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In the shade of a high sandstone arch, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and a platoon of American soldiers from the 1st Armored Division guard the main point of entry into Baghdad’s Green Zone, the heavily fortified area west of the Tigris River from which the Coalition Provisional Authority governs occupied Iraq. The arch was built a few years ago by Saddam Hussein, in imitation of ancient gates that once protected Baghdad from Persian invaders. American soldiers now call it the Assassin’s Gate.
Early each morning, before the sun grows dangerous, crowds of Iraqis gather at the Assassin’s Gate. Some are job-seekers, others are protesters carrying banners: “please reopen our factories,” “we wish to see mr. frawley.” Demonstrators bring their causes here and sometimes turn into rioters. People hand out lists naming family members executed by Saddam’s regime or carry letters addressed to L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator in Iraq. With the old order overthrown, the Baath Party authorities purged, and the ministries stripped bare by looters, most Iraqis don’t know where to take their grievances and petitions, where to unload the burden of their personal histories. So, like supplicants to the Caliph of ancient Baghdad, they bring them directly to the front gate of the occupation. But few Iraqis have the credentials to enter the Green Zone, and there are few, if any, interpreters at the gate. The Iraqis stand on one side of coils of concertina wire, gesturing and trying to explain why they must get in; on the other side stand American soldiers in body armor, doing twelve-hour shifts of checkpoint duty, keeping them out.
One day in July, a tiny woman in a salmon-colored veil stepped out of the crowd and thrust a handwritten letter at me. She was a schoolteacher, about thirty, with glasses and thick white face powder and an expression so pointedly solemn that she might have been a mime performing grief. Her letter, which was eighteen pages long, requested an audience with “Mister respectable, merciful American ambassador Pawal Bramar.” It contained a great deal of detailed advice on the need to arm the Iraqi people so that they could help fight against the guerrilla resistance. The teacher, who was well under five feet tall, wanted permission to carry an ak-47 and work alongside American soldiers against “the beasts” who were trying to restore Saddam or bring Iranian-style oppression. She had drawn up a fake gun permit to illustrate her desire. She was having trouble sleeping, she said, and had all but stopped eating.
A man with a cane hobbled over from the line. His left hand, wrapped in a bandage, was missing the thumb. He explained to the teacher in Arabic that he had been paralyzed in a car accident while fleeing Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War, and that at some point he had lost the piece of paper entitling him to hospital care. Now that the Americans were in charge, he felt emboldened to ask for another copy—and so he had come to the Assassin’s Gate. The man, unshaven and wretched-looking, began to cry. The teacher told him not to be sad, to trust in God, and to speak with the American soldiers at the checkpoint. He shuffled back into line.
“Please, sir, can you help me?” the teacher continued. “I must work with Americans, because my psychology is demolished by Saddam Hussein. Not just me. All Iraqis. Psychological demolition.”
The Coalition Provisional Authority, or C.P.A., is headquartered in the Republican Palace, about a mile beyond the Assassin’s Gate, down a road of eucalyptus trees, past bombed state buildings and concrete barriers. The palace, protected by a high iron gate and sandbagged machine-gun positions, is a sprawling two-story office building in the Babylonian-Fascist style favored by Saddam, with Art Deco eagles spanning the doorways. Evenly spaced along the top of the fa\c Unknown LaTeX command \c c ade are four identical twenty-foot gray busts of Saddam, staring straight ahead, his eyes framed by an imperial helmet. Beneath these Ozymandian tributes, twelve hundred officials of the C.P.A. go about the business of running the country. Getting in to see one of them, a senior adviser to Bremer acknowledged, “is like a jailbreak in reverse.” Though it is in the geographical heart of ochre-colored, crumbling Baghdad, the C.P.A. sits in deep isolation. There are legitimate security reasons for this: on November 4th, the compound was hit by mortar fire, and four people were injured.
The Republican Palace is lavishly paved in marble and granite, with mirrored alcoves, gilded faux-Louis xiv furniture, and, in one vast domed room, murals of Scud missiles and the Al Aqsa mosque in a Jerusalem without Jews. Along a second-floor corridor is the office of the C.P.A.’s advisers to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. After the overthrow of the Saddam regime, a thirty-six-year-old American, Andrew P. N. Erdmann, who has a doctorate in history from Harvard, became Iraq’s acting Minister of Higher Education.
Drew Erdmann is a rangy, broad-shouldered former rower with a strong chin and short sandy hair parted in the middle; when I met him during a month’s stay in Iraq, he had a bushy mustache that turned his face into that of a British colonial official circa 1925. His features and oarsman’s physique, together with those double-barrelled middle initials, prepared me for a terse Anglophilic bureaucrat. Instead, Erdmann broods. He speaks in long, reflective sentences that are frequently interrupted by second thoughts and qualifications; he settles into a faster, more explosive rhythm when recounting something that angers him—often, his own conduct. He was getting just a few hours of sleep a night, sharing a cramped trailer on the grounds of the palace. By his own account, he was short-tempered and close to nervous exhaustion.
He had just returned from a meeting at which he’d tried not to humiliate a university president who asked what “operating budget” meant during the fifth or sixth discussion of the subject. Two weeks earlier, on the campus of Baghdad University, Jeffrey Wershow, a twenty-two-year-old soldier from Erdmann’s security detail, had been shot dead at point-blank range while waiting for Erdmann to come out of another meeting. Wershow was the seventy-first American soldier in Iraq to have been killed since the overthrow of Saddam. Since then, attacks on coalition forces have doubled—to more than thirty a day—and grown more fierce, sometimes involving car bombs. More than a hundred and fifty soldiers have been killed during the first six months of the occupation, and some twenty-two hundred have been wounded.
