This is the second of a three-part series on retired Army Col. Peter Mansoor and his eventful journey from influential military leader to controversial faculty at Ohio State. Read tomorrow’s Lantern for part three. Read Part 1 and Part 3.
It was no easy task to influence the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, who were becoming increasingly impatient with the coalition troop presence. Mansoor understood this and often spent time attending neighborhood councils and talking with local Iraqis. Mansoor’s grandfather immigrated to the United States from British Palestine in 1938, and his unique heritage both endeared him to and distanced him from the locals, depending on who he was addressing. His surname translates into “victorious,” and while older Iraqis in local councils appreciated the fact, Iraqi students were not as forgiving.
On Dec. 22, 2003, Mansoor, along with other coalition officers and Iraqi professionals, spoke to students about the future of democracy and other issues in Iraq. When Mansoor mentioned he was half Palestinian, the majority thought less of him as a result. The reasoning for the young Iraqis’ discontent is hard to detect for Mansoor.
“Saddam Hussein had favored the Palestinians in certain ways and there could have been some sort of resentment in that regard. The students were highly nationalistic, and they didn’t like the fact that we were there,” Mansoor said.
“I think there was probably resentment that someone of Arab descent, who had come in wearing the uniform of the United States of America, was imposing an occupation that they fundamentally disagreed with,” he said.
Photo courtesy of Peter Mansoor
A costly move
Toward the end of Ready First Combat Team’s tour in April 2004, Mansoor visited the military base in Taji, where the unit replacing his would move. Coalition forces would no longer live on small forward-operating bases near the heart of the city like Mansoor and his soldiers did; now, because of a fear of over-staying their welcome, troops would move to the outskirts of town, away from the people they were to protect. To Mansoor and many of his comrades, this was another crucial mistake.
“Our replacement unit, which occupied the base on the opposite side of the Tigris River and had to commute 45 to 60 minutes just to get to their zone, could not protect the people the way we could,” Mansoor said.
“The idea that we needed to get out of the cities really came from Gen. (John) Abizaid from Central Command … who felt the longer we stayed in the Iraqi cities the more the people would come to resent us, that we were somehow a virus infecting Iraqi cities and we needed to disengage from the population centers.
“I looked at it differently – what the Iraqi people really wanted above all us was security and in 2003 and 2004 they didn’t really care who provided that security – they just wanted to feel safe. I felt that the Iraqi people would have continued to welcome our presence provided we could secure them and build stakeholders for the new government from the ground up rather than imposing a top-down system that, in effect, was dysfunctional from the start,” Mansoor said.
Had bases not been moved outward, the war might have taken a different direction, and the sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shi’ites in 2006 could have been reduced, Mansoor said.
“I think we could have prevented the sectarian violence of 2006, the really horrific violence that according to UN statistics killed 3,500 Iraqis in that year alone.”
“I don’t think Iraq had to go down that road and I think that our strategy of disengaging and turning over security responsibilities to Iraqi forces that were fundamentally unready to receive them is a strategy for defeat.”
One tour ends, another begins
On July 7, 2004, the Ready First Combat Team ended its mission in Baghdad. After fifteen months, nearly 50,000 patrols, the capture or killing of more than a thousand suspected insurgents and 24 deaths among Ready First soldiers, it was time to go back home to their base in Germany. Mansoor and his soldiers had spent their time in Iraq during a historic period, a time of transition when Iraq was in flux, its future unknown. Although he and his soldiers had done much in their view to help Iraq, Mansoor believes the future of Iraq is in its inhabitants’ hands.
“As Gen. (David) Petraeus said, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, there’s no victory dances in the endzone because it’s very, very difficult to tell what the Iraqis will make of the opportunity they have been given,” Mansoor said. “We can only push and prod so much; ultimately it will be up to them to determine whether they want to salvage their country.”
In 2006, two years after his return from Iraq, Mansoor joined the Council of Colonels, an advisory board to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff consisting of talented, educated colonels who would help get the situation in Iraq back on track.
“We got there in fall 2006 with a pretty broad and wide open agenda, and that was to relook the strategy of the Iraq war from the ground up and to leave no option off the table,” Mansoor said. He and his colleagues offered different options, including downsizing the coalition’s presence, but ultimately initiated the “surge” of troops that many have argued has led to relative stability in Iraq. Although other organizations were working on the policy in addition to the Council of Colonels, Mansoor said it was an interesting time to be a part of the effort.
In early 2007, Mansoor found himself back in Iraq, but now in a completely different role: executive officer to Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the multinational forces in Iraq. Petraeus had earlier recommended Mansoor to the Council of Colonels, and in his new role Mansoor would be chief of staff of Petraeus’ sizable staff.
“I hired Colonel Pete Mansoor … because I thought he was brilliant,” Petraeus said in an e-mail. “He had commanded a brigade superbly in Iraq, and he had an impressive understanding of (counterinsurgency) operations.”
Petraeus was overseeing the drafting of the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual, and Mansoor assisted significantly in the effort, as well as being the founding director of the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center.
In Mansoor, Petraeus said he saw a soldier with a wide array of skills. Mansoor demonstrated “a willingness, as they say, to ‘speak truth to power,'” Petraeus said. The two worked closely in Iraq, and “constantly shared ideas, best practices, thoughts on the situation in Iraq, and so on,” Petraeus said.
Mansoor was contributing at a high level in Iraq, but earlier this year, an opportunity too good to pass arose: The General Raymond Mason Chair of Military History at OSU.
Peter Mansoor will sign copies of his book, “Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander’s War in Iraq,” at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 7 at Barnes & Noble at 1598 High St.
Tom Knox can be reached at [email protected].
