Saturday, October 15, 2005
I voted against.

The verdict against one of the soldiers involved in the drowning of Zaydun was a major disappointment. The defense continues to claim that no body was found, hence no murder. No one brought up the point that US authorities in Samarra kept postponing the exhumation of Zaydun's corpse using the excuse of the security condition in the city.

The National Guard unit which helped Marwan out of the water was not brought in to testify and the court seems to have brushed aside the fact that they are important witnesses to the case. The lying and conflicting statements by the soldiers and their commanders was also not discussed.

Maybe we were simply naive to be led to believe that pursuing the case in a US court would help bring justice. But this is hardly the end of it.

The body had not yet turned up. Indeed, at that point, early in January 2004, it wasn't clear there was a body at all. Months later, at the trial, the lawyers would still be arguing about it, the puffy, wrinkled corpse that was finally found floating face down in an irrigation canal off the Tigris. But even then, even before the dead man surfaced, it was clear that something had gone wrong on that cold Iraqi night down by the river, something wild by the American military's standards of discipline and force, and the problem had wended its way up the chain of command to the unit's commander, Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman.

From his base in Balad, a largely Shiite city in a sea of Sunni villages, Sassaman bucked the civilian authorities and held local elections months earlier than in most of the country's other towns and cities. His relations with the locals in Balad were so warm that on each Friday afternoon, inside a circle of tanks on an empty field, his men would face off against the Iraqis for a game of soccer. He was a West Point grad and the son of a Methodist minister. As quarterback for Army's football team in the 1980's, he ran for 1,002 yards in a single season and carried West Point's team to its first bowl victory. Everyone in the Army knew of Nate Sassaman.

Yet as his junior officers briefed him in January about what had happened to two Iraqis his men detained that night by the Tigris, the straight lines and rigid hierarchy of the Army that had created him seemed, like so many other American ideas brought to this murky land, no longer particularly relevant. More important, Sassaman told me later, were his own men, most of them 19- and 20-year-old kids plunked down in this seething country, wearing themselves out to keep the enterprise going, coming under fire four or five times a day. The same day that his men took the two Iraqis down to the river, he attended a memorial service for one of his ablest junior officers, Capt. Eric Paliwoda, whose heart had been punctured by mortar shrapnel and whom Sassaman had lifted into a medevac helicopter as the last of his life drained away.

There would be a fuss if his superiors discovered what his men had done that night, Sassaman did not doubt. It would be the kind of indignation you could expect from people who didn't really know what it was like to fight and live in this place. Sure, it was a dumb thing, but his men had assured him that neither of the Iraqis had been hurt. His best platoon commander even jumped into the water a couple of days later to prove the point. And so Sassaman, standing on the porch of the battalion's command post, decided to flout his 19 years in the Army and his straight-and-narrow upbringing. He turned to one of his company commanders, Capt. Matthew Cunningham, and told him what to do.

"Tell them about everything," Sassaman said, "except the water."

The events that would end the career of one of the Army's most celebrated midlevel officers sent a shock through the American force in Iraq. It is only now, with the Army's investigation complete and Sassaman's career over, that the story can be pieced together from interviews with him, his comrades and the Iraqis. Twenty-two months after that night on the Tigris, it is a tale that seems like a parable of the dark passage that lay ahead for the Americans in Iraq.

[...]

Sometimes Sassaman's efforts in Balad approached the absurd. When he wanted to set up a police force, no one in his battalion had the slightest idea of what this would entail. His men asked around, and it turned out that a reservist who was attached to Sassaman's battalion had brought an operations manual with him from the Tiverton, R.I., Police Department. Soon the Balad Police Department was functioning remarkably like its counterpart in a New England village. When Sassaman decided to hold an election, some members of the civilian leadership in Baghdad thought he was pushing too fast. Sassaman and his men forged ahead anyway, registering 45,000 voters. He finally received permission by agreeing to call the balloting a "selection," not an "election."

His power was very nearly total. He could chart the future of a city, lock up anyone he wanted and, if trouble arose, call in an airstrike. When he walked into a crowd, the Iraqis would sometimes smile and sometimes tremble, and sometimes both.

