The 9/11 Wars (26 page)

Bremer and the most senior CPA officials had their offices in the giant palace, which was still adorned with vast busts of the former dictator. Between 1,000 and 1,500 – the CPA was permanently understaffed – people worked there. Supposedly international, the operation was ‘99 per cent American, half a per cent British, half a per cent the rest,’ remembered Andy Bearpark, the CPA’s director of operations.
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They were an odd bunch. Some were grizzled veterans of nation-building efforts hired by the CPA who had come direct from Afghanistan or, like Bearpark, from Kosovo. The rest were either drawn from America’s best and brightest or knew someone in the Republican Party or both. They were often extremely young. The mixture of jaded pragmatism, can-do naivety and starry-eyed ideology was striking. ‘The CPA is having to invent this day by day,’ said Mark Kennon, the authority’s coordinator for Salahuddin province. Contacts with the local population were limited. When people did travel they ended up ‘looking at Iraq through armoured glass surrounded by guns,’ in the words of Rory Stewart, deputy governer in Maysan province and then in Nasariyah.
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In the provinces, moving three CPA engineers involved a convoy of seven Humvees, two with .50 calibre machine guns and seven squad-level weapons. The atmosphere was rendered even more surreal by two enormous disconnects: between official language and reality ‘beyond the wire’ and between what was expected of the CPA and what it could deliver. One reporter turned his mobile back on after sitting through a long briefing on how security was excellent around the country to find messages reporting a series of car bombs.
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As in Afghanistan, ‘there was a crisis of expectations’, according to Bearpark. Tom Parker, a Briton who headed the CPA’s Crimes against Humanity Investigation Unit, was blunter. ‘First impressions count, and the first three months were a disaster,’ he said.
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If talking to the Iraqis was tough, so was talking to other CPA officials. Links with the offices in the various provinces, set up several months into the CPA’s rule, were haphazard at best.
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Emails from distant governorates went unanswered or unreceived. Cash was distributed in thick wads of plastic-wrapped new dollar bills.
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With nearly $10 billion owed to Iraq under the Oil for Food programme that had been languishing in United Nations accounts, money was not short, but finding a sensible and productive way to spend it was complicated.
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With the twin hierarchies of civilian and military command meeting only in Washington at stratospherically high levels, coordination of effort was almost impossible. Enormous amounts were lost through corruption or simply accounting incompetence. The consequences were evident to anyone travelling around the country.
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Before the overthrow of Saddam, 95 per cent of urban Iraqis and 75 per cent of those living in rural zones had access to clean drinking water, according to needs assessments by the United Nations. By 2003, these levels had declined to 60 per cent and 50 per cent respectively. By the end of 2005, the figure had dropped to 32 per cent.
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When the CPA was criticized for missing the target of generating 4,400 Kw of power in July 2003, the target was then achieved two months later by the simple expedient of switching on all the facilities in the country for twenty-four hours. Many were then shut down for ‘maintenance’ and remained closed. In much of Baghdad water supply was down to three hours per day by the end of the year. Though hospitals were receiving a better supply of basics such as insulin or antibiotics, often provided by independent NGOs such as the Red Cross or Médecins Sans Frontières, there were no drugs for any more advanced treatments.
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It was not the cultural inappropriateness nor the dysfunctional administrative systems – which many of the bright, experienced and hardworking officials eventually got to work – nor even the isolation of most of those who lived, ate, drank and breathed only in the Green Zone that crippled the CPA. It was what it was trying to do. The mission statement of the CPA appeared relatively uncontroversial. The aim was to reach an endstate defined as ‘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 neighbours or international security and is able to defend itself.’
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Yet the ideological roots of the project were obvious. When a year after the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration had published a National Security Strategy, its first page had included the pledge: ‘We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets and free trade to every corner of the world.’
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Across most of the globe, the obstacles to fulfilling this were manifest. However, post-invasion Iraq, both for those with little interest in the history of the local communities or for those who were well-informed but ideologically committed, appeared to be the perfect place to realize that promise. The mission statement of the CPA was a wish-list drawn up by people who were absolutely certain that their values and models were applicable and attractive to other societies and cultures
whatever the circumstances.
The latter qualification is of critical importance as it traces a path between essentialist arguments that ‘Muslims’ or ‘Arabs’ cannot ever be receptive to ‘Western’ ideas of democracy, free-market capitalism, human rights and so forth and the equally problematic argument, favoured by so many within the Bush administration, that such ideas were a universally applicable panacea. In fact, as the 9/11 Wars were to demonstrate again and again, any culture, taken to mean the totality of values, norms, learned behaviours and worldviews of any community, is infinitely flexible and dynamic all while evolving within inherited boundaries set over time. Unlike in Afghanistan, where the security project had seen an ideological component grafted on to it, the project in Iraq had been ideological from the start. It was not rooted in a continuing, sensitive and informed appraisal of the measures best suited to bring security, stability and prosperity to Iraq in 2003 or early 2004 but in a utopian, universalizing vision which, as the National Security Strategy had made clear, served American interests. It suffered enormously as a result.

For the primary obstacle to the American plan to re-create Iraq rapidly became the paradox of many such attempts by one community to change the behaviour and nature of another: the values that the powerful foreigners hoped to encourage, support or, if they had to, impose were fatally tarnished by the indelible fact that they were those of the occupiers or at least those the occupiers preferred. Though a significant minority of Iraqis still saw a Westernized future for their nation as preferable, vast swathes of the population had come to see such values as foreign. When asked if ‘democracy can work well in Iraq’, 51 per cent said, ‘No, it is a Western way of doing things and will not work here.’ All that was conservative, religious and nationalistic was thus naturally vested with a new sense of being ‘Iraqi’ and acquired a powerful legitimacy as culturally authentic. Whether or not this had been the case before the invasion was immaterial.
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The invasion and the subsequent acts of the CPA had triggered vast change. Any predictions based on anything other than the finest knowledge of pre-war conditions were now unreliable at best. Often they were entirely redundant.

