The Assassins' Gate (15 page)

The girl's family had gone to Tehran, where Mustafa found them and broke the terrible news. The year he spent in theocratic Iran showed him “the true face of Islamist ideology.” It reminded him of nothing so much as the regime in his own country; he was even jailed for forty days after publishing a newspaper article deemed blasphemous. After 1989, Mustafa began a decade of wandering. He went from Iran to Syria, to Lebanon, and eventually to the Greek islands, where he worked as a waiter at a resort. One day in the mid-1990s, the guest was none other than George H. W. Bush. Serving the ex-president's table, Mustafa summoned enough courage to lean forward and ask why the American government had left Saddam in power to slaughter rebellious Iraqis after the Gulf War in 1991. When I met him, he was still waiting for the answer. In London, Mustafa became a hotel porter, but soon he fell into the INC circle and met Kanan Makiya, whose books transformed his mind and completed his evolution into a liberal democrat.

I never quite learned how Mustafa made a living (his wife was expecting their first child). He had connections at Radio Free Europe and at the INC weekly paper; his business card read “Iraq Future Affairs Institute.” Two months earlier in Damascus, a cab driver recognized his accent and said, “Congratulations. The Americans are coming to help you. Let's hope they come to help us afterward.” This, Mustafa assured me, was the true opinion of the Arab street, not the vitriol shown in the Arab media. “The problem with Arabs is we live on our history,” he said. “And the history is a big lie.” Mustafa was ashamed of his English, but he had an epigrammatic way with language. As far as he was concerned, the next president of Iraq should be either a woman or a man without a mustache. Exile had cost him almost everything. His mother, whom he hadn't seen since 1988, died in Baghdad just a few months before the start of the war that would have reunited them. Mustafa was one of those fugitives from dictatorship whose whole life hangs in suspension until the regime's fall. He spent a full day driving me around Iraqi London, insisting on paying for everything. When we said goodbye, he warmly kissed my cheeks and promised that we would meet again soon, in Baghdad. It was impossible not to wish it so.

*   *   *

IN THE GRAND BALLROOM
of the London Hilton Metropole, Makiya was sitting at a long table next to Ahmad Chalabi and a few other opposition figures before a throng of journalists. Conspicuous by their absence were the leaders of the ethnic parties. Makiya had promised to say nothing, to let the others speak, to let the document speak for itself, and for a while he kept his word. But when reporters began lobbing questions in his direction, he described what was in the report and, as usual, he grew intense. “It carries forward a completely new idea that doesn't exist anywhere in the Arab-Muslim world. This is something tremendous, this is something unbelievable. We're talking above all of an idea of democracy that isn't only majority rule, an idea of democracy that is about minority rights and group rights and above all individual human rights.”

Murmuring spread among the press corps, a ripple of excitement. Who was this guy? He sounded nothing like the parade of speakers who had been droning on throughout the weekend.

“This is a fighting document, by the way,” Makiya said. “We intend to fight for it on the floor of the conference.”

When the session broke up, the journalists flocked around Makiya. Into the ballroom rushed Hoshyar Zebari, a leader of one of the Kurdish parties, red faced and furious, telling anyone who would listen that Makiya's document had no authority at the conference.

Later, I asked Zebari what he thought of Makiya's ideas about federalism, about the ethnic parties, about old and new politics. Zebari (who would become the very capable foreign minister of the new Iraqi government, the first Kurd to hold the office in Iraq's history) was a bear of a man with a thick black mustache. He smiled through his answer, but he kept thumping me in the chest as he spoke. “We are rooted in the country, we are the ones who have suffered,” he said. “What Kanan Makiya has done, I appreciate his intellectual work, but it's just an intellectual exercise.”

“Makiya is trying to give it teeth,” I suggested.

