Digging In For A Fight

By NANCY GIBBS

However a government may try to hide them, there are ways to measure the costs of war, and last week people could take their pick. You could see, for the first time, the coffins of dead soldiers, wrapped tight like a gift in the flag for which they fought. You could mourn the one whose name was familiar, the football star who took a million-dollar pay cut to defend his country after 9/11. You could listen, for the first time, to the Pentagon leaders admitting that they would need both more troops and more money to get the job done. A year ago, the war planners figured that 200 armored humvees would be enough for the invasion and occupation of Iraq; now they want 20 times that many. The U.S. death toll in April 2003, the month Baghdad fell, was 37; the number killed in hostilities in April 2004 climbed to 107 last week, a reminder that winning a war can be deadlier than fighting it in the first place. "There's a rumor that Bush is going to redeclare war here. Have you heard it?" asks a 1st Cavalry Division private on patrol as he mans a machine gun in a Baghdad slum. "It's a good idea. Right now we drive around just enough to get people really angry and let them take shots at us. We should just roll over Sadr City and take out all the bad guys."

If the commentariat supposed that all the bad news on the ground would bring political costs, the polls held surprises too. As the U.S. returns to a war footing and braces for what comes next, people are paying close attention. In surveys last week, twice as many listed the war among their top concerns as did just a month ago. But the escalating bloodshed seemed, if anything, to make people lean forward and dig in for the fight. A Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 51% of Americans still believed the war was worth fighting--3 percentage points higher than in February. According to a USA Today poll, support for sending more troops has tripled since January, to 33%.

In interviews from Georgia to California, TIME heard voters expressing a sober mix of resignation and resolution. Hindsight is 20/20, people say of the failures in war planning. We made this mess, and we have to clean it up, they say of the task ahead. They'll hate us no matter what we do, they say of the enemy. I wouldn't want to be in his shoes, they say of the President. Even as voters fault George W. Bush's judgment, many praise his instincts. "I don't think he has the faculties of his father," says Steve Guest, a computer engineer in Cincinnati, Ohio, "but he has the resolve, and that's what matters." A less admiring observer, Matt Streng, a health-care teacher in Chapel Hill, N.C., sees the public's mood a little differently: "They have blind faith in a President who has blind faith in his cause," he says.

--HOW MANY SOLDIERS WILL IT TAKE?

War and tyranny can make a country go mad, and it's pretty clear that in Iraq there's no such thing as a quick recovery. The Americans promise the Iraqis that once things are calm, we'll truly let you run things. But the Iraqis reply that until they are running things, there will be no calm. It is hard to accept the Pentagon's hearty insistence that the scattered attacks in Iraq are just the work of a few thousand Iraqi dead-enders backed by foreign fighters when so much of the country has become so impossibly dangerous in just the past few weeks--when drivers trying to move around Baghdad, even in the supposedly safe neighborhoods, now run into checkpoints manned by insurgents looking for foreigners to confront or kidnap; when Iraqi police officers strip off their uniforms before heading home for fear of being tarred as collaborators with the hated occupiers; when contractors are confined to their walled compounds because they risk voiding their life-insurance policies if they venture out into the country they are expected to rebuild.

If anything, the American public has shown itself more willing than the government to confront the implications of Iraq's bloody spring. When he invaded Iraq with barely four divisions last year, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wasn't just trying to win a war; he was trying to make a point--that the U.S.'s post--cold war Army could do more with less and do it better and faster. That proved right as far as the invasion went, but occupying the country was a different matter entirely. "The notion that with [about] 130,000 troops, we have sufficient numbers to provide security is patently wrong," says Ivo Daalder, who was on the National Security Council staff under Clinton and is now at the Brookings Institution. "We need at least twice as many to make sure that the streets in Baghdad are safe enough for people to go out and shop--let alone take care of the counterinsurgency."

