Imperial Life in the Emerald City (26 page)

As the law was being written, Hallen began firing Iraqis. The old stock exchange employed eighty-five people—far more than he needed for the new, computerized exchange. Instead of keeping all of the former employees, as other CPA staffers had done with the government agencies they supervised, Hallen was determined to create a lean, American-style exchange with just forty salaried positions. He met with each of the old employees and then chose forty-five to sack. “It definitely ruffled feathers,” he said. “It was not an easy time, because people in Iraq are not used to getting fired.”

Hallen nominated nine Iraqis to serve on the exchange's board of governors. To ensure the board's independence, he needed to find at least four who would not be involved in the exchange's day-to-day operations, but he didn't know many Iraqi businessmen beyond those involved with the stock market. For recommendations he turned to two Iraqis he trusted. As he met candidates, he screened them for proficiency in English—he later said that this was for his personal benefit—and for “a very American style of thinking in terms of business and capitalism.”

He eventually assembled what he thought was an outstanding group, until an Iraqi friend told Hallen he was making “a big mistake.” Most of the candidates Hallen had selected were Sunni Arabs. It was an understandable oversight—most of the wealth and business expertise in the old days was in the Sunni community—but even so, Shiite and Kurdish leaders were bound to be upset. Hallen struck a few Sunni names from the list.

Opening the exchange also required money to buy the computers, to fund the construction of a trading floor, to lease a building, and getting money meant Hallen had to compete against other CPA staffers and their pet projects. “Some could argue that the country had so many needs, like electricity and security, so who cares about the stock exchange?” But Hallen believed that his project was just as deserving. He began to lobby his boss, and everyone else involved in disbursing funds, to pay for the exchange. In the end, he got the money he needed.

By the spring of 2004, the securities law was ready. It had been vetted by the CPA's lawyers and several cabinet agencies in Washington. On April 19, Bremer signed it, and simultaneously appointed the nine Iraqis selected by Hallen to become the exchange's board of governors. Another five Iraqis were named to the new Securities and Exchange Commission.

The stock exchange's board selected Talib Tabatabai, the American-educated broker who had been so critical of Hallen, as its chairman. The new securities law that Hallen had nursed into life gave the board control over the stock exchange's operations, but it didn't say a thing about the role of the CPA adviser. Hallen assumed that he'd have a part in decision making until the handover of sovereignty. Tabatabai and the board, however, saw themselves in charge.

The board hired back the forty-five workers whom Hallen had fired. The stock exchange didn't need more employees, but it didn't make sense to create enemies of fellow Iraqis. Who knew what a pink-slipped worker might do?

Tabatabai and the other governors also decided to open the market as soon as possible. They didn't want to wait several more months for the computerized trading system to be up and running. They ordered dozens of DryErase boards to be installed on the trading floor. They had used blackboards to keep track of buying and selling prices before the war, and that's how they'd do it again.

Tension between Hallen and the board grew. Hallen regarded the board as “stubborn and resistant to change.” Board members couldn't understand why Hallen wouldn't leave them alone. It was their country, after all. The board balked at paying bills for services ordered by Hallen that they felt were unneeded; Hallen believed that the board was refusing perfectly reasonable expenses, such as guards to prevent squatters from occupying the stock exchange. “It was not a pleasant business,” Hallen said.

On June 22, Hallen left Iraq. Two days later, the stock exchange opened. Brokers barked orders to floor traders, who used their trusty whiteboards. Transactions were recorded not with computers but with small chits written on in ink. CPA staffers stayed away, afraid that their presence would make the stock market a target for insurgents.

When he returned to the United States, Hallen told an interviewer from the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training that his work in Iraq “was not the crowning achievement of my career.”

“When I think about how I felt when I left, I was unhappy,” he said. “But when I look back on it… and put it in perspective and look at everything I was up against, I feel differently. I was by myself for five months in a nearly impossible situation. At times it really felt impossible, trying to pull everything together. When I look at how things are, I feel very proud because I knew I was instrumental in bringing things to where they are today, even if things didn't turn out the way I wanted them to. If I hadn't done my job, maybe nothing would've happened at all.”

I asked Tabatabai what would have happened if Hallen hadn't been assigned to reopen the stock exchange. He smiled. “We would have opened months earlier. He had grand ideas, but those ideas did not materialize,” Tabatabai said of Hallen. “Those CPA people reminded me of Lawrence of Arabia.”

But even T. E. Lawrence had known when to back down. As Tabatabai spoke, I thought of one of Lawrence's most apropos quotations, and wondered if anyone in the palace had bothered to read him:

Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.