“He's the only one,” said an American in a blue suit, hovering around the conversation. He was David L. Phillips, an official from the Council on Foreign Relations, who had consulted with the State Department on the Future of Iraq Project. “The report is not a political document—it's not a blueprint. If it becomes one, it will be divisive.” Phillips sharply criticized Makiya for hijacking the writing of the report and then lobbying so hard for its provisions. The ideas were too lofty, too far ahead of their time, to stand a chance of being realized soon. “Iraqis aren't quite ready for the new politics. The tribal structures, the ethnic groupings—they matter to Iraqis. They're important. This isn't a Brandeis laboratory.”

The London conference ended with expressions of unity and support for that vague thing called democracy in Iraq. But no provisional government was formed, and the report of the Democratic Principles Working Group, printed and distributed, with hundreds of pages of appendixes and dissents, was never officially discussed. Back in Washington, officials thanked the group for its advice and shelved the report that the State Department had solicited. Makiya had called their bluff, and now they were calling his.

The movement toward war kept rolling forward, with or without democratic principles. Makiya had antagonized a sizable part of the Iraqi opposition, but he still had strong backers in Washington. On January 10, 2003, Makiya, Rend Rahim, and a doctor from a prominent Sunni family in Tikrit named Hatem Mukhlis were ushered into the Oval Office for a meeting with the president, Cheney, Rice, and Khalilzad. Bush asked them for their personal stories, but the exiles also spent a good portion of the time explaining to Bush that there were two kinds of Arabs in Iraq, Sunnis and Shia. The very notion of an Iraqi opposition appeared to be new to him. Bush struck Mukhlis as unfocused on the key policy questions of the future of the Iraqi army, debaathification, and an interim government. “But we saw in his eyes that we were going to war.” Cheney kept his thoughts to himself; he seemed on edge. It was clear that the administration still hadn't settled on a postwar plan.

Makiya tried to push one into existence. With Rahim, he urged the president to announce a provisional government of Iraqi exiles before the war. “The Iraqis on the inside have been brainwashed,” he said, “and a government in exile would be prepared to take over when there's change.” Makiya told the president that his actions would transform the image of America in the Arab world, that war could be a force for progress, for democracy. “People will greet the troops with sweets and flowers,” he said.

Mukhlis agreed, but he added, “If you don't win their hearts at the start, if they don't get benefits, after two months you could see Mogadishu in Baghdad.” Mukhlis gave the president other warnings: A government of exiles would not be accepted by Iraqis inside the country, and dissolving the Iraqi army would change the complexion of American forces there, from the liberators Bush said he intended them to be into occupiers. Bush asked whether Iraqis hated Israelis, and again Makiya and Mukhlis, who had been schoolmates at Baghdad's elite Jesuit high school in the mid-1960s, gave contradictory views: Makiya said that Iraqis were too focused on their own oppression; Mukhlis insisted that they were brought up and educated in school to be anti-Zionists. Makiya and Mukhlis also disagreed about the nature of Iraqi society. It was still strongly tribal, Mukhlis said; Makiya argued that over the past fifty or seventy-five years Iraqis had become engineers, doctors, capable citizens of a modern state. No one in the room pursued the obvious contradiction between this optimism and Makiya's vision of a nation of the brainwashed.

Both Iraqis left the meeting convinced that Bush saw things as they did. “I thought Bush understood where I was coming from,” Mukhlis later said. “At that time I was absolutely certain Iraq was going to be paradise.”

Makiya emerged from the White House and declared himself “deeply reassured” by the president's dedication to Iraqi democracy.

Two months later, in mid-March, Vice President Cheney appeared on
Meet the Press
and told the country that American troops would be greeted as liberators in Iraq.

“If your analysis is not correct,” Tim Russert pressed him, “and we're not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?”

Cheney wasn't worried. “Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim,” the vice president said in his low-key, soothing way, “because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. I've talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. The president and I have met with them, various groups and individuals, people who have devoted their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside Iraq. And like Kanan Makiya, who's a professor at Brandeis but an Iraqi, he's written great books about the subject, knows the country intimately, and is a part of the democratic opposition and resistance. The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.”

