Imperial Life in the Emerald City (5 page)

In those chaotic weeks after the war, most phones in Baghdad didn't have a dial tone. The Americans had bombed the major telephone exchanges and hit the phone company's headquarters with so many precision-guided bombs that it resembled a giant block of Swiss cheese. Most ORHA members didn't have satellite phones—and none of them had e-mail at the time—which made it almost impossible for them to communicate with fellow ORHA staffers (or with their families in America). Carney resorted to slipping handwritten notes under his colleagues' office doors.

Among Iraqis, the lack of modern technology was no big deal. They had been through this before, in the months after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when Baghdad had been shattered by weeks of coalition bombardment. They simply passed messages by word of mouth. And it worked. Within three days, most of the ministry's managers had reported for duty at the battery factory. Rank-and-file employees showed up too—with banners calling for a purge of the old guard.

I was on my way to another appointment when I saw the commotion outside the factory. As I walked to the front gate, I met a clean-cut, thirty-year-old laboratory technician named Mohammed Sabah who was holding a cloth banner that read
WE DEMAND NEW MANAGEMENT FREE FROM THE PAST REGIME'S THUGS.
Sabah, who worked for the al-Sawari Chemical Manufacturing Company, one of forty-eight enterprises owned by the ministry, said that he and seventy fellow employees were protesting the reinstatement of the company's director, a man who Sabah said was corrupt and deeply involved in Saddam's Baath Party. “We want an independent, non-Baathist, honest administrator who will look into the welfare of the employees,” Sabah declared to the applause of his obstreperous co-workers.

Inside the factory's gate, the mood was no less tense. Dozens of senior ministry officials milled in front of the director's office. The men said that the office had been taken over by Ahmed Rashid Gailani, the Baathist deputy minister of industry in Saddam's government. He, with the apparent support of several factory directors, had anointed himself as the new minister. At that moment, the men said, Gailani was meeting with his first official visitor: a tall American man with a straw hat named Mister Carney.

Although Carney had introduced himself as the “senior adviser” to the ministry, the men assembled outside the director's office knew he was the new boss. He had arrived with gun-toting soldiers and a leather portfolio. He had the demeanor of a man who had been around and wasn't about to put up with any nonsense.

The men wondered if Carney would let Gailani stay on as minister, and if the protesters would get what they wanted. But more significantly, they wondered how Carney would deal with people who had been affiliated with the Baath Party. Would it be an automatic disqualification as the protesters wanted, or would it be a nonissue?

A stocky man in an olive safari suit introduced himself to me as Jabbar Kadhim, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the ministry. He was the director of the ministry's technical section. He said his division was responsible for repairing equipment in state-run factories. He also said he was a “sectional” member—one of the top three levels—of the Baath Party.

Surprised by his candor (most Iraqis I had met until then had disavowed any association with the party), I asked if his membership would disqualify him from serving in a senior ministry job. Kadhim launched into a tirade.

“There's no Iraqi who was not in the party,” he insisted. He claimed that there were seven million members, which I took to be an outlandish exaggeration. Most reliable estimates put party membership at somewhere between one million and two million.

“Most of them are highly educated and technical,” he continued. “In the past, if you weren't a Baathist, you wouldn't be able to rise in the hierarchy.”

That was true. While the party did have plenty of thugs, many of Iraq's most capable scientists, engineers, and other professionals also belonged. To gain admission to the best colleges and graduate schools, to get a coveted government job, to get a promotion, you had to be a member. If you excelled at your job, you might be promoted into the party's upper ranks, even if that was not something you sought. Turning down a promotion could get you fired or sent to jail.

Soon I was able to walk inside the director's office, where Gailani announced that he and Carney had made a decision about the chemical company. The protesters would get what they wanted. The director, who was deemed to be a high-ranking party member, would be dismissed. Carney said he would obtain an order to that effect from Jay Garner.