I sought out Erdmann in part because his dissertation adviser had been Ernest May, an authority on historical analogies. I was interested in the analogies that Erdmann was carrying around in his head for his new job of nation-building: The British in colonial Iraq? The Americans in postwar Germany? Lying on a cot in the trailer and fiddling with a Swiss Army knife, his feet propped on an Army duffelbag, his desk littered with water bottles, empty packets of Meals Ready to Eat, and unread books on the Middle East, Erdmann flashed a self-mocking grin. “I can’t think historically—there’ve been times when I don’t even know what I did forty-eight hours before,” he said wryly. “I try. It’s like a test for myself. Can I remember what I did the day before? I eventually can, but it takes effort. That’s not a good situation. You should be able to remember what you did in the last twenty-four hours.”
Hanging on the wall of Erdmann’s office was a sign that reminded him of his mission. It read,
“end state: a durable peace for a united and stable, democratic iraq that provides effective and representative government for and by the iraqi people; is underpinned by new and protected freedoms and a growing market economy; and no longer poses a threat to its neighbors or international security and is able to defend itself.”
Erdmann believed in this goal, but he was wary of the lofty rhetoric. One of his favorite books, which he was trying to find time to reread in Baghdad, is the French historian Marc Bloch’s “Strange Defeat,” a firsthand account of the collapse of France in 1940. Bloch served in the French Army in both world wars and then joined the Resistance before his capture, torture, and execution by the Nazis. Erdmann, in talking about his own efforts in Iraq, more than once cited a passage from “Strange Defeat”: “The abc of our profession is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings.”
The ongoing debate over the war in Iraq has rarely moved beyond abstract terms to take into account the human beings—Iraqis and Americans alike—whose lives are affected by decisions in Washington. To Erdmann, success in Iraq will ultimately depend on the small, concrete actions of individuals on the ground. The psychological demands of the occupation were daunting, he said, and added, “Some people can navigate it, some people can’t. Some people can make a mistake and recalibrate, others can’t. On both sides.” He paused. “So much of this is up to the wisdom of people—their prudence, their judgment.”
Before arriving in Iraq, in April, Erdmann had done a lot of relevant historical thinking. In his dissertation, “Americans’ Search for ‘Victory’ in the Twentieth Century,” he wrote about Americans’ growing realization that in a military intervention a careful transition from war to peace is as crucial as battlefield success. “The language that we live with today of ‘exit strategy,’ and the focus on the ‘end game’—that’s recent, and part of this historical evolution,” he said.
Erdmann received his Ph.D. in 2000, and promptly abandoned an academic career. There is something self-punishing and obsessive in his character. A life spent analyzing military history would be insufficient; he was the sort of academic who had to know how he would do under fire. He wanted to be a good citizen more than a good professor.
In early 2001, Erdmann was about to fly to Kosovo and take the first job he could find — “Anything. Load bags of grain. That’s how far away I wanted to get from academia” — when a call came from Richard N. Haass, who had just been named director of policy planning at the State Department. By May, Erdmann was in Washington, working for the Bush Administration. At Harvard, he had been an Eisenhower specialist, and he entered government in the old-fashioned spirit of a political independent. “This is a little too grandiose, but there is a previous tradition in foreign-policy circles of being more nonpartisan, serving the national interest,” he said.
In the summer of 2002, when the Administration began leaning toward an invasion of Iraq, Haass asked Erdmann to analyze twentieth-century postwar reconstructions. In fifteen single-spaced classified pages—epic length for a State Department memo—Erdmann applied the ideas in his dissertation to a series of case studies from the two world wars through more recent conflicts such as Bosnia and Kosovo. One of Erdmann’s fundamental conclusions was that long-term success depended on international support. In the short run, he explained to me one evening, “the foundation of everything is security,” which partly depended on having sufficient numbers of troops. “You don’t have to look too far to see that isn’t the case here. And I don’t fault the people who are here. There’s no way any fault should be put on the kids in the 3rd I.D. or the brigade commanders. The question is, why weren’t more people put in? That was the concern of my project—were we prepared to do what it took in the postwar phase?”
Last fall, Secretary of State Colin Powell circulated Erdmann’s memo to Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. “Maybe it wasn’t read,” Erdmann said.
Erdmann’s view that rebuilding Iraq would require a significant, sustained effort was echoed by the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Throughout 2002, sixteen groups of Iraqi exiles, coördinated by a bureau official named Thomas S. Warrick, researched potential problems in postwar Iraq, from the electricity grid to the justice system. The thousands of pages that emerged from this effort, which became known as the Future of Iraq Project, presented a sobering view of the country’s physical and human infrastructure—and suggested the need for a long-term, expensive commitment.
The Pentagon also spent time developing a postwar scenario, but, because of Rumsfeld’s battle with Powell over foreign policy, it didn’t coördinate its ideas with the State Department. The planning was directed, in an atmosphere of near-total secrecy, by Douglas J. Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, and William Luti, his deputy. According to a Defense Department official, Feith’s team pointedly excluded Pentagon officials with experience in postwar reconstructions. The fear, the official said, was that such people would offer pessimistic scenarios, which would challenge Rumsfeld’s aversion to using troops as peacekeepers; if leaked, these scenarios might dampen public enthusiasm for the war. “You got the impression in this exercise that we didn’t harness the best and brightest minds in a concerted effort,” Thomas E. White, the Secretary of the Army during this period, told me. “With the Department of Defense the first issue was ‘We’ve got to control this thing’—so everyone else was suspect.” White was fired in April. Feith’s team, he said, “had the mind-set that this would be a relatively straightforward, manageable task, because this would be a war of liberation and therefore the reconstruction would be short-lived.”
