Imperial Life in the Emerald City (28 page)

The single district wasn't the only option on the table. Several CPA staffers maintained that a national database used to dole out monthly food rations could be used to provide a reasonably accurate estimate of how many people lived in each province. It was an approach that al-Sistani himself had suggested to circumvent the problem of a census.

The question of whether to hold a single-district election sparked intense debate within the Bush administration. The Pentagon, the State Department, and Vice President Cheney's office all argued against it on the grounds that it would give religious Shiite parties a head start. Bremer and the White House worried that using the ration database could draw objections from Iraqis—particularly Shiites who believed that they had been undercounted by Saddam's government—resulting in a delay. That was unacceptable to the viceroy and to the president's advisers.

“There were plenty of us who said that a single-district election would be a disaster and that you could have a proportional-representation system with the ration [database],” a senior CPA official told me. “But Bremer and his keepers at the White House didn't care. The type of election was a secondary issue to them. What mattered more than anything else was holding it on time. It was style over substance.”

On June 15, Bremer signed CPA Order 96. It stated that Iraq “will be a single electoral constituency.”

THE GREEN ZONE, SCENE XI

About a month before the handover of sovereignty, Joshua Paul, a young CPA staffer, typed up a joke on his computer and sent it to a few friends in the palace. The recipients forwarded it to their friends, who did the same thing. In less than a week, almost everyone in the Green Zone had seen it.

QUESTION:
Why did the Iraqi chicken cross the road?

CPA:
The fact that the chicken crossed the road shows that decision-making authority has switched to the chicken in advance of the scheduled June 30th transition of power. From now on, the chicken is responsible for its own decisions.

HALLIBURTON:
We were asked to help the chicken cross the road. Given the inherent risk of road crossing and the rarity of chickens, this operation will only cost
$
326,004.

SHIITE CLERIC MOQTADA AL-SADR:
The chicken was a tool of the evil Coalition and will be killed.

U.S. ARMY MILITARY POLICE:
We were directed to prepare the chicken to cross the road. As part of these preparations, individual soldiers ran over the chicken repeatedly and then plucked the chicken. We deeply regret the occurrence of any chicken-rights violations.

PESHMERGA:
The chicken crossed the road, and will continue to cross the road, to show its independence and to transport the weapons it needs to defend itself. However, in the future, to avoid problems, the chicken will be called a duck, and will wear a plastic bill.

AL-JAZEERA:
The chicken was forced to cross the road multiple times at gunpoint by a large group of occupation soldiers, according to witnesses. The chicken was then fired upon intentionally, in yet another example of the abuse of innocent Iraqi chickens.

CIA
:
We cannot confirm or deny any involvement in the chicken-road-crossing incident.

TRANSLATORS:
Chicken he cross street because bad she tangle regulation. Future chicken table against my request.

14

Breaking the Rules

BY EARLY 2004,
leaders of the CIA-led team searching for weapons of mass destruction had all but concluded that Iraq didn't possess nuclear, biological, or chemical munitions. The laboratories that Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administration claimed were production facilities for biological and chemical agents turned out to be agricultural testing stations and decrepit medical research centers.

But what Iraq did have, and there was no doubt about it, was the knowledge to manufacture anthrax, nerve gas, and, quite possibly, a crude nuclear device. Hundreds of Iraqi scientists had been involved in clandestine weapons projects during the twenty-four years Saddam was in power, and they were still around, many of them living quietly with their families in homes they had received from the government. Some of them had been captured by the CIA and the American military. Many others had been interrogated and released. Scores more had never been questioned.

Of those who were free, most were jobless. The Military Industrial Commission, which employed hundreds of weapons scientists, had been dissolved by Jerry Bremer. Others, who before the war were hired by state-run companies as a cover for their real activities, received the same monthly stipends as rank-and-file government workers, but those handouts were paltry compared with the off-the-books compensation they had gotten from Saddam's government.

With stipends or without, the scientists were an unhappy lot. They worried that they'd never again find work, that they'd be unable to provide for their families. Some contacted the Iranian government or were approached by Iranian agents. Iran had money, and the desire to increase its stable of weapons scientists. So did other rogue nations, whose agents also began to put out feelers.

Anne Harrington, the deputy director of the State Department's Office of Proliferation Threat Reduction, first warned of the danger posed by disaffected Iraqi scientists soon after the fall of Baghdad. Harrington had worked extensively with former Soviet weapons scientists during the 1990s. She told colleagues at State that the United States needed to reach out to Iraqi scientists, offering them new jobs and additional compensation. The Americans also needed to help them regain their self-worth, she said, by paying for them to join professional associations, receive scholarly journals, and attend international conferences. But her superiors rebuffed her. “Don't even think of it,” she recalled being told. “It's off the table. State doesn't have a role.”

