Iraq War II, Part 10: Soda Straws and EFPs
To mark the 20th anniversary of the "wholly unjustified and brutal invasion" of Iraq, as George W. Bush himself now characterizes it, we are serializing that chapter from my 2021 book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism over the next few weeks exclusively here at Substack.
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven, Part Twelve, Part Thirteen, Part Fourteen.
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During the Iraq “surge,” the U.S. also fought a small war against one major Shi’ite faction. The infamous “Collateral Murder” video leaked by Chelsea Manning and published by Wikileaks showed a July 12, 2007, Apache helicopter gunship attack which killed a group of civilians, including two Reuters reporters, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. They had been covering the U.S. Army fighting in East Baghdad against the Shi’ite forces of Muqtada al-Sadr.
Sadr, however, was part of the United Iraqi Alliance that the Americans were supporting and fighting so hard to enthrone in power in Baghdad. “Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada!” the mob had chanted at Saddam Hussein’s hanging in 2006. The son and son-in-law of two powerful Shi’ite clerics who had both been murdered by Saddam Hussein, Sadr had an incredible amount of political legitimacy among the Shi’ite masses in southern Iraq. As soon as U.S. troops entered the capital in 2003, the people of the eastern Baghdad slum “Saddam City” renamed it “Sadr City” in his family’s honor. Initially dismissed as just a “minor cleric” and nuisance by U.S. occupation forces, Sadr has been one of the major kingmakers behind the Da’wa Party and ISCI leaders that America has put in power since 2005. Prime ministers Jaafari, al-Maliki, Abadi, Mahdi and Al-Kadhimi have all gotten the job with, and only with, Sadr’s support. Yet in 2007, America was taking the fight to him at the same time as his sometimes-enemies in the Sunni-based insurgency.
Secretary of Defense Gates said that the problem with the public seeing the “Collateral Murder” video was that they “end up looking at the war through a soda straw,” and so could not understand the proper context or meaning.
So, what was the context? Why was the U.S. fighting to weaken one of the three central pillars of the faction they were fighting the whole war to install in power? It was to weaken his influence compared to the Supreme Islamic Council and the Da’wa Party, his major partners in the United Iraqi Alliance group. But to what actual end, and at what cost? The Americans claimed that Sadr was a puppet of Iran and was serving their interests by insisting that the U.S. withdraw all forces from the country. This was despite the fact that since the start of the war, Sadr had positioned himself as an Iraqi nationalist, willing to cooperate with the Sunnis — when his forces were not helping to cleanse them from their neighborhoods — and had repeatedly denounced both the U.S. and Iran for their interference in the country. During the first battle of Fallujah in the spring of 2004, the Sadrists had also risen up in response to the shutting down of one of their newspapers in eastern Baghdad. In the middle of that fight, he sent Shi’ite fighters in pickup trucks to Fallujah in the predominantly Sunni west to show nationalist solidarity and fight on their side against Gen. Mattis’s marines.
Sadr had also routinely condemned the far more Iran-tied ISCI and Da’wa factions for their emphasis on the Iran-friendly policy of “strong federalism” for Iraq. Sadr wanted an alliance with the Sunnis and a strong central Iraqi government with the ability to limit foreign intervention in Iraq by the U.S. or their neighbors.
The assault on Sadr’s forces during the 2007–2008 surge killed many people, but if anything, it accomplished the opposite of the mission’s goals. Sadr himself escaped the assault by fleeing to Iran, where he received further religious instruction and gained a higher clerical rank. In response to Petraeus’s assault, many members of Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army, traveled to Iran to be trained by the Iranian Quds force, supposedly the reason the U.S. launched the attack against them in the first place. Republican Senator John McCain famously accused Iran of taking in al Qaeda fighters for training until his friend Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman stepped up to correct him to just call them “militants.” This revealed that McCain, one of the biggest proponents of the 2003 invasion and the 2007 “surge,” did not have the first clue who was fighting who in Iraq nor what Iran’s role in the conflict was. Sadr also continued to insist on American withdrawal as a condition for continuing to support the al-Maliki government the U.S. had installed.