This was the view held by exiles in the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi. The exiles told President Bush that Iraqis would receive their liberators with “sweets and flowers.” Their advice led policymakers to assume that Iraqi soldiers and policemen would happily transfer their loyalty to the Americans, providing a ready-made security force. “There was a mistaken notion in certain circles in Washington that the Iraqi civil service would remain intact,” Barham Salih, the Prime Minister of the Iraqi Kurdish administration and a strong advocate for the overthrow of Saddam, said. A week before the war, he discussed the problem of law and order with a senior member of the Administration. “They were expecting the police to work after liberation,” Salih told me. “I said, ‘This is not the N.Y.P.D. It’s the Iraqi police. The minute the first cruise missile arrives in Baghdad, the police force degenerates and everybody goes home.’ ”
In the Pentagon’s scenario, the responsibility of managing Iraq would quickly be handed off to exiles, led by Chalabi—allowing the U.S. to retain control without having to commit more troops and invest a lot of money. “There was a desire by some in the Vice-President’s office and the Pentagon to cut and run from Iraq and leave it up to Chalabi to run it,” a senior Administration official told me. “The idea was to put our guy in there and he was going to be so compliant that he’d recognize Israel and all the problems in the Middle East would be solved. He would be our man in Baghdad. Everything would be hunky-dory.” The planning was so wishful that it bordered on self-deception. “It isn’t pragmatism, it isn’t Realpolitik, it isn’t conservatism, it isn’t liberalism,” the official said. “It’s theology.”
On January 20th, President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive No. 24, which gave control of postwar Iraq to the Department of Defense. At the end of the month, the Pentagon threw together a team of soldiers and civilians, under the leadership of retired General Jay Garner, in the newly christened Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. orha would administer Iraq after the end of hostilities. The war was only seven weeks away.
In 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, Garner had led the largely successful effort to save Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq. Garner and his inner circle of generals and ambassadors essentially used the same template for the war in Iraq. orha was divided into three “pillars,” as Garner called them: humanitarian assistance, reconstruction, and civil administration. Garner’s experience in northern Iraq led him to focus on the potential for a humanitarian disaster: displaced populations, starvation, outbreaks of disease, prisoners of war, and, above all, chemical-weapons attacks. The U.N. was warning of the possibility of half a million deaths. orha thoroughly prepared for each of these nightmares—and if any one of them had come to pass Garner’s foresight would have been applauded.
But in concentrating on possible emergencies he failed to consider the long view. On February 21st and 22nd, some two hundred officials gathered in an auditorium at the National Defense University, in Washington, for a “rock drill”—a detailed vetting of the plans that had been made so far. The drill struck some participants as ominous.
“I got the sense that the humanitarian stuff was pretty well in place, but the rest of it was flying blind,” one orha member recalled. “A lot of it was after hearing from Jay Garner, ‘We don’t have any resources to do this.’ ” Plans for running the country’s ministries were rudimentary; orha had done little research. At Douglas Feith’s insistence, his former law partner Michael Mobbs was named the head of the civil-administration team. According to Garner and others, Mobbs never gelled with his new colleagues. Yet this “pillar” would turn out to be the one that mattered most.
During the rock drill, Gordon W. Rudd, a professor from the Marine Corps’s Command and Staff College, who had been assigned to Garner’s team as a historian, noticed that a man sitting four rows in front of him kept interjecting comments during other people’s presentations. “At first, he annoyed me,” Rudd said. “Then I realized he was better informed than we were. He had worked the topics, while the guy onstage was a rookie.”
It was Tom Warrick, the coördinator of the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project, and his frustrations had just begun. Two weeks after the rock drill, after a meeting at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld asked Garner, “Do you have a guy named Warrick on your team?” Rumsfeld ordered Garner to remove Warrick from orha, adding, “This came from such a high level I can’t say no.” Warrick, who had done as much thinking about postwar Iraq as any other American official, never went to Baghdad.
The war between State and Defense continues: For months, Feith’s office has held up the appointment of other senior State Department officials to the C.P.A., even as the organization remains fifty per cent understaffed. The reports of the Future of Iraq Project were archived. In Baghdad, I met an Iraqi-American lawyer named Sermid Al-Sarraf, who had served on the project’s transitional-justice working group. He was carrying a copy of its two-hundred-and-fifty-page report, trying to interest C.P.A. officials. Nobody seemed to have read it.
The Administration was remarkably adept at muffling its own internal tensions. On only two occasions did dissenting views become public. The first was on the subject of money: a reporter from the Wall Street Journal quoted Lawrence Lindsey, the President’s chief economic adviser, floating a figure of up to two hundred billion dollars for the war and the reconstruction. This was at odds with the Administration’s projection—stated publicly by Vice-President Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz—that the cost of reconstruction would be largely covered by Iraqi oil revenue. By April, the White House had requested only $2.4 billion for postwar rebuilding.
The second rift was over troop deployment. In February, General Eric Shinseki, the Army’s chief of staff, testified before the Senate that the occupation of Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops. This prediction prompted Wolfowitz to get on the phone with Thomas White, the Army Secretary. “He was agitated that we in the Army didn’t get it,” White recalled. “He didn’t give arguments or reasons. Their view was that it was going to go the way they said it was going to go.” Two days later, Wolfowitz appeared before the House Budget Committee and said that so high an estimate was “wildly off the mark.” He explained, “It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his Army. Hard to imagine.”
On March 16th, three days before the first bombs fell on Baghdad, a hundred and sixty-nine orha members flew to Kuwait. Among them was Drew Erdmann.
Though he had left academia behind, Erdmann’s reasons for going to Iraq were, in a sense, professional. “My analysis was that we really are at a turning point in history,” he told me in Baghdad. “I had a particular historical perspective. I felt that this was a defining event which, good or bad, would have an impact for the next decade. If it went badly, the consequences would be worse than Vietnam. And, second, the postwar phase was going to be the most important.” Before heading to Iraq, Erdmann had to justify his plans to his wife, who was skeptical of the need for war. “I knew if I didn’t go I’d always regret it,” he said. “And my wife did, too. She knew that my regret would be corrosive.”
Erdmann asked to join the civil-administration team, led by Mobbs. By the time he reached the beachfront villas in Kuwait where orha had set up operations, Mobbs’s team was in disarray. They were getting more information about the fighting in Iraq from cnn than from Washington, and nobody even had an “org” chart of the Iraqi ministries. Garner had decided to divide Iraq into three (later four) administrative zones, which meant that orha’s maps bore no relation to the country’s eighteen governorates.
