Centripetal Force

Lawrence Kaplan's Centripetal Force, The case for staying in Iraq is a must read. Unfortunately it's also subscription only. (But you can try a four week free trial.)

Excerpt:

For a glimpse of what Iraq would look like in the event of a precipitous U.S. withdrawal, one need look no further than Tall Afar, where there was a precipitous U.S. withdrawal. Before the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment (3rd ACR) launched its offensive to clear Tall Afar last September, the city, like Falluja before it, had become a horror show. With only 400 soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division patrolling the roughly 10,000-square-mile sector around it, officers say, there simply weren't enough troops to pacify the city. During the Falluja offensive in November 2004, police stations across the province fell to insurgent attacks, and Tall Afar itself fell under guerrilla control. On the western side of the city, tension between Sunni and Shia tribes escalated into open warfare; the remnant of the Shia-dominated police force launched brutal reprisals against the population; and forces loyal to Abu Musab Al Zarqawi moved into the city, mounting their own campaign of atrocities--killing patients in the local hospital, kidnapping and beheading hostages, and forcing children to act as human shields. "I know people at home will roll their eyes," says one American officer, "but Restore Rights [the September 2005 operation to clear Tall Afar] cleansed this place of something genuinely evil."

Police headquarters in Tall Afar is located on the grounds of a centuries-old Ottoman castle, which sits on a large hill in the center of the city. From its parapets, one can usually see the entire city, but it is pouring rain, and even tanks slide in the mud. The castle also houses the mayor of Tall Afar, Najim Abdullah Jabouri, who, until recently, was the city's police chief as well. The mayor still operates as the city's de facto sheriff--a bullet-riddled police vest hangs on the wall of his office. The power has gone out, and it is freezing and nearly pitch-black, but the mayor seems relieved just to be here. Only a few months ago, he says, "Zarqawi was ejecting Shia from the city; and the sky--it was raining mortars. Now, we target the insurgents, not each other." Even today, 3rd ACR has Tall Afar locked down, with tanks on street corners and patrols crisscrossing the city. "The American Army is mediator and judge," the mayor says. "It is a higher authority than any institution in Iraq." So desperate, in fact, is the mayor to block 3rd ACR from leaving that he has penned a letter to President Bush, pleading for the unit to stay. "Our security forces are not well-equipped," he explains. "We are undertrained, nowhere near the situation where we can take care of our own responsibilities."

Still, the violence in Tall Afar has declined sharply. Following Operation Restore Rights, attacks on U.S. forces in Tall Afar dropped from about seven per day to one. At first, the city's Sunni leaders refused to cooperate with U.S. forces, citing the brutality of a Shia commando brigade operating in the area. But 3rd ACR had the brigade pulled back, and it released detainees whom the Sunni sheiks would vouch for. In addition, explains Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Hickey, whose Sabre Squadron operates out of the castle that houses police headquarters, "I knew I needed Sunni police to get information from the population. The Shia police were just inflaming sectarian violence." After pressing local leaders to encourage police recruits, Sunnis began to sign up, eventually swelling an exclusively Shia force of 200 into a majority Sunni force of 1,700. And, as Hickey predicted, intelligence tips began flowing in. The regiment also poured millions of dollars into the city, funding 150 water, electricity, school, and cleanup projects. At the same time, it embedded advisers with Iraqi army and police units. Today, 3rd ACR personnel live among Iraqi platoons and among the population itself, having fanned out across the city and established 29 patrol bases--including directly between the warring Sunni and Shia tribes.

Having melted into a once-hostile population center, the Americans have become an essential part of the landscape here--their own tribe, in effect. Seen from a helicopter roaring above Nineveh province, telephone wires provide the only evidence of modernity among the ancient forts, castles, and clay huts that dot the plain below. In this primitive universe, it's easy to confuse the door gunners, their aviation helmets emblazoned with Superman logos (the "S" actually stands for their unit, Stetson Troop), with actual supermen. Which many Iraqis do: Wedged between tribes of Sunnis Arabs, Turkomen, Shia, and Kurds, a regal and persecuted people--the Yazidis--call Nineveh province home. The Yazidis, who, among other things, don't wear blue, don't eat lettuce, and take a somewhat nuanced view of Satan (their Muslim neighbors have accused them, falsely, of being devil worshippers), initially confused the arrival of the Americans with the Second Coming. An officer at the forward operating base in Sinjar elaborates: "They think that, um, we're Jesus."

The Yazidis aren't the only ones. At a base in central Iraq a few days earlier, two U.S. helicopters taxi to a halt near a C-130. The crew chiefs jump out and guide two rows of detainees, handcuffed and blindfolded, away from the prop blast. A detainee's fate, as I learned last year on stumbling across a similar scene in Baghdad, depends largely on his destination. The idea of prisoners begging to get into Abu Ghraib may seem like a stretch, but, more than anything else, they fear being turned over to the Iraqi security forces. They know the Americans probably won't kill them, and that, in all likelihood, they will be released in a few days.

As for the Americans themselves, the soldiers value their roles here just as much as the local population does. Back at regimental headquarters, framed pictures of the fallen line the wall--3rd ACR has lost 42 men during its yearlong tour, and many more have been terribly wounded, including the regiment's command sergeant major. And, yet, contrary to the faux moral posturing of those who claim to speak for the troops back home, when the troops do speak, what they say is invariably some variation of "leave us alone to do our job." The soldiers' confidence in their mission derives in part from a sense of ownership that the Army has about Iraq. While Colin Powell's reported warning on the eve of the invasion--"If you break it, you own it"--applies even as the war grinds toward the end of its third year, for the Army at least, it is equally true that, when you break it, it owns you. Having bled so much here, the officer corps cannot entertain the possibility that they did so in vain. Its members truly believe that victory, even at this late date, may be within reach.