When Eric Shinseki, then the Army Chief of Staff, testified publicly before the war that it could take "several hundred thousand troops" to occupy Iraq, he found himself a general non grata, and the rest of the brass got the message. A year later, junior officers are no longer holding their tongues. "He wants to wage a war consistent with this fantasy of what a war is rather than what it is in reality," an Army officer at the Pentagon says privately of Rumsfeld. "It's this bulls___ notion that you can have an efficient military instead of an effective one."

The official estimates of how many troops would be required going forward have been wobbling for a year, but until last week the trend line was always heading down. A year ago, U.S. Central Command was saying the 150,000 troops needed for the initial invasion could be reduced to 30,000 by last September. Then by Christmas the new goal was to reduce the force to 105,000 by spring. Now, concedes Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the arrow is pointing up. "The debate is about whether to keep 135,000 troops there or to add more," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. Warning that tensions may only grow with the approach of June 30, the day the U.S. plans to return sovereignty to Iraq, General John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, told the New York Times that 135,000 may not suffice. "We're going to make sure we have the right forces in place to do the job that needs to be done," he said.

For starters, the U.S. will have to take up the slack left by departing allies. When Spain's new Socialist Prime Minister held firm on his campaign promise to withdraw his 1,300 troops, Honduras and the Dominican Republic, which rely on the Spanish for command and control, decided to bug out as well. Thailand threatened to withdraw its aid workers if attacked, and even faithful Australia is down to 850 of the 2,000 troops it originally shipped over last year. Secretary of State Colin Powell called leaders of roughly half the 34 coalition countries to try to prevent further defections.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi police and security forces to whom the U.S. had hoped to turn over more responsibility were proving barely competent. U.S. officers on the ground in Fallujah, Najaf and other hot spots warned of a level of training and coordination by rebel bands that kept U.S. troops tied down. Plus, there is no slack in U.S. force strength. "Everybody's committed," says an Army officer who has tracked U.S. troop levels in Iraq over the past year. "If civil war erupts between the Kurds and Sunnis, who goes there? There is nobody. How is it possible we are fighting a war and there is no available reserve?"

The loss of internal and external allies now forces U.S. commanders to rethink their tactics and timetables. The notion that U.S. soldiers would gradually pull back off the streets of the cities to a local base and then to a few main garrisons while local Iraqi forces stepped in to smooth the path toward a peaceful and democratic Iraq looks a little quaint now. And as long as U.S. troops are spread out across the country to douse local flare-ups, the supply lines will be long and the convoys vulnerable to roadside bombs and ambushes. The only way to protect such convoys is to make them big and mean enough to defend themselves against attack. That may mean adding air cover, usually helicopter gunships like the Army's AH-64 Apache or the Marines' AH-1 Cobra--which in turn would require more troops and more choppers than are available in the theater at the moment. Although vital supplies are getting through, there are shortages of little luxuries--like deodorant--in the green zone, and looming shortfalls of ammunition and fuel. "We didn't have enough transportation units in the major combat operation, and we sure don't have enough now," says an Army planner intimately involved in the war. "You know, we were thinking of taking airmen and sailors and throwing them into trucks. We abandoned that, but that shows how desperate the Army is for people."

With each notch up in tension, the whole rebuilding enterprise becomes more difficult. The fighting has grown so intense, security costs that were supposed to account for about 10% of the $18 billion in reconstruction money through September 2004 are instead running at 25%. Major contractors like General Electric and Siemens AG are scaling back their efforts because of the unsafe environment. Money and energy that were meant to go into new schools and new water-treatment plants are diverted toward rebuilding bombed police stations and retraining Iraqi troops.

With reversals of fortune come reversals of policy: having initially dissolved the Iraqi army and purged civilian ministries of most members of Saddam's Baath Party, Pentagon officials reversed course--they deny it is a policy change--and began inviting them back in hopes of drawing on much needed expertise. Despite President Bush's vow that the June 30 deadline for handing sovereignty back to Iraqis was cast in stone, Administration officials on the Hill were slicing the definition of sovereignty. The interim authority could make no laws, they said, and even Iraqi troops would remain under American control.