Gordon Rudd, the military historian, was worried enough to speak to Garner. “I said, ‘We’re not putting enough attention on civil administration.’ And he said, in so many words, ‘Gordon, that can wait—we’ve got to focus on humanitarian assistance.’ He was thinking about saving lives, not reforming Iraq. And at the time that made perfect sense.”
“I really like Jay Garner,” one orha member told me. “But I never got from him what the vision was and what we were going to do. To the extent that I did, it didn’t seem remotely realistic to me—that we would be going in there for three months and we would get everything in order and we would be done.”
In Kuwait, Erdmann and some others felt so undirected that they began looking for tasks. Together they drew up a list of sixteen key sites around Baghdad that the military should secure and protect upon the fall of the city. At the top of the list was the Central Bank. No. 2 was the Iraqi Museum. “Symbolic importance,” Erdmann explained. The Ministry of Oil was last.
On March 26th, the list went to the military war planners at Camp Doha, near the Iraqi border. Two weeks later, as Baghdad fell and intense looting began, Erdmann and the others went to Camp Doha to find out what had happened to their list. They met with a young British officer. “He’s sitting there on the stool in front, in his British desert cammies,” Erdmann recalled. “And he’s, like, ‘Well, you know, I just became aware of this big stack of stuff that you orha guys did yesterday.’ ” The list had fallen into a bureaucratic gap—and now Erdmann was watching on television as the Iraqi Museum was looted and the ministries were burned.
One day during the war, Albert Cevallos, at the time a contractor with the United States Agency for International Development, was standing with a group of civil-affairs officers at the Iraq-Kuwait border. One officer asked him, “What’s the plan for policing?”
Cevallos’s job was in the field of human rights. “I thought you knew the plan,” he said.
“No, we thought you knew.”
“Haven’t you talked to orha?”
“No, no one talked to us.”
Cevallos wanted to run away. “It was like a Laurel and Hardy routine,” he said. “What happened to the plans? This is like the million-dollar question that I can’t figure out.”
Timothy Carney, a career foreign-service officer who was called out of retirement by Wolfowitz to join Mobbs’s team, said that the military simply didn’t understand orha’s importance. “It was as if these guys didn’t have a clue what Jay Garner was about,” he said. “There was no priority given to the essential aspects of our mission.”
Erdmann was impatient with any facile condemnation of the planning effort. When I mentioned that, in 1944, the United States military had produced a four-hundred-page manual for the occupation of Germany, he retorted that, given the available lead time, a fairer comparison would be with the wartime occupation of French North Africa, which was so beset with problems that it nearly cost General Eisenhower his job. Erdmann reminded me that, in the case of Iraq, doing any planning at all was a delicate matter. The Administration had to prepare for the effects of a war it was still claiming it wanted to avoid.
“How much diplomacy would there have been at the U.N. if people had said, ‘The President is pulling people out of the Departments of Agriculture and Commerce to take over the whole Iraqi state’?” Erdmann said. “That’s the political logic that works against advance planning.”
But the haste and confusion of the planning, the determination to keep grim forecasts out of public view, the groundless assumptions, the desire to do it on the cheap—all this left Erdmann and his colleagues poorly prepared for what awaited them when they finally reached Baghdad, on April 23rd.
An infantry captain in Baghdad gave me his war log for the months of March, April, and May. The days leading up to the city’s fall are crowded with incidents. But immediately after April 9th, when the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down, the entries turn brief: “Nothing significant to report, stayed at airport all day doing maintenance and recovery operations.” Meanwhile, the city’s leading institutions were being plundered.
It remains a mystery why American forces did so little to stop the looting. Martial law was not declared; it was days before a curfew was imposed throughout the city. It was as if the fall of Baghdad were the military’s only objective. At a Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld regarded the chaos with equanimity. “Freedom’s untidy,” he said. “Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”
The economic cost of the looting was estimated at twelve billion dollars. The ruined buildings, the lost equipment, the destroyed records, and the damaged infrastructure continue to hamper the reconstruction. But on a more profound level the looting meant that Iraqis’ first experience of freedom was disorder and violence. The arrival of the Americans therefore unleashed new fears, even as it brought an end to political terror. The Administration had naïvely concluded that an imprisoned and brutalized population would respond to its release by gratefully setting up a democratic society. There was no contingency for psychological demolition. What had been left out of the planning was the Iraqis themselves.
“The state disappeared,” Erdmann said. “Mostly, either the people melted away or the institutions were melted down by them.” By the time Erdmann and his colleagues moved into the Republican Palace, which was without doors or windows or electricity or water, with half an inch of fine desert dust coating everything, they were already months behind schedule.
Iraqis, who had been taught by Saddam that individual initiative could be fatal, were waiting to be told what would come next; and no one told them. Many reacted to the vacuum with a kind of paralysis. “People just stopped doing everything that they would normally do,” an orha official recalled. In late April, a man in a Shia neighborhood approached Noah Feldman, a law professor at New York University, who had come to Iraq as a constitutional adviser, and asked him who was in charge. Nobody seemed to know.
“We were incompetent, as far as they were concerned,” Feldman said. “The key to it all was the looting. That was when it was clear that there was no order. There’s an Arab proverb: Better forty years of oppression than one day of anarchy.” He added, “That also told them they could fight against us—that we were not a serious force.”
In the last week of April, American officials met with three hundred and fifty Iraqis in the Baghdad Convention Center to discuss the country’s future. Garner was asked by a tribal sheikh, “Who’s in charge of our politics?”
“You’re in charge,” Garner answered.
The audience gasped. An American who was present said, “I later realized they were losing faith in us by the second.”
