The Assassins' Gate (49 page)

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FROM DECEMBER THROUGH MARCH
—between the Ramadan Offensive and the nationwide uprisings—the CPA worked under the illusion that it was making real progress. Those were, relatively speaking, quiet months, when it was possible for officials in the palace to believe that the project of transforming Iraq was succeeding. In mid-November, Bremer, under pressure for different reasons from both the White House and Ayatollah Sistani, abandoned his seven-step plan for the restoration of Iraq's sovereignty. With Iraqi support for the occupation plummeting into the single digits in opinion polls, the transition had to be speeded up, and Sistani's basic demand that the constitution be written by an elected body, which Bremer had ignored for months, must be granted. The November 15 agreement, which the CPA wrote and then obliged the Governing Council to sign, speeded up the return of sovereignty to a fixed date, June 30, 2004. Both the CPA and the council, which most Iraqis correctly saw as unrepresentative and ineffective, would then dissolve. An interim assembly, chosen through a process of nationwide caucuses so complex that not even American officials could explain it, would govern Iraq until national elections in early 2005. The elected government would then write the new constitution.

Much of this plan eventually went the way of previous American blueprints, unable to survive prolonged contact with Iraqi reality. Sistani objected to the caucus system for the same reasons he had blocked Bremer's earlier plan—because it wasn't based on a democratic election. As before, Bremer and his aides in Governance clung to the scheme for months before finally giving up. Then the Bush administration, having spent more than a year pushing the UN aside, asked it to return to Iraq in the person of the Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi to oversee the transition. The United States simply lacked the legitimacy to manage the process itself. But one thing from the November 15 agreement remained sacred: the June 30 handover. Suddenly, the CPA had an expiration date.

The pace of hard work in the palace grew frantic. Meghan O'Sullivan and her colleagues invested weeks of time and enormous energy negotiating with the Governing Council an interim law by which Iraq would be ruled until the permanent constitution. Bremer issued a blizzard of legal orders covering everything from the registration of NGOs to the appointment of inspectors general in the ministries. The CPA opened training and resource centers around the country for businessmen, tribes, women's groups, political parties. Hundreds of “democracy dialogues” took place in dozens of cities and towns. Contracting officers poured into the Green Zone to hasten the spending of Congress's eighteen billion dollars. Ray Salvatore Jennings, who specialized in postwar reconstructions, described the CPA officials he knew as people underwater, sinking with the pressure, isolated, wearing down. “They talk to everyone else and each other by e-mail. And they worry that they're running out of time.” Officials in Washington found that the CPA was becoming a kind of foreign government with power massed in one man's hands, unanswerable to the administration, ever more out of touch with Iraqis, and still insistent that it knew best. The two political decisions of the occupation that could be called successes—the November 15 agreement and the return of the UN to help with the transition—had to be forced on Bremer and the CPA by Robert Blackwill, a Kissinger protégé and former ambassador to India with a reputation for abusing underlings, who was appointed to serve under Rice at the NSC as a political czar on Iraq, in an effort to rein in the CPA. The flow of information from Baghdad to Washington was slow and sometimes misleading, and mutual antagonism filled the void. O'Sullivan, a rising young star under Richard Haass and then Bremer, was frequently criticized back in Washington for failing to see how little the Governing Council mattered to Iraqis—for not knowing how much she didn't know. During the long year at the palace, she and other talented officials seemed to become more and more enameled in the belief that they were succeeding, more and more impervious to dissenting views. Yet all the while, the country was slipping away.

