January 13, 2007
Bush Authorized Iranians' Arrest in Iraq, Rice Says

By DAVID E. SANGER and MICHAEL R. GORDON
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — A recent series of American raids against Iranians in Iraq was authorized under an order that President Bush decided to issue several months ago to undertake a broad military offensive against Iranian operatives in the country, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday.

“There has been a decision to go after these networks,” Ms. Rice said in an interview with The New York Times in her office on Friday afternoon, before leaving on a trip to the Middle East.

Ms. Rice said Mr. Bush had acted “after a period of time in which we saw increasing activity” among Iranians in Iraq, “and increasing lethality in what they were producing.” She was referring to what American military officials say is evidence that many of the most sophisticated improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, being used against American troops were made in Iran.

Ms. Rice was vague on the question of when Mr. Bush issued the order, but said his decision grew out of questions that the president and members of his National Security Council raised in the fall.

The administration has long accused Iran of meddling in Iraq, providing weapons and training to Shiite forces with the idea of keeping the United States bogged down in the war. Ms. Rice’s willingness to discuss the issue seemed to reflect a new hostility to Iran that was first evident in Mr. Bush’s speech to the nation on Wednesday night, in which he accused Tehran of providing material support for attacks on American troops and vowed to respond.

Until now, despite a series of raids in which Iranians have been seized by American forces in Baghdad and other cities in Iraq, administration officials have declined to say whether Mr. Bush ordered such actions.

The White House decision to authorize the aggressive steps against Iranians in Iraq appears to formalize the American effort to contain Iran’s ambitions as a new front in the Iraq war. Administration officials now describe Iran as the single greatest threat the United States faces in the Middle East, though some administration critics regard the talk about Iran as a diversion, one intended to shift attention away from the spiraling chaos in Iraq.

In adopting a more confrontational approach toward Iran, Mr. Bush has decisively rejected recommendations of the Iraq Study Group that he explore negotiations with Tehran as part of a new strategy to help quell the sectarian violence in Iraq.

In the interview on Friday, Ms. Rice described the military effort against Iranians in Iraq as a defensive “force protection mission,” but said it was also motivated by concerns that Iran was trying to further destabilize the country.

Mr. Bush’s public warning to Iran was accompanied by the deployment of an additional aircraft carrier off Iran’s coast and advanced Patriot antimissile defense systems in Persian Gulf countries near Iran’s borders. Both the White House and the secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, insisted Friday that the United States was not seeking to goad Iran into conflict, and that it had no intention of taking the battle into Iranian territory. The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, warned reporters away from “an urban legend that’s going around” that Mr. Bush was “trying to prepare the way for war” with Iran or Syria.

Mr. Gates said that the United States did not intend to engage in hot pursuit of the operatives into Iran.

“We believe that we can interrupt these networks that are providing support, through actions inside the territory of Iraq, that there is no need to attack targets in Iran itself,” Mr. Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I continue to believe what I told you at the confirmation hearing,” he added, referring to last month’s hearings on his nomination, “that any kind of military action inside Iran itself would be a very last resort.”

Ms. Rice’s comments came just a day after the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, issued a sharp warning to the administration about the recent raids against Iranians in Iraq, including one in Erbil early Thursday.

He said the vote to authorize the president to order the use of force to topple Saddam Hussein was not a vehicle for mounting attacks in Iran, even to pursue cells or networks assisting insurgents or sectarian militias. “I just want the record to show — and I would like to have a legal response from the State Department if they think they have authority to pursue networks or anything else across the border into Iran and Iraq — that will generate a constitutional confrontation here in the Senate, I predict to you,” Mr. Biden said.

In the view of American officials, Iran is engaged in a policy of “managed chaos” in Iraq. Its presumed goal, both policymakers and intelligence officials say, is to raise the cost to the United States for its intervention in Iraq, in hopes of teaching Washington a painful lesson about the perils of engaging in regime change.

Toward this end, American officials charge, Iran has provided components, including explosives and infrared triggering devices, for sophisticated roadside bombs that are designed to penetrate armor. They have also provided training for several thousand Shiite militia fighters, mostly in Iran. Officials say the training is carried out by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security.