Upon his arrival in Baghdad, Erdmann joined an effort to find the highest-ranking officials “still left standing” from the Saddam regime—if only to fire them. But the ministries had been stripped of everything, including the urinals and pipes. Simply getting out of the palace was difficult, with few military escorts available. Progress depended almost entirely on random encounters in the city between American officials and Iraqi bureaucrats. “You had Iraqis just showing up at work, hoping that someone from the coalition would stop at their ministry, and saying, ‘Welcome. Take me to your leader,’ ” Erdmann recalled, laughing. “No joke! It was like, ‘I represent the Grand Galactic Federation.’ ” He cupped his hands around his mouth to make a ghostly echo. “ ‘Who are you? And what is your position?’ Then they’d tell you their job, and then it’s like, ‘What the hell is that?’ ”
Owing to the tightfistedness of the Office of Management and Budget, in Washington, Erdmann and his colleagues initially had roughly twenty-five thousand dollars for each devastated Iraqi ministry. Getting the money required grant applications that took several weeks for approval. (This process was later streamlined.) “To do reconstruction, you need to have the ability to deliver resources right away,” Erdmann said. “People in a desperate situation need help. Boy, that’s a blindingly obvious insight! The next thing is that if you’re not giving them help they’re going to go somewhere else.”
After spending just twenty-four hours in the capital, Jay Garner flew north to Kurdish territory, where he was acclaimed as a hero. He met with the two Kurdish leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, to discuss the political handoff. The Kurds and the opposition leaders who had been in exile, including Ahmad Chalabi, would form a provisional government in Baghdad, along with a few “internals”—Iraqis from inside the country. When these pro-Western Iraqis took charge, the Americans could slough off some responsibility without giving up power.
Garner recently spoke with me in his office at the defense-contracting company he now heads near the Pentagon. I asked him if these political moves had been directed by Defense officials. “I never got a call from anybody saying, ‘Don’t do that,’ ” Garner said. “You follow me?”
But Chalabi short-circuited the plan. According to an Iraqi politician who was close to the negotiations, Chalabi, along with the Shiite leader Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, who was killed in an August car bombing, resisted Garner’s idea of including internals—and anyone else who might diminish their power. “They wanted basically to control who would be there,” the Iraqi politician said.
Chalabi’s obstructionism ultimately didn’t matter. The handoff scenario that had been hatched in Washington was disintegrating even as Garner was trying to carry it out. “The exiles made a big mistake, thinking that they could ride an American tank into Baghdad and gain legitimacy. It just doesn’t work that way,” the Iraqi politician said. Chalabi and the seven-hundred-man militia of the Iraqi National Congress, which commandeered choice properties upon arrival in Baghdad, were not acclaimed by their compatriots. (“They may have looked like a bit of a warlord group,” Gordon Rudd said. “I told that to Garner. He said, ‘Gordon, I don’t like that word.’ ”) Making matters worse, the police and the Army had not defected; they had disappeared. Criminal gangs proliferated throughout the city.
“All of this was funnelled up to Feith,” a senior Administration official said, “and from Feith to Rumsfeld, and they had a come-to-Jesus meeting and said, ‘We’ve got to change things fast.’ ”
In late April, Rumsfeld called Garner to tell him that the veteran diplomat L. Paul Bremer would be replacing him. It was a tacit admission that the situation in Iraq was out of control. In an interview, Feith insisted that Garner’s removal was routine and signalled no change of policy. He also denied that the Administration had been intent on transferring power to Chalabi. “The idea that we had a rigid plan for the political transition is a mistake,” he said. “We developed concepts, policy guidelines—for example, organize as much authority as possible in Iraqi hands. That is a policy guideline. But, as for specific names and timetables and rules, nobody here presumed to dictate that, because you can’t possibly know that. That’s like trying to tell a local commander in advance of the battle exactly how many people to put where as the fighting proceeds. Nobody can work with a plan that rigid. Nobody here in Washington is micromanaging.”
But Bremer suggested that his appointment was marked “Urgent.” “I had ten days to get ready to come here,” he told me in Baghdad. A former diplomat who had served under Republican Presidents before becoming the managing director of Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm, Bremer was acceptable to Rumsfeld; his selection represented a brief truce in the war between Defense and State. By mid-May, he had taken Garner’s place. Garner had worn shirtsleeves and insisted on being called Jay; his successor wore a suit and was referred to as Ambassador Bremer. orha was dissolved into the Coalition Provisional Authority, and Bremer, with the status of a Presidential envoy, the legal imprimatur of a U.N. Security Council resolution, and the command authority that Garner never had, let it be known that he was in control. The Iraqi Army was promptly abolished, all members of the top four levels of the Baath Party were expelled from government service, Chalabi’s militia was disarmed, and the formation of a provisional government was stopped cold. There was even talk of shooting looters, though it didn’t happen.
The Defense Department, which was predicting in early May that troop levels would be down to thirty thousand by the end of the summer, extended the deployment of battle-weary divisions indefinitely. What had been envisaged as a swift liberation had become a prolonged occupation.
To this day, key policymakers maintain their faith in the Pentagon’s original plan. According to a senior Administration official, not long ago in Washington, Cheney approached Powell, stuck a finger in his chest, and said, “If you hadn’t opposed the I.N.C. and Chalabi, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” But one Pentagon official acknowledged that his agency was responsible for the debacle. “It was ridiculous,” he said. “Rummy and Wolfowitz and Feith did not believe the U.S. would need to run post-conflict Iraq. Their plan was to turn it over to these exiles very quickly and let them deal with the messes that came up. Garner was a fall guy for a bad strategy. He was doing exactly what Rummy wanted him to do. It was the strategy that failed.”
In April, cnn aired footage of a marine in Baghdad who is confronted with a crowd of angry Iraqis. He shouts back in frustration, “We’re here for your fucking freedom!”
In the months following the overthrow of Saddam, tens of thousands of soldiers who thought they would be home by June saw their departures postponed again and again. They are now the occupation’s most visible face. Combat engineers trained to blow up minefields sit through meetings of the Baghdad water department; airborne troops who jump in and out of missions spend months setting up the Kirkuk police department; soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division who spearheaded the invasion pass out textbooks in a Baghdad girls’ school. The peacekeeping missions in the Balkans gave some of them a certain amount of preparation, but there was little training for the concerted effort now required of soldiers in Iraq. Ray Jennings, a policy consultant who spent several months in Iraq, told me that he encountered officers running midsized cities who said, “I’m doing the best I can, but I don’t know how to do this, I don’t have a manual. You got a manual?” A civil-affairs captain asked Albert Cevallos for training in “Robert’s Rules of Order 101.” Rumsfeld’s nightmare of an army of nation-builders has come to pass in Iraq.
