The Assassins' Gate (30 page)

In Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, I met a leather-faced father of nine with Coke-bottle glasses named Othman Ali Sadiq. He had worked as a technical supervisor for fire and safety at the oil company, until Bremer's order left him unemployed. Sadiq's twenty-eight years at the company were four fewer than his service to the Baath Party, in which he rose to a level that made him responsible for keeping tabs on two hundred families. “Every country has its system,” he said. “In Iraq it was the Baath Party.” He described his party job as a kind of civic duty, like serving on the board of aldermen. He got nothing for his pains except fired, he said. He never wrote a bad report on anyone; he never saw evidence of Baathist crimes. “What I heard is these mass graves are thousands of years old.” His only way to feed his family now was to drive a taxi. If he were younger, he implied, he would pick up a gun and fight the occupation. No one at his level of the party had clean hands; morally, the Debaathification Order seemed unassailable. Such things were clearer before the insurgency ignited and Bremer's critics began to point to the May 16 order as an aggravating factor. It was the policy of an occupier that didn't think it needed to worry about making enemies. Drew Erdmann liked to say that American foreign policy at its best went by the dictum that what is right is also what is wise. In occupied Iraq, this became harder and harder to do.

For Erdmann, who had to fire seventeen hundred Baathist university professors and staff, the German analogy was apt. He bristled at any notion that academic freedom might be at issue. “In June 1945 you're not going to have a discussion about the legitimacy of the Nazi ideology and the legitimacy of the Nazi Party and you're sitting in Germany,” he said. “It's not academic! Hello? It's only a few months ago, the people are still living next door, they're still working next door, they're still on campus, they're still around, they're still threatening.”

Erdmann explained his support for debaathification by telling me about the Saddam bonus. On the scale of the dictator's crimes, the Saddam bonus was a minor atrocity. Under Iraq's college admissions system, students were ranked by test scores, and with thousands applying for a limited number of openings, a few points made a great difference. The Saddam bonus awarded five extra points to high school boys who married widows of the Iran-Iraq War, women often twice their age. “This is just the beginning of this fucked-up example,” Erdmann said. The last Baathist minister of higher education under Saddam had withdrawn the points of certain applicants after determining that the marriages were fraudulent. “These guys came to me so they could get back their bonus points,” Erdmann marveled. “Me, the American coalition guy! They think I'm going to give them the fricking Saddam bonus points for a fake marriage? To war widows? This is my example of how it penetrated in such a twisted way, and you multiply this by how many times to understand how deep this goes and how dark and twisted it is.”

The dissolution of the army was harder to justify even at the time, and it came to be seen as one of the disasters of the war. With a stroke of the pen, Bremer put several hundred thousand armed Iraqis on the street with no job and no salary. It could have occurred only to an occupying power that was sure its enemy was beaten. The order was immediately unpopular with officers of the American military, who had no trouble grasping the likely strategic consequences in a country where unemployment was somewhere over 50 percent.

Douglas Feith and others would later say that the Iraqi army had already demobilized itself with the arrival of the invasion forces, when soldiers went home rather than putting up a fight. The dissolution order simply made it official. Walter Slocombe, a rare senior Democrat in the CPA, who had been Clinton's Feith and whom Feith asked to rebuild the Iraqi military after the war, told me, “There wasn't any army left. The assumption we had, which was that we were going to have substantial intact units, was wrong. What are we going to do? There was nothing to decide.” It would have been impossible as well as stupid to summon the units back to duty, Slocombe said. The mostly Shiite conscripts were happy to be home and couldn't have been called back for love or money; and an Iraqi army composed of the remnant of a mostly Sunni officer corps would have driven the majority of Iraqis into opposition.