--THE FALLUJAH DILEMMA

Even if you have all the troops in the world, it may not do any good against an enemy that's firing on you from inside ambulances and using children as human shields. Nowhere is the challenge of how to win the battle without losing the war as painfully visible as it is in Fallujah, where the Marines' siege entered its fourth week with both hopes for a resolution and fear of a bloodbath. The city of 200,000, 35 miles west of Baghdad, is the war's open sore. A Sunni stronghold, it has festered since the start of the occupation, when U.S. forces faced with a crowd of anti-American demonstrators killed 17 civilians. Since then, about half a dozen different military outfits have had responsibility for keeping order, which has made it hard for soldiers to build relationships with any local Iraqis not allied with the die-hard Saddam loyalists and foreign jihadists who set up shop in the city.

Many officers maintained that Fallujah had to be taken on eventually, and the ambush and mutilation of four U.S. security contractors in the city in March set the stage. The U.S. vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice. Marines surrounded the city, imposed a curfew and engaged in a pitched battle with what the White House now says could be as many as "a few thousand" insurgents. Hopes for a peaceful resolution fluttered when Iraqi civic leaders helped broker a cease-fire: if the insurgents would surrender their heavy weapons, the Marines would pull back from their cordon. The U.S. even offered to let Iraqi officers from Fallujah lead patrols there.

But Lieut. General James T. Conway, the Marines' top commander in Iraq, has not been impressed by the weapons turned in so farthe first truckload last week was a rusty junk bin of antique arms--and warned that an all-out assault would follow if the rebels did not comply. A showdown, he said, would come in "days, not weeks." Some former Pentagon officials are worried about the signal that deadline sent. "We've got to stop this business of getting up in front of the world and saying, 'We are going to do this in Fallujah,' and then we seem to back off the next day," says former Central Command chief Anthony Zinni. "In that part of the world, strength is respected greatly, and if you look weak, you're in trouble."

There was good reason for the Americans' hesitation: the prospect of a full assault on the city was having repercussions across the country, where moderate Iraqis were watching Arab TV stations that claimed there had already been hundreds of civilian casualties in Fallujah. At Friday prayers in Baghdad, at least one prominent Sunni cleric called for an uprising in the Sunni areas if Fallujah was attacked.

--THE POLITICAL FALLOUT

The Pentagon can handle its immediate needs by delaying the rotations of soldiers who were supposed to be home by now and sending back to Iraq ahead of schedule those who have already gone home. But the admission that in the end more troops may be needed for a longer time than anyone had planned put some basic military issues on the table. Democratic Senator Joseph Biden and Republican Senator Chuck Hagel raised the possibility that a volunteer military may not be sufficient going forward. Pentagon officials remain opposed to restoring the draft, abolished in 1973, confident that an older and more experienced enlisted force performs better than younger, revolving-door draftees. "I don't know anyone in the Executive Branch of the government who believes that it would be appropriate or necessary to reinstitute the draft," Rumsfeld said. Churning military manpower through a draft, he has long argued, yields less experienced soldiers at a higher cost.

For now, Pentagon officials say they are still meeting their manpower targets. In the Army Reserve, for instance, a 7% shortfall in re-enlistments was offset by an excess of new recruits. Still, the demands on soldiers and their families are being felt in communities all across the country, and members of Congress were hearing about it from their constituents during recess. "Iraq was the No. 1 issue on people's minds," says Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins. Her state has the third highest rate of deployed National Guard members and reserves in the country. One reserve unit, the 94th Military Police Company, has been deployed overseas on active duty for 2 1/2 of the past four years. The reservists were finally scheduled to come home on Easter weekend, but their tour was extended three months. "To make matters worse," Collins says, "they literally were on a bus on their way to the plane that was going to take them back to the U.S." when orders came to turn around and return to their base camp. "This war feels very close and very personal to those of us in Maine," she says. "It doesn't feel distant."

--Reported by Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington and Andrew Lee Butters, Simon Robinson and Paul Quinn-Judge/Baghdad, with other bureaus

With reporting by Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington and Andrew Lee Butters, Simon Robinson and Paul Quinn-Judge/Baghdad, with other bureaus