The captain who showed me his war log was a company commander named John Prior. He is a twenty-nine-year-old from Indiana, six feet tall and stringy. His youthful face, deadpan sarcasm, and bouncy slew-footed stride do not prepare you for his toughness.
“Some people are just born to do something,” Prior said. By his own account, he loves Army life, the taking and giving of orders. “The sappy reasons people say they’re in the military—those are the reasons I’m in,” he said. “When the Peace Corps can’t quite get it done and diplomacy fails and McDonald’s can’t build enough franchises to win Baghdad over, that’s when the military comes in.”
His unit, Charlie Company of the 2nd Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment, is now based at the Iraqi military academy in south Baghdad. (His soldiers’ sleeping quarters are festooned with crêpe-paper decorations from the last Ramadan.) The academy is next to the bombed ruins of a vast military camp and airfield that have become home to five thousand displaced people, looters, and petty criminals. After the fall of Baghdad, it took two and a half months for Prior’s company to arrive at its current location. During their odyssey in central Iraq, Prior and his men came to realize that what President Bush, on May 1st, had called the end of “major combat operations” was just the beginning.
Charlie Company’s first mission after the fall of Baghdad sent Prior west to the town of Ramadi, to retrieve the body of Veronica Cabrera, an Argentine journalist who had been killed in a highway accident. Prior and his soldiers were the first conventional forces to enter Ramadi, which was becoming a center of Baathist resistance. The company was asked by Special Forces and the C.I.A. to stay on for a few days and help patrol the town. They promptly found themselves in the middle of an anti-American riot, with insults, fruit, shoes, two-by-fours, rocks, and, finally, chunks of concrete flying at them. The Americans didn’t shoot and no one was seriously injured; in his log Prior commends his soldiers for their restraint. In the following days in Ramadi, and then in the nearby town of Fallujah, Prior records a series of successful raids on houses and weapons markets. He expresses pride in his soldiers’ resourcefulness. Then something new and strange enters the margins of his account: Iraqis.
In Ramadi, a man who speaks broken English around other Iraqis suddenly pulls Prior aside and whispers in flawless English, “I am an American, take me with you.” When Prior tries to learn more, the man reverts to broken English and then clams up. Another man on another day approaches a soldier and, speaking perfect English, warns him not to trust Iraqis—that things are not what they seem. He disappears before the soldier can get more information. Prior and his first sergeant, Mark Lahan, track down the man at home with his family. Now using broken English, the man tells them that everything is fine.
In another mysterious incident, an Iraqi approaches Lahan and abruptly asks, “How are things in Baghdad? Have there been any suicide bombings? Have any Americans been killed?” Soon afterward, the guerrilla war starts.
“The entire situation seemed very weird,” Prior writes on April 26th, after five days in Ramadi. “It is clear now that they are not as happy as they say that we are here. For the first time in a while, I felt extremely nervous being in such close proximity to Iraqi nationals.” In another entry, from Fallujah, he writes, “The Iraqis are an interesting people. None of them have weapons, none of them know where weapons are, all the bad people have left Fallujah, and they only want life to be normal again. Unfortunately, our compound was hit by R.P.G.”—rocket-propelled-grenade—“fire today, so I am not inclined to believe them.”
Prior was among the first soldiers to encounter the hidden nature of things in an Iraq that was neither at war nor at peace. Firepower and good intentions would be less important than learning to read the signs. Iraqis, no longer forming the cheering crowds that had greeted the company on its way up to Baghdad, were now going to play an intimate role in Prior’s life.
The raids in Ramadi and Fallujah lasted almost a month; then Charlie Company was recalled to Baghdad. There Captain Prior’s log ends. “We put trouble down, we left,” he told me. “Trouble came again.”
Charlie Company spent its first month back in Baghdad billeted at the zoo. The soldiers had been there in mid-April, on a mission to escort a truckload of produce and frozen meat (“A gift from the Kuwaiti people to the Iraqi people”) for the few animals that had survived firefights and were too dangerous or worthless to steal. I visited the zoo several times, and the experience was always upsetting. It was the one place in Iraq where Saddam’s regime seemed still to exist. “It was not a zoo, but more of an animal prison,” Prior notes in his log. “Small cages, closely packed, no attempt to give the animals any sense of natural setting.” Dogs and puppies, favorites of Saddam, lay panting in sweltering cells next to a catatonic blind bear that had mutilated its own chest. (Some of the dogs had been fed to the lions during the war, when food supplies ran out.) The soldiers who took control of the zoo in April found a baboon loose on the grounds; it proved harmless to them, but when one of the zookeepers, who had been hiding in his office, was brought out the animal flew into a rage and attacked him, so that the soldiers had to shoot the baboon to save the Baathist.
Bremer’s C.P.A., needing a public-relations victory, refurbished the zoo and reopened it to the public in July, with great fanfare; the cost was close to a half million dollars. On a subsequent visit, I found the place, which had been popular before the war, desolate and nearly abandoned. It was surrounded by American checkpoints, which discouraged families from visiting. In September, a group of soldiers at the zoo got drunk after hours, and one of them reached into the cage of a Bengal tiger with a piece of meat; when his hand started to disappear into the tiger’s mouth, one of his buddies shot the animal. The Baghdad Zoo seemed to combine the cruelty and injustice of the old regime with some of the stupidity and carelessness of the new.
Charlie Company spent a month establishing security in the area near the zoo and setting up a neighborhood council. Then, in late June, the company was moved again—to the military academy in south Baghdad—because its zone of control did not coincide with Baghdad’s administrative districts. “We’d made friends there,” Prior recalled. Packing up again, he said, “was not that cool.” He added dryly, “We’d been planning this war since freaking 12 September, and it might have helped if someone had drawn a map before the war and figured out where everyone went.”