In the first two weeks of May, Colonel Paul Hughes, Garner's planning chief, was meeting with a group of eight Iraqi generals and colonels to organize the distribution to ordinary soldiers of twenty-dollar salary payments. Hughes and the Iraqi officers met at the Republican Guard officers club, an elegant plate-glass structure that had been partially looted. The Iraqis, remnants of a defeated army, wore coats and ties and looked anxious. “They knew I had them by the balls,” Hughes said. “I told them that the future of Iraq belonged to their children. It was evident to me they as officers had no loyalty to Saddam Hussein, otherwise they wouldn't be talking to me. I said, ‘You guys had best not be Baathists, because if you guys are Baathists I'm gonna come get you.'” The Iraqis wanted to cooperate, and after four meetings they had collected the names of one hundred thousand soldiers. Hughes felt a level of trust in American goodwill. He began the process of securing the money at the CPA. No one in Washington seemed to care one way or the other.

“Anyone who's done postconflict work says do not get rid of the military,” Hughes told me. “You've got to control them—if you don't control them, you don't know what they're going to do. As long as we paid them twenty dollars, they were going to dance a jig for us.”

In mid-May, Hughes went home on a brief leave for his daughter's college graduation. The day before returning to Iraq, he turned on the TV and heard the news that the Iraqi army had been abolished, with no provision for soldiers to be paid. Back at the Republican Palace, three officers from the group that he'd been meeting with at the officers club came to see him. Hughes went down to meet them in the rotunda. “I couldn't look them in the face. I was completely discredited in their eyes.” Hughes assured them that he would somehow find a way to cover the salaries. The Iraqis thanked him. “They were complete gentlemen. That was the thing that just broke my heart, that I had built trust with these guys and people had taken steps to break it.”

To Hughes, the dissolution of the Iraqi army was a decisive turn in the American presence in Iraq. “From the Iraqi viewpoint, that simple action took away the one symbol of sovereignty the Iraqi people still had,” he said. “That's when we crossed the line. We stopped being liberators and became occupiers.” A fatal riot of cashiered soldiers at the Assassins' Gate forced the CPA to begin paying off the men it had just fired.

The two orders had their origins in the Pentagon, and, probably, the vice president's office. Bremer's decision to break up the Iraqi leadership group that Garner had been organizing and to amass much more authority under himself and the CPA was his own initiative. After the occupation went bad, neoconservatives in and out of the administration would accuse Bremer of being responsible. If their idea of installing the exiles under Chalabi in power early on had been followed, they argued, America would not have become an unwanted occupier. The most basic of this argument's many flaws is that everything Bremer did was approved by Rumsfeld, who had laid claim to the postwar in Iraq. A senior official involved in Iraq policy said, “It is absolutely ludicrous for someone in Rumsfeld's office to say, ‘Oh, well, gee, if only we'd been in charge.' They were in charge. That's the other side of the coin. Bremer increasingly turned himself into a viceroy answerable only to God, and the control freak let him get away with it. It's stunning.”

By midsummer, some of Bremer's aides were privately acknowledging that the early orders had been ill considered. “He was a very dynamic person, very capable guy, very sincere,” a top adviser said. “But he's a man in a hurry, and he made decisions quickly.” The adviser saw in some of those decisions the origins of the insurgency: “Over time I think we all came to believe that we were creating enemies in Iraq. My personal belief is that the insurrection in Iraq is a result of those initial policy mistakes—failure to stop the looting, failure to establish firm control right away, and the initial decisions which were made when Bremer came in that pissed off Iraqis.” Bremer himself never admitted any such thing. He struck visitors from Washington that first summer as absolutely sure of himself, too sure—depending largely on speculation because he didn't know the country, surrounded by aides no better informed than he, imagining Iraq as postwar Germany or postcommunist Europe, charging ahead with plans to apply economic shock therapy and privatize state industries despite the soaring unemployment, carrying out the ideological vision as if only will and determination were what mattered. By the end of the CPA's tenure, an Iraqi politician who knew Bremer said that he had begun to understand his early mistakes. Over time, his decisions became less ideological, more practically attuned to the reality in which he found himself. He put aside the privatization plans, he partly reversed debaathification. If he had waited a few months, Bremer might not have made the fateful choices of his first days in Baghdad.

