Iraqi Stability Depends on U.S. Business
While U.S. presidents and secretaries of state fill their planes to Baghdad with aides and journalists, foreign leaders fill theirs with businessmen.
RAMADI—Seventeen years ago the road from Abu Ghraib through Fallujah to Ramadi was among the most dangerous real estate in Iraq. On Feb. 12, 2004, insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades at a convoy transporting John Abizaid, then-commander of U.S. Central Command, and Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, in Fallujah. Later that month, insurgents attacked three police stations simultaneously and freed close to one hundred prisoners. By March 2004, insurgents were cementing control over Fallujah. Attacks on U.S. and allied Iraqi forces became a near-daily occurrence both in the city, in nearby Habbaniyah, and in the provincial capital Ramadi. On March 31, 2004, insurgents ambushed a Blackwater convoy, set their bodies ablaze, dragged their corpses through the streets, and hung their charred remains from a bridge spanning the Euphrates River. One week later, U.S. forces besieged the city. Twenty-four days later, U.S. Marine General James Conway lifted the siege and transferred power to the so-called Fallujah Brigade. It did not work. During the siege, there were five bombings; in the weeks that followed, there were thirty. By the end of the year, the U.S. military was back. Fallujah was leveled. “It was like Hiroshima” one resident explained to me over tea yesterday. Tragedy was not over. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a sectarian Shi’ite, systematically discriminated against the governorate between 2006 and 2014. The Islamic State insurgency took control of the province and terrorized local residents. As that group fell, locals skirmished with Iranian-backed militiamen. Eating lamb and rice at a communal lunch yesterday, a tribal sheikh told me simply, “We lived through hell.”