In 2006, President Bush and the military began to claim that all their Iraq problems were Iran’s fault. But in 2007, with the launch of the “surge,” the administration started a whole new media campaign to reinforce this narrative. Any time an American soldier was killed fighting in a predominantly Shi’ite part of the country, typically in eastern Baghdad or the southern city of Najaf, the U.S. would blame it on Iran, particularly if they were killed by an Explosively Formed Penetrator (EFP) roadside bomb. EFPs were a distinct improvement over other forms of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in that they were shaped charges with copper cores that could cut through American armor. More than 500 out of the 4,500 Americans killed in Iraq War II lost their lives fighting Sadr’s Mahdi Army, many of them by these EFPs. A major propaganda campaign was launched by Gen. Petraeus and the American media. Michael Gordon of the New York Times, the same man who co-authored many of Judith Miller’s worst tall tales about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programs in 2002 and 2003, took the lead pushing this story on the public. They claimed that all of these bombs had Iranian origins and had been sent as part of a plot to kill American troops. But it was shown repeatedly in reports by Gordon’s New York Times colleague, Alissa Rubin, Reuters staff, Andrew Cockburn in the Los Angeles Times, Yochi J. Dreazen in the Wall Street Journal, Ellen Knickmeyer in the Washington Post, David Hambling in Wired, Sam Dagher of the Christian Science Monitor, Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker and Gareth Porter in Interpress Service that the EFPs were not Iranian weapons. They were made in Iraq by Iraqis. Further, Porter demonstrated that the Iraqi Shi’ites had picked up the technique from Lebanese Hezbollah, who in turn had first learned it from the Irish Republican Army, not Iran.
Retired Marine Captain Matthew Hoh, regimental engineer in 2006 and 2007 for the 7th and then 2nd Marines and who was stationed at the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) in 2008, confirmed to the author that “Yes, the EFPs were all made in Iraq, in workshops by Iraqis.”
James Aragon, at the time an Air Force Master Sergeant-select, was then an augmentee for 5th Special Forces Group when that unit took command of Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Arabian Peninsula (CJSOTF-AP). He was the Combined Intelligence Cell night-shift Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge (NCOIC) and lead analyst for concerns related to Iranian influence in Iraq. Aragon “lived and breathed the secret side of the war for over 2,600 hours” and “read over 4,000 intelligence summaries from all intelligence agencies” during the 2007–2008 period. He told the author in an email that Iranian Quds Force commander, Qasem Soleimani “denied to Iraq Minister of Interior Jawad al-Bulani that he had any knowledge of EFPs in Iraq. I never saw any intelligence that proved otherwise.”
That is no surprise because there was no evidence proving that the EFPs came from Iran, much less that they were all sent as part of an Iranian military operation against the United States. Petraeus scheduled a big press conference to state his accusations, but they canceled it when the assembled reporters started looking critically at the pile of random hardware laid out for display. They noticed that some had “Made in the UAE” printed on them in English, and others read in Arabic, “Made in Haditha,” that is, Iraq. This again indicated that these parts were bought on the open market and assembled there. “The truth is, quite frankly, we thought the briefing overstated, and we sent it back to get it narrowed and focused on the facts,” National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley admitted. They never tried again. The CIA, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Peter Pace, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the British army all backed down from claims about Iranian involvement in the Sadrist resistance and the supplying of roadside bombs.
Even if the military had proven the Iranian origin of these weapons — which they never did — they certainly did not show that the Iranian government was behind the effort at all. Due to the war, the border was essentially left wide open to arms dealers and black marketeers of all descriptions. Also, the only reason Sadr’s Mahdi Army was fighting and killing any Americans at all was because Petraeus had decided to pick an ultimately meaningless fight.
