By Kevin Carroll
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
The United States pulled out of Iraq after 23 years at
the beginning of October. Most news articles I read ranged from downbeat to pessimistic. I understand why, as the war was a mistake and
became unpopular, but the coverage didn’t capture the full picture of what I
remember. As an Iraq war veteran myself, I felt relief that no more Americans
will be killed there and wonder about what our slain or wounded brothers and
sisters’ sacrifices accomplished. Everyone who served in Iraq had their own
distinct experience. An amputee or
someone whose friend died in their arms has a harder-earned opinion than mine
and may disagree with me. But I’m glad I served in Iraq.
I was a reserve military intelligence captain assigned to
the Joint Staff at the Pentagon in 2002, just a junior officer, but one with a
view from the cheap seats as the Bush administration headed to war. We should
remember what President George W. Bush knew, or thought he knew, about Iraq and
about al-Qaeda between September 11, 2001, and March 20, 2003.
In the 18 months between 9/11 and the Iraq invasion, Bush
was bombarded daily with intelligence reports that 1) al-Qaeda planned further
mass casualty attacks on the U.S., which was true, as the main 9/11 plotter
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed revealed when captured by the Central Intelligence
Agency in Pakistan in March 2002; and 2) that the group had obtained a nuclear
weapon, which was not true.
Iraq was a state sponsor of terrorism supporting Palestinian jihadist groups. Saddam Hussein
started two wars that killed several hundred thousand people, gassed his own
citizens, and ran a fascist police state that brutally oppressed the country’s
Shiite majority and Kurdish minority. Its military regularly shot at allied
planes enforcing the U.N.-endorsed no-fly zones over Iraq. The Iraqi
Intelligence Service (IIS) plotted to assassinate President George H.W. Bush.
President Bill Clinton had signed legislation committing the U.S. to overthrowing
Iraq’s Baathist regime.
Every intelligence service in the world believed Saddam
possessed chemical weapons stockpiles, and many thought he sought nuclear
weapons. Intelligence from allies who did not want America to go to war, such
as France and Germany, emphasized the risk of our troops suffering casualties
from chemical weapons.
Intelligence regarding any links between Saddam and Osama
bin Laden was then inconclusive. We knew that a senior member of
al-Qaeda, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, had been in the IIS. Was Hadi the IIS liaison
between Saddam’s secular regime and bin Laden’s millenarian terror group? Or
did he become a religious radical and defect to al-Qaeda? The latter, as we
found out only after Hadi was captured circa 2007.
An Iraqi embassy official in Malaysia, Ahmad Hikmat
Shakir, expedited future 9/11 hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi
through airport customs and to the January 2000 meeting where that attack was
planned ... and then disappeared. Was Shakir an IIS officer? Doubtful, but we
only learned that later from Hadi, Saddam, and documents recovered from bin
Laden’s Pakistan hideaway.
The 16 Iraqi detainees captured in Afghanistan and held
at Guantanamo were regularly interrogated about their knowledge of any
relationship between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime, but they were all
low-ranking and had no such knowledge.
We also knew that Jordanian al-Qaeda member Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi was holed up in northern Iraq, plotting poison attacks on European
subways such as the Paris Metro, which were thwarted, and the assassination of
American diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman, which succeeded in October 2002. Was Saddam helping Zarqawi? No,
but we did not know that then.
Considerable thought was given to dropping the Ranger
Regiment and an Army special mission unit (SMU) on Zarqawi’s mountain redoubt
in July 2002 to disrupt his plots, which we knew were real, down to imagery
intelligence of his men gassing goats to death. When some of Zarqawi’s
operatives were arrested en route to Europe, the decision was made to cancel
the special operations raid and wait until the conventional invasion of Iraq in
2003 to deal with his terror camp. That was a consequential mistake: Zarqawi
was responsible for triggering Iraq’s sectarian civil war in February 2006, and
his al-Qaeda in Iraq group killed thousands of American service members before
special operators and an F-16 fighter jet killed him in July of that year. A
successful raid, short of a full invasion, might have sufficiently deterred
Saddam from giving terrorists shelter in Iraq.
The National Security Council staff and the Office of the
Secretary of Defense asked the Joint Staff repeatedly about the Iraq/al-Qaeda
question. To his great credit, our boss Patrick Duecy shielded intelligence
analysts from any pressure that might have been exerted from on high to reach a
certain answer. Anyone with the proper security clearances could read the
limited available information for themselves, he said. The reporting was smoke
but not fire, as there was no evidence of a link between Saddam and bin
Laden.