In the interview on Friday, Ms. Rice said, “We think they are providing help to the militias as well, and maybe even the more violent element of these militias.”

In addition, American officials say the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Force is active in Iraq. A senior military official said last week that one of the Iranians seized in Baghdad late last month was the No. 3 Quds official. He said American forces uncovered maps of neighborhoods in Baghdad in which Sunnis could be evicted, and evidence of involvement in the war during the summer in Lebanon.

That Iranian official was ordered released, by Ms. Rice among others, after Iran claimed he had diplomatic status.

This week, American forces in Iraq conducted at least two raids against suspected Iranian operatives, including the raid in Erbil. The United States is currently detaining several individuals with Iranian passports who were picked up in those raids. The Iranians have said that they were in the process of establishing a consulate, but American officials said that the Erbil operation was a liaison office and that the workers there did not have diplomatic passports.

A defense official said Friday that such raids would continue. “We are going to be more aggressive,” he said, referring to the suspected Iranian operatives. “We are going to look for them and to try to do what we can to get them into custody.”

Thom Shanker contributed reporting.

THE AYATOLLAH IS DYING
Written by Michael Ledeen
Friday, 12 January 2007

The Supreme Leader of Iran - the man who really runs the place, not the Persian Midget Ahmadinejad - is the Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei. Some people confuse him with his mentor and founder of the Iranian Revolution, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, as the spellings are confusingly similar.

But Khomeini died in 1989, and Khamenei assumed power after that. Ever since, he has been the Terror Master in Chief, the principal sponsor of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, especially against Israel and America in Iraq. Now, at age 66, he is dying.

Indeed, no one seems to be able to show that he is either alive or dead. He never made his obligatory appearance on the holiest day of the Shia calendar, called Eid, last week. He has not been seen in public since.

The AP reported he spoke in the "holy" city of Qom this week (1/8), but even the AP reporter didn't see him (he said his photographer did but there's no picture). There was no footage of the supposed event on Iranian national television.

The next day (1/9), I spoke to a senior Western intelligence official, who has followed Iran a lot longer and closer than I have, and we had a little chat. Here are the salient exchanges:

Do you think Khamenei is alive or dead?

"I don't know. We have good reports on both sides."

How do you evaluate the behavior of the regime about this story?

"It seems pretty clear that Khamenei is either dead or dying, and the regime is trying to figure out how the Iranian people will or would react if his death were announced."

And what's it look like?

"They could care less."

This is of a piece with dozens of conversations I have had with other Iran-watchers. Some think he's dead, some think he's as-good-as-dead.

The last medical report I have, as of the time he left the hospital more than week ago, reported bad circulation, weak pulse, spiking blood pressure, echoes in his ears, virtually no sight in one eye, and severe back pain. He apparently could not get up from a chair or from bed by himself. All this on top of the ongoing pain from cancer.

Still, he defiantly told his doctors that he would not die until the Americans were driven out of Iraq, and an Islamic Republic was declared in Lebanon.

Either way, the bottom line here is that the mullahs are engaged in a succession struggle, and they are worried that the Iranian people might seize the moment to act against the regime.

It seems unlikely to me that the death of the tyrant-whenever it happens or has happened, and whenever it is announced-will be an occasion for a popular uprising, especially since no Western country has seen fit to actively support the pro-democracy forces in Iran.

The senior official's dry remark, "they couldn't care less," accurately encapsulates most Iranians' contempt for their leaders and defines the opportunity and moral obligation to support democratic revolution, but there is still no sign that any of our leaders has the will to embrace regime change in Iran, or in Syria, the mullahs' half-brother on the other side of Iraq.

Meanwhile, the power struggle continues apace. There is now an effort in the Iranian Parliament, the Majlis, to impeach President Ahmadinejad.

They have collected 38 supporters out of the required 72. An Iranian editor, Issa Saharkhiz, is reporting, "Ahmadinejad's golden era is over."

This is a continuation of the anti-Ahmadinejad campaign within the leadership ranks that surfaced in the results of the most recent "elections," when he and his followers were slapped down in favor of the so-called "reformists" and the pro-Rafsanjani forces.