I asked Gailani about his own association with the party. As a former deputy minister, I noted, he certainly had to be a member. He insisted he was only “in a very low rank.”

“I went to a meeting once every three months,” he said. “I said I was very busy in the ministry.”

I couldn't determine just then if he was telling the truth.

When Carney left the room, I followed him and asked how he was addressing the issue of past party involvement. There was no clear directive, he said. He and the other senior advisers were relying on their judgment. “Among the Iraqis, everyone knows who was either too bad or too Baath,” he said. “The bottom line is the ultimate triage is going to be with the future Iraqi authority. If we are introduced to someone who was either active in the production or development of weapons of mass destruction or in terrorism or a major human rights violator, we will remove those people as we become aware of them. Others will be subjected more to an Iraqi process than a coalition process.”

Kadhim, the senior party member in the safari suit, didn't hear what Carney told me. All he knew was that the chemical company director was getting the boot. As I walked out of the building, he stopped me with a finger-wagging admonition: “If the [Baath] party members are treated in a normal manner and they are given their rights, there will be no more party,” he said. “If not, the Baath Party will rise again.”

         

Back at the palace, Carney was becoming increasingly dispirited. ORHA seemed to be a mess.

Part of the problem was that the military did not appear to care about helping ORHA, whose civilian staffers needed more amenities than the average grunt. Carney and other veteran diplomats deemed showers and laundry facilities essential. They had to meet Iraqi government workers who, despite the privation of postwar Baghdad, were showing up at ministries dressed in suits and ties. But water was not always flowing in the palace. Clothes handed over to the military's laundry service, run by Kellogg, Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, were returned after two weeks, if at all. Instead of finding a laundry in Baghdad or hiring Iraqis to wash items by hand, KBR sent the garments to Kuwait. Cell phone service, which the army had promised to start within weeks of liberation, was nonexistent. So, too, were computers. Getting basic supplies from the military was equally frustrating. Metal-frame canvas cots, which the army brought to Baghdad by the truckload, were not issued to civilians in ORHA. Most galling to Carney was the lack of transportation. There were only about ten military police escort convoys for the more than three dozen ORHA personnel who needed to leave the palace every day.

Unwilling to remain sequestered in the palace, Carney disregarded rules requiring travel in two-vehicle convoys with at least two long-barreled weapons. He tucked a borrowed nine-millimeter Beretta handgun into his waistband, donned his straw hat, and drove his Halliburton-issued GMC Suburban out of the palace grounds by himself. He soon learned his way around Baghdad so well that he stopped consulting his maps. He found Baghdad's best restaurant, a Lebanese place called Nabil's, and became a regular at lunch. In the palace, there was no alcohol in the dining hall. At Nabil's, lunch for Carney included at least one well-chilled, sixteen-ounce can—two if it was a rough day at the ministry—of Efes pilsner from Turkey.

The palace began to resemble a summer camp for adults. Mosquito nets were strung up over sleeping bags. Flashlights and pocket knives became must-carry accessories. Hot food, no matter how greasy or overcooked, was regarded as a luxury after the army's constipating field rations.

Carney was the wise older scout, the guy who knew what to bring that wasn't on the official packing list. He had a box of powdered detergent to wash his own clothes. He had a car charger for his satellite phone so he could make calls when he was driving around the city. A roll of super-strong duct tape and a can of industrial-strength mosquito repellent were always at hand. And he'd brought his own laptop and printer.

Every night before turning out the lights, Carney wrote a few lines in a spiral-bound notebook he had purchased in Kuwait. Some of the entries were prosaic: “Went to ministry for meetings today and then did laundry.” When he wanted to note something private or sensitive, he scribbled in Khmer, a language he had learned in Cambodia and was sure nobody else in the palace read or spoke. “Are we in teething problems or fatally flawed in concept?” he wrote soon after arriving.

As the weeks wore on, his assessment became ever more pessimistic. “Military and OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] cannot make the transition from military to political-military mission,” he wrote.