Upon hearing these words, Feisal Istrabadi, the Chicago lawyer, felt his heart sink. “I knew nobody who spent four decades in exile knew what was going on in Iraq. I didn't and Kanan didn't. The only difference was I was a hell of a lot more cautious. He always made promises he knew he could not keep.” Makiya knew that “sweets and flowers” were unlikely to be the response, Istrabadi said. “But he also knew Bush didn't know any better. He wanted Bush to go in. We all did.”

About one thing Cheney was right: Makiya had written great books on the subject. In
Republic of Fear
and
Cruelty and Silence
he had stared unflinchingly at totalitarian Iraq and the consequences of Baathist terror, the human wreckage it produced, the sight and smell of it. After the Gulf War, when he and other dissidents drafted Charter 91 outlining principles of tolerance for a new Iraq, Makiya received a severe letter from an old friend that he was honest and brave enough to reprint in
Cruelty and Silence:
“I think—and please allow me to tell you this—that the ideas of the Charter issue from an ivory tower which has elevated itself so high up into the sky that we who are standing down below can hardly see or hear where they are coming from. You see, our society today has become like 1984. There is no one who remembers or who even dares to remember the meaning of words like ‘freedom,' ‘democracy,' ‘brotherhood,' or ‘humanity.' They no longer know what ‘human rights' are. I mean, what does this have to do with them!… Their only preoccupation is to survive and to live, like sheep.”

Makiya knew all this, and when, in late January, he crossed the snowy mountains along the border between Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan with a small group that included Ahmad Chalabi, and met old comrades in the Kurdish town of Salahuddin, and a man he didn't know threatened his life one night over a perceived slight, Makiya sent an e-mail to a few friends describing the incident. “This is the human raw material that you want to build democracy for,” he wrote. “Every day in the last five weeks of my travels I have come across such damaged and wounded people, people who breathe nationalism, sectarianism, without knowing that they are doing so, and people who are deeply chauvinistic and suspicious toward their fellow Iraqis. These are the facts of life for the next generation in this poor, unhappy and ravaged land. Don't even think of coming back to it after liberation if you are not prepared to deal with such facts.”

Reading these words, I was reminded of the voice that I first heard before I ever met Makiya—the fearless voice of his books. As a writer, Makiya knew what Iraq had become. But now he was also playing a central part in a great historical drama, an event on such a vast and audacious scale that no one could imagine the full extent of the consequences. He had become a politician, and he wrote in his e-mail from Kurdistan, “Politics is the harshest judge in the world that there is, infinitely harsher than the God of the Old Testament or the Allah of the Quran.” What he had been able only to dream about throughout his life was suddenly within reach. There would be no second chance, and his own future was uncertain, for Makiya had been diagnosed with the same form of leukemia that killed Edward Said. So he made himself forget what he knew long enough to say a few words to the president of the United States that will some day feature prominently in his obituary.

The sound of the first bombs falling on Baghdad was, to Makiya, a joyful noise. Three weeks later, on April 9, he sat with the president in the White House and watched the statue of Saddam Hussein fall to the ground in Baghdad's Firdos Square, and he wept.

And after that, the trouble began.

4

S
PECIAL
P
LANS

IN THE SUMMER
of 2003, a young American from Rochester, New York, named Andrew P. N. Erdmann was working for the Coalition Provisional Authority in an office on the second floor of the Republican Palace, on the west bank of the Tigris River in central Baghdad. The sign on the office door said “Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research.” Erdmann, a thirty-six-year-old State Department employee with a doctorate in history from Harvard, was the Iraqi ministry's senior adviser—in effect, the acting minister.

Drew Erdmann was a rangy, broad-shouldered former rower with a strong chin, short sandy hair, and a bushy mustache, which (until it disappeared at some point over the summer) turned his face into a British colonial official's circa 1925. He was getting just a few hours of sleep a night, in a cramped shared trailer on the grounds behind the palace. When he woke up every morning before six, without an alarm, Erdmann's first thought was: Saigon—shit. His roommate, an Englishman named Philip, would say, “How are you doing this morning, Dr. Erdmann?” And Erdmann would reply, “Another day in paradise.” The anxiety of all that needed to be done in the day ahead was already racing through him.