A General’s High-Stakes Fight

To get to see Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, you pass through four security checks and two body searches and then are driven past high concrete barricades, earth-filled barriers and helixes of barbed wire deep into the bowels of one of Saddam Hussein’s more splendid former palaces stretched out on the bank of the Tigris.

His office is in the security-sanitized swath of Baghdad known as the “green zone,” an area where English is the language, guns must be cleared before entering and people jog in shorts and T-shirts as though they were back home in the USA.

Just beyond the bubble, however, Sanchez, who has become the public face of the U.S. military effort, faces a world of trouble.

Sanchez is the plain-spoken tank officer who in June took command of the coalition forces in Iraq, who now number 134,000. On his shoulders falls a set of herculean responsibilities: carrying out the hunt for Hussein, eliminating an Iraqi resistance that is killing several U.S. service members a week, deterring foreign fighters and suspected Islamic terrorists who are entering Iraq, and supplying most of the immediate security and logistical support for the reconstruction of Iraq.

Sanchez grew up “dirt poor” in Texas, brought up on welfare, one of six children raised by his mother after his parents divorced, in what he described as the poorest county in America.

“My way out was to join the military,” said Sanchez, one of the few Latino generals in the U.S. Army. “Fortunately I had an ROTC scholarship [at Texas A&I; University] that allowed me to go to college and get my degree and commission.”

Now the 52-year-old Rio Grande native, dressed in crisp desert camouflage with a pistol holstered at his side, is out to convince the doubters that given enough time and resources, his soldiers can make the U.S. presence in Iraq a success.

It’s a goal that more and more Americans are worrying about as casualties mount, insurgents appear to operate unfettered and mistakes like the “friendly fire” shooting deaths of at least eight Iraqi law enforcement officers by U.S. forces near Fallouja on Friday fan anti-American passions. And he realizes that addressing those doubts is now part of his job description.

“A critical aspect of this operation,” he said, “is to make sure we are selling -- not selling, but to make sure that America and the international community understand the reality on the ground.”

During the course of a wide-ranging interview Friday, Sanchez called the shooting of the Iraqi officers a “tragic event” of a kind that is often unavoidable in wartime. He also asked for continued support and patience from the American people.

“Something that needs to be communicated across all of America ... is that America’s sons and daughters are doing a fabulous job here,” he said. “The sacrifices that we’re making are not in vain -- they are truly making an impact on this country.”

Echoing President Bush’s statements linking the war to topple Saddam Hussein to the war on terrorism, Sanchez said the stakes were too high to think of quitting. “We’ve got to realize that this is a critical battlefield for America itself. This is where we have to win.... I am absolutely convinced that if we don’t win here, the next battleground will be the streets of America. We can’t allow that to happen.”

With thick black hair, a broad face and a soft, aw-shucks Texan manner, Sanchez’s demeanor suggests a belief that the job is tough, but that everything remains under control and will move forward.

A year from now, he said, he hopes he will be back with his family in a U.S. Army base in Germany and that Iraqis will have been left with a “stable and secure” country.

“I do hope by that point in time the people of Iraq have been absolutely convinced that the Saddam regime is never going to return,” he said. “And I hope that they’ve also made a commitment towards securing their own country and eliminating some of this terrorist activity that is hurting them probably a lot more than it is hurting the American forces here today.”

Sanchez said he wanted to enlist in the Army straight from high school to emulate his older half-brother who served in Vietnam. At the time, he wanted to go there and fight, but his brother convinced him to go to college instead and that “the war would be waiting for me.”

As it turned out, it wasn’t. He graduated in 1973 as a first lieutenant, just missing the war in Southeast Asia.

Some critics see a new Vietnam starting up in Iraq, but Sanchez rejects the parallel. His troops are facing not a guerrilla war, he said, but “a low-intensity conflict environment” that a single battalion would be enough to handle militarily.

What he needs most, he said, is “actionable intelligence ... that will allow us to strike at these cells and these terrorists that are out there.” For a guerrilla war to succeed, he said, it must possess two things: a unifying ideology and popular support. So far, he insists, he does not see either in Iraq.

Restoring Hussein and his ruling Baath Party does not constitute a winning ideology, he said. “You do not see people demonstrating to bring back the Saddam Hussein regime,” Sanchez said.

And neither, he says, does militant Islam.

“Yeah, there are some fundamentalists, religious fundamentalists, who are out there. But there are a lot of counterbalancing elements of the society,” he said. “This is not a fundamentalist society that exists here in Iraq. It’s fairly advanced, and I don’t believe there is a fundamentalist majority here at this point in time.”

He would like to see more troops from other allied countries come into Iraq under his command, he said, but not because the overall number of troops here now is inadequate. Rather, he said, other countries’ participation would be “a clear signal to the Iraqi people that the international community has made a commitment to their future” and a signal “that we are not an occupying force.”

“The more countries that make that commitment, the clearer that message will be,” he added.

More than 300 U.S. troops have died since the war in Iraq began in late March. Sanchez has pointed out that the 15 or so attacks on U.S. troops each day increasingly involve remote-control devices and mortar rounds -- indicators that the enemy in Iraq does not want to fight up close because that means losing too many people.

Meanwhile, Sanchez said, U.S. troops are getting better at countering the insurgents’ main tactic of roadside bombs. For the first time since May, U.S. forces went seven days, starting Sept. 2, without a single combat fatality. Sanchez credited the Army’s ability to adapt.

“If you look back in history, every Army that we have ever fielded has gone through dynamic learning experience, depending on what the enemy is doing,” he said. “That’s what is expected of us as warriors, and that’s what we are doing here.... And, yes, we are being more effective in identifying especially some of these improvised explosive devices that he’s employing against us. And we’re being more effective in destroying his forces.”

The enemy facing U.S. troops is something of an enigma, Sanchez said. It is hard to distinguish between a terrorist and someone who simply feels he is fighting to end the occupation, he said.

“It’s pretty hard to distinguish when you’re out there and you’re on a patrol and you get attacked ... whether you’ve got a loyalist, whether you’ve got a terrorist, or whether you’ve got a criminal that’s shooting against you. That’s a function we have to perform at a higher level to try to determine which groups are conducting operations against us.

“I don’t believe it is a clear-cut case out there.”

Nevertheless, he insists that foreign terrorists are a big slice of the opposition.

“It is very clear to me that there are in fact foreign fighters coming into the country with a very specific purpose of killing coalition, and especially Americans,” he said. “And we have to be prepared for that.”

One puzzle is whether the Al Qaeda types are starting to link up with the loyalists to Hussein. Sanchez indicated that he did not yet have a firm picture of whether that is happening.

“There are some indications that there may be some elements of cooperation,” he said, “but I don’t think they have completely merged at this point.”