Imperial Life in the Emerald City (31 page)

The collapse of police and civil-defense units across Iraq in the face of al-Sadr's uprising stunned CPA officials. A few days later, the CPA was surprised again when a battalion of Iraq's new army mutinied rather than obey orders to help the marines fight insurgents in the streets of Fallujah. Both events revealed fundamental problems with the CPA's strategy to build up the Iraqi police force and to create a new army after Bremer's fateful order to disband the old one. The decision to hire back as many former policemen as possible, even without training, had been meant to reassure Iraqis by putting more officers on the street. But it also put thousands of ill-prepared men, some with ties to the insurgency, into uniform—a problem that the CPA long feared but did not fully grasp until the Mahdi Army rebellion. Of the nearly ninety thousand police on duty at the time of the rebellion, more than sixty-five thousand had not received any training.

Another major mistake, Iraqi and American officials said, was the failure to provide enough equipment to the police and the Civil Defense Corps, a forty-thousand-member paramilitary force. At the Rafidain station, only half of the 140 officers had handguns. There were just ten AK-47 assault rifles in the armory, three pickup trucks in the parking lot, and two radios in the control room. No one had body armor, save for a few guards at the front door who wore American military vests.

In the case of the Iraqi army, the problem wasn't equipment or training but esprit de corps. Bremer and his first security adviser, Walt Slocombe, had outsourced the training of new soldiers to a contractor. Upon graduation from the contractor-run boot camp, the new soldiers were assigned to U.S. Army units, headed by American officers they had never met. When those officers asked the Iraqis to fight, there was no rapport, no bond of trust forged through training, no reason why the Iraqis should put their lives on the line for a foreign army. In other nations, American Special Forces soldiers trained units and then deployed with them, a system that always seemed to work. But in Iraq, there weren't enough American soldiers to do that.

“The Americans misunderstood us,” said Major Raed Kadhim, the senior officer at the Rafidain station. “We will fight for Iraq. We will not fight for them.”

         

Bremer's move to close the newspaper was a profound miscalculation. When he ordered the shutdown of
al-Hawza,
there was no comprehensive backup strategy for military action in case al-Sadr and his militia chose to fight back. There was no advance warning provided to soldiers in al-Sadr strongholds such as Sadr City. There was no coordination with senior army commanders. Attempts by the U.S. military to regain control of areas seized by the Mahdi Army resulted in two months of ferocious ground combat that was more intense than anything American troops had encountered during the year-old occupation or even the initial invasion of Iraq.

Bremer chose to pursue al-Sadr at the same time tensions were boiling over in Fallujah, a Sunni-dominated city west of Baghdad. Two days before the newspaper closure, American marines killed fifteen Iraqis during a raid. Later that week, on March 31, four American security contractors were murdered by a mob. The contractors' mutilated bodies were hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River.

Bremer vowed that the deaths of the contractors would “not go unpunished.” But there was little agreement among the Americans on the response. The marines wanted to wait until they could identify the culprits and then mount operations to apprehend them. “We felt… that we ought to probably let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge,” Lieutenant General James Conway, the top marine commander in Iraq, told me later. At the time, he said as much to his boss, Lieutenant General Sanchez, who passed it up the chain of command to General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Myers conveyed Conway's position to Donald Rumsfeld.

But back in Washington, the desire for revenge was overwhelming. On April 1, the day after the attack, Rumsfeld and General Abizaid went to the White House to plot a response with President Bush and his national security team. Rumsfeld didn't share Conway's position with the president. Instead, the defense secretary presented a plan to mount “a specific and overwhelming attack” to seize Fallujah. Bush approved it on the spot.

Sanchez would later tell Conway and his aides that “the president knows this is going to be bloody. He accepts that.” But at the April 1 meeting, according to a White House official involved in the discussions, Rumsfeld said that an attack on Fallujah “was something they could do with a relatively low risk of civilian casualties.”

