstill. Chalabi was intimately involved in every aspect of the negotiations. He spoke perfect English and perfect Arabic and his energy and intelligence were limitless.

Even so, I had to be careful whenever I chose to rely on him. Chalabi always had his own agenda, usually several of them, which he worked on different levels, like a game of three-dimensional chess. Chalabi wanted a unified Iraq, but he was a friend of the Kurds, who wanted autonomy. He was an entirely secular man, but he had pulled close to Muqtada, who wanted an Islamic state. He wore suits and he wore dishdashas. Who was he this time? I felt like any member of the American government must have felt in dealing with Chalabi: was I getting more out of Chalabi than he was getting out of me? Or was I being conned and charmed into submission?

(pp. 261-263):

I was pondering the mystery of Chalabi. I called Robert Baer, a former operative for the CIA. I'd never met Baer but people told me he was the man to talk to. He'd worked with Chalabi in the 1990s in Kurdish-controlled Iraq, when the CIA was trying to cause trouble for Saddam. Back then, the CIA loved Chalabi; he seemed willing to go anywhere, do anything. He'd cobbled together a band of guerrillas that was harassing the Iraqi army, just what the CIA wanted. Then things got out of hand; it turned out Chalabi was serious, even if the CIA was not. Chalabi wanted to topple Saddam, and he'd turned his guerrillas loose on one of Saddam's divisions. He'd almost started a war. Back in Langley, CIA officials were furious. They claimed to be stunned. After that, the CIA pushed Chalabi away. It was only later, when he was adopted by neoconservatives in other parts of the American government, that Chalabi began to rise again. [ . . . ]

I asked [Baer] why the CIA came to loathe Chalabi.

"Chalabi was as true to me as the day is long," Baer said. "The thing with Chalabi is, he is Levantine. In order to get anywhere with him, you've got to conspire with him, enter his world. Manipulate people. Do people in. Like when he tried to introduce me to Iranian intelligence in Salah al-Din."

Iranian intelligence? I said.

"Yeah," Baer said. "Chalabi said to me, Look, I need these guys. I need to make sure the Iranians are not going to cause trouble for me. Would you like to meet them?"

Baer explained how, as an American, even as an American spy, he was prohibited from meeting representatives of the Iranian government. At the time, the Iranians were sitting at the other end of the hotel lobby from Baer. They were wearing turbans.

This is where the gray area comes in," Baer said. "The whole time we were there, Chalabi was traveling in and out of northern Iraq and in and out of Tehran. If you asked Chalabi, he would say, I have to deal with the Iranians. In our terms, in American terms, that would make him an Iranian asset. All of his CIA connections -- he wouldn't get away with that sort of thing with the Iranians unless he had proved his worth to them. He's basically beholden to the Iranians to stay viable. If he got out of hand, they would kill him.

"He's not our guy," Baer said.

(p. 264):

Chalabi ducked into a bathroom and reappeared in a well-tailored suit and tie. Then we drove to Ilam, a nearby city, where an eleven-seat Fokker jet was idling on the runway of the local airport. We took off for Tehran, flying over a dramatic landscape of canyons and ravines. We landed in Iran's smoggy capital, and within a couple of hours Chalabi was meeting with the highest officials of the Iranian government. One of them was Ali Larijani, the national security adviser.

I met Larijani the next morning. Chalabi arranged it. "Our relationship with Mr. Chalabi does not have anything to do with his relationship with the neocons," Larijani told me. His red-rimmed eyes, when I met him at 7 a.m., betrayed a sleepless night. "He is a very constructive and influential figure," Larijani said of Chalabi. "He is a very wise man and a very useful person for the future of Iraq."

Useful to whom? I wondered. The Iranians were deeply involved in Iraq, pumping in guns, pumping in money. I asked Larijani about reports that a few months before, the Iranian government had brokered a deal among Iraqi Shiite leaders to choose a prime minister. At the time, Chalabi had been one of the contenders. Larijani was happy to have me believe it. "America should consider this power as legitimate. They should not fight it."

A couple of hours later came a meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president.

16. The Revolution Devours Its Own: (pp. 272-273):

Abu Marwa had not come to talk about the Americans. There was something else. With a nod of his head, he got down to his story.

"According to our Iraqi tribal traditions and beliefs, each tribe must take revenge for the death of one of its members," he said. "This is a solemn obligation, even if it means you must kill a member of Al-Qaeda."

Everyone agreed about the need to kill Americans, Abu Marwa said. There was no argument about that. The trouble, he said, was that Al-Qaeda was killing not just Americans but Iraqis, too. Al-Qaeda was bombing Shiite mosques, public markets, murdering Iraqi civilians by the thousands. Al-Qaeda's war, he said, had nothing to do with his own.

"You have to differentiate between the real resistance and Al-Qaeda," Abu Marwa said, sitting in the shadows at the corner of the room. "We want to liberate our country. We want to rid our country of the Americans. We are the real resistance.