That would be Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, another Khomeini protégé whom Ahmadinejad defeated in the 2005 presidential election. We'll talk more about him later. For now, the Supreme Ayatollah is dying, and Ahmadinejad's day in the Iranian sun dying with him.

Making Iraq Work 
   By: Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani 
  The Wall Street Journal, January 12, 2007  

The American mission in Iraq must succeed. Our goal -- promoting a stable, accountable democracy in the heart of the Middle East -- cannot be achieved by purely military means.
 
Iraqis need to establish a civil society. Without the support of mediating civic and social associations -- the informal ties that bind us together -- no government can long remain stable and no cohesive nation can be maintained. To establish a civil society, Iraqis must rebuild their basic infrastructure. Iraqis must take control of their destiny by rebuilding houses, stores, schools, roads, highways, mosques and churches.
 
But the constant threat of violence, combined with a high unemployment rate estimated between 30% and 50%, fundamentally undermines that effort. This not only sustains the fertile breeding ground for terrorist recruiters but has the same corrosive effect as it would in any city -- raising the likelihood of further violence, civic decay and a crippling sense of powerlessness.
A massive effort must be made to engage in a well organized plan to rebuild Iraq. The goal: an infrastructure to support and encourage a strong, stable civil society.
 
The week before Christmas, the Pentagon asked Congress to approve a supplemental $100 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, on top of the estimated $500 billion spent to date. The administration should direct a small percent of that amount to create an Iraqi Citizen Job Corps, along the lines of FDR's civilian conservation corps during the Great Depression. The Job Corps can operate under the supervision of our military and with its protection. The Army Corps of Engineers might be particularly helpful in directing this effort. It will place our military in a constructive relationship with the Iraqis -- both literally and figuratively.
 
Today, Iraq has almost 200 state-owned factories that have been abandoned by the governing authorities since the outbreak of war in 2003. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Paul A. Brinkley has led a team to 26 of those facilities, traveling far beyond the Green Zone to idled plants from Fallujah to Ramadi. Mr. Brinkley believes that under Department of Defense leadership, at least 10 of these facilities could be re-opened almost immediately, putting more than 10,000 Iraqis to work within weeks. This should be done without delay -- and it is only the beginning.
 
The wages that these thousands of gainfully employed workers receive will be used to purchase goods and services that will employ other Iraqis. Those goods and services must be produced by still other Iraqis. These are the first steps in creating the requisite conditions of a stable functioning economy and the best hope of displacing retribution and violence with hope and opportunity.
 
We must try to achieve constructive and compassionate goals through conservative means -- jump starting civic improvement and the individual work ethic in Iraq, without creating permanent subsidies. The goal is to get more Iraqis working, especially young males, who are most susceptible to the terrorist and warlord recruiters.
There are many lessons from the successful welfare reforms in New York City that can be readily applied in Iraq. In the early 1990s, New York City suffered an average of 2,000 murders a year while more than 1.1 million people -- one out of every seven New Yorkers -- were unemployed and on welfare. Too many neighborhoods were pervaded by a sense of hopelessness that came from a combination of high crime, high unemployment and despair. "Workfare" proved an excellent method to change this destructive decades-long paradigm. It required able-bodied welfare recipients to work 20 hours a week in exchange for their benefits. In the process, we reasserted the value of the social contract, which says that for every right there is a responsibility, for every benefit an obligation.
 
As many as 37,000 people participated at a single time, working in the neighborhoods that most needed their help, cleaning up streets with the Sanitation Department, removing graffiti from schools and government buildings, or helping to beautify public spaces in the Parks Department.
 
More than 250,000 individuals went through our Workfare program between 1994 and 2001, and their effort helped to visibly improve the quality of life in New York City. Many of them moved on to permanent employment. This change from welfare to work did as much as the New York Police Department Compstat program to keep reducing crime. A similar model can work in Iraq.
 
There is an opportunity not only to increase employment by rebuilding roads, houses, schools and government buildings, but also to engage the Iraqi people to participate in laying the foundation for a civil and prosperous society.
 
The population of Iraq is roughly 30 million with a pre-war median annual income equivalent to $700. Subsidizing unemployed Iraqis with a meaningful wage in exchange for meaningful work rebuilding their society is well within the means of the U.S. and its allies.
 
