The Assassins' Gate (50 page)

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THE DECISION
on March 28 to suspend Sadr's newspaper for sixty days wasn't considered important enough to clear with Washington or even to involve Bremer. Bremer's top deputy, Ambassador Richard Jones, and his legal adviser, Scott Castle, were simply following a CPA policy against incitement. Other papers had been slapped for lesser deeds, and if
al-Hawza,
which printed lists of names of “collaborators,” accused American soldiers of deliberately rocketing mosques, and charged Bremer himself with starving Iraqis, was allowed to go on publishing, the CPA would be playing favorites.

No one seemed to anticipate the consequences. When the Mahdi Army took to the streets, Bremer was still waiting for an operational plan from the military to neutralize Sadr and his followers. Sadr was unaccountably left free to direct the uprising, and four days later, at Friday prayers in his headquarters mosque in Kufa, just outside Najaf, he urged the faithful to rise up against the occupation and strike terror in its heart. The next day, April 3, Lieutenant General Sanchez informed Bremer at their morning meeting that his soldiers were going to arrest Sadr's top lieutenant, Mustafa Yaqoubi, that same day in Najaf on an outstanding warrant in the murder of Khoei (Sadr's warrant remained sealed, but the military had standing orders to enforce the two dozen others). Fine, Bremer said. Some people at the meeting thought Yaqoubi was an al-Qaeda operative.

The shutdown of the newspaper and the arrest of Yaqoubi were never thought through and coordinated, within the CPA, between Bremer and Sanchez, or between Baghdad and Washington. Yaqoubi's arrest sparked a massive rebellion, which Sadr had obviously planned in advance—a direct bid to seize power from the occupation forces. Mahdi Army militiamen began pouring down from Sadr City to Shiite towns across southern Iraq, and within a few days they had overrun and trashed CPA offices in Kut and Nasiriya, where the Ukrainians and Italians were unable to hold their ground. The Spanish in Najaf and Bulgarians in Karbala would have been overwhelmed, too, if American forces hadn't been rushed down to reinforce them. The whole multinational division proved to be a paper army that was no match for the thousands of untrained, foolishly brave young Shiite militiamen who fought out in the open with AK-47s and RPGs.

At that same moment, the chronic Sunni insurgency in Anbar province suddenly exploded into full-scale combat. The mutilation of the four Blackwater contractors on March 31 shocked the American public. At the White House, President Bush declared, “I want heads to roll.” It was an impulsive reaction, based on the domestic impact of the pictures from Falluja, as if Iraq were a shootout in which personal honor was at stake (just as Bush's response to the initial stage of the insurgency had been to say, “Bring 'em on”). Officials in Baghdad called this kind of long-range tinkering “the eight-thousand-mile screwdriver,” and at the other end was a president who often said that the lesson of Vietnam was that politicians shouldn't try to do the job of generals. The order went down the chain of command for the new Marine division in Anbar to surround Falluja, which had been left unpatrolled for weeks by the Eighty-second Airborne, retake it, and hunt down the contractors' killers. The commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, Lieutenant General James Conway, later said that he wasn't happy about the order to attack a whole city in revenge for four deaths; the Marines had come to Anbar with the idea of taming the rebellious province with a smoother, softer touch than the ham-fisted Eighty-second, and Conway wanted to handle the crisis with targeted operations. Bremer was also opposed, according to an official in Washington, but Rumsfeld overrode him, and Bremer's appeal to Bush was in vain.

Conway was unhappier still when, three days after the assault began, with the Marines approaching the city center in close fighting, the order came from the Pentagon to stop. Unconfirmed reports on Arab satellite TV of hundreds of civilian deaths in Falluja were inflaming opinion all over Iraq and the region; Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special representative in Baghdad, said that his mission was about to collapse, and several members of the Governing Council threatened to quit. The fighting in Falluja, which spread to Ramadi, created for the first time an alliance of Sunni and Shia against the Americans: Shiite mosques organized blood drives and aid convoys for besieged Fallujans, and Sadr's picture appeared in Sunni mosques. There was even some tactical coordination between fighters. Most of the country now seemed to be in open rebellion against the occupation. The United States was fighting a two-front war without enough troops, and in the first two weeks of April, a year after the formal end of major combat operations, forty-eight soldiers were killed.

