Armed Humanitarians (18 page)

It seemed to be an easy way to buy goodwill. Soon, however, the military spent down the cash confiscated from Saddam Hussein's regime. In the fall of 2003, the administration of President George W. Bush included a request for more CERP funds as part of the $87 billion emergency spending package to pay for the ongoing costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Around $18.7 billion in supplemental money was earmarked for the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund. The bill passed by Congress included $180 million for CERP funds. Oversight of reconstruction funds, however, was extremely haphazard. Coalition officials were given “footballs,” bricks of $20 bills delivered by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and loaded them into trucks and Chevrolet Suburbans to deliver them around the country.
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Stuart Bowen, appointed as special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction in early 2004, recalled seeing bags of dollar bills being literally hauled out of the Republican Palace, the headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority. “What I saw was troubling: large amounts of cash moving quickly out the door,” he later wrote.
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In the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, spreading around CERP funds quickly became a major priority. The 101st Airborne Division under Major General David Petraeus arrived there in late spring of 2003. Mosul was an ethnically mixed city, with a Sunni Arab majority in some areas, as well as a sizable population of Kurds, Assyrians, and Turkmen. Mosul was a potential tinderbox, and with the strongman gone, dormant ethnic rivalries threatened to reignite. The city was also a key trade center, and the division began spending money across the board to keep Mosul stable. In a press briefing shortly after the division's arrival in Mosul, Petraeus ticked off a laundry list of projects his troops had undertaken:

Our soldiers have deployed throughout our area of operation, securing cities and key infrastructure facilities; helping the new interim city and province government get established; conducting joint patrols with Iraqi policemen and manning police stations in the city; helping organize and secure the delivery of fuel and propane; assisting with the organization of the recently begun grain harvest, a huge endeavor in this part of Iraq; building bridges and clearing streets; helping reopen schools and Mosul University; assisting with the reestablishment of the justice system in the area; distributing medical supplies; helping with the distribution of food; guarding archaeological sites; working to restore public utilities, and ninety percent of Mosul now has power and water.
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Petraeus also began paying salaries to government workers. The division used national bank funds that had been safeguarded during the looting, paying the salary arrears of government workers who had not received paychecks since the collapse of the regime in April. It was an important move: The public sector employed a large segment of the Iraqi population, and keeping civil servants on the payroll was one way to keep a lid on discontent.

Essentially, Petraeus was trying to prime the pump, both politically and economically. The lightning advance on Baghdad in 2003 had decapitated the old regime, but the dearth of postwar planning meant that military commanders on the ground would have to improvise. Faced with a population that had no recent experience of representative government, and an almost crippling dependence on the state for everything from bread rations to fuel vouchers, smart leaders like Petraeus realized that they would have to step in and perform many of the functions of the Iraqi state. But they needed more than just military manpower for the job: American soldiers could never be a substitute for local Iraqi administrators from the communities they were supposed to serve.

That approach, however, would require some finesse. Bremer's first move as the head of the CPA was to issue a sweeping de-Ba'athification order, which in effect barred thousands of low-level civil servants from work. Under Saddam, Ba'ath Party membership had been obligatory for many professionals, including doctors, professors, and schoolteachers. Petraeus would seek, and receive, an exemption from Bremer in order to keep some of those institutions functioning.

Petraeus was careful not to clash openly with Bremer, but Colonel Lloyd Sammons, who worked in the CPA's governance office, noted that Petraeus was conspicuously absent from the regular meetings in Baghdad on provincial affairs. “The military commanders were also supposed to come in for these meetings,” Sammons later noted. “Every commander came in except one, and that was Petraeus. General Petraeus never showed up at the time I was there. He blew them off.”
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In Mosul, as in other cities throughout Iraq, soldiers who were trained as aviators, infantrymen, or artillery gunners were having to adapt to a new job description: aid worker. Lieutenant Katrina Lewison, a young West Point graduate from western Kansas and now a Black Hawk pilot, was one of the soldiers who unexpectedly found herself on a quasi-humanitarian mission. On paper, she was a platoon leader with the Sixth Battalion of the 101st Aviation; in practice, she was a construction boss, supervising a team of sixty Iraqi day laborers.