The entire effort will help stabilize and grow the Iraqi economy. It should be open to all willing Iraqis -- Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds -- as a means of helping to create a common culture through shared participation in work projects to rebuild and take ownership of their nation.
 
One word of caution: The program should be overseen by the U.S. military, not private contractors, to avoid unnecessary delays in deployment or accusations of cronyism in the bidding process. Our military will still be devoted to its primary role of hunting down terrorists and patrolling the streets, but administering a jobs program would be a direct extension of their effort to secure law and order. After the program has been started and becomes successful, it can be transferred to a civilian authority within the Iraqi government.
 
The creation of an Iraqi Citizen Job Corps will help expedite the establishment of a more stable civil society and improve the growing Iraqi economy through the transforming power of an honest day's work.
 
Mr. Giuliani is the former mayor of New York City. Mr. Gingrich is a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Victory Means Victory
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 12, 2007

President Bush went easy on the word “victory” on Wednesday. In his entire 2,916 word speech outlining a new Iraq strategy, he used it only twice, and in the same paragraph.
“Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved,” the president warned.

“There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship. But victory in Iraq will bring something new in the Arab world -- a functioning democracy that polices its territory, upholds the rule of law, respects fundamental human liberties, and answers to its people.”

Precious few are the American politicians who dare use the word at all. Even John McCain, who appears to have staked his 2008 presidential hopes on the troop “surge” the president announced, is gently trying to put some distance between his political fortunes and those of the president.

Speaking on FoxNews shortly after Wednesday night’s speech, McCain said he supported the troop surge, noting that it was “not really just an increase in troops, it is a change in strategy.”

Then he hastened to add: “I can’t guarantee that it will succeed...but if we fail, we will have greater problems throughout the region.”

I am sure the readers of the page will correct me, but so far the only U.S. politician I have found besides the president who has talked about victory in Iraq is Joe Lieberman, still the junior senator from Connecticut, but now free of the Democratic Party label.

“There are two ways we can end the war in Iraq,” he said a few days before the president’s speech. “Defeat, or victory.”

Bush was right when he framed his new strategy – which ressembles the seize and hold strategy of classic counter-insurgency warfare – in the larger context of the global war against terror. He used varying terms to define the enemy: “radical Islamic extremists,” was the most clear, but more often this became, simply, “extremists.”

Similarly, he watered down his warnings to Iran, even though they were widely remarked by commentators on the Left, who found yet more evidence that the Bush White House plans an “unprovoked” war on Iran.

I was disappointed that the president did not insist that the Director of National Intelligence (or whoever is in charge of intelligence coming out of Iraq these days) declassify the critical information that was leaked to reporters shortly after the capture of two senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers in Baghdad over Christmas.

One of them, identified as General Chizari, was said to be third in command of the Qods Force, the Revolutionary Guards strike arm used to plan and carry out overseas terrorist attacks.

Michael Ledeen called the documents seized from Chizari as a “wiring diagram” of Iran’s terrorist networks inside Iraq.

Eli Lake of the New York Sun revealed on January 3 that the documents confirmed "that Iran is working closely with both the Shi'ite militias and Sunni jihadist groups.”

Please pause for a second and reread that last sentence. It is absolutely critical to understanding the magnitude of the threat America is facing, and the manifest incapacity of our intelligence establishment to grapple with that threat (let alone defeat the terrorists and their masters).

Since 1979, when Islamic terrorism took off as a religious phenomenon, U.S. intelligence analysts have used exquisite (Western) logic to differentiate between Shi'ite Muslim terrorist groups, backed by Iran, and Sunni Muslim terrorist groups, backed initially (during the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan) by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United States.

But all that began to change in the early 1990s, when Iran took a fresh look at the success of Osama Bin Laden’s jihadis against the Soviets. The Iranians concluded bin Laden increasing estrangement from his Saudi backers presented an opportunity they could exploit. They were right.

In 1993, Iran dispatched its top overseas terrorist, Imad Mugniyeh, to meet with bin Laden in Khartoum. We know about this meeting because the man who organized now sits in a U.S. prison, after copping a plea with prosecutors for his involvement in the 1998 Africa embassy bombings and other al-Qaeda operations against the United States.