The Marines eventually withdrew from Falluja. The city was handed over to a contingent of former Iraqi soldiers called the Falluja Brigade, which soon lost control to the insurgency and in some cases went over to the other side. The Falluja Brigade was Lieutenant General Conway's idea; the CPA wasn't consulted. Falluja would become a Taliban-like fiefdom and base of operations for Iraq's most violent jihadis, foreign and local, until a new division of Marines would retake the city by frontal assault in November. Sadr's militia was soon repelled from Kut and other towns by American forces and armed tribes; under pressure from Shiite clerics and politicians, Sadr returned control of the holy cities to the Iraqi police. But the Mahdi Army was still armed and far from finished. It would take a second round of fighting in Najaf and Sadr City, Sistani's intervention, and then the beginning of serious negotiations and reconstruction projects, to persuade Sadr to end the Shiite insurgency and join Iraqi politics—a rare strategic success for America in Iraq.

“Six months of work is completely gone,” said a CPA official who survived the April battles in the south. “There is nothing to show for it.” By sheer fecklessness, confusion, and ignorance, the administration in Washington and the occupation authority in Baghdad had allowed Iraq to become explosive and had then triggered the detonator themselves.

During the violence of April and May, the credibility of the CPA collapsed. The civilian and military spokesmen, a Republican appointee named Dan Senor and a brigadier general named Mark Kimmitt, stood up at daily press conferences in the convention center and issued statements about the history of Sadr's arrest warrant and the coalition's intentions toward the rebels that were usually at odds with the facts, on occasion flatly untrue, and often in direct contradiction to statements made a day or a week earlier—all the while insisting that American policy remained firm and the violence was sporadic, minor, and under control. Senor and Kimmett were only repeating the blithe reassurance coming from the White House and Pentagon in the midst of a presidential campaign, but in Baghdad their words took on the tone of farce, and the audience that mattered most—the Iraqis—wasn't fooled.

The scandal of prisoner abuse, which had been going on for months but broke publicly in early May with the uprising still seething, became a microcosm of the larger failures. Bremer had known that the prison system was broken for some time, but an official who worked on the issue of detainees told me that Sanchez and the military steadily resisted the CPA's attempts to get information about the prisons or have certain prisoners released. The attitude was: This is our job, we know what we're doing, stay out. Bremer never publicly showed that the issue concerned him, and Iraqis, including those who could get no word about the fate of family members, believed that the entire occupation was to blame—which, in fact, it was. Bremer and Sanchez, the senior civilian and the senior soldier in Iraq, “literally hated each other,” an official in Washington said. “Jerry thought Sanchez was an idiot, and Sanchez thought Jerry was a civilian micromanaging son of a bitch.” So the CPA allowed the single worst stain on its reputation to spread indelibly.

“What's the moral difference between Saddam Hussein and us?” one soldier, who didn't find the abuse itself particularly terrible, wrote me in May. “Obviously a lot, I believe, but the problem is that those who don't know America aren't going to see it that way. It's set our work back a long, long ways, which is the greatest shame if you're like us and want to see Iraq succeed. That's the depressing part, its effect on everyone else, not what actually happened.”

Over time, it became clear that the ultimate responsibility lay in Washington, at the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and finally the White House. The memos on torture and the Geneva Conventions written by the president's counsel Alberto Gonzales and others made abuses inevitable. One administration official who had served in Vietnam said, “There's no doubt in my mind as a soldier that part of the responsibility for Abu Ghraib and for Afghanistan belongs with the secretary of defense and the president of the United States. There's an old aphorism: Keep it simple, stupid. KISS is the acronym. You always have personalities in uniform—I had them in Vietnam—who will take advantage of any ambiguity, any lack of clarification in the rules of engagement, and kill people, or whatever his particular psyche is liable to do. You don't have rules for your good people. You have rules for that five or six percent of your combat unit that are going to be weird. You need those people, because sometimes they're your best killers. But you need the rules. And when you make any kind of changes in them, any relaxation or even hint of it, you're opening Pandora's box. And I fault Gonzalez, the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, the chain of command, Myers, Abizaid, Sanchez, the whole bunch of them.”