Lewison's career in the construction business began on Mosul's unemployment line. Each day, hundreds of jobless men from Mosul would line up outside the front gate of the airfield where the helicopter unit was based. A minor local sheikh named Doctor Mohammed had presented himself to the division on the day it arrived in Mosul, sending out a handwritten note, in stilted English, that was hand-carried to the airfield by an elderly man. Major Fred Wellman, the battalion executive officer, went to meet Doctor Mohammed. Over a gelatinous plate of lamb meat, Wellman agreed to help start building clinics and schools in the local villages.

The sheikh emerged as a trusted labor broker, and helped Lewison to hire carpenters to do some construction jobs. “After I hired one family, they had other family members and friends, and with the sense of family honor, I could hold one man responsible for all the family members, and they knew that if one person did something wrong that I would fire all the rest of them,” she said. To Lewison, the employment scheme seemed to be working. Iraqi men were getting cash, and they were staying off the streets.

The division's approach to governing Mosul—in essence, spreading cash around and trying to restore essential services—had its hazards, however. The Civil Affairs approach meant getting outside the wire and working among the population in Mosul. But that hearts-and-minds work was often hard to square with the imperatives of what the military called “force protection.” On August 2, 2003, Lewison received permission to accompany her husband, Lieutenant Tyler Lewison, on a local reconstruction project. Tyler Lewison's unit was assigned to a Civil Affairs project at the University of Mosul, and reopening classes was a point of pride for Petraeus. For Katrina Lewison, the mission was supposed to be a break from the routine. August 2 was Tyler's birthday, and Katrina, who did not get to see much of her husband while on deployment, had received permission to accompany Tyler's unit for the day.

As the soldiers left one of the university buildings and climbed into their Humvee, someone tossed a hand grenade at their truck. Amid the noise and confusion, the soldiers sped away; a warrant officer was bleeding from a shrapnel injury in the neck, and Katrina Lewison had been nicked by a grenade splinter.

Iraq had no clear frontline, and the troops there faced a war in which the adversary's primary weapon was the roadside bomb, termed by the military parlance an improvised explosive device, or IED. At the beginning of the war, the IED was not expected to be the main threat. But as the U.S. military settled into an uneasy routine of occupation in the summer of 2003, insurgents began seeding the roads with improvised bombs. They observed the patterns of the U.S. patrols, counted how many vehicles were in each different convoy, and noted what kinds of vehicles they used and how vulnerable they were.

During its stay in northern Iraq, the 101st Airborne Division became the region's largest single employer. The division had around twenty thousand troops at its disposal, and it could saturate Mosul and Nineveh Province with patrols and Civil Affairs projects.
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Under Petraeus's leadership, things were starting to get up and running, but the question remained: What would happen after the division went home? In late January 2004, the 101st Airborne Division began rotating home to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and it handed over responsibility for the area to Task Force Olympia, an eight-thousand-strong force built around the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division, commanded by Brigadier General Carter Ham.
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(A Stryker is a type of eight-wheeled, armored combat vehicle.)