According to the brigade’s original calendar, Baghdad’s infrastructure would be rebuilt in August, elections would take place in September, and the soldiers would leave the city in October. This brisk forecast was soon abandoned, of course. Because of confused planning, it wasn’t until August that Charlie Company’s activities began to yield tangible benefits for Iraqis. And there was no time to lose. Throughout the summer, electric power operated sporadically, violence of all kinds kept rising, and Iraqis who could have been won over to the American side were steadily lost.
One morning, I sat in the base-camp canteen with Prior, First Sergeant Lahan, and their translator, Numan Al-Nima, a gray-haired former engineer with Iraqi Airways. Prior opened a coalition map of Baghdad’s security zones and showed me the piece of the city he “owns”: a rectangle of Zafaraniya, a largely Shiite slum in south Baghdad. Roughly two hundred and fifty thousand people live in the area. Prior chairs the new neighborhood council and is in charge of small reconstruction projects such as renovating schools; he’s also responsible for sewage and trash disposal in his battalion’s zone, which contains half a million people.
“Infrastructure is the key now,” Prior said more than once. “If these people have electricity, water, food, the basics of life, they’re less likely to attack.” Sewage, Prior realized, was the front line of nation-building. When I met him, in early August, Prior was trying to get two hundred thousand dollars into the hands of Iraqi contractors as fast as he could.
“Show us something,” the translator urged Prior. “People are hungry, starving. They don’t believe they got rid of Saddam. If they got rid of Saddam, give me something to eat. That’s why people hate Americans. We don’t hate them because they are Americans. It is because they are the superpower, but where is the super power?”
We went out into the streets of Zafaraniya, travelling in the usual two-Humvee convoy, complete with gunners. Captain Prior’s mission that morning was to visit nine pumping stations, which directed the district’s untreated sewage into the Tigris and the Diala Rivers. To study a Shiite slum’s sewage is to understand that Saddam reduced those parts of Iraq he didn’t favor to the level of Kinshasa or Manila. Green ponds of raw waste, eighteen inches deep, blocked the roads between apartment houses where children played. The open ditches that were the area’s drainage system were overflowing.
“How foolish of me not to realize that the open sludge flowing past the children is the way the system is supposed to work,” Prior remarked. A complete overhaul of the system was not his immediate priority. “I’m going to support their open-sewage sludge line and get it flowing,” he said. The heat rose, the streets stank, and Prior moved in battle gear at such a businesslike pace that two engineers from another battalion struggled to keep up. Each of the pumping stations, in various states of disrepair, was maintained and guarded by an Iraqi family that lived in a hovel on the premises, tended a lush vegetable garden, and kept an ak-47. Prior had never studied civil engineering—and he reminded me that his unit contained no city planners—but he already seemed to have mastered the inner workings of the Zafaraniya sewer system. Lahan told me, “People have said the Army’s done this before, in ’45 with Japan and Germany. Unfortunately, none of those people are in the Army anymore, so we have to figure it out ourselves.”
With Prior, there were no earnest attempts to win hearts and minds over multiple cups of tea. He was all brisk practicality, and the Iraqis he worked with, who always had more to say than Prior gave them time for, seemed to respect him. “I will get you the money,” he told a grizzled old man who was explaining at length that his pump was broken. “Six thousand U.S.? Yeah, yeah, great. Get started.”
Later, we visited Zafaraniya’s gas station, another of Prior’s responsibilities. Initially, he had devoted his energy to getting customers to wait in orderly lines. “In a lot of ways, you’re trying to teach them a new way of doing things,” he said. “ ‘Teach’ might be the wrong word—they’re capable, competent, intelligent people. We’re just giving them a different way to solve certain problems.”
Prior’s mission that day was to settle a price dispute between the gas-station managers and the community, which was represented by several neighborhood council members. A meeting took place in the gas-station managers’ cramped back office, equipped with an underperforming air-conditioner. The council members wanted three hundred litres of diesel set aside every week for neighborhood generators. The managers wanted written permission from the Ministry of Oil.
The council members pulled out authorizations signed by various American officers. Prior tried to move the discussion along, but the Iraqis kept arguing, until it became clear that the problem went beyond a dispute over diesel. One of the most hierarchical, top-down state systems on earth had been wiped out almost overnight, and no new system had yet taken its place. The neighborhood councils are imperfect embryos of local democracy. Confused, frustrated Iraqis turn to the Americans, who seem to have all the power and money; the Americans, who don’t see themselves as occupiers, try to force the Iraqis to work within their own institutions, but those institutions have been largely dismantled.
Flies were landing on Prior’s brush cut. “Guys, we’ve been talking about this for twenty minutes,” he said to the council members. “Do what I say. Go to the Oil Ministry. Just do it—just be done with it. Then you won’t have to have slips of paper and we won’t have to have this conversation.”
Everyone was getting irritated. One of the council members told Prior that other Iraqis suspected them of making millions of dinars off public service. They were considered collaborators; their lives had been threatened.
Prior changed his tone and lowered the pressure. “I would tell all of you candidly that you have a very tough job,” he said. “We are not paying you, your people are angry and frustrated, and I know they take out their anger on you, and I really thank you for what you’re doing. They may not understand or appreciate it now, but I’m telling you, your efforts, they’re what are going to transform this country.”
There was a commotion outside the office—loud, accusatory voices. Prior put on his helmet and flak vest, grabbed his rifle, and went out to the pumps. Customers had left their vehicles, a crowd had formed, and it was getting ugly enough that the soldiers who had been waiting by the Humvees were trying to intervene. Amid the shouting, Prior established that an employee of the Oil Ministry had come to collect diesel samples from each of the pumps for routine testing. One of the council members was accusing him of stealing benzene.
“No accusations!” Prior said. “Let’s go see.”
The crowd followed him under the blinding sun to the ministry employee’s truck. Five metal jerricans stood in back. Prior opened the first can with the air of making a point and sniffed: “Diesel.” He opened the second: “Diesel.” As he unscrewed the cap on the third jerrican and bent over to smell it, hot diesel fuel sprayed in his face.