THE GREEN ZONE, SCENE X

American military personnel stationed in the Republican Palace rarely had a kind word to say about the CPA. The soldiers, many of whom were majors and colonels, had been in uniform for more than two decades and resented being ordered around by CPA staffers in their twenties. Some of the soldiers had done tours in Kosovo, Haiti, and Somalia, and a few had even served in Vietnam. They knew a thing or two about post-conflict nation building. But to the CPA's young turks, the soldiers were drivers, guards, and errand boys. The civilians made policy; the soldiers implemented it.

Since the soldiers weren't supposed to drink, they didn't hang out at the bars or the al-Rasheed's disco. They kept to themselves, smoking in the rear portico, exercising in the gym, and playing cards in their trailers. They maintained that things would be a whole lot better if they were in charge. The acronym CPA, they joked, stood for Can't Produce Anything.

In early 2004, a contingent of marines was assigned to guard the palace. They erected concrete barriers to limit traffic around the compound and strung new coils of razor wire atop the blast walls. They set up more observation posts and established a sign-in table, where those without plastic CPA badges had to hand over a piece of identification in exchange for a visitor's pass, which had to be displayed at all times while that person was on palace grounds.

Behind the desk was a white DryErase board upon which the marines drew cartoons. One day the board depicted a gravestone inscribed with the words
COMMON SENSE.
Underneath was a caption: “Killed by the CPA.”

13

Missed Opportunities

DRIVING ANYWHERE IN BAGHDAD
before the war took about fifteen minutes. A network of wide expressways and boulevards crisscrossed the city. Motorists could zip along at the speed limit or faster. Everyone stayed in his lane and stopped at red lights. Traffic policemen—in white shirts, white hats, and white gloves—manned busy intersections. The traffic was light because the importation of cars was restricted. If an Iraqi wanted a car, he put his name on a list at the Ministry of Trade. If he was lucky, he'd get a letter five years later informing him that a car was ready for purchase—at a subsidized price. Perhaps it would be a Toyota, a Volkswagen, or a Russian Lada. He took what he could get. Of course, the car everyone wanted was a Chevy Caprice, or any American-made, eight-cylinder gas-guzzler. Saddam hated Washington, but the Iraqis loved Detroit.

After the war, the most noticeable change in Iraqi life was the traffic. The stoplights went out. People started driving on the wrong side of the road, secure in the knowledge that cops were no longer reporting for work. Cars barreled down sidewalks. People who always wanted to make a left turn in front of their house but couldn't because of a concrete median simply hired construction workers to jackhammer away the obstruction.

Lawlessness was only part of the problem. The American military closed off streets near its bases in the city, regardless of whether they were vital thoroughfares. To protect the Green Zone, the military shut down one of the bridges spanning the Tigris and two expressways connecting western and northern Baghdad with the city center. The sight of barricaded roads was a daily reminder to Iraqis that they were under occupation, and those barricades did more to stoke anger at the Americans than almost anything else.

But the biggest problem had its roots in a well-intentioned CPA policy. Peter McPherson, Bremer's economics czar, abolished duties on imports, including a tax on cars that could be as much as 100 percent of the cost of the vehicle. Within days, savvy entrepreneurs brought truckloads of used cars to Baghdad from as far away as Germany and the Netherlands, and Iraqis who had socked away money under their mattresses bought their first car, or, in many cases, a second car for the family. The CPA estimated that a half million cars were shipped into Iraq in the first nine months of the occupation, more than doubling the number of vehicles on the road. Iraqis were happy—until they had to get somewhere or fill up the tank. Yes, they were living atop the world's second-largest oil reserves, but Iraq's refineries could not produce enough gasoline to fuel all the new cars. Gas lines stretched for miles, prompting the CPA to pay Halliburton millions of dollars a day to truck in gasoline from Kuwait and Turkey. But even with gas in the tank, the volume of new cars on the roads made routine trips interminable.

Iraqis weren't the only ones grousing. American soldiers grew increasingly nervous about getting stuck in traffic. Although the traffic police had returned to their posts a few months into the occupation, the CPA forbade them to levy fines. The traffic cops had been notoriously corrupt, forcing motorists to fork over money instead of issuing them summonses to appear in court. The CPA was standing on principle, even if declawing the cops meant that traffic would continue to crawl.

