My Share of the Task(267)

                insurgents operated undisturbed: Ibid., 42.

                insurgents focused on the Americans: Interview with task force member.

                rates there were extraordinarily high: Mark Kukis, “The Most Dangerous Place in Iraq,” Time, December 11, 2006.

                five Marine and army battalions: Smith and MacFarland, “Anbar Awakens,” 43.

                third-tier sheikh: Najim Abed Al-Jabouri and Sterling Jensen, “The Iraqi and AQI Roles in the Sunni Awakening,” Prism (December 2010), 12.

                reimagined as his guests: Ibid., 15.

                officially under way: Smith and MacFarland, “Anbar Awakens,” 48. The same event is recounted in Al-Jabouri and Jensen, “The Iraqi and AQI Roles,” 11.

                wrote to Nouri al-Maliki: Khalid Al-Ansary and Ali Adeeb, “Most Tribes in Anbar Agree to Unite Against Insurgents,” New York Times, September 18, 2006.

                Iraqi government payroll: Al-Jabouri and Jensen, “The Iraqi and AQI Roles,” 14–15.

                did not like having an American tank: Sheikh Sattar’s attitude toward the tank, and the rotation of Iraqi and American models, was recounted in an interview with Sterling Jensen. It also appears in his article, written with Al-Jabouri (ibid.,13).

                now a token of power: Sheikh Abdul Sattar was assassinated a year later, in September 2007, but not before he had served as a rallying point for the Sunni Awakening in Ramadi. His brother assumed his mantle as a leader of the Awakening.

                my old friend Graeme Lamb: Lamb took the title of Deputy Commanding General/Senior British Military Representative in MNF-I on September 7, 2006.

                and declare a national position: My recollection of the early Awakening was confirmed by interviews with task force members and with Graeme. As the Awakening gathered steam and consolidated, Graeme noted in January 2007 that “a conference of tribal chiefs in Anbar ended with a pledge to support the national government’s campaign against Al-Qaeda insurgents.” Graeme Lamb, “Dispatches from Baghdad: A Soldier’s View on Iraq,” Ministry of Defense, January 9, 2007.

                created the “COIN academy”: For details of the COIN Academy General Casey established, see Thomas E. Ricks, “U.S. Counterinsurgency Academy Giving Officers a New Mindset,” Washington Post, February 21, 2006.

                cited its teachers’ precepts: Lawrence F. Kaplan, “Letting Go,” New Republic, July 10, 2006.

                Squeeze Chart: Graeme’s description that day would later that fall be visualized in a series of increasingly descriptive diagrams that we called “The Squeeze Chart.” While they underwent a number of iterations, the most lasting chart that summarized his concept was a Venn diagram, with three circles laterally spaced. The leftmost circle comprised Sunnis, the rightmost Shia. They did not overlap, but where their edges touched was at the center of the third circle, in the middle. This central circle represented those groups assisting, or not resisting, a legitimate Iraqi government.

                permeated the rest of the Coalition: This point is made in Mark Urban, Task Force Black (Abacus, 2011), 186.

                terms helped us conceptualize: While Ambassador Khalilzad described groups as “irreconcilables” that summer, General James Mattis gives credit to Graeme for meaningfully introducing these terms—and the attendant logic—into the Coalition’s mindset. Al-Anbar Awakening, vol. I, 30.

                “not an independent phenomenon”: See book eight, chapter six of Carl von Clausewitz’s great work On War for his extended treatment of this famous quote. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton University Press, 1984).