Read Online No True Glory by Bing West - Free Book Online

hearing a spirited rejoinder from the CPA about disruptions to existing programs, Rumsfeld worked out an agreement whereby control over the Iraqi Army passed to CentCom, while the CPA retained control over the police.
    In Fallujah and elsewhere Iraqi police with scant training and old, thuggish habits struggled on. The CPA wanted to bring in European advisers, as had been done in Bosnia, but few volunteered, and none for Fallujah. The 82nd rated all forty-nine police stations in its area of operations as noneffective. The CPA had provided 92 of the 318 police vehicles requested by the 82nd, 274 of the 1,445 radios, plus sixty pistols and a three-week training course for a thousand officers.
    Month after month Gen Swannack asked the CPA for the equipment. Swannack believed his requests were hampered by “bureaucrats” who remained in Iraq only for a few months, leaving before they had made good on their promises. “My comments fell on deaf ears,” he said.
    The 82nd complained that the CPA retained tight control from Baghdad but failed to deliver. While illustrating the lack of communication between the CPA and the JTF, the charge did not do justice to the thicket of regulations surrounding the CPA. Congress had tied money for Iraqi forces to a labyrinth of peacetime restrictions. Some members of Congress urged the CPA to cut through the bottlenecks, while others blamed Bremer for hasty decisions that seemed to result in waste. Many in the CPA pointed to the layers of congressional restrictions placed upon purchases, slowing expenditures to a dribble.
    “Every major project had to go to Washington for a budget review, then over to Congress for authorization. Any change over two percent among dozens of programs had to go back to congressional committees for approval,” Lieutenant General Jeffrey Oster, the CPA chief of staff, said. “The congressional process for releasing money was a maze.”
    Rather than have local seamstresses sew uniforms for the Iraqis, competitive bids had to be taken on the American market, causing delays of months. Vehicles purchased for the Iraqi police had to be advertised and competed for in the United States, when a five-hour drive over the border into Jordan yielded trucks at a fraction of the cost (an option several battalion commanders quietly chose).
    Inside the administration, friction and backbiting arose about the causes of the slow expenditure of funds. The deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, directly blamed the CPA for not spending the authorized money. “We have little complaint about congressional restrictions on [Iraqi] spending,” he told a congressional committee. “CPA moved more gingerly than they should have.”
    Bremer was damned if he rapidly spent the money and damned if he didn’t.
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    At the tip of the spear in the most dangerous city in Iraq, LtCol Drinkwine didn’t care about the high-level issues of assigning blame or about billion-dollar budgets. His concerns were the lack of equipment for the police, the daily attacks on his troops, and sorting out which city leaders were secretly supporting the insurgents.
    Drinkwine began 2004 by coordinating with the special operations forces to search the souk next to the Brooklyn Bridge at the western end of the city, an area the police refused to patrol. The souk consisted of hundreds of one-story boutique shops jammed side by side in a maze of twisting alleyways in the oldest section of the city, called the Jolan District. The insurgents boasted that the Jolan was invulnerable; the tangle of streets provided them with hundreds of back alleys through which to escape and circle back to swarm over any invading force of Americans.
    The Special Operations Command came to Drinkwine with an unorthodox solution that he supported enthusiastically. On the morning of January 2 the souk was jammed with people and cars, the smoke from faulty exhaust pipes obscuring the view of the Brooklyn Bridge, a few hundred meters