The Third Stryker brigade was designated as a reserve force for Multi-National Corps-Iraq, meaning that it was on call to support other units outside of northern Iraq, so it was stretched a bit thin. It also had far fewer CERP funds at its disposal than the 101st. A RAND research report noted that the 101st Airborne Division spent around thirty-one million dollars in reconstruction funds during its stay in northern Iraq; the arriving Stryker brigade had less than half that amount, around fifteen million. The 101st Airborne Division also had an engineering unit that was able to take on ambitious projects to rebuild roads and irrigation systems, repair a major bridge between Irbil and Mosul, and reopen Mosul University.
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Using cash as a temporary fix had its risks: Although it kept some of the holdover institutions running, new, fully functioning Iraqi civil and political institutions had yet to emerge. So when the money ran out, it could all fall apart. Watching the Mosul handover from his office in CPA-Baghdad, Lieutenant Colonel Lloyd Sammons warned in October 2004 that things would not turn out well. Before leaving Iraq, he took a trip to visit an Army Reserve Civil Affairs group in Mosul, and he relayed his concerns to an interviewer from the U.S. Institute of Peace. “They were very worried, and they had a good reason to be worried,” Sammons said. “General Ham had replaced General Petraeus in charge of the Stryker force in the north. Ham was a nice guy, but he was no Petraeus. Petraeus walked around with two stars on his shoulders and two stars in his pocket. You could tell. You could feel it. I hear now they call him King David over there.”
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More important, Petraeus could commandeer more cash and other resources than Ham.

Petraeus was on an upward career trajectory. Less than half a year after the 101st Airborne Division returned from Iraq, he was rewarded with a third star and command of Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq, which was responsible for training and equipping the Iraqi military and police forces. Ham, meanwhile, presided over a dwindling supply of emergency funds, and his troops could not always follow through on humanitarian aid and reconstruction projects begun by the 101st Airborne Division.

“The Iraqis were furious because Ham couldn't fund a lot of the projects that had been promised by Petraeus,” Sammons complained. “Do you think that maybe the Civil Affairs people are going to have a hard time working and living in that situation? We're talking mainly about reservists who, for the most part, were not equipped to handle a lot of violence. A lot of them are very smart. You have Ph.D.s and you have people with real world experience who know how to do things and are no idiots. I don't know how they managed in the long term, but I can't imagine that they've had an easy time of it.”

Sammons's worries prove to be well founded. Mosul may have been judged a success during the 101st Airborne Division's stay, but things rapidly went south after the handover to the Stryker brigade. Major Tim Vidra, an Army reservist, was one of the soldiers who found themselves in the difficult position of trying to rebuild Mosul as a violent insurgency gained momentum. For Vidra and soldiers like him, figuring out who, exactly, was in charge—whom to work with—became one of the primary challenges in the frontier chaos of post-Saddam Iraq.

In July 2004, Vidra was on reserve duty at U.S. Northern Command in Colorado Springs. It was a convenient part-time assignment; Vidra was attending graduate school, and Colorado Springs was a good place to hang out, take courses, and do reserve work at the same time. As the Iraq War entered its second year, however, Civil Affairs specialists were in especially high demand. Vidra was involuntarily transferred to a Civil Affairs unit that was preparing to deploy to Iraq. The Army gave him six days' notice. After reporting to Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, he received an assignment to Bravo Company, 448th Civil Affairs Battalion, which would be supporting the Stryker brigade that replaced the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul.

Bravo Company's first assignment was to support Fifth Battalion, Twentieth Infantry Regiment, a unit of the Stryker brigade that had been sent out to patrol the area surrounding Tal Afar, a rough border town in Nineveh Province not far from the Syrian border. Tal Afar was a magnet for insurgent groups, but the battalion, which was sent to pacify the town and the surrounding area, had only 650 soldiers to patrol an area about twice the size of Connecticut. There was no local police force, and only a few Iraqi National Guard troops supplemented the U.S. soldiers. A particularly heavy battle erupted on September 4, 2004, after insurgents shot down an OH-58 Kiowa reconnaissance helicopter. When a scout platoon moved in to secure the crash site and evacuate the pilots, dozens of insurgents converged on their position, and Bravo Company had to fight through an ambush to rescue the embattled platoon. The incident could have turned into another Mogadishu-style debacle, but digital networking tools—which gave the commander on the scene a precise, up-to-the-minute picture of the location of friendly forces—helped identify the crash site and escape routes. More than a hundred insurgents were killed in the firefight; only one Iraqi National Guard trooper was killed.
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