Ali Mohammed not only arranged that 1993 meeting between bin Laden and Mugniyeh; he continued to broker Iranian assistance to al-Qaeda, all the while he duped the FBI and got paid as a confidential informant.

I wrote about Ali Mohammed and the Khartoum meeting in Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran. I felt it was essential to show how Iran’s Shi'ite fundamentalist leaders came to the conclusion that supporting the Sunni fundamentalist al-Qaeda movement served their strategic interests, and how they acted on those interests.

The CIA has consistently attempted to debunk any notion of Shi'ite-Sunni terror collaboration. From Paul Pillar, the top CIA analyst on Middle East terror until he retired in 2004 (thank-you, Porter Goss!) to Stephen Kappes, the current deputy director of CIA, the Agency establishment has pushed the story that an iron wall exists between Shia and Sunni terrorists.

The documents seized in Baghdad provide yet more proof that such a wall does not exist. The Iranians tore it down in 1993, and have never regretted it.

Even the 9/11 Commission reluctantly came to that conclusion on page 241 of its final report, which described the material assistance Iran gave to “eight to ten of the muscle hijackers” who carried out the September 11 attacks. (There is much more to that story that I learned from sources, which I described in my book).

The Left has tried to argue that the upsurge in violence in Iraq came as a result of Israel’s “war against Lebanon” this summer – yet another myth that inserts Israel as the nefarious evil doer into events to which it was completely foreign.

Anyone who has followed the war in Iraq knows that sectarian war erupted on February 22, when terrorists attacked and severely damaged the Golden Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest shrines in Shi'ism.

Everyone just assumed that the attackers were Sunni insurgents, probably al-Qaeda or backed by a-Qaeda.

I noted in this space last month that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge. From what I was hearing from my Iranian sources, the attack had the fingerprints of the Iranians all over it.

Would Shi'ite Iran encourage the destruction of a Shi'ite shrine in Iraq to incite Iraqi Shi'ites to battle Iraqi Sunnis? You bet.

Remember the August 1978 arson against the Ahwaz cinema in Iran, when hundreds of Iranian moviegoers perished in flames. At the time, Iran’s “revolutionaries,” led by Ayatollah Khomeini, blamed the Shah for mercilessly killing his countrymen. Only two decades later did the revolutionaries themselves admit to what many had suspected for years: that they themselves had planned and carried out the arson attack, in order to ignite the match of revolution.

Just hours after the president’s speech on Wednesday night, U.S. forces in Iraq seized six Iranians from a safe house in Irbil, in northern Iraq. U.S. commanders said they had convincing evidence that the men were involved in preparing terrorist attacks.

In Tehran, the regime “summoned” the ambassadors of Iraq and Switzerland (which has represented the United States since Iran’s revolutionaries broke diplomatic relations during the hostage crisis), to demand the return of the men. The Iranians claimed they were just five, not six, and that they had been seized from an Iranian “consulate.”

It was the type of “consulate” where “diplomats,” who normally wore shoulderboards when at home, dispensed orders, money, and munitions to terrorist recruits. It was a trick the Iranians have perfected for years. (Photographs of Rev. Guards training in Iran then appearing as “humanitarian aid workers” in Iraq in 2003 can be seen here.)

President Bush in his speech gave a restrained presentation of Iran’s deadly meddling in Iraq. U.S. commanders on the ground have demonstrated that they are now willing to take off the gloves, and execute the president’s orders to “disrupt the attacks on our forces” and “interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria.”

Democratic Senator Dick Durban indulged in Jesse Jackson jive in his immediate reaction to the Bush speech, saying the U.S. needed, not a surge in troops, but a “surge in diplomacy.”

His comment was not just absurd. Or ignorant. It was downright insane. The man ought to be committed – or better, sent to Tehran dressed in drag.

Over the past week, the U.S. Navy has given orders to the U.S.S. John Stennis carrier battle group, based in Bremerton, WA, to steam toward the Persian Gulf, where it will join the U.S.S. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Navy sources say the Pentagon is getting ready to announce the dispatch of a third carrier battle group – the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan – from San Diego. That will make three carrier battle groups in the region starting at around the end of January.