The EFP narrative was a lie, one that the hawks used throughout the spring of 2007 to try to push President Bush into striking Iranian Quds Force targets inside Iran, which he thankfully refused to do. This was apparently based on sound advice given to him by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that if the U.S. were to start a war with Iran, they could not promise “escalation dominance.” While America’s technically sophisticated armed forces far outmatched the Iranians, they did not have confidence that they could control every stage of the war. It was not clear what Iran might do to retaliate, but the generals knew they would not be able to prevent it. In the event of a real war with Iran, the U.S. had tens of thousands of troops and a vast array of military targets vulnerable to missile attack in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain. This was especially true in Iraq where the U.S. had more than a hundred thousand troops stationed at the time, and which could be expected to “light up like a candle,” because, as a four-star general told Seymour Hersh, “the Iranians could take Basra with ten mullahs and one sound truck.” Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq (ISCI) told a journalist that if the U.S. attacked Iran, “Then, we would do our duty.” In other words, their Badr Brigade, and for that matter the new Iraqi army, would turn on their American allies and fight on Iran’s side of the war in an instant.
At this point, the neoconservatives were desperate. None other than David Wurmser, the man who said invading Iraq would tame the wicked Iranian mullahs, was among those most determined to spread the war to Iran to try to correct for his massive error. It was Wurmser, then-Vice President Cheney’s deputy assistant for national security affairs, who told a group of hawks in late spring 2007 that due to Bush’s reluctance to attack, Cheney was considering having the Israelis provoke a conflict with Iran as an “end run” around the president, to trap him into going to war. They would force Iran to hit U.S. naval forces in the Gulf in retaliation for Israeli missile strikes against the Natanz nuclear facility, thus starting a full-scale war. This wild-sounding claim by Washington, D.C. liberal think tank official Steven Clemons was confirmed by the New York Times, Time magazine and Washington Post reporter-author Barton Gellman in his book Angler.
The commander of CENTCOM, Admiral William “Fox” Fallon, finally made it known publicly that the U.S. would attack Iran “over his dead body,” and that the administration had better cool their harsh rhetoric. He was clearly insubordinate, but it sure is ironic how America’s permanent standing military is so often the restraining force on their own civilian commanders. As America’s founders knew, the military has the most substantial incentive to find things to do to keep itself going at the people’s expense. But thankfully, they sometimes also pull the brakes on the civilians’ worst political agendas. In this case, it seems that the Joint Chiefs and CENTCOM commander were the most important factors in stopping the war in the spring and summer of 2007.
There may be some truth to the claim that the Iranian Quds Force helped to coordinate Shi’ite resistance to the U.S. in East Baghdad and Najaf. Iran had reason to let the Americans know that their stay was only temporary, and that the Shi’ite majority was only tolerating them for short term help in defeating their Sunni Arab enemies. But it was never proven. The claim that they were behind the EFP roadside bombing campaign is demonstrably false. The idea that they were the reason everything had gone wrong with the war was only as true as U.S. forces made it for them.
The book The Good Soldiers by Dexter Filkins tells the story of these soldiers who were killing and dying in this war in East Baghdad during the “surge,” fighting against one of the exact same factions that their army was fighting for in the larger war. At only one point each do the local commander and the journalist-author muse about the irony of fighting a war against their ally before dismissing those concerns and getting back to the work of leading and chronicling that fight.
The leader of the brigade profiled in that book, Sadr City “surge” commander U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich, was credibly accused by two of his soldiers, Ethan McCord and Josh Stieber, of ordering them to commit war crimes against civilians in that unnecessary subset of an unnecessary war. Retired Army Major Danny Sjursen, the influential antiwar writer and activist, lost his best friend Alex Fuller and many others fighting these pointless battles against the Shi’ites of eastern Baghdad during Petraeus’s failed “surge.” None of this succeeded in marginalizing the power of Muqtada al-Sadr, who remains one of the most powerful political figures in Iraq to this day, where he still rails against American and Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs.
Stay tuned to this space for the rest of Enough Already, Chapter 3 Iraq War II. They will be published every few days until the anniversary of the invasion in mid-March.
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