The Pentagon had claimed the job of dealing with the scientists, and it was in no mood to play nice. Defense Department officials viewed the Iraqi scientists as Saddam's accomplices. Those not in American custody were lucky to be free.

Harrington refused to give up. State had always taken the lead in implementing nonproliferation programs, and she wasn't about to cede ground to the Pentagon, especially when it wasn't willing to reach out to the Iraqis. She began to lobby the National Security Council, which agreed in late June 2003 to allow State to work with Iraqi weapons scientists. By July, a State team was ready to go, but the Pentagon refused to give the go-ahead for its departure. Defense officials kept coming up with new reasons why the State team couldn't deploy. To Harrington, it was “a masterful slow-roll strategy.”

Finally, in January 2004, more than six months after Harrington's proposal, the State Department staffer in charge of the redirection program arrived in Baghdad. His name was Alex Dehgan, and he was an unlikely emissary to men who had manufactured deadly weapons for a living.

Dehgan was a mammal man. A beefy thirty-four-year-old with unruly brown hair and rumpled shirts, he had a doctorate in mammalian biology and a law degree. He had lived in Madagascar for three years studying lemurs. He was spending two years as an American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow at State, where he had assumed he would be focusing on conservation issues. Instead, he was assigned to the Bureau of Near East Affairs and was asked to work on subjects ranging from human trafficking to the financing of terrorist organizations. By the time Baghdad was liberated, Dehgan was so frustrated that he began lobbying to go to Iraq, figuring that it would at least be an adventure. One of Harrington's colleagues, also a mammalian biologist, took a shine to Dehgan, recommending that he be sent to Baghdad to open a “science center,” a place where Iraqis who had worked on weapons programs could interact with one another and learn about new jobs. “It was all based on the fact that we both study animals that give milk and have a certain number of ear bones,” Dehgan said.

Dehgan reminded me of Jim Otwell, the firefighter who became the interim minister of labor and social affairs. Their résumés didn't suggest them for their jobs, but they had plenty of chutzpah and, more important, they weren't political hacks. They believed in pragmatic solutions to accomplish a mission.

For Dehgan, that meant breaking the rules.

The Green Zone turned out to be the most hostile territory he trod in Baghdad. The CIA's weapons hunters and the Pentagon regarded Dehgan as an ignorant do-gooder trampling on their turf. No matter that he had a $2 million budget and a letter from Colin Powell, complete with a ribbon and a wax seal, stating that he was in charge of a United States government program to redirect Iraqi scientists; the CIA team wasn't going to help him. He had a place to stay and an office in the palace, but he was told that he wasn't part of the CPA club.

When Dehgan asked the CPA's accounting office for petty cash, he got the Baghdad equivalent of “Your credit card won't work here.” The CPA was a Defense Department entity, the accountants told him. They couldn't give any money to a State guy, even though there were millions of dollars in the palace safe. It's all the same American taxpayer money, Dehgan said. Doesn't matter, they told him.

Desperate for start-up cash, Dehgan hopped a military flight to Kuwait and went to the American embassy there, where his letter from Powell was like a platinum credit card. He withdrew fifty thousand dollars in cash, put it in his backpack, and flew back to Baghdad. Every few weeks, he did another money run, until he came up with a less onerous solution: he had his funds wired from Washington to a Kuwaiti bank, which sent the money to a bank in Baghdad. It worked without a hitch, until one of the CPA's accountants got wind of it and told Dehgan that he was breaking federal law and could wind up in jail. A week later, the same accountant approached Dehgan and said that he needed to arrange to wire funds to the American embassy that would take over from the CPA in June. “Tell me how you did it,” the accountant told Dehgan. “We're going to copy it.”

Nothing was easy for a State guy in the Emerald City. Halliburton refused to repair his car because he wasn't running a CPA program. So, once again, he had to fly to Kuwait with his backpack. He hauled back two hundred pounds of auto parts.

Dehgan begged American security guards in the Green Zone to help him train the Iraqis he had hired to guard the science center in how to search for car bombs and pat down visitors. One American finally agreed, but on the condition that Dehgan procure a full-length mirror from outside the Green Zone so the guard could look at his Iraqi girlfriend's backside when they had sex in his trailer. Dehgan went to the market that day and had a mirror custom made.

Razor wire was as abundant in the Green Zone as coal is in Newcastle, but when Dehgan asked for a few coils of it to string around the science center, he was told he couldn't have any. Negotiations ensued. The keeper of the razor wire was willing to help Dehgan, but he wanted a set of silverware from one of Saddam's palaces. Dehgan hit the markets again, and after much searching, he found a box of official Iraqi state silver flatware.

All those obstacles were minor, however, compared with the resistance from members of the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-led team searching for weapons. When Dehgan asked them to suggest Iraqi scientists who should be invited to participate in the center, ISG leaders refused. So Dehgan tracked down the Iraqis himself. Before long, his list of contacts included dozens of scientists, including a senior microbiologist. When the ISG learned of Dehgan's dealings, he was summoned for a meeting. “Back off!” a senior ISG official yelled at Dehgan. “This is our turf.”