In February, a fifty-year-old investment banker in Virginia named Brad Swanson got a call from his old friend Michael Fleischer, the brother of Ari Fleischer, Bush's bald and implacable former press secretary. Fleischer was working with the CPA on private-sector development—setting up a stock market, getting foreign investment, making loans to Iraqi businesses. But he was severely understaffed. Would Swanson come out to Baghdad and help? Swanson had been a foreign-service officer in Liberia in the early eighties, he had done investment deals in countries all over the world, but he had never worked anywhere like Iraq. He was a good-looking, thoughtful man who wore buttoned-down shirts, with a wife, three sons, two dogs, and a rambling old house in a horsey suburb outside Washington. He didn't need to jump-start his career, or earn a tax-free salary, or win his stripes with the Republican Party, or prove his courage. But the historic nature of what was happening in Iraq attracted him. Swanson's wife saw the excitement in his eyes and didn't try to talk him out of it, but his two younger sons, fourteen and eleven, were angry and frightened. Swanson told me, “If I'd been somebody who said, ‘I am going to put the well-being or the composure of my family above everything else,' I wouldn't have gone.”

Bureaucratic delays kept Swanson from reaching Baghdad until mid-March. He quickly fell into the intense rhythm of the palace, the mission culture, working absurd hours seven days a week, leaving the Green Zone in an unmarked pickup truck to meet Iraqi businessmen, at considerable risk to both parties, and negotiate loan agreements. There was still goodwill on both sides and a desperate need to get factories started up and Iraqis hired. But days went by, and then weeks, and nothing happened. The money from the eighteen billion, which included a portion for business loans, was bottled up by stateside procurement rules, with provisions for insurance and workman's compensation that made no sense in Iraq, and by turf battles between the various government agencies whose detailees staffed the CPA. Swanson didn't know whether the bureaucracy was simply incapable of working any faster, or the Bush administration didn't want to break so many rules as to create a sense of urgency that might raise public concern about how well Iraq was really going. But it wasn't until late October 2004, seven months after his arrival in Iraq and three months after his departure, that Swanson's first loan, to the owner of a factory that made plastic water bottles, finally came through.

Even in the heat of the effort, Swanson realized that the CPA was failing. He imagined Iraq as a patient lying on a table with his arteries open, and the Americans pumping in blood as fast as they could, and the blood pouring out as fast as it was pumped in. Late at night, out by the swimming pool behind the palace where officials could sit with a beer and relax, he would sometimes delicately broach the big questions—Was it really working? Did it all make sense?—but he seldom found takers and quickly backed off. “I think people either didn't want to admit it, or didn't want to talk about it, or couldn't concentrate on anything beyond their immediate environment.” The determination to get the job done overrode everything else, and so no one asked whether the CPA had any business writing codes for Iraq that created a 15 percent flat tax, transparent accounting procedures, and new banking and commercial laws. “The quality of the fairyland that was created was very lovely. All these things were great laws, but they just had no application in the real world.”

The word Swanson used to describe the mental atmosphere at the CPA was “groupthink”: the uniform mind-set that takes hold of any hermetic, hierarchical institution with strong leaders and a sense of common mission, where bad news is unwelcome and no one wants to be the one to ask the truly unsettling questions. Swanson had seen groupthink once before, at the U.S. embassy in Liberia in the early eighties, where the American policy was to support a half-literate sergeant named Samuel Doe who had shot and disemboweled his way into power. As a political officer, Swanson sounded out a variety of Liberians about Doe, and they all said that if America continued to finance and arm him, Doe would bring the country to ruin. Swanson, the enthusiastic young diplomat in his first overseas post, argued that it couldn't be true, Doe was learning to be a good ruler, the IMF was coming in, things were getting better. But the Liberians were right: Within a few years, Liberia collapsed into a terrible civil war that destroyed the country and much of the region. “Something I'll live with the rest of my life,” Swanson said.

In Iraq he was older, with more critical distance, and so he was able to recognize the telltale signs of groupthink, which had traveled the eight thousand miles from Washington and taken hold at the palace in Baghdad. Michael Fleischer, Swanson's friend and boss, was a true believer. The two men disagreed about the reasons for the ongoing war: In Swanson's view, part of the fault lay with the CPA, since the insurgency fed on the Americans' failure to spend money and even partially satisfy the expectations of Iraqis. To Fleischer, it was much simpler. “He believed that there were insurgents because in any population there was going to be a number of bloody-minded, psychopathic, terrible people.” But the two remained good friends, and Swanson worked his heart out in spite of his misgivings. He didn't understand exactly
why
the CPA was a failure until he left Iraq at the end of July and rejoined his family on vacation in England, where he took long walks in the countryside and began to acknowledge the huge futility of what he'd been trying to do.