He kept thinking back to lessons he'd drawn from his experiences in Cambodia: “You had to have a plan. You had to have a lot of money. You had to have really good staff.”

ORHA didn't lack just military support. The organization was rudderless. The mission plan still had not been completed. And even if it had been, it would not have guided Carney in dealing with Baathists in his ministry. By then, he had just two people on his staff, both army reservists, to manage a ministry with more than one hundred thousand employees. And he had no budget. ORHA, he realized, was an organization built on a false premise. Had there been no looting, had the police stayed on the streets, had Iraq's infrastructure not been whittled to incapacitation by Saddam's government, then perhaps an outfit such as ORHA, with no plan, no money, and a skeletal staff, would have been appropriate.

While ORHA's overall agenda was still a work in progress, Garner did have a plan to address the most important dilemma he faced: how much power to give the Iraqis and when to hand it over. The problem was that the Pentagon, the State Department, and, most significant, the White House, had not signed off on it.

Exiled Iraqi political leaders wanted to form a transitional government that would take over control of the country from the Americans. The government would be led by a small council comprised of the most prominent exiled politicians: Ahmed Chalabi and Ayad Allawi, Shiite leaders Ibrahim al-Jafari and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and Kurdish chieftains Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani. To Garner, the group seemed to represent Iraq's diverse society. Chalabi and Allawi, who hated each other, were both secular Shiites. Al-Jafari and al-Hakim were far more religious. The group promised to bring on board at least one Sunni Arab and a few “internals”—Iraqis who had never gone into exile.

Garner thought it was a great idea. The exiled leaders were people the U.S. government had worked with before, all of whom had impeccable anti-Saddam credentials. All of them, except Chalabi, represented large blocs of Iraqis. And they were willing to assume the responsibility of leadership. To Garner, they were the “takeover guys.”

Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Doug Feith did not tell Garner how to manage the political transition. Garner assumed that all three favored a dominant role for the exiled leaders, particularly Chalabi, in a transitional government. But the Pentagon trio worried that an order to Garner to hand over authority to the exiles would have made its way back to the State Department and sparked new debate within the Bush administration. State didn't want the exiles in charge. It believed that authority should rest with the United States, either through a military commander or a civilian governor, until a representative group of Iraqis, internals as well as exiles, formed a government. In State's view, there would have to be elections and perhaps even a new constitution written before the Americans handed over the keys. Although Cheney and his staff were strong backers of Chalabi, the rest of the White House, specifically President Bush and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, had not articulated a clear view of how the transition should unfold. If the issue were forced, Pentagon leaders feared that Bush and Rice might choose elements of the State plan. But if Garner were not given orders, and events on the ground were allowed to run their course, Pentagon officials hoped the exiles would simply form a transitional government. Once that happened, the officials thought, it would obviate the need for State's transition plan.

“I never knew what our plans were,” Garner said. “But I did know that what I believed, and what the plans were, were probably two different things.”

By the time he left Kuwait for Baghdad, Garner had concluded that elections should be held within ninety days. When he made that view known to reporters, it infuriated his bosses at the Pentagon, who feared that an election would not be in the best interests of the exiles. Once Garner got to Iraq and met with Kurdish leaders Talabani and Barzani, both of whom he had known from running relief operations in northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, his plans evolved. He still wanted elections, but he also threw his support behind the exiles' plan to form a transitional government. That pleased the Pentagon but irritated State. Before long, Colin Powell and Richard Armitage voiced objections to Garner's plan at the White House.

In Baghdad, efforts to get the exiles to broaden their ranks with internals soon ran into trouble. The exile leaders could not agree on whom to invite. As a sign of reconciliation, Allawi wanted to include someone who had been in the Iraqi army or in Saddam's government. Chalabi and the Shiite religious leaders regarded such people as too compromised. Chalabi also expressed concern that anything more than a small expansion of their ranks would dilute the exiles' power. The not-so-subtle message was that he didn't want to loosen his hold on the nascent government.