To Major General Martin Dempsey, the commander of the First Armored Division, the army unit in charge of Baghdad, the solution seemed clear. He decreed that a new traffic law be drawn up. The order trickled down the ranks to a captain named John Smathers, a personal-injury lawyer from Maryland.

Smathers was a reservist attached to the military's civil affairs team working with the CPA to administer Baghdad. He was forty-five, though he had the trim physique of a soldier a generation younger. The only giveaway was his graying hair and his intense, no-nonsense demeanor. He had already received three Bronze Stars for his service in Iraq. He fended off an ambush in southern Baghdad the day after the city's liberation. Over the next few weeks, he and his quick-reaction team captured two of the fifty-five Iraqis most wanted by the Pentagon; foiled a bank robbery, recovering $6.3 million in cash; and found ten artifacts stolen from the Baghdad Museum.

As a former county prosecutor, Smathers knew a fair bit about traffic laws. His first step was to read a translated copy of Iraq's code. After poring through it, he judged it a disaster. Traffic officers could seize a driver's car without a judge's permission. They could collect fines on the spot. They could jail a driver for two years for simply uttering an insult. “There was no definition of what powers the police had, other than whatever they wanted,” Smathers said.

With the help of an Iraqi judge he befriended, Smathers began rewriting the law. It took him three weeks. His finished draft was fifty-three pages long, more than twice the length of the original law, and it embodied all of the earnest intentions and parochial biases of the American occupation. He limited officers to issuing tickets payable at a courthouse. As collateral, they could seize a driver's license. If drivers wanted to dispute citations, they could do so at new traffic courts established under the law.

To Smathers, the old law was riddled with sloppy definitions and loopholes. Since he didn't know enough about traffic law to rewrite those sections himself, he logged on to the Internet and searched for a document to serve as his model, a document he knew well: the State of Maryland's motor vehicle code. After reading the Maryland law, he engaged in a flurry of cutting and pasting. The Iraqi law, he noticed, didn't have a ban on following another vehicle too closely. Section 21-310 of the Maryland code had just the wording he needed. It became Article 18, Paragraph 11, of his draft: “The driver of a motor vehicle may not follow another vehicle more closely than is reasonable and prudent, having due regard for the speed of the other vehicle and of the traffic on and the condition of the highway.” He did the same borrowing for regulations on speeding, unsafe lane changes, and the failure to yield. If it was good enough for Baltimore, it was good enough for Baghdad.

As he went about drafting the code, the personal-injury lawyer in Smathers seized upon the fact that the original law had no provision for people to sue the police for misbehavior. He saw this as a glaring omission. He opened his laptop and typed out a paragraph:

If a police officer, acting within the scope of his duties as an employee of the Ministry of Interior, uses excessive force to make an arrest and causes personal injury to another or unnecessarily damages the property of another, then the injured person or owner of damaged property has a civil cause of action against the Ministry of Interior, in civil court, to recover compensatory damages for (1) the value of medical services rendered; (2) lost wages; (3) pain and suffering; and (4) the lesser of the cost of repair of damaged property or the value of the property. If the police officer acted intentionally and with malice, then the person may also recover punitive damages.

Smathers regarded his crafting of the new law as a model of an enlightened occupation. He had consulted with an Iraqi judge and had stuck to the general framework of Iraq's old law, but he had added the necessary safeguards against abuses of power. He proudly carried the document to the Republican Palace and gave it to the team of CPA staffers working with Iraq's Ministry of Justice. They were to vet the proposed law before it was sent to Bremer's office for final approval.

They read his draft and called him back for consultations. As soon as he walked in, it was clear to him that they didn't share his enthusiasm. They had dozens of other legal matters to address: reopening courts, rehabilitating prisons, revising laws addressing serious crimes. A new traffic law seemed so trivial. Besides, they noted, who would train the police, set up the new courts, and process the fines? The CPA was already stretched thin. “Nobody was saying it was a bad idea,” one of the CPA participants recalled. “It was a matter of priority and timing.” But they didn't dismiss Smathers outright. They knew that a general wanted the law. They finally told him to return in a few weeks. They'd have to consult with the Council of Judges and the Interior Ministry, which supervised the traffic police.

A few weeks later, in early February 2004, the CPA staffers met with a group of high-ranking traffic officers. Smathers showed up with a folder filled with copies of his draft. The Iraqis, who had read a translation, were equal parts angry and incredulous. They couldn't believe that the Americans would involve themselves in such minutiae, and they were none too pleased with the prospect of losing the power to shake down motorists.

