Free No True Glory by Bing West

suspected of plotting attacks. “It has to be removed.”
    As January drew to a close, Drinkwine believed the city elders were prevailing over the shrill voices of the Sunni clerics. Preachers like Janabi weren’t speaking up in the council meetings. They seemed to be malcontents whose influence could be marginalized by economic improvement. “After you cut out a cancer, you have to rejuvenate the body,” he said, elaborating on his cancer analogy. “We’re cutting out the FREs. Then the body has to heal. Fallujah needs a healthy economy and hope in the future.”
    From his perspective, the city elders lived in perpetual fear of political and economic isolation, paranoid about change and the outside world because it had never brought them any good. With their provincial accent, country ways, and enormous rate of illiteracy, they were the butt of jokes among the Baghdad middle class. The bustling eight-lane highway outside the city had devastated their commerce as a waystop between Baghdad and Jordan. Their industry, which had been totally subsidized by Saddam’s military machine, had collapsed. Aside from farming, kidnapping, and truck driving, the sources of income in the city were nil. The business leaders had no functioning businesses.
    Every family in Iraq was provided with food and electricity, when it was on, for free. This subsistence economy and lack of money gave rise to a belief among the American military that creating jobs was the surest means of combating the insurgency.
    Col Smith regularly trekked to Baghdad with a list of the brigade’s needs that overwhelmed the resources it received. For Fallujah, he had a total of $200,000 a month to spend. Repairing the sewer and water-purification system alone would cost $20 million. Thirty industries capable of employing tens of thousands of laborers lay idle; the cost of rejuvenating them would be $25 million.
    “Baghdad kept too much for itself,” Smith said.
    Baghdad was the political, economic, and cultural capital of Iraq. Both the CPA and the JTF had their headquarters there. Baghdad had to show progress toward stability and economic growth. The CPA’s next priority was taking care of the political aspirations of the Shiites. Then came Kurdish restiveness in Kirkuk and the needs of population centers like Mosul and Basra.
    Although Fallujah was at the top of the list in terms of violence, in terms of politics it was a backwater problem.

 
    5
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    VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE
    IN FEBRUARY TWO IRAQI NATIONAL GUARD battalions arrived in Fallujah, and on February 12 Gen Abizaid visited one of the battalions at the Government Center. In Abizaid’s view, the time had come for Americans to take their hands off the controls and allow the Iraqis to help themselves. “It’s their country,” Abizaid said. “It’s their future.”
    The Iraqi battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Nowar, proudly presented a briefing. When Abizaid asked a question, Nowar began his answer by saying, “Well, we all know Fallujah is a tough town.”
    No sooner had he spoken than two rocket-propelled grenades exploded in the courtyard.
    “See?” Nowar said.
    The plan for Abizaid to walk downtown, as American reporters had done the previous summer, was promptly canceled.
    The officers of the 82nd were not pleased that the four-star general had been fired upon in Fallujah. The police insisted the attack had been the work of outsiders and criminals. They shrugged off posters promising death to collaborators. There was no insurgency, the police said. If the Americans stayed away, all would be well. With a battalion of National Guard in the city, Drinkwine agreed to remove his soldiers from all fixed checkpoints. The police assured him they could handle the situation.
    Two days later, on Valentine’s Day, Drinkwine was at his battalion base east of Fallujah when reports came in of a heavy gunfight in the center of the city. Two dozen insurgents, some in National Guard and police