"Al-Qaeda attacks even though many Iraqis are around their targets," he said. "They have done this repeatedly.

"Sunni, Shia -- this means nothing to us," he said.

17. The Labyrinth: (pp. 281-282):

"Sir, Jill [Carroll, a kidnapped American reporter] is being held at the racetrack in Amiriya," said Ahmad, my Iraqi fixer. "I am talking directly to one of the kidnappers. He is criminal. He is resistance. One hundred percent."

"I am talking directly to the kidnappers" -- that was Ahmad's style: self-dramatizing and, in the end, as clear as a muddy river. Ahmad was a freelancer I hired when I couldn't get information any other way. As Baghdad grew more dangerous, and Western reporters were moving around less and less, stories became harder to find. People became harder to reach. That is where Ahmad came in: he lived in the middle of the anarchy; he understood it and used it to his advantage. Ahmad could find people and get to places like no other Iraqi I knew.

Ahmad, a Shiite, lived in one of Baghdad's mixed neighborhoods. He was a character: he wore black leather jackets and carried two cell phones into which he whispered and shouted almost continuously. He had a pair of eyebrows that seemed perpetually arched, as if in wonder. His laugh was a madman's cackle. "Sir!" Ahmad would say, "I have a story for you -- a great story!" Almost always he did.

The thing that made me worry about Ahmad was what made him so necessary. He patrolled the Iraqi underworld, talking to marginal people -- creeps, hustlers, gunmen -- people whom most Americans, and most Iraqis, avoided. Ahmad introduced me to death squad leaders and insurgents. It was Ahmad who led me to the group of Iraqi insurgents who were fighting Al-Qaeda. No one else I knew could have managed that.

Nothing on what happened to Carroll [she was released three months later], but Ahmad soaked the Times for a lot of money.

18. Fuck Us: (p. 304):

A few minutes later I heard an explosion.

"IED," someone said.

Half an hour later, Nelson stepped into the building. The bomb had struck the Humvee and ruined its front end. Everyone was okay. Nelson looked fine. He even looked exhilarated.

"Best feeling in the world," he said, eyes bright. "To get hit with an IED and live. It's like bungee jumping."

You serious? I asked.

"Yeah," Nelson said. "You get these vibrations all over your body like somebody pounded the hell out of you."

Nelson goes on to explain how this was his fifth IED survival.

19. The Boss: (pp. 312-314):

The marines gathered at battalion headquarters to hear the plan. The reporters were sworn to secrecy. Inside the Briefing room stood a large map of Saddam Hospital in Ramadi.

"Five hundred rooms and a whole shitload of people," one of the officers said.

He turned to the map.

"We think there are terrorists in there," he said. "Torture chambers in the basement." [ . . . ]

At 3 a.m., the marines swarmed into the hospital. They surrounded the complex and rushed inside for maximum surprise. They broke the locks on all the doors, to the supply rooms, the operating rooms, the patient wards. The marines ran to the top of the building and fanned out across all nine of its floors. They set up machine-gun posts at each end of each floor to isolate the violence in case things got out of control.

They didn't find much. A garbage bag full of bomb triggers and cell phones had been hidden behind a ceiling panel. The marines made a big deal out of that. There were no torture chambers in the basement. No terrorists. The marines corralled the hundred-odd Iraqi patients, mostly befuddled old people. They shuffled down to the first-floor lobby, where they sat on the floor and waited, none saying a word. [ . . . ]

Before long, I noticed that a couple more Iraqi soldiers had joined me, about a half dozen in all. We had a good nap. The marines didn't say a word.

That morning, the Americans sent out a press release. I didn't see it until much later, after I got back to Baghdad.

"Early this morning Iraqi Security Forces, with support from Coalition forces, began searching a hospital in northern Ramadi, which was being used as center for insurgent activity," the release said. "This Iraqi Army-led operation will deny the insurgents use of the Saddam Hospital."

20. The Turning: (p. 321):

Whenever I'd gone to his [Abdul Aziz Hakim's] compound before, I had to allow myself to be searched by Hakim's guards,members of the Badr Brigade, SCIRI' Iranian-trained militia. It wasn't difficult to tell that the Badr gunmen were professional: when they were just standing around, for instance, they kept their index fingers locked straight above the triggers. Their camouflage uniforms were clean and pressed.

Now, the same guards were standing around out front. They carried the same Kalashnikovs, and they wore the same camouflage uniforms. Their fingers were over their triggers. The only difference was that patches had been sewn onto the shoulders of their tunics. "Ministry of Interior," they said.

"Self-incorporated." That was the phrase an American official used when I told him what I saw. Two thousand Badr gunmen, once employed by the Supreme Council, had just donned police uniforms. Or sewn patches onto the uniforms they already had. "The chain of command is basically intact," the American official said. "They answer to SCIRI."