Contemporaneously, Chicago gang member turned terrorist
José Padilla and fellow al-Qaeda member Adnan Gulshair el Shukrijumah traveled
to the U.S. to plan an attack using a radiological dispersion device or “dirty
bomb.” Padilla was arrested as he deplaned at O’Hare Airport in May 2002, while
Shukrijumah remained at large until killed by Pakistani special forces in
December 2014. Their dirty bomb plot was impractical: They lacked the
radioactive material to build the device. The pair considered instead renting
Manhattan apartments and leaving gas stoves on and time bombs behind them as
they left. The resulting blast could destroy a building, killing hundreds of
New Yorkers as they slept.
I was on counterterrorism watch at the Pentagon on the
evening of September 10-11, 2002. Voluminous intelligence reporting indicated
another attack on New York City would take place on the 9/11 anniversary. The
night before, the Coast Guard reported that radiological sensors found a
nuclear weapon on a cargo ship in New York Harbor, the M/V Palermo Senator.
The director of defense intelligence, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, was about to
wake up Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers and Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld with this alarming news when a reservist, who was a nuclear
scientist in civilian life, encouraged everyone to check the ship’s cargo
manifest, as ceramic tile sometimes gave off a false positive for radiation.
The Coast Guard confirmed that the Palermo Senator carried a cargo of
... ceramic tile. The Coasties, the Navy’s SMU, and its explosive ordnance
disposal team still got the ship out of New York Harbor and searched it from
stem to stern, way out at sea, just to be sure.
The intelligence community (IC) decided years later that
al-Qaeda didn’t have a nuclear weapon, for the simple reason that if bin Laden
had one, he’d have already used it. But the incident in New York was the kind
of thing crossing Bush’s desk each day while he decided whether to invade Iraq.
And in retrospect, a reasonable bureaucratic decision made by policymakers
after 9/11 may have had an unintended effect.
Senior leaders formerly received just the President’s
Daily Brief (PDB), a product of carefully vetted intelligence analyses. After
the CIA failed to give Bush actionable intelligence about the looming attack,
beyond the agency’s August 6, 2001, PDB article “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike
in US,” someone understandably ordered that Bush be informed of every terror
threat about which the IC received information. Thus was born the “President’s
Daily Threat Matrix,” which included solid human intelligence and
communications intercepts on real plots al-Qaeda’s core leaders were working
on, such as an airline hijacking attack on a half-dozen major office buildings
on the West Coast and in the Midwest. This plan was broken up when the CIA
captured Indonesian al-Qaeda member Riduan Isamuddin in Thailand in August
2003.
But the matrix also included a lot of bad
intelligence—for example, from random “walk-ins” to American embassies who
insisted on speaking with CIA officers about alleged threats. This kind of
information must be recorded and disseminated within the IC but is rarely
briefed to a president. I wonder whether Bush was unable to separate the signal
from the noise in the matrix and so thought that the terror threat from fall
2001 to spring 2003 was even worse than it was, as he made up his mind about
Iraq.
Congress ultimately authorized the use of force in Iraq
by large bipartisan majorities, 296-133 in the House and 77-23 in the Senate.
Bush, arguably failed by his war Cabinet, then made the historic mistake of
invading Iraq.
I never doubted the president’s good faith, though. He is
an intelligent and sincere man, and only a fool or a villain would start a war
on false pretenses, knowing as a small-d democratic leader that his factual
misstatements would be exposed as such before he faced voters for
reelection in 2004. Bush didn’t lie. He was just tragically wrong.
And as we now know, everyone was wrong about the WMD.
Saddam ran the most effective strategic deception campaign since the Allies
convinced Adolf Hitler that they’d invade his Fortress Europe at the Pas de
Calais and not Normandy in June 1944. The Achilles Trap by Steve Coll sets forth how and why
Saddam convinced even his own general staff that he possessed WMD. And again
there were no ties between Iraq’s government and al-Qaeda, neither of which had
a nuclear weapon.
I supported the bad decision to go to war, for whatever
little my opinion was worth as a junior officer. I disregarded the wise advice
of a Joint Staff colleague who warned that we had unfinished business in
Afghanistan to take care of before possibly starting a new war. I replied
stupidly, paraphrasing President Lyndon Johnson’s remark that America could
fart and chew gum at the same time.
Because I supported going to war, I had a moral duty to
serve in it, especially when it went badly. Instead of resuming my prewar legal
practice, I joined the CIA as a case officer trainee in September 2004 and
requested assignment to Iraq upon finishing training in December 2005. I
arrived in February 2006, just in time for Zarqawi to start the civil war by
bombing the Shiite mosque in Samarra. My job for the next year was supporting a
rotating cast of Marine regimental combat teams, Navy SMU squadrons, and Army
Special Forces companies. These Marines suffered heavy losses holding the
Euphrates River Valley from west of Ramadi to the Syrian border. This was when
the Sunni tribes’ “Anbar Awakening” began as they turned against al-Qaeda and
its foreign fighters, just before Gen. David Petraeus’ surge turned the tide of
the war.
