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Every Friday that I was in Iraq, I flew from Balad to Baghdad to meet with General Casey. Periodically, in addition to my operations officer, T.T. (or his replacement, Kurt Fuller), and Mike Flynn, I brought two members of TF 16. I wanted Casey to see the knowledge and commitment that defined the task force.
Most of my travels around Iraq were at night. But flying over Baghdad every week for more than four years gave me a time-lapse-photography-like view of a city as it convulsed from the relative calm of 2004 to the dark days of 2006 and 2007 and settled back into a seething equilibrium in 2008. In January 2005, the streets we flew over were tagged with reminders of that pivotal juncture in Iraq. Colorful election posters and banners with flashy Arabic text hung alongside wanted posters for Zarqawi, with tip-line phone numbers running below his cold face staring out under a black kufi.
Since taking over, George Casey’s two strategic priorities had been to build up Iraq’s security forces and to support the emergence of a legitimate government. According to this plan, midwifing a new Iraqi government required that Casey secure the three Iraqi votes scheduled that year: in January to elect an assembly to draft the permanent constitution, in October to ratify that constitution, and again in December to vote for the government that would serve under that constitution.
We were increasingly focused on integrating our efforts with the larger MNF-I objectives. So in the lead-up to the January 30, 2005, election, we were doing everything we could to contain Al Qaeda’s plans to undermine them—which Zarqawi announced a week before the election. On January 23, Zarqawi released an audiotape calling democracy heresy. Eight years earlier, while the two were locked away together in Jordan’s Suwaqah Prison, Abu Mohammad al-Maqdisi, a leading ideologue of the jihadist movement, had mentored a younger Zarqawi. Maqdisi made his name in the 1990s, in part through an innovative treatise that argued democracy constituted not just a separate political process but a religion unto itself. For true believers, then, voting was a veritable act of heresy.
Zarqawi now invoked this logic as religious top cover for what were surely more clear-eyed strategic concerns. His sectarian scheme relied on keeping Sunnis paranoid and fighting. This wasn’t hard: Whether or not Sunnis voted, the elections were going to entrench the majority Shia in power in Baghdad. But Zarqawi needed Sunnis fully disenfranchised—to make the specter of Shia domination more fearsome and to prevent insurgents from getting the idea that integrating into the political process might have its benefits. So, joined by other hard-line insurgent groups, Al Qaeda in Iraq prepared to unleash hell on the polling sites and the vulnerable queues of Iraqi voters. Its online warning that week was ominous—and essentially an admission that Zarqawi would target Sunnis. “Take care not to go near the centers of heresy and abomination . . . the election booths,” it threatened. “The martyrs’ wedding is at hand.”
Violence on election day was far more muted than Zarqawi’s histrionics portended. Insurgents overran no election sites. But their threats were enough to keep many Sunnis home; others boycotted in genuine protest of the new government, which would freeze them into a minority role. Only 3,775 people voted in all of Anbar Province—2 percent of the population. Sunnis secured a mere 17 of the new National Assembly’s 275 seats.
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Within the military, the elections had crystallized the increasing competition over resources, which had grown more acute that winter. The conventional forces understandably sought to employ intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft, like UAVs, to monitor polling sites in the days preceding the vote. We had asked for control of these assets in order to ramp up an offensive effort to preempt AQI’s attacks. We sought a balanced approach of using the ISR to pressure AQI’s network up until the day before the elections, then shifting them to monitor the voting areas.
Although not the first occasion for passionate competition between special and conventional operations over select resources like ISR, the January elections foreshadowed an extended debate over the best use of what were always scarce, highly useful tools. For relatively new assets, like the Predator UAV, demand continued to soar as more units identified valid, innovative ways to employ them.