That's how the civil war worked: the death squads became official. The Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army, the two big Shiite militias, just joined the police forces of the Shiite-led government. It was like a revolving door, always spinning. One woman told me that her son had been taken away by the Iraqi police, and then, the next day, she'd received a phone call from a man claiming he was with the Mahdi Army. He said he had her son. He wanted ransom. She never got him back.

(pp. 322-323):

It wasn't just the Shiites frothing with revenge. The Sunnis had their own death squads, even the Sunnis in the government. The Iraqi government had given each of its twenty-seven ministries its own "facilities protection forces," 145,000 gunmen in all. Some of them were Shiite, some were Sunni. One such group, the 16th Brigade, was charged with guarding the oil pipeline that ran into the refinery at Dora. The 16th Brigade was mostly Sunni, and it started carrying out assassinations of local Shiites. When their commander, Colonel Mohsin Najdi, tried to stop them, they killed him, too.

(pp. 325-327):

Not long after, I talked about these things with Yusra al-Hakeem, one of the Iraqi interprters I worked with. Yusra was one of my best Iraqi friends. She was bright, funny and loud, one of those Iraqis who had taken immediately to the new freedoms. And yet in the past year life had changed dramatically for Yusra, and Yusra had changed herself. A Shiite and a liberal, Yusra had begun wearing a long black abaya, which she loathed but which was necessary, she believed, to protect her from the militias in her neighborhood. Yusra usually tore it from her head the second she walked inside the Times compound. "Stupid thing," she'd say, hurling it onto the couch.

And now Yusra had decided to leave the country. At first she joked in her usual way. "After 1,400 years, the Shiites have had their chance, and look at the mess they made. The Shiites, they cannot govern Iraq -- bring back the Sunnis!" Adn then a laugh. Yusra didn't mean it -- she loathed Saddam. But the danger was different now, debilitating in a way it had not been during the years of Saddam.

"I'm so tired," Yusra said. "In Saddam's time, I knew that if I kept my mouth shut, if I did not say anything against him, I would be safe. But now it is different. There are so many reasons why someone would want to kill me now: because I am Shiite, because I have a Sunni son, because I work for the Americans, because I drive, because I am a woman with a job, because" -- she picked up her abaya -- "I don't wear my stupid hejab." [ . . . ]

"We Iraqis," she said. "We are all sentenced to death and we do not know by whom."

And so she would leave Iraq. For Jordan, for Syria -- and then, if she was lucky, for America. All she was waiting for, she said, was for her son to graduate from university. He had one semester to go.

21. The Departed: (pp. 328-329):

The soldiers carrying the bag stepped into the sand; their feet made no sound. As they passed, the men and women saluted, even a wounded man on a stretcher. No one said a word.

A young man named Terry Lisk was in the bag. He was twenty-six, from a troubled home in Fox Lake, Illinois. That morning, Lisk had been standing in an intersection when a mortar shell landed about thirty paces away. A shard of metal had pierced the soft spot under his right arm, in the narrow strip between the armor plates. [ . . . ]

In the darkness, as the sound of the helicopter faded, Colonel MacFarland walked to the front of the group.

"I don't know if this war is worth the life of Terry Lisk, or 10 soldiers, or 2,500 soldiers like him," the colonel said. "What I do know is that he did not die alone."

"A Greek philosopher said that only the dead have seen the end of war," Colonel MacFarland said. "Only Terry Lisk has seen the end of this war."

Epilogue: Laika: (pp. 339-340):

When I was in Iraq, I might as well have been circling the earth from a space capsule, circling in farthest orbit. Like Laika in Sputnik. A dog in space. Sending signals back to base, unmoored and weightless and no longer keeping time. Home was far away, a distant place that gobbled up whatever I sent back, ignorant and happy but touchingly hungry to know. And then I was back, back in the world with everyone else, looking back on the ship myself though not returning all the way, still floating like Laika, through the regular people in the regular world. [ . . . ]

For me, the war sort of flattened things out, flattened things out here and flattened them out there, too. Toward the end, when I was still there, so many bombs had gone off so many times that they no longer shocked or even roused; the people screamed in silence and in slow motion. And then I got back to the world, and the weddings and the picnics were the same as everything had been in Iraq, silent and slow and heavy and dead. Your dreams come alive, though, when you come home. Your days may die but your dreams explode.

(p. 340):

After I got back I called the mother of a marine I'd gotten to know over there, a nineteen-year-old from a small town in Georgia, and when I told her who I was she told me she'd framed the story I had written about her son in Iraq and hung it on the wall.

After he'd come home, for about six weeks or so, she had him sleep in bed with her, on account of his nightmares. He'd turn in his sleep and sweat and moan, and sometimes scream, and she'd hold him and look at him and try to help him ride out the terrible storms. She seemed kind of embarrassed for telling me that, but I didn't mind.

posted 2009-10-16