On April 4, the same day Swope's platoon was attacked in Sadr City, two thousand marines converged on Fallujah. The following day, they began attacking—and encountered stiff resistance. Insurgents hiding in homes and mosques unleashed gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades. Five marines died that first day, as did an untold number of insurgents and civilians. The next day, the insurgents employed an anti-aircraft gun to fire on American helicopters. The Americans responded with an escalating barrage of bombs, mortars, and gunfire, killing more insurgents and civilians. It was never clear how many civilians died, but it didn't really matter. Al-Jazeera and other Arab television stations broadcast breathless reports of large-scale civilian deaths in the city.

Rumsfeld and other proponents of a massive attack had believed that the threat of force would lead residents of Fallujah to hand over the contractors' killers. If not, they believed the insurgents could be targeted with “smart bombs” and other munitions in surgical operations. But instead of giving up the insurgents, many residents rallied around them. And it wasn't just in Fallujah. People in other cities, including Shiites who used to regard Fallujah's residents as the hillbillies of Iraq, rushed to donate blood and money. And Sunnis in Fallujah and other Sunni-dominated cities in central Iraq, who had deemed al-Sadr a troublemaker, began to laud him as a hero. Each side was drawing strength from the other.

The Emerald City went into lockdown. Force Protection forbade CPA staffers to travel outside the Green Zone, no matter how important the business. Contractors stopped going to construction projects. Reconstruction work ground to a halt.

CPA staffers moped around the palace. With only three months before the handover of sovereignty, there was no time to spare. They huddled in the dining hall and in the bars. The news from both fronts of the new war was grim. They wondered if they'd ever be able to leave the bubble.

Some of them began to question the management of Iraq outside the walls of the Green Zone. Taking on al-Sadr at the same time the marines were attacking Fallujah seemed ill-conceived. “Did we have to go after him right now?” one senior CPA official told me at the time. “It should have been delayed. Dealing with both these problems at one time is crazy, if not suicidal.”

As news reports focused on the mounting civilian casualties in Fallujah, Bremer and Bush ran into a new front of opposition. British prime minister Tony Blair telephoned President Bush on April 7 to object to the marine offensive. Three influential Sunni members of the Governing Council warned Bremer that they would resign if the military operations did not cease. Lakhdar Brahimi, who was in Baghdad to begin selecting members of the interim Iraqi government, also threatened to quit. At a news conference, Brahimi, a Sunni, lashed out at the way the Americans were dealing with Fallujah, calling it “collective punishment.”

Faced with the prospect of the CPA's political transition plan imploding yet again, Bremer urged the White House to consider a cease-fire to allow Sunni politicians to negotiate a peace deal with city leaders. Bob Blackwill, who was back in Washington, also lobbied for a cease-fire. He didn't want Brahimi to quit.

On April 8, the marines were ordered to cease offensive operations by noon the following day. Lieutenant General Conway and his aides seethed. Although they didn't support the all-out offensive attack by Bush, they wanted to finish the mission they had started. Marine units were already near the city center. Conway's deputy, Major General James Mattis, estimated that the marines would have taken Fallujah with two more days of fighting. “When you order elements of a marine division to attack a city, you really need to understand what the consequences of that are going to be and not perhaps vacillate in the middle of something like that,” Conway told me later. “Once you commit, you've got to stay committed.”

The CPA, the marines, and members of the Governing Council all attempted to strike an agreement with city leaders to hand over the contractors' killers. After two weeks of fruitless talks, Conway turned to former members of Saddam's army. Working with the CIA, Conway met with the head of Iraq's intelligence service, Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, who introduced the marine commander to a handful of former Iraqi army generals. The generals offered to set up a force of more than a thousand former soldiers from Fallujah who would control the city and combat the insurgents, if the marines pledged to withdraw from the city. Conway agreed.

