Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [281]
The resistance was centered in Iraq’s western Sunni provinces. Because the 3rd Infantry Division had been denied access to Iraq’s north through Turkey, most of the Sunni territory was not covered by U.S. troops in the early days of the war. Major combat operations were over by the time U.S. troops reached those strongholds. This meant that cities like Fallujah, Tikrit, and Ramadi never experienced major battles with U.S. troops and became safe havens for insurgents.
In the list of intelligence shortcomings, the failure to highlight the dangers of an insurgency was among the more serious. Intelligence reports occasionally discussed the possibility of postwar disorder and instability, but I don’t recall seeing a briefing that anticipated the likelihood of a sustained guerrilla campaign against the coalition.* Our intelligence community lacked an appreciation for the Baathist regime’s ability to finance, command, and control an insurgency after Saddam’s overthrow. They repeatedly asserted that ideological conflicts between the secular Baathists and the jihadist religious extremists of al-Qaida precluded strategic cooperation between them—yet such cooperation became the heart and soul of the insurgency.
Out of the dozens of intelligence and military briefings on what might be expected from a war in Iraq, the first time I had heard of the possibility of “protracted guerrilla war” came from someone removed from the intelligence community. In April 2003, as our troops raced northward through Iraq, a retired Marine colonel named Gary Anderson wrote an op-ed on the possibility of a guerrilla war. Anderson had served in Somalia and Lebanon and was steeped in the lessons of asymmetric warfare. “Many observers of the war with Iraq are focused on the looming battle for Baghdad in anticipation that it will be the culminating event of the conflict ... ,” he wrote in the Washington Post several days before the fall of Baghdad. “But in the view of the Iraqi leadership, it may be only the end of a first stage in a greater Iraqi plan.” He warned about the rise of “a protracted guerrilla war against the ‘occupation,’ which the American-British coalition bills as liberation.”50 He even raised the specter that the new phase of the war could be managed by Saddam himself. After reading Anderson’s article, I decided it should be of interest to Bremer and Abizaid. Because I found it different from what we were being told, I also sent it to Myers, Wolfowitz, and Feith and asked them to give it some thought.51
Senior DoD officials discussed what we should label this resistance movement in July 2003. I did not want to label the enemy inaccurately or give it legitimacy that it didn’t deserve. As the new CENTCOM commander, Abizaid did an initial assessment of the problem. In one of his first press briefings as CENTCOM commander, he called it “a classical guerrilla-type campaign against us.”52 Guerrillas can have positive connotations in many parts of the world. Many saw guerrillas as the brave vanguard of an outmatched force committed to bringing down a government through asymmetric means. I was also cautious about using the word “insurgency” at first. Insurgency struck me as an organized effort with a central command and control committed to the overthrow of a government. DoD’s official definition of the term supported this interpretation.* In summer 2003, Iraq didn’t have its own government and, moreover, the attacks seemed to lack central coordination. I told senior DoD officials that we had “to do a better job of using words that are well