Oh, and along with them is the amphibious assault group led by the U.S.S. Boxer, which can land several thousand U.S. Marines to seize and destroy strategic sites near the coast at a moment’s notice. (Busheir? Bandar Abbas? Jask? The three Persian Gulf islands Iran seized from the UAE in the 1990s and has since fortified to harass Gulf shipping? Your pick).

Victory in Iraq cannot come until the United States makes it clear to Iran – even more than Syria, since the Syrians will take their lead from Tehran – that we will no longer tolerate their intervention in Iraqi affairs.

The president has now said this. And the U.S. military is beginning to back it up.

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U.S. Unit Patrolling Baghdad Sees Flaws in Bush Strategy
By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 12, 2007; A01

BAGHDAD, Jan. 11 -- A few hours before another mission into the cauldron of Baghdad, Spec. Daniel Caldwell's wife instant-messaged him Thursday morning. President Bush, Kelly wrote, wanted to send more than 20,000 U.S. troops and extend deployments in Iraq. Eight weeks pregnant, she was worried.

Caldwell, a tall, lean 20-year-old from Montesano, Wash., wondered whether he would miss the birth of his child. He walked outside and joined his comrades of Apache Company, 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, Stryker Brigade. They, too, had heard the news.

Moments before he stepped into his squad's Stryker -- a large, bathtub-shaped vehicle encased in a cage -- Caldwell echoed a sentiment shared by many in his squad: "They're kicking a dead horse here. The Iraqi army can't stand up on their own."

Bush's decision to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq rests on a key assumption: that the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki can produce a well-disciplined, impartial army capable of taking the lead in securing Baghdad. U.S. troops, the president said, would now play more of a background role.

The day after his speech, the soldiers of Apache Company went on a mission to the volatile neighborhood of Hurriyah that underscored the challenges confronting U.S. troops as they attempt to clear neighborhoods of sectarian fighters and keep them that way under Iraqi control.

Across Baghdad, Iraq's mostly Shiite security forces have proved unable to keep neighborhoods secure on their own. Sunni Arabs deeply mistrust the army and police, viewing them as a sectarian weapon of the Shiite-led government. Iraqi army commanders say their soldiers lack training and equipment, while some U.S. officials worry that Iraq's troops are too dependent on their American counterparts and will become even more so with the expected surge.

The Stryker rolled through the mud of Camp Liberty and made its way to Hurriyah, a mostly Shiite area nestled west of the Tigris River. Apache Company's mission: to search a few houses for weapons caches based on intelligence reports. Caldwell and his soldiers worried about the intelligence they had been given. It had come from an Iraqi army -- or "IA," in U.S. soldier lingo -- officer a week ago. They wondered whether they were being set up for an ambush.

"It's a joke," said Pfc. Drew Merrell, 22, of Jefferson City, Mo., shaking his head and flashing a smile as the Stryker rolled through Baghdad.

"They feed us what they want," said Spec. Josh Lake, 26, of Ventura, Calif., referring to the intelligence. "I guarantee that everyone in the city knows where we're going. Because the IA told them. The only thing they don't know is how big a force we're coming with."

On this morning, 22 U.S. soldiers were in the Stryker convoy along with one Iraqi interpreter, whom the soldiers called Joey. He didn't want his real name used for security reasons.

"Pretty soon the Shiites will be tired of our presence, just like the Sunnis," said Lake, noting that the squad now makes almost daily trips to Hurriyah.

"The general feeling among us is we're not really doing anything here," Caldwell said. "We clear one neighborhood, then another one fires up. It's an ongoing battle. It never ends."

"We're constantly being told that it's not our fight. It is their fight," said Sgt. Jose Reynoso, 24, of Yuma, Ariz., speaking of the Iraqi army. "But that's not the case. Whenever we go and ask them for guys, they almost always say no, and we have to do the job ourselves."

"You do have corruption problems among the ranks," said Sgt. Justin Hill, 24, of Abilene Tex., the squad leader. "I don't know what they can do about that. They have militias inside them. They are pretty much everywhere."

"The intel they give us and the intel we get are two different things," Lake said.

Caldwell, as he listened to the conversation, leaned his head back and said:

"I want to go back and play my PlayStation."

