General Casey’s direction to Graeme was not surprising to me. Although not much noticed in writings about this period, George Casey had been beating the drum to do counterinsurgency, often called COIN, and do it well. At the end of 2005, he had created the “COIN Academy” in Taji, to root out the conventional mindset and jittery tactics that sowed enmity in the people and inflamed insurgencies. Sean MacFarland’s soldiers cited its teachers’ precepts during the early stages of their immersive approach to Ramadi.
Shortly after meeting with Casey in September, Graeme came to visit me at Balad. I met him on the tarmac, and although he entered Iraq at its bleakest moment yet and had been handed a hard assignment, he appeared fresh and upbeat as he decamped the helo. After a two-year hiatus from Iraq, he was freed of the peculiar guilt that gnaws at a soldier like Lamb who, when stuck in garrison, can come to feel like a charlatan as wars are fought without him. After a bear hug, we walked across the pavement toward TF 714’s big brown hangar.
Lamb, a Scot, was a rare soldier and comrade. His default pose, with forearms folded across his chest, erect stance, dark eyes, and latent tenacity gave him the air of a nineteenth-century bare-knuckle boxer. Despite his protestations otherwise, Graeme read deeply, but with a sort of utilitarian drive, finding and then rereading a few books—Hart’s biography of William Tecumseh Sherman, Junger’s Storm of Steel, and Rousseau’s The Social Contract—turning their heavily dog-eared pages into handbooks for fighting and leading and living. He plumbed the past for guidance, and it gave him a stoic appreciation for history’s hard truths. Where the American military could produce soldiers who lapsed into earnest, jargon-filled bullet points, Lamb could offer profanity-laced parables. His explanations had academic nuance but were tinged by his Scottish brogue and often infused with a Churchillian vocabulary—we’ll give it the ol’ . . . His delivery contributed to his mystique, as did a certain darkness. In a way few others did, especially Americans newer to these nasty small wars, Graeme, a veteran not only of Basra but also of Afghanistan and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, conveyed an intimate appreciation for Hobbes’s view of man.
As we entered our hangar and walked past tables and screens, Graeme said hello to the many familiar faces. Since he had finished commanding in Basra in December 2003, the British special forces had become full-fledged and highly valued members of Task Force 16. In addition to their work down south, they had been invaluable in suppressing the Baghdad car-bomb networks since mid-2005, when we emptied much of our forces out of central Iraq to fight up in Al Qaim. Without the Brits keeping the insurgent cells in Baghdad under pressure, we feared the insurgents would simply relocate away from our push on the Euphrates, and the effort would do nothing more than move mercury on a table. As a former troop and squadron commander in the SAS and, later, commander of all British special forces, “Lambo” was a beloved member of their tribe. From his emeritus perch, he had remained a close observer of our task force.
Inside the SAR, we chatted for a bit and got down to business. Graeme explained the concept for establishing a cell that would pursue strategic reconciliation. Put simply, Graeme proposed talking to the most violent of our enemies to see if we could nudge their thinking.
In parsing the different “types” of enemy we faced, Graeme spoke of these groups existing along a spectrum from “reconcilables” to “irreconcilables.” While the extremist edges of both the Sunni and Shia combatants might fall into the latter category, most of both branches fell into the former. In between sat the government of Iraq—or those actors and groups either assisting the new Iraqi project or at least not actively resisting it. Certain groups—namely, the jihadist wing of the Sunni insurgency and the Iranian proxies on the Shia end—could not be reconciled to the Coalition project. But the rest might be persuaded, through threats or enticements, to move toward the political center. While others might have spoken with this nuance before, Graeme’s language of reconcilables and irreconcilables soon permeated the rest of the Coalition. His terms helped us conceptualize—and visualize, in what we called the Squeeze Chart—how these groups might be split or how they might be redirected. He was fond of reminding skeptics that Clausewitz hadn’t finished the sentence when he argued war was “not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.” “And to politics it must return,” Graeme added.