Everyone fell silent. Prior stood motionless with the effort to control himself. He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed them with his fingers. The fuel was on his helmet, his flak vest. A sergeant rushed over with bottled water. Then the chorus of shouts rose again.
“Everybody shut up!” Prior yelled. “I’m going to solve this. What is the problem? No accusations.” His face wet, he began to interrogate the accusing council member, who now looked sheepish.
“How do you know someone gave him benzene? This is a great object lesson, everybody!” Prior was speaking to the crowd now, as his translator frantically rendered the lesson in Arabic. “You came out here and said this guy’s a thief, and everybody’s angry and he’s going to get fired—and now you’re backing down.”
“It wasn’t just an accusation,” the council member said. “The guy drove up on the wrong side—”
“But what proof do you have that he did it? Wait! Hold on! I’m trying to make a point here. How would you like it if my soldiers broke into your house because your neighbors said you have rocket-propelled grenades, and I didn’t see them but I broke into your house—how would you feel? Stop accusing people, for the love of God!”
“I caught him red-handed,” the council member insisted.
“No, you didn’t.”
“O.K., no problem.”
Prior wasn’t letting it go. “There is a problem: the problem is that you people accuse each other without proof! That’s the problem.”
Prior’s treatise on evidence-gathering and due process ended. The crowd dispersed, and the meeting resumed inside. Prior tried to laugh off the incident. “Who doesn’t like diesel in their eyes?” he joked. Later, he told me, “I wish I hadn’t lost my temper. It wasn’t the diesel—it was the way they kept bickering.”
That afternoon, two of the council members, Ahmed Ogali and Abdul Jabbar Doweich, invited me for lunch. Both men were poor, and neither had a home he was proud of, so we ate chicken and rice in the living room of Ogali’s brother-in-law. Ogali, a thirty-three-year-old gym teacher, said, “Today was a small problem. If I told you about our problems, you wouldn’t believe it. They exhaust us.” Both men were working without pay—they couldn’t even get cell phones or travel money from the C.P.A. “Prior is doing more than his best,” Ogali said. “But he’s also controlled by his leaders.”
Doweich, an unemployed father of four, had spent eight years in prison under Saddam for belonging to an Islamist political party. He still hoped for an Islamic state in the future—as did eighty per cent of Iraqis, he added.
“That’s his personal opinion,” Ogali interrupted. “It’s not eighty per cent.”
For now, Doweich saw working with Captain Prior on the neighborhood council as the best way to serve his country. The expectations of Iraqis were falling on the council members’ heads, and Doweich believed that, at levels well above Prior, American officials had no interest in solving problems.
“The people are watching,” Ogali said. “When I come back at night, they’re waiting. They want to know what we’re doing. Last week, I told them about the schools, the sewer projects. They were happy—but these are very old projects, they were promised for a long time.”
Doweich suggested that the Americans give a hundred dollars to every Iraqi family. That would take the edge off people’s frustration. “I can’t say why the Americans don’t do these things,” he said. “Iraqis have trouble understanding Americans.”
Ogali said that, sadly, the reverse was also true. The Americans, he told me, “came here to do a job, and that’s what they’ll do. Iraqis work closely with them, but they don’t try to understand us.”
American soldiers have a phrase for the Iraqis’ habit of turning one another in. Prior once used it: “These people dime each other out like there’s no tomorrow.” With these betrayals, Iraqis play on soldiers’ fears and ignorance, pulling them into private feuds that the Americans have no way of adjudicating.
The night after the meeting at the gas station, Prior and a few dozen soldiers from Charlie Company went out in two Humvees and two Bradleys to look for a suspected fedayeen militiaman. For such missions, Prior used a different translator: a strapping young guy with an aggressive manner. I expected to see the rougher side of Prior and Charlie Company that night—these were soldiers, after all, not civil engineers.
The suspected fedayeen happened to be named Saddam Hussein, and he was High Value Target No. 497. It would be the Americans’ second visit to his house. The tip had come from a plump informant whom Prior called Operative Chunky Love, and whose intelligence had already tagged three men in the neighborhood, including his brother-in-law. Tonight, Chunky Love was supposed to show up at his sister’s house, near Saddam Hussein’s, in an orange garbage truck loaded with weapons—a sting operation. Lahan warned me, “Out of a hundred tips we’ve gotten from Iraqi intelligence, one has worked out.”
Recently, Prior had experienced what he called an epiphany. He and his soldiers were searching a man’s house on what turned out to be a false accusation. “And I just realized—we’re on top,” he said. “Rome fell, and Greece fell, and I thought, I like being an American. I like being on top, and you don’t stay on top unless there’s people willing to defend it.” It was a feeling not of triumph but of clarity—and a limited kind of empathy. “I thought, What if someone did this to my family? I’d be pissed. And what if I couldn’t do anything about it? And I thought, I don’t want this to happen to me or my family, and we need to maintain superiority as the No. 1 superpower.”
Tonight’s target was a village along a dirt road, on a peninsula where the Diala River doubles back on itself. At sunset, Prior pulled up before a yard where a cow was grazing. A middle-aged woman came to the gate. She was the sister of Saddam Hussein and the wife of one of the men picked up on Prior’s last visit.
“Saddam Hussein?” she said. “The President? He’s not here.” She laughed nervously. Prior did not; his dry humor was not in evidence tonight. “Saddam Hussein moved out with his wife and children,” she said. “I don’t know where they went.”
“She’s lying,” the translator told Prior, in a thuggish tone. Prior told the woman that he wanted to search the house. A younger woman who looked ill was trying to calm a crying baby.
The search of the bedroom turned up nothing: pictures of a young man with his girlfriend, love notes, Arab girlie photographs.
I went back into the living room, which was nearly bare except for a television. An old Egyptian movie was on, without sound. The woman with the baby was retching in the doorway. Speaking Arabic, the middle-aged woman exclaimed, “We were happy when you America
Posted by cds at November 29, 2003 01:36 PM