I returned briefly as an Army reservist in 2008-09, as
the surge ended, to help Special Forces advise Iraq’s Counterterrorism Command
(CTC). This tour in Baghdad’s Green Zone was relatively calm. The CTC later
went on to defeat ISIS in the 2014-17 war, taking terrible casualties along the
way.
I spent 15 months in Iraq. The CIA tour was hard; my late
mother said that the light went out from behind my eyes over there and never
came back. It’s hard to forgive myself for being unable to collect enough
intelligence to save more Marines. I cannot accept thanks for my reports that
saved American lives and limbs without accepting my concomitant share of
responsibility for the more than 80 youngsters in the units I supported who did
not come home to their families, and hundreds more who did not make it home
whole.
Like many other Iraq veterans, I got the usual party
gifts from my tours: failed romances, mild cases of post-traumatic stress, and
“burn pit” cancer, the latter from our military’s curious practice of burning
enormous piles of human waste and other garbage with diesel fuel. I’ll tell
you, folks, there’s nothing quite like
the smell of billowing black clouds of burning feces on a day that’s already
125 degrees and humid.
All who fought in Iraq need to decide for themselves
whether their service was worth it. It’s a deeply personal question, especially
while acknowledging that the war was a mistake, given the wrong intelligence
analyses upon which it was predicated.
There is no getting around the human cost of war: 4,418
uniformed Americans dead and 31,994 wounded, thousands more coalition soldiers,
and an untold number of Iraqis. In any war, civilians are killed, and innocent
women, children, and older or disabled people suffer the worst.
We made serious mistakes in Iraq. Poor prewar
intelligence damaged America’s credibility abroad, postinvasion planning was
insufficient, de-Baathification went too far, and the implementation of the
successful counterinsurgency strategy developed by Gens. Petraeus and James
Mattis was delayed for far too long. The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib was
shameful. Our pullout of forces in December 2011 by President Barack Obama was
too hasty, as our military soon had to return to help defeat ISIS. Our intense
focus on the Middle East over the last quarter century has left us militarily
ill-prepared for potential future conflicts with China and/or Russia.
Meanwhile the national debt, fueled in part by trillions
of dollars in Iraq war spending, ballooned from about $6 trillion in 2000 to
$40 trillion today. This taxpayer money could have either been saved or spent
on more pressing domestic needs.
And yet ... Saddam did support terrorism, albeit not
al-Qaeda. He was an evil dictator. The world is a better place without Saddam,
as most Iraqi Shiites and Kurds, and even many Sunnis, would agree. Iraq was a
dystopian, totalitarian state under his leadership and is a democracy
today—flawed, and strongly influenced by our enemy Iran for religious and
geographic reasons, but a democracy all the same. That is something to take
pride in. Good leaders came to the fore during the war, such as Petraeus, Mattis,
Stanley McChrystal, John Kelly, William McRaven, and others. The U.S. military
is leaving Iraq only because we’ve been asked to do so by its elected
government, and we’re not an empire. An American Embassy remains in Baghdad,
unlike in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Something we’ll never know is whether any of the
thousands of foreign fighters who flocked to Iraq to try and kill us Americans
there would otherwise have attacked the U.S. at home. I suspect so, but perhaps
that’s more of a hope or just a rationalization. A sentiment I heard expressed
was that it was better these fanatics threw down with us in Iraq, heavily armed
and well-trained as we were, rather than with American civilians back home. One
SEAL jokingly referred to himself as being a “bug-zapper” in that sense. Maybe
he was right.
An enduring memory of the war is my admiration for the
enlisted men and noncommissioned officers I observed. They’d patiently stand a
post in excruciating heat, while wearing dozens of pounds of gear, knowing they
could be hit by a sniper or a rocket. They’d stoically roll out on convoys or
patrols, again and again, knowing that roadside bombs might lie in their path
to maim them.
Two of the eight Medals of Honor awarded in Iraq went to
men killed elsewhere during my long tour there, Specialist Ross McGinnis of the
Army’s First Infantry Division and Petty Officer Michael Monsoor of SEAL Team
3. Both selflessly jumped on grenades to save colleagues. That’s a special kind
of bravery, properly recognized as such.
The quiet day-in, day-out toughness shown by
less-heralded young men and women is another form of bravery I also deeply
respect. Knowing that strong character is what so many good fellow Americans of
different backgrounds are made of, all of them home now, most raising families
and working in new professions, gives me hope for our country in the difficult
times ahead.
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