Even so, Graeme remained an advocate for relentless targeting. As the Coalition targeted insurgents ever more effectively, they would either back into a corner and fight to the death, or they would come toward daylight. Graeme’s reconciliation program would be the latter choice, a choice made more appealing if they feared the alternative. Graeme proposed finding the groups just shy of the most extreme poles on the spectrum and convincing them that even if they didn’t want to align with the American or Iraqi government, it was in their interest not to be allied with the irreconcilables. The key would be to feel for the fissures between the groups, and rip.
Linking our targeting efforts with Graeme’s strategic engagement—which operated under a few names but eventually took the name Force Strategic Engagement Cell, or FSEC—would further redefine the “precision” we aspired to achieve with our targeting. In this context, precision did not just mean killing or capturing targeted individuals and leaving the houses or civilians around them unharmed. Rather, these precise actions would need to bring about desirable second- and third-order effects by moving certain groups’ thinking or behavior in the right direction.
While it sounded logical, what Lamb proposed would be extremely controversial, especially within TF 714. Many of the hard-line leaders Graeme would propose releasing were those whom my men had spent years of their lives trying to capture, losing limbs and friends in the process. Graeme’s program meant setting them free in the hope that, once convinced, they could be more useful on the outside by altering the calculus of their former comrades in a way that benefited us. It was a tough case to make, and without my support and that of those under me, his project would be stillborn.
I agreed on the spot to lend members of TF 714 so that he could staff the cell. I did so in part because I knew and trusted Graeme. I also felt Graeme’s concept was a necessary tack. By that fall of 2006, I felt the dynamics needed to change were we to succeed. Simply getting enemies talking could be a start.
Graeme’s military career, from experiences as a soldier three decades earlier, had uniquely equipped him for the task at hand. Graeme’s first assignment as a young officer was to patrol the streets of West Belfast in 1973, during the height of the Troubles. During one of his later numerous tours in Northern Ireland, Graeme had to grit his teeth beneath his tam-o’-shanter and watch as men convicted in court of killing his mates sauntered by as free men, with sinister smiles as they pointed at him, their hands in the shapes of pistols, and snapped their thumbs down like hammers. The experiences armed Graeme with a longer view of how these wars are fought and how they end. Martin McGuinness, a convicted leader of the Irish Republican Army, had been notorious on the Belfast streets Graeme patrolled. Now, Graeme would remind his American counterparts, McGuinness had just finished a stint as Northern Ireland’s deputy minister of education.
Graeme talked with a soldierly respect and even a certain sympathy when he described the need to understand our enemies’ beliefs and logic. And yet his tone could easily pivot from generous to menacing.
“We can offer them a way out, we can show them daylight, yeah,” he said, “but if they don’t take it, we’ll put ’em in the fucking grave.”
* * *
With the war’s tectonics seemingly seized up, the domestic debate back in the United States grew in intensity. On Tuesday, November 7, during the midterm elections, the Democrats retook a majority in Congress. The vote was widely seen as a verdict on the Iraq war and the Bush administration’s handling of it.
The day after the election, President Bush appeared in the East Room and announced that he and Secretary Rumsfeld had “agreed that the timing is right for new leadership at the Pentagon.” The president announced he would nominate Dr. Robert Gates for the vacant post. At the time, Gates was serving as president of Texas A&M, but he had been a career CIA man. By that month, many Americans judged the war to be dangerously close to failure. More Iraqi civilians died in October than in any other month of the war. One hundred seven Americans died, and nearly eight hundred were wounded. Upwards of one hundred thousand Iraqis were fleeing every month, mostly from the secular, educated, and moderate classes that had the means to get out. Confidence in Nouri al-Maliki’s ability to lift the country out of sectarian killing was perhaps at its all-time low. And yet the nascent Sunni Awakening was growing.