The problem lay in the hubris of the whole enterprise. “CPA was set up to do a root and branch transformation of the country, and that wasn't what was required,” Swanson said. “What was required was to get two basic things right: security and economy. CPA was created to be a long-term institution, a MacArthur-type restructuring of the society. And then, when there was the abrupt decision in November to hand over in June, there wasn't the follow-through to pare down the CPA's activities and focus on one or two key things. Instead, this machine kept grinding on, creating structures as if it were going to be there for years to implement them. But then it just stopped, and the structures collapsed of their own weight with no enforcement, no real foundation.”

Back in Virginia, Swanson set his thoughts down in an op-ed piece. When it was published, he sent a copy to Michael Fleischer. He heard nothing back, and several attempts to get in touch went unanswered. Finally, Swanson received a very brief e-mail from his old friend. “If we speak again,” Fleischer wrote, “it will be sometime in the future.”

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IN THE GREEN ZONE
, it was as if a construction crew was carefully applying the finishing touches to the interior of a new house without noticing the arsonists gathering outside. Politics was a game played out of public view. For example, the interim law signed by the twenty-five members of the Governing Council in early March was a real achievement, with a liberal bill of rights and hard-won compromises on the most intransigent issues, like the autonomy of Kurdistan and the role of Islam. The final negotiations lasted all night, with Bremer and other CPA officials sitting back from the table in silence while the Iraqis argued out their differences.

But the Governing Council was a creation of the CPA, and negotiating with it, one of Bremer's deputies said, was “like staring at your own navel. They had no relevance to the average Iraqi, and there was no way they were going to gain relevance, because they had no real authority.” After the signing ceremony, the document was taken outside the Green Zone and presented as a fait accompli to the Iraqi people, who knew nothing about any of it. The CPA tried to mount a public relations campaign, but it was overwhelmed by the speed of the popular reaction, which was prompted in part by negative propaganda from the office of Ayatollah Sistani, who objected to the effective veto granted to minority groups over the permanent constitution. Not surprisingly, the sessions at which American and Iraqi officials tried to explain the law's contents and invited comment turned into angry denunciations. I sat in on the meeting of a district council in a palace that had belonged to one of Saddam's daughters. Two representatives from the Governing Council were shouted down by people in the room, who complained that Kurds received more rights than Arabs, Jews would use the law to return to Iraq and take over the economy, the law hadn't been explained in the media. Finally a man standing in the back of the room said, “Don't you think you should bring this to the Iraqis first, and then decide what you're going to do with the country?” The law hadn't come from them or anyone chosen by them—this was the real objection. The CPA sacrificed legitimacy for control, and it ended up with neither.

Moqtada al-Sadr quickly took advantage, organizing daily protests against the law in Firdos Square and claiming to be acting on behalf of Ayatollah Sistani, who in fact was his main rival for power among the Shia. Ethnic tension increased noticeably around the country. One day, when I went to see Bashir Shaker, the doctor from the morgue, at his house in Sadr City, his brothers had just come back from a demonstration where Kurds were denounced as infidels and traitors.

“The story will be like Lebanon,” Dr. Shaker said. “A civil war.”

Arab against Kurd?

“A strong possibility.”

Shiite against Sunni?

“It's a possibility. The constitution will be the starting point, and then the event will be gradually increased.”

Entire armies fighting each other?

“This is how I imagine it.” The likeliest scenario of all, he said, was civil war among the Shia.

It was my last visit to the house. Later, neighbors belonging to Sadr's militia warned the doctor against having an American over.