By the spring of 2004, as the CPA began to prepare for an eventual handover to restore sovereignty to Iraq and to transfer its responsibilities to a nominally independent government, it had long become clear to most observers that the ‘endstate’ originally envisaged in Washington and elsewhere was a long way off. This was made very evident when Bremer had postponed elections and hinted strongly he envisaged a process of undetermined length, possibly up to two years according to one British diplomat, to design a constitution.
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Eventually, in June 2004, the CPA handed over to an interim government led by Ayad Allawi, an exile, a moderate Shia and former Ba’athist dissident with good Western intelligence connections who, though he had a narrow support base within Iraq limited to educated secularists, was seen as at least relatively pro-American. Three elections were scheduled: in January 2005 for a new transitional assembly which would elect itself a new prime minister, a referendum to ratify a constitution and finally, at the end of the year, for a government that would sit for a four-year term. There was no public leaving ceremony for Bremer, and the CPA was dissolved in some disorder. On June 28, Condoleezza Rice scribbled a note which Donald Rumsfeld then passed to President Bush at the NATO summit in Turkey, informing him that Iraq was sovereign. ‘Let freedom reign,’ the president wrote across it and turned to shake hands with the man on his right, Tony Blair.
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THE ROAD TO NAJAF

The new Iraqi government’s first real test came in August 2004 with a fresh round of fighting between American and allied military forces and the al-Mahdi Army militia of the young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
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This second strand to the insurgency in Iraq had emerged in the spring. Very different in its origins, structure and aims from the Sunni insurgency, being far closer to an organized religious, cultural and political movement like the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s, Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in the Gaza Strip, it nonetheless shared some qualities of other insurgents in Iraq. There was the same pattern of recruitment through association, the same often chaotic reliance on self-forming communities, the same capability to rapidly adapt to changing contexts and challenges. There was also the same rapid development of a capability to cause serious harm and to pose a significant threat to the stability of Iraq.

Muqtada al-Sadr and the al-Mahdi Army were the product of the intersection of the major historical trends which have already marked much of this narrative: demography, Islamism, nationalism and cultural revivalism. The demographic element had two elements, both with significant political consequences. Firstly, the Shia, a minority in Iraq when it had been ruled by the Sunni Ottomans, had been a majority since the southern desert tribes had converted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and thus collectively felt that Saddam’s deposition would inevitably lead to their domination of any subsequent political set-up. Secondly, Saddam’s Iraq had seen the same explosive population growth rates as the rest of the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s. This meant a huge number of potentially troublesome young men by the first decade of the twenty-first century. Naturally, then, in the aftermath of the invasion, it was likely that Shia male youth would be a source of trouble.

Like the young men who had made their way to the Afghan camps, their counterparts in the slums of Basra, Nasariyah or Baghdad had also seen a series of different ideologies fail in their short lives. Pan-Arab secular Socialist nationalism was clearly associated with their oppressor, Saddam Hussein, and brutal Sunni repression and discrimination; their only real experience of Western liberal democracy had been the betrayal of the Iraqi Shias in the aftermath of the 1991 war, when hundreds of thousands who had revolted against the government were butchered without any Western intervention, and then the punishing sanctions that had followed; the fall of Communism had discredited left-wing thought and Saddam’s highly effective purges had destroyed any left-wing activism. All that was left was religion in its various politicized and non-politicized forms.

Here Muqtada al-Sadr had a unique advantage: the two great dissident Islamist leaders in recent decades in Iraq had been his father, Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, and his father-in-law, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Sadr.
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Both had been killed by Saddam Hussein and were popularly venerated as martyrs. They were known as al-Sadr I and al-Sadr II. The first had been one of the key thinkers of the wave of new radical ideology that emerged in the 1960s among Shia Muslims. This matched strains of Sunni political Islamism being developed elsewhere and found its most obvious expression in the 1979 Iranian revolution. Men like al-Sadr I and his contemporary Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran developed the radical new concept of
wilayat al faqih
or ‘the guardianship of the jurist’ and challenged the long-established Shia tradition that the clergy should remain aloof from ‘corrupting’ secular politics.
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Both saw mass activism as the only way to realize their respective theocratic visions.
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Despite their assassinations and the ruthless repression of activists both older al-Sadrs had retained a following that was still extensive in Saddam’s final years.
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The young Muqtada al-Sadr was careful, however, to combine the appeal of this activist Islamism with an appeal to Iraqi nationalism. Like their religious identity, the national identity of the Iraqi Shia had always been stronger than many, especially relatively Westernized exiles, had given them credit for. Their perpetual grievance was that they had been deprived of a fair share of power in the Iraqi state – not that the state itself was somehow illegitimate. It was their senior clerics who had hoisted the banner of jihad in the great Iraqi revolt against the British in 1920, and when the question of national allegiance had been posed sharply during the Iran–Iraq war of 1980 to 1988 the Iraqi Shia troops who made up the bulk of the rank and file fought, often bravely.
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The posters pasted to walls all over the slum suburb of Baghdad once called Saddam City and now universally known as Sadr City showed Muqtada al-Sadr’s chubby, acned face in the foreground, his respected forebears and the Iraqi national flag behind.