Smathers had expected the Iraqi police to dislike his revisions. “It puts power in the hands of the people,” he said later. “It holds the police accountable. It stops them from making money on the side. I really didn't know how these guys were paid before, but a lot of them were rich. They had twenty cars… and I wasn't going to allow that.”

The Iraqis proposed that they draft their own version. They promised to do it within two weeks. The CPA staffers agreed. The days of ordering the Iraqis around were supposed to be over.

Smathers felt burned.
The Americans hate my plan because it wasn't invented in the palace,
he thought as he walked out.
And the Iraqis hate it because it will take their power away.

“The people working in the CPA were debaters who wanted a hundred percent best solution for any problem,” he told me. “Sometimes the sixty percent solution today is better than the hundred percent solution six months from now. And that's what those people needed. They needed
something.
They needed
some
kind of action even if it's a little bit of one to show them that you're doing something. And what got sent from Washington was a bunch of debaters. They'd sit around in the Green Zone and debate. Well, I don't know about this. Let's try this. And then they'd debate it for months and months and months and months, and nothing would happen.”

Smathers never made it to the next meeting. On February 21, a convoy in which he was traveling was ambushed south of Baghdad by a band of insurgents. His interpreter was killed, and his sport utility vehicle flipped over. Smathers broke his arm in two places and busted his knees. He was evacuated to an army hospital in Germany later that day.

While he was recovering, the Iraqi traffic officers returned to the Green Zone to present their draft. They had written it in Arabic but had gotten an Interior Ministry employee to translate it into English for the benefit of the CPA staffers. The document was laden with what seemed to be nonsensical prohibitions. Standing on the seats of a moving car was forbidden. So was talking to the driver. The draft even banned smoking in cars. The CPA staffers weren't sure what to make of it. Iraqis smoked more than almost anyone else on the planet. What were the traffic officers thinking? Their draft was even sillier than Smathers's.

It turned out that the Iraqis didn't mean to prohibit smoking in all cars, just on public buses. It was a translation error—the sort of goof that bedeviled so many of the CPA's attempts to administer a country where few of the administrators spoke the language of the administered. The CPA team thanked the Iraqis for the draft and promised to include elements of it in the new law. And then they set about melding the original Smathers draft with the Iraqi one. It was at the very bottom of the to-do matrix in the general counsel's office, but it finally did get finished, vetted, and signed by Bremer.

The final document included much of what Smathers had written, but it contained dozens of new provisions as a sop to both the Iraqis' and the CPA's micromanagement tendencies.

• Pedestrians walking during darkness or cloudy weather shall wear light or reflective clothing.

• The driver shall hold the steering wheel with both hands.

• Long-distance driving may cause drowsiness or fatigue. To avoid this, rest should be taken for five minutes for every one hour of driving.

The traffic code became CPA Order 86.

Before Bremer left, he signed a hundred orders in all. Some were essential. Order 96 established rules for elections. Order 31 modified the penal code. Order 19 guaranteed freedom of assembly. But many others were aspirational or just plain unnecessary in a nation wracked by a violent insurgency. Order 81 revised Iraq's laws governing patents, industrial design, undisclosed information, integrated circuits, and plant varieties. Order 83 revised the copyright law. Order 59 detailed protections for government whistleblowers. Order 66 created a public-service broadcasting commission.

Many in the Emerald City assumed that if you wanted to change something, you changed the law, just like in the United States. But Iraq didn't work that way. Solving traffic snarls had little to do with a new law. Traffic lights had to be fixed. Traffic officers needed to be trained. Cars had to be registered. Imports had to be regulated. A decree wasn't a substitute for the laborious, on-the-ground work of rebuilding a nation.

The Iraqis, of course, just disregarded the new traffic code. It was never distributed to officers or announced to the public. After Bremer left, I asked Sabah Kadhim, a senior official at the Interior Ministry, what would happen to the traffic law. He laughed. “Our main concern is terrorism,” he said. “You have to be practical. We haven't reached the state where we can implement traffic laws. It's great in theory, but in reality, we are not focusing on it. We have no resources to enforce it, and it's not our priority.”

Moreover, Kadhim said, laws promulgated under the occupation were suspect. “There is a question mark there,” he said. “We will have to evaluate it. We need to enforce traffic laws in an Iraqi way. The Americans inside the Green Zone acted like they lived in New York, not in Baghdad. Good work is not going to bring good results unless you tailor it to a country's concerns. Outside solutions won't work here. It has to be an Iraqi solution. They should have let the Iraqis develop these laws themselves rather than imposing laws imported from America.”