The Long, Blinding Road to War

Unexpected Challenges Tested Petraeus in Iraq

First of three articles

At 7:30 a.m. on March 26, 2003, I slipped into the command post tent of the 101st Airborne Division to find the commander, Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, on the telephone. His face was drawn, as if he had slept poorly. Two days of appalling weather had virtually halted the U.S. Army's drive toward Baghdad, including the 101st, which was now trying to gather itself in a miserable swatch of Iraqi desert called Forward Operating Base Shell, 30 miles southwest of Najaf. Dust lay drifted in windrows inside every tent, and the division's 260 helicopters looked like they had been dipped in milk chocolate.

Worse yet, Iraqi Fedayeen irregulars continued to attack U.S. forces with fanatical and unexpected intensity. As Petraeus finished his call, an intelligence officer whispered to me that orders had come down overnight banning the term "Fedayeen," which means "men who sacrifice themselves for a cause," because it ostensibly invested them with too much dignity. They were to be referred to as "paramilitaries," an edict most soldiers duly ignored.

Petraeus hung up and ordered an aide to get his Humvee ready for a trip to the V Corps command post 20 miles to the north. He pushed back from the table, snapped the chin strap on his helmet, and shrugged on his flak vest. "Want to step outside and chat for a minute?" he asked.

We stood 15 feet beyond the tent flap. I blinked at the swirling dust, and felt grit between my molars. When Petraeus turned to face me, I was alarmed to see how troubled his blue eyes were. "This thing is turning [bad]," he said. "The 3 ID" -- the 3rd Infantry Division, fighting just ahead of the 101st around Najaf -- "is in danger of running out of food and water. They lost two Abrams and a Bradley last night, although they got the crews out. The corps commander sounds tired."

A scheme to parachute the 82nd Airborne Division into the Karbala Gap -- the Army's preferred gateway to Baghdad -- had evaporated. Two battalions had their jump gear rigged and ready at Kuwait International Airport, but the proposed drop zone was discovered to be perilously rocky; also, it was uncertain that ground reinforcements would reach the paratroops in time to forestall substantial casualties. Instead, the 82nd would be used to secure besieged supply routes in southern Iraq.

The dust was blinding. I had misplaced my goggles and it was difficult to see without squinting hard. I suggested that we move behind his small tent, which was adjacent to the command post, but when dust pursued us there we stepped inside.

Petraeus noted that because of Turkey's opposition, the Pentagon had finally abandoned all hope of pushing the 4th Infantry Division into northern Iraq through Turkey. The flotilla of ships carrying the division equipment would sail from the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal, around the Arabian Peninsula, and up the Persian Gulf. "You know how long that will take," Petraeus said.

U.S. forces had yet to encounter the Republican Guard, but Iraqi irregulars seemed much more aggressive than anticipated and the Shiite south, contrary to expectations, had hardly welcomed the invaders as liberators. The battlefield was what soldiers call nonlinear, with only a vague distinction between the front and the rear.

"No one really saw this coming, did they?" I said.

"No," he replied. No prewar estimates had anticipated a defense of Najaf by Iraqi regular army or Republican Guard troops, nor did those estimates predict stiff resistance from paramilitary forces. "We did worst-case scenarios, where the enemy really put up a fight, but no one took it very seriously. We need to get lucky. The CIA really needs to pull one out."

For the first time since the war began on March 20, it was evident that senior battlefield generals believed that the campaign was developing in unexpected and disturbing ways. Capturing or killing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein seemed a wan hope at the moment, and I said as much. Petraeus agreed. "Hell, we couldn't find Noriega for four days in a country that we owned," he said, referring to the frustrating hunt for the strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega in Panama in 1989.