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IRAQ WAS A NONSTOP CRISIS
, and the CPA existed in a temporal as well as spatial bubble; any attention to a past or future beyond thirty days was a luxury. When I went to see him in mid-August 2003, Bremer was completely immersed in the details of running the country. A question I asked about the historical precedents for his position led him almost directly to the urgent need for a 20-kilowatt generator at the oil refinery in Basra. That week riots had broken out in Basra over long fuel lines directly related to the electricity shortage, which was reaching a critical state. Bremer, wearing a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, khakis, and combat boots, leaned over the coffee table where we sat and spread out his map of the electrical grid to show me why the existing system was in such disrepair and demand still exceeded supply. The CPA now had a plan for increasing megawattage, he said; unfortunately, it would cost billions of dollars. Meanwhile, Iraqis were growing unhappier and blaming it on the Americans.

Bremer spoke directly to Iraqis every week in television and radio addresses, as well as in meetings with dignitaries around the country. He was personally popular, especially with women, and he enjoyed the approval of twice as many Baghdadis as disapproved, according to a Gallup poll (higher than the CPA's ratings, and far beyond those of President Bush, who was not regarded favorably in the capital). His approach to the awesome task of leading a foreign country, in which Americans were still at war, through a political, social, and economic revolution was largely technical. Under pressure or criticism, he resorted to figures. Through the harsh summer, Bremer explained over and over that the power outages came from a lack of capacity in the system, aggravated by looting, sabotage, and the collapse of civil administration. Somehow, the message never got through. He reminded Iraqis just as often that they now had their freedom. This, too, sometimes failed to sink in.

“You have to understand the psychological situation that Iraqis are in,” he said when I asked why they appeared to appreciate so little of what the CPA claimed to have achieved in its first months. “They went from this very dark room to the bright light in three weeks. It's like somebody just threw a switch. And so this is pretty jarring psychologically anyway. And your mentality, if you're an Iraqi, still is: It's the government that fixes things. And here comes a government that can throw out our much-vaunted army in three weeks, so why can't they fix the electricity in three weeks?” The failure to communicate, Bremer pointed out, “isn't a technical problem of tuning a television to get the right channel. It's psychological and intellectual.”

He stood up, went over to his desk, and brought back some of the studies of postwar reconstruction that he was reading when he had time. “What I tried to do was study the relevant sort of reconstruction examples, of which there are four or five. There's Japan and Germany after the war. There's Bosnia, Kosovo. To some extent Afghanistan. And of those, the ones that are probably most relevant are Germany and Japan because they involved a war followed by a physical military occupation of those countries.”

He opened a heavily underlined pamphlet written by a group of British experts and began to read aloud. “‘In the immediate postwar period, security and the rule of law are essential.' Okay, well, that's true.” Bremer had no interest in looking back at the looting and the failures of postwar planning. “I frankly don't have time to go back and reread what we knew and didn't know,” he said. “I've got to worry about tomorrow. There'll be some great PhD theses that can be written on the subject.” He read aloud again: “‘Security means civilian policing, ability to arrest, detain, and try offenders. Minimize arrogance.'” He laughed. “Here's vetting—decontamination and debaathification. ‘One of the lessons from particularly Germany was, typically, a deep process of vetting out occurs first and is best performed with speed.' Which is exactly what we did. We took it down and then we can build it back up, and of course we're turning it over to the Iraqis.”

Bremer tossed the pamphlet on the coffee table. He was growing restless; he had things to do. I thanked him and said goodbye. There had been no small talk whatsoever, no curiosity about my own observations, and (this was quite striking in Iraq) no tea or other refreshment brought in. He made no effort to charm, and there was little evidence of wit. Bremer was already back at his desk by the time I was escorted out of the office.

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THE PROBLEMS OF PSYCHOLOGY
and intellect cut both ways. Almost all of Bremer's confidants were Americans. The Arabic-speaking ambassadors with years of experience in the Middle East had less access to the administrator and less work to do than his small coterie of trusted aides from Washington. An Iraqi who was close to the CPA told me that, in general, the less one knew about Iraq, the more influence one had.