All of these men kept their jobs. One was even promoted. The failure to hold anyone in authority responsible ensured that immoral and, from a practical point of view, worthless methods of interrogation would continue. Even after the world saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib, prisoners would go on being tortured in American custody.

The events of April and May 2004 showed that no one was making decisions based on a clear, realistic strategy. No one was really in charge of Iraq. Bremer acted without consulting Washington, Washington kept stepping in to overrule Bremer, the Pentagon was still battling State and NSC, the White House had its eye on the political calendar, Bremer and Sanchez were barely speaking, Sanchez left his division commanders to pursue wildly different tactics. When something went wrong, it was somebody else's fault—a psychopathic sergeant, or the press corps, or the Iraqis. And the Iraqis turned out to have their own ideas about their country's fate. Looking back, a senior CPA official said, “What they needed was somebody in charge in Washington and somebody in charge in Baghdad, and they needed to be twins, in the sense that they were really on the same wavelength. Rumsfeld was kind of washing his hands, it seemed. Jerry over time began dealing more and more with Rice and Powell. Unfortunately, by then you had a full-blown insurgency.”

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THE FIGHTING DELAYED THE REDEPLOYMENTS
of twenty-five thousand soldiers for two or three months. The plan to reduce American troop levels to 115,000 was tossed out as the coalition once again had to improvise. Departing convoys of exhausted soldiers were turned around on the road to Baghdad International Airport. The First Armored Division was sent south from Baghdad to Najaf and other cities to take over from the overwhelmed multinational force. Within a few weeks of his departure, and hastily married, John Prior was back in Iraq.

Prior's battalion ended up at a base in a former chicken factory, twenty miles south of Baghdad outside a squalid town called Mahmudiya. Prior's war log for April 2003 recorded that thousands of jubilant Iraqis had thronged the main road in Mahmudiya as Charlie Company liberated the town on its way to Baghdad. The area was now called the Triangle of Death. The town was mixed Sunni and Shiite, but the outlying lands were largely Sunni, with a large number of former Republican Guard officers in houses built after 1991 by the old regime to create a line of defense between Baghdad and the Shiite south. Mahmudiya was dense with munitions factories, which had been looted after the invasion, and was now the scene of constant roadside explosions and even suicide car bombings. One car bomber drove into a checkpoint and blew up eight soldiers in an explosion so powerful that his steering wheel landed two hundred feet away and a thirty-ton Bradley was disabled. Insurgent attacks on Shiite policemen and pilgrims traveling to the holy cities were increasing, and Mahmudiya was also notorious for the shooting of journalists and other foreigners along the highway that passed through the middle of town. Mortar or rocket fire was directed at the chicken factory almost every night. Charlie Company was spending the last of its fifteen months in Iraq in a bleak, hostile place.

I went to see Prior there in the middle of June. Highway 8, the strip down from Baghdad, was closed to civilian traffic, and one section of the road, a bridge over a canal, had recently been blown up. The soldiers who escorted me down to the base made no secret of their feelings about the prolonged stay in Iraq. “I sympathized with the Iraqis when we first got here,” said a young sergeant who had spent every day of the occupation in Iraq. “But now I'm cold, I feel no remorse. When you see some of your friends get killed, it changes you.” I asked if he still distinguished between good and bad Iraqis. “How can you tell them apart? The same guy that waves at you can shoot you with an RPG.”

At the base I heard the same thing from almost every soldier I talked to. The bitterness extended beyond Iraqis to their own chain of command. Rumsfeld, who had sent them out here without enough men and armor and then extended their deployment several times, came in for particular hatred, and even the president wasn't popular; a number of soldiers said that they intended to vote for John Kerry, who at least had served in Vietnam. Everyone was still doing his or her job, but the heart had gone out of it and a stale air of cynicism hung over the place as the soldiers waited for their orders to ship out. After the close relationships Prior and his lieutenants and NCOs had developed with their translators in Zafaraniya, it seemed an unfortunate development that the portable toilets at the base in Mahmudiya were segregated between American soldiers and Iraqi workers. The Americans complained that the Iraqis kept breaking the seats by standing on them. Thousands of years of civilization, the Americans said, and these people still didn't know how to use a sit-down toilet.