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During the last week of November 2004, as the second battle of Fallujah waned, I invited General Casey and key members of his Multi-National Force–Iraq (MNF-I) staff to our compound at Balad to discuss our concerns over the foreign-fighter flow.
Although I had a good relationship with George Casey, I was glad that he brought his operations officer, Major General Eldon Bargewell. I’d known Eldon since we were captains at Fort Benning. A highly decorated Vietnam veteran, Eldon and I had worked together many times in later years during his service both in Green and on the TF 714 staff. Eldon was unfailingly helpful in smoothing tensions between MNF-I and TF 714. The setup of our two headquarters invited friction: Although we fought in Iraq, TF 714 answered to CENTCOM, not to MNF-I. Meanwhile, the ground-holding commanders’ occasional annoyance with TF 714—over disruptive targeting missions in their domain or our greater share of resources—all percolated up to MNF-I headquarters. By being there, Eldon could translate our mission and culture to those he served with on the conventional side.
In the long meeting, Mike Flynn and some of our best minds, like Wayne Barefoot, laid out the case for the threat this foreign flow presented. I was disappointed at how much our read on the enemy differed from that of some of Casey’s key staff. One senior officer on the MNF-I team openly doubted our assessment of AQI’s central role in the insurgency.
I sympathized with the concern that emphasizing the role of foreign fighters could be a way to unintentionally sidestep the reality that Iraqis were, in large numbers, joining the insurgency motivated by earthly grievances, not religious jihad. Especially early in the war, we in TF 714 and much of the rest of the Coalition problematically used “AQI” as a catchall designation for any Sunni group that attacked Americans or the Iraqi government. In truth, more than fifty named insurgent groups fought at one time or another. These distinctions were important but also could be misleading. By numbers, AQI never constituted the majority of the insurgency. But AQI usurped the insurgency’s leadership and gave it direction and shape—often through sheer intimidation. So while in 2004 and 2005 an Iraqi fighting for a nominally nationalist group did not consider himself a card-carrying member of AQI, his group was fighting within Zarqawi’s strategic framework. The insurgent groups were like local gangs, while AQI—richer, crueler, and better linked across the country—was the mafia.
No major MNF-I orders or initiatives flowed from that November meeting at Balad, but our discussions continued. Unfortunately, the thinking at our respective headquarters continued to diverge. Around the time we met with George Casey and his staff, a month before Tom D. and Tres stood up our JIATF to combat foreign influence in Iraq, MNF-I assigned its own Baghdad-based JIATF to target “former regime elements”—essentially old Saddam apparatchiks.
“The fat, old, jowly Baathist generals holding meetings in hotel lobbies in Amman and Damascus are not controlling the insurgency,” John Christian lamented after the meeting, voicing our collective frustration. “They are not the instigators of violence.” Nor were they the levers to success, despite some of their aggrandizing claims to control the spigot of insurgent attacks.
Although disappointed, I appreciated it was an antidote to groupthink for two major headquarters in the same theater to come up with such different assessments. And we could not fault Casey’s staff for eyeing us as a kind of special-interest group. TF 714’s global mission was almost entirely directed toward Al Qaeda and its close affiliates. So in Iraq we focused on AQI and its terrorist allies like Ansar al-Sunnah. That narrow lens could produce assessments that inflated Al Qaeda’s role. And because threat measurements guided resource allocation, TF 714 had an interest in portraying Al Qaeda as the central enemy. As TF 714’s growing credibility gave us greater sway in the war’s decisions, I knew we needed to maintain a culture of self-scrutiny and humility, lest we have it wrong. Our divergent outlooks also told me our integration and communication with MNF-I was too weak. This we could, and would, labor to fix. At the conclusion of the meeting, while I felt his staff had it wrong, I sensed General Casey remained unconvinced but open-minded.