The scene that followed increased my unease. After Bremer finished, Lieutenant General Sanchez moved to the podium and cued up a video. The monitors on stage first showed shaky nighttime footage of the hole in which our men had found the toppled dictator. The video then displayed an American medic sifting through his mangy hair with white latex gloves. Sanchez began to narrate, but when he said “Saddam”—clarifying that the raggedy man being prodded was indeed the tyrant—loud whistles and cheers from the audience interrupted him. “Death to Saddam! Death to Saddam!” the Iraqis in the audience, ostensibly reporters, shouted. Men in the front stood up from their seats to cheer. The video rolled on, showing Saddam with a cowlike expression, mouth open and tongue out. Sanchez tried to continue but was interrupted again by shouts and clapping.
The death shouts, likely most loudly voiced by Shia Iraqis, reflected an anger that was largely unimaginable to most Americans. Meanwhile, these images of Saddam and cheers likely amplified fearful questions that had been growing among Sunnis that fall. With Saddam gone, what revenge would these Shia seek? On that day, thermal emotions erupted in outbursts at the monitors. But the anger and fear they both represented and provoked would be cynically tapped and manipulated by both Zarqawi and his Shia opponents, and would lead to mind-numbing internecine cruelty.
Because I had always shared the fairly common army ethos that self-promotion was something quiet professionals eschewed, I was disappointed soon after Saddam’s capture when I found out that members of my force had given President Bush the pistol found with Saddam in his spider hole. While I understood the desire of the team to thank a president they had followed in combat since 9/11, I felt such an act smacked too much of currying favor. My opinion changed somewhat in 2008 when I went with then–Brigadier General Scott Miller to the Oval Office to brief President Bush. He showed us the pistol, which he had kept in a framed exhibition case. I realized the gesture had, in fact, meant much to a person in the loneliest of jobs, wartime commander-in-chief.
* * *
Any optimism Saddam’s capture brought was short lived, and a growing Sunni insurgency was emerging as the principal threat in Iraq. The de-Baathification decision from the previous summer, which reduced Sunni presence in key positions, reinforced Sunnis’ fears that the fall of Saddam would leave them disenfranchised in the face of Shia dominance. The dissolution of the Iraqi army stoked those fears and pushed thousands of trained potential fighters into an economy wracked by unemployment. Severe electricity shortages—which deprived Iraqis of fans or air-conditioning in the searing summer and convinced many that the high-tech American military withheld basic services out of spite—brought frustrations to a boil.
Particularly troubling was the assessment that one of Green’s top intel analysts, then-Major Wayne Barefoot, brought when he came to my office in Iraq two weeks after Saddam’s arrest, during the first week of January.
“Sir,” Wayne said, “we have good reason to believe Zarqawi is in Iraq.” Although we knew he had been in northern Iraq on the cusp of the American invasion, and attacks over the summer and fall had borne his hallmark, this was the first time we had felt certain he was setting up shop in the country. “And, sir,” Wayne continued, “we believe he’s building up a network.” Most troubling, the Jordanian operative seemed to be angling to control the growing Iraqi uprising.
At the time, my focus was still primarily on the venues where we believed Al Qaeda’s command structure lay, Afghanistan and Pakistan. I sensed but didn’t fully appreciate at the time what Zarqawi’s presence in Iraq augured. He was preparing to shift the group’s center of gravity from the Hindu Kush to Anbar. But his growing impact also represented a broader post-9/11 change in the nature and networking of Al Qaeda, as our pressure had forced the group to move beyond its core-guided organizational model in the 1990s. We were seeing more, but Al Qaeda’s command structure remained opaque.
On 9/11, Al Qaeda still largely organized its movement as it had at its inception thirteen years earlier. On an international scale, it mirrored the model of native insurgent movements I had studied throughout my career. This model included three concentric circles: a core group, enclosed by support elements, with auxiliary components on the periphery.