"For a whole year," Sassaman told me, "I was the warrior king."

For all the intensity of the war in Iraq, one of the most remarkable things is how little American generals prepared the Army to fight it. When Sassaman and his men arrived in Iraq, they were ready to fight World War II or the first gulf war, but nothing as murky as a guerrilla insurgency. ("I wish there were more people who knew about nation-building," Sassaman told me one night. "Don't they have those people at the State Department?")

[...]

As we wound our way down a country road, we spotted Sassaman and a handful of his men standing on the roadside, gathered round an Iraqi man. It was an interrogation.

"If you weren't here with your camera, we would beat the [expletive] out of this guy," one of the soldiers said. He may have been bluffing, but he was clearly frustrated. Sassaman seemed a harder man, too, though it had been just a few weeks since he was swearing in the City Council and his men were playing soccer with the locals. Beginning in October, the Iraqi insurgency had taken off. The American command decided to lift the curfew in many Iraqi cities to coincide with the arrival of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. Sassaman went further, setting up a tent and inviting local tribal leaders to announce a "cease-fire." As long as his men did not come under attack, Sassaman told the sheiks, he would ease off from offensive operations.

[...]

In one dawn raid, soldiers from the 1-8 Battalion surrounded a house, kicked open its doors and stormed inside. They rousted 11 men from their beds, pulled them outside and forced them to squat on their haunches. Still inside, in the living room, a young woman stood with three small girls, probably her daughters, each with her hands high in the air. The Americans found no weapons. The Iraqi men squatted outside for half an hour. "I feel bad for these people, I really do," Sgt. Eric Brown said that morning. "It's so hard to separate the good from the bad."

On the night of Nov. 17, as one of the battalion's patrols moved past Abu Hishma, a crowd of young Iraqis began taunting them. Seconds later, a team of insurgents fired a volley of rocket-propelled grenades directly at one of the Bradleys. One rocket-propelled grenade, or R.P.G., sailed directly into the chest of the driver, Staff Sgt. Dale Panchot. It nearly cut him in half.

The death of Panchot seemed to change everything for the battalion.

[...]

The day after Panchot was killed, Sassaman ordered his men to wrap Abu Hishma in barbed wire. American soldiers issued ID cards to all the men in the village between the ages of 17 and 65, and the soldiers put up checkpoints at the entrance to the town. Around the camp were signs threatening to shoot anyone who tried to enter or leave the town except in the approved way. The ID cards were in English only. "If you have one of these cards, you can come and go," Sassaman said, standing at the gate of the village as the Iraqis filed past. "If you don't have one of these cards, you can't."

As a measure intended to persuade the Iraqis to cooperate, wrapping Abu Hishma in barbed wire was a disaster. As they lined up at the checkpoints, the Iraqis compared themselves with Palestinians, who are sometimes forced to undergo the same sort of security checks and whose humiliations are shown relentlessly on television screens across the Arab world. "It's just like a prison now," said Hajji Thamir Rabia, an old man in the village. "The Americans do night raids, come into our houses when the women are sleeping. We can't fight them. We don't have any weapons." After Abu Hishma was wrapped in barbed wire, the attacks against the Americans dropped off, but it was a victory bought at no small price. Much of the village felt humiliated and angry, hardly the conditions for future success. Sassaman's reputation was sealed, as I discovered when I slipped past the guards and into the town. "When mothers put their children to bed at night, they tell them, 'If you aren't a good boy, Colonel Sassaman is going to come and get you,"' an old man in the village said.

[...]

Under the prodding of the generals, Sassaman took the concept of nonlethal force to its limits. His theory was that no progress would be possible without order first and that ultimately, even if his men were hard on the locals, they would come around. When his men came under fire from a wheat field, Sassaman routinely retaliated by firing phosphorous shells to burn the entire field down. The ambush site would be gone, and farmers might be persuaded not to allow insurgents to use their land again.