The Iraqi force, called the Fallujah Brigade, would turn out to be a disaster. Instead of wearing the desert camouflage uniforms the marines had provided, members dressed in their old Iraqi army fatigues. Instead of confronting insurgents, the former soldiers merely manned traffic checkpoints on roads leading into the city. After a few weeks, even that ended. Eventually, the eight hundred AK-47 assault rifles, twenty-seven pickup trucks, and fifty radios the marines had given the brigade wound up in the hands of insurgents.

Although the anger spawned by the marine offensive subsided in other parts of Iraq, insurgents from Fallujah metastasized to Samarra, Ramadi, Bayji, and other Sunni-majority cities, where they enlisted legions of impressionable young men. All of a sudden, it wasn't just Fallujah that was off limits to Americans, but most of the Sunni-dominated center of Iraq. Reconstruction projects and programs to promote democracy in those places were put on hold, and eventually canceled altogether.

After a while, CPA staffers and American contractors were again allowed to leave the Green Zone for day trips, but they couldn't travel outside Baghdad, except in military helicopters. The constraints on travel, and the daily compilation of insurgent attacks, which had ballooned from about a dozen to more than seventy-five, prompted another round of soul-searching in the dining hall and the bars. The CPA had been focused on minutiae: How many foreign banks should be licensed? What needed to be in the new copyright law? Should there be traffic courts?

“We were so busy trying to build a Jeffersonian democracy and a capitalist economy that we neglected the big picture,” one of Bremer's aides ruefully told me in late May. “We squandered an enormous opportunity, and we didn't realize it until everything blew up in our faces.”

THE GREEN ZONE, SCENE XIII

A few weeks before the handover of sovereignty, CPA staffers gathered by the palace pool for a farewell barbecue. Everyone was there, except the Iraqis working in the palace. Nobody had told them to stay away. They just did.

Halliburton brought out hot dogs, burgers, grilled chicken, and corn on the cob, served by the crisply uniformed Indians and Pakistanis who worked in the dining hall. Blackwater, the private security firm that had the lucrative contract to guard the viceroy, provided the booze.

For the occasion, military officers waived General Order 1, which prohibited soldiers from consuming alcohol. Nineteen-year-old privates got hammered and dove into the pool.

It felt like a college graduation party. It was a last chance to say goodbye, to exchange e-mail addresses, to take a group photo. Some looked back on their time in Baghdad with regret. Others laughed and slapped one another on the back. They had done a great job. They were heroes.

They all talked about their summer, about vacations and family reunions. Some were returning to their old jobs. Others would work for the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign.

After an hour or so, a CPA press officer noticed two journalists in the crowd. She pulled them aside. “Who invited you here?” she barked. “What are you doing here? No press is allowed here.”

The journalists said they had been invited by a CPA staffer. The press officer told the journalists to stay put while she consulted with a superior. She returned a few minutes later with a handheld video camera. Kicking them out might cause a scene and would inevitably result in
a story. The journalists could stay, but they would have to promise on tape that they wouldn't write about what they saw.

“We never came to a CPA barbecue,” one of them said on camera. “These people behind us aren't CPA people drinking beer. We were never here.”

“We will not report the fact that everyone here is celebrating the end of the CPA,” the other said.

A short while later, Bremer and Lieutenant General Sanchez joined the party. Everyone wanted a picture with the two men. Some even asked for an autograph.

There were plans for a few skits and musical performances. One guitar-playing staffer had even worked up a parody about Bremer to the tune of “The Man Who Never Returned.” But senior CPA officials, fearing satire, canceled the show.

As the crowd peaked, Bremer walked onto a small stage. The world would look back on the CPA, he said, and “recognize what we've done.”

“We've made Iraq a better place,” he said. Everyone applauded. He shed a tear.

The British ambassador read a congratulatory letter from Tony Blair. Then a brief recorded message from President Bush was projected onto a large screen. He, too, heaped hosannas on the CPA.

“Thank you and God bless you,” he said. “And enjoy your barbecue!”