'We Need the Americans'
In Hurriyah, the convoy pulled up outside the Muheaman Mosque, a tan Sunni house of worship overlooking a dirt field with junked cars. Last month, militiamen from the Mahdi Army, the force of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, killed several mosque workers. Now, an Iraqi army unit, with all Shiites, was stationed inside the mosque. The area, they said, was controlled by the Mahdi force.

Lt. Dan Futrell, 23, of Santa Clara, Calif., walked into the mosque, flanked by his comrades. Unarmed, bleary-eyed Iraqi soldiers greeted him and called for their commander, Maj. Saad Khalid Fetlawi, who wore a red beret.

Futrell asked him for 10 Iraqi soldiers to help search the targeted houses. Fetlawi immediately agreed and ordered his men to report for duty. As he waited, Fetlawi said he had heard that the United States was sending thousands of extra troops.

"This is good news. We have a weak government and a weak army. We need training, we need more equipment," Fetlawi said. "We need the Americans to help us go forward. Iraqi army soldiers are not ready to do all this themselves. At the moment, 20,000 is a good number to help us to bring security."

His soldiers came out with old, rusting AK-47 assault rifles and mismatched uniforms. One soldier wore baby blue running shoes with his beige camouflage gear. Some wore black masks so they wouldn't be recognized in the community. Another soldier tucked silver shears into his chest strap.

"This is one of the more squared-away units," Hill said.

"That's something," quipped Merrell, looking at the soldier with the shears. "The Iraqis are always ready to prune a good hedge."

"Okay," barked Hill, looking at the Iraqis. "You guys will lead out."

They walked around the corner, onto a narrow, unpaved street with two-story houses. Residents watched from their walled yards as the Iraqi soldiers politely knocked on the doors of the targeted houses. They went in, followed by the Apache Company troops.

Inside one house, an Iraqi soldier walked up to Reynoso. He had found two AK-47 magazine clips. By law, the family can own only one. The Iraqi soldier asked Reynoso what he should do.

"I am not going to tell you what to do," Reynoso said, clearly trying to wean the soldier from depending on him. "It is against the law, but it is up to you to decide."

The Iraqi soldier smiled. Then, he handed back the magazine clip to a member of the family.

In another house, an Iraqi soldier asked whom he should take orders from, the Americans or his Iraqi squad leader.

"I'll tell your squad leader what to do, and he will tell his squad what to do," replied Sgt. Justin Mongol, 25, of New Market, Va., as Joey translated.

After nearly a half-hour, the soldiers had not unearthed a single weapon. Futrell asked Joey to see whether they were near Mahanara School, as the informant had told them. They weren't. They were near Imam Ali School.

The houses they were meant to search were in another section of Hurriyah.

Some of the American soldiers were angry. They had wasted their time and put their lives at risk.

"Are we even in Hurriyah?" Mongol demanded.

"We're chasing a ghost," Hill said.

They returned to the mosque and asked Fetlawi for a map of Hurriyah.

"I have no map of the place. I came here two days ago," he said.

Still, Fetlawi made a call and was able to find the correct school. He dispatched a pickup truck with his men to guide the U.S. soldiers.

Inside the Stryker, Lake fumed: "A debacle," he declared.

"Same old bull. . . ," Caldwell said, using an expletive.

No Help Without Orders
The Stryker stopped along a main street in Hurriyah.

The soldiers walked into a compound, the base of the Iraqi army unit in charge of a nearby checkpoint. The targeted house was across the street. And Futrell needed the help of Sgt. Ahmed Faisal. He needed some of his men to help raid the house.

Faisal refused.

"Our duty is only at this checkpoint, not inside the sector," Faisal said. "We can't send any men with you. I can't work without orders."

So the Americans crossed the street and searched the two-story house. They examined a red trunk on the roof and dug through a pile of sand. No weapons. "I think it's a dry hole," Mongol said, with disappointment.

Inside the Stryker, as it headed back to the base, the soldiers of Apache Company wondered whether they had been given false information by their Iraqi army contact. "They know things we don't," Lake said, repeating what he had said on the way to Hurriyah.

"That's why we're still here. That's why we will be here for years."