Sassaman detained Sunni sheiks, holding them responsible when his troops were attacked. When Iraqis gave him bad intelligence, he detained them too. When locals scrawled graffiti on a wall, denouncing President Bush or calling on the Iraqis to kill Americans, Sassaman asked local leaders to paint it over, and if they did not, he ordered his men to destroy it. If kids threw rocks, his men threw rocks back. If they caught an Iraqi man out after curfew, they piled him into a Bradley, drove him miles outside of town and told him to walk home. "All I was getting at was, If grown-ups throw rocks at me, we're throwing them back," Sassaman said. "We are not going to just wave. We are not driving by and taking it. Because a lot of the units did."

On a mission in January 2004, a group of Sassaman's soldiers came to the house of an Iraqi man suspected of hijacking trucks. He wasn't there, but his wife and two other women answered the door. "You have 15 minutes to get your furniture out," First Sgt. Ghaleb Mikel said. The women wailed and shouted but ultimately complied, dragging their bed and couch and television set out the front door. Mikel's men then fired four antitank missiles into their house, blowing it to pieces and setting it afire. The women were left holding their belongings.

"It's called the 'leave no refuge' policy," Mikel later explained to Johan Spanner, a photographer working for The New York Times.

That same winter in Samarra, Sassaman's men moved through a hospital and pulled a suspected insurgent from his bed. When a doctor told the Americans to leave, a soldier spat in his face. Another time, an officer told Spanner, one of Sassaman's soldiers threw a wounded man into a cell and threatened to withhold treatment unless he told them everything he knew. "We've told him he's not getting medical attention unless he starts to talk," Capt. Karl Pfuetze told Spanner. The man's fate was unknown. (Pfuetze now denies the withholding of treatment. Sassaman insists he never condoned beatings or denial of medical treatment.)

The best explanation for such tactics was offered by an officer in the Fourth Infantry Division. Echoing the private comments of many American officers, he said that the Iraqis seemed to understand only force. "To an American, this might upset our sense of decency," he added. "But the Iraqi mind-set was different. Whoever displays the most strength and authority is the one they are going to obey. They might be bitter, but they obey."

Among the enlisted men in Sassaman's unit, one of them, Specialist Ralph Logan, had demonstrated his misgivings about the rough tactics. Logan, 26, was sometimes chided by his peers for the delicacy with which he searched Iraqi houses, carefully pulling blankets out of closets and folding them into piles, while his comrades flung everything onto the floor. "People didn't exactly get beaten up," Logan said. "They got slapped around, roughed up, usually after they were detained. It was gratuitous. Sassaman didn't do it, but he definitely knew about it. He definitely condoned it."

But most of the tactics employed by Sassaman's men had been explicitly ordered or at least condoned by senior American officers, and many units in the Sunni Triangle were already using the same kind of tough-guy methods.

[...]

Majool Saadi Muhammad, 49, a tribal leader in Abu Hishma, said that he had harbored no strong feelings about the Americans when they arrived in April 2003 and was proud to have three sons serving in the new American-backed Iraqi Army. Then the raids began, and many of Abu Hishma's young men were led away in hoods and cuffs. In early 2004, he said, Sassaman led a raid on his house, kicking in the doors and leaving the place a shambles. "There is no explanation except to humiliate," Muhammad told me. "I really hate them."

[...]

"The soldiers fighting the insurgents became demoralized because they were the strong fighting the weak," van Creveld says. "Everything they did seemed to be wrong. If they let the weaker army kill them, they were idiots. If they attacked the smaller army, they were seen as killers. The effect, in nearly every case, is demoralization and breakdowns of discipline."

One such moment may have come in January 2004, when Mikel and his men, on the same day they destroyed the women's home, asked a group of about 10 Iraqi men to help them find someone. According to Johan Spanner, the photographer, the men shrugged and told Mikel that they didn't know anything. Mikel and his men told the Iraqis to do push-ups. "Do this," one of the Americans said, getting down on the ground to demonstrate. So the Iraqi men got down on the ground and started doing push-ups, and the American soldiers stood around and laughed.

It was around this time that soldiers in the 1-8 started getting people wet.