A few days later, another ISG member pulled Dehgan aside. “You should be careful,” he said. “This is a war zone, and anything can happen.”

Dehgan started carrying a nine-millimeter handgun and an AK-47 rifle. He was the only guy in the Emerald City who feared his fellow Americans more than he did Iraqi insurgents.

Because he didn't do business the Green Zone way, Dehgan not only managed to open the science center before the handover of sovereignty, but he also created an institution that was immediately successful. The center, housed in a villa near Baghdad University, was far more lavish than anything the CPA had constructed. He purchased an enormous cherrywood conference table and leather chairs and equipped the building with sophisticated computers and high-speed Internet access. The monthly stipends he offered scientists were several times greater than their government handouts. The scientists were highly educated and successful, and they had been doted upon by Saddam. Dehgan figured they needed a little tender loving care.

He allowed the Iraqis to hold their own meetings in the center to identify ways to help the country, and eventually asked Bremer to send letters to Iraqi cabinet ministers inviting them to tap the center's talent for free. Nobody was foisted upon a ministry; it was voluntary.

“One of the biggest problems of Iraq was that we weren't listening to the Iraqis, and that our presence in the room, just like perhaps Saddam's presence in the room, was preventing people from thinking independently and taking the initiative,” Dehgan said later. “The key was not for us to be more involved, but for us to be less involved.”

         

Iraq was rife with militias. The Kurds had the
peshmerga—
“those who face death”—a seventy-thousand-strong force that protected the autonomous Kurdish provinces in the north before the war. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq had the Badr Corps, which had tens of thousands of members scattered across the south. The other large Shiite party, Dawa, also had a militia. So did the rebellious young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army fought regular battles with U.S. forces and the Iraqi police. Ahmad Chalabi had his own militia as well, the Free Iraq Forces, which was trained and equipped in Hungary at U.S. taxpayer expense.

Bremer wanted all the militias dismantled before he left. He regarded them as a threat to the development of Iraq's police and military. If parties were allowed to retain their militias—each of the two largest Kurdish parties, for instance, had its own contingent of
peshmerga—
he feared that they could use those forces to intimidate political rivals.

Bremer turned to his director of security policy, David Gompert, the man who ran the office in which Dehgan was based. Gompert was a veteran diplomat who had worked in the National Security Council under President George H. W. Bush and then for the Rand Corporation. He and his aides drew up an ambitious transition-and-reintegration plan to break up the militias. Militia members would be offered a variety of options: they could join the army, the police, or the national guard; they could obtain job training and seek a non-security-related government job; or they could retire and receive a pension. The policy would be applied regardless of which militia a person belonged to. If a militia refused to comply, its members could be subject to prosecution.

SCIRI and the Kurds immediately objected. The Shiites insisted that the Badr Corps was necessary to protect cities in the south from Sunni insurgents. The Kurds argued that the
peshmerga
was necessary to protect the north, where the Americans had deployed only a smattering of soldiers. But Gompert was skeptical. The Badr Corps received weapons and financial support from the Iranian government, and there were reports that the militia was involved in retribution killings of Baath Party members. And if the Kurds were allowed to retain the
peshmerga,
Gompert worried that they would use the militia to evict Arabs from disputed territory in the north.

In Iraq, the ideal solution was rarely possible. But often this wasn't clear from inside the Emerald City.

The Kurds and the Shiites were not going to give up their militias until they could be sure that Iraq was peaceful and stable and their political rights were secure—goals that would take years to accomplish. SCIRI offered to make the Badr Corps a social organization with a security component charged with protecting party offices and Islamic shrines in the cities of Najaf and Karbala. The Kurds offered to put the
peshmerga
under the control of the Kurdish Regional Government instead of the two large political parties. But Bremer and Gompert wanted full demobilization.

Gompert worked up a special plan to deal with the
peshmerga.
Half would be given positions with the National Guard. The other half would be divided into three new units under the control of the Ministry of Defense: a counterterrorism force, a rapid-reaction unit, and a brigade of “mountain rangers” to patrol the hilly terrain of the north. Kurdish leaders told him they would not give up the
peshmerga.
The militiamen had fended off the Iraqi army after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, ensuring that northern Iraq was autonomous from Saddam's rule. They had fought alongside U.S. forces to liberate the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul. And they were the only insurance the Kurds had in Iraq's new, chaotic landscape.

But Gompert was insistent. He told the Kurds that Bremer would not compromise on militia demobilization. The Kurds invited Gompert to the north to sign his agreement, which they did after warning him that they could accept the arrangement only “in principle.” As Gompert walked to his helicopter, signed agreement in hand, he asked Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani how to translate the term
mountain rangers
into the Kurdish language.