The Assassins' Gate (37 page)

Sitting at a picnic table, Adams began to question the driver and fill out paperwork. Where did he get the grenades?

“That one is mine. That one was put in my car by the police,” the driver said, and he reached to point at the grenades on the picnic table.

The pretty boy grabbed his arm and yanked him away. “Next time he touches that grenade I'm going to break his fucking hand.” A white thread was stuck in the driver's hair, and the soldier who was tagging him with his prisoner number pulled it out. “That's sweet,” the pretty boy sneered.

“Did you serve in the army?” Adams asked the driver. He had served less than a year before deserting. “Baath Party?” The driver made a quick, firm gesture of wiping his hands clean of the Baath Party, followed by a short monologue.

Before the translator could render it in English, the pretty boy broke in. “He's saying all that shit just to say no? I can't speak Arabic except to tell him to shut the fuck up.”

“This one is very thirsty,” the translator said, indicating the passenger. “He needs water.”

“He'll get it when he kneels down. Tell him this is not no 7-Eleven. This is prison—we're not here for your fucking convenience.”

It wasn't Abu Ghraib, just the ugliness of a bored and probably sadistic young man in a position of temporary power. But I left the airfield that night with an uneasy feeling. I'd had a glimpse under the rock of the occupation; there was bound to be much more there.

*   *   *

IRAQIS LIKED TO COMPLAIN
that the Americans didn't know how to be occupiers. The British troops in the south, many of them veterans of Northern Ireland, seemed far more comfortable with the inherent ambiguities of police work and civil affairs. Americans were both too soft and too hard. Niceness and nastiness seemed to be two conjoined sides of their personality: Love me or I'll kill you. They had allowed the looting, Iraqis said, and they were allowing criminals and extremists to have the run of the country. At the same time, they turned friends into enemies with impulsive, violent reactions.
The New York Times
told the story of a fifty-one-year-old merchant with heart trouble who was kicked, beaten, and urinated on by the soldiers arresting him; then he was sent to a military hospital, where he was treated just as well as the wounded American in the next bed. He told the nurse, “I'm really confused. At the base, they beat me and tortured me. Here they treat me like a human being.”

I once sat in on a meeting between three American junior officers in Kadhimiya and two Sunni tribal elders from Adhamiya, the district just across the river. Rockets were being fired from their neighborhood over the Tigris into the Americans' base, and the officers wanted the elders' help in stopping it.

One of the elders, wearing a gold-bordered brown robe and a kaffiyeh, lit a cigar and urged the Americans to emulate the British down in Basra. “I don't mean to hurt your feelings, but you don't have any experience here,” he said. “You have to study the psychological way, study the community and the faith. That's why they have no problems.”

“The reason is they have a long history of colonialism,” the American captain said. “We have no interest in this. We don't want to stay here and run Iraq.”

The elder puffed on his cigar and smiled. “The Americans need a lesson from the British.”

The elders launched into a familiar litany of complaints: the power outages, the security situation, the checkpoints, the abuse of women during raids, the Americans' aggressiveness, the Americans' passivity. The soldiers sweated heavily in their flak vests, with helmets and M-16s at their sides. Every now and then one of them tried to mount a defense.

“There are explosives on the highways,” an elder said.

“We can't watch every inch of road,” the major replied. “This is where we need help we're not getting.”

The elder ignored him. “And four a.m. is too early for the curfew to end.”

Finally, one of the elders seemed to take pity on the American officers, who were so much less skilled at this old game of negotiation that was apparently a specialty of tribal sheikhs and British colonial officials. He put an end to the criticism with the faintest possible praise: “If we have to choose between the former regime and this one, we choose this one.”

“But it's not a regime,” the captain said, rousing himself. “We're here helping. That's important to understand. We are not here to impose a regime. I'd love for my job to be taken by someone from Kadhimiya and go home.”

The elder recited an enigmatic aphorism. “If you're piloting a boat, why burn it?”

The meeting ended in the handshakes, the hands on hearts, the elaborate displays of cultural sensitivity and mutual respect with which such encounters always began and ended. I imagined the officers going back to their base in a rage. The whole point of the meeting—the rocket attacks—had barely been mentioned.

*   *   *

THE SOLDIERS
were out on the streets, and so they began to grasp the difficulty of the occupation much earlier than the CPA in the palace. They were on the front line of complaints: It was the lieutenant on foot patrol, not the senior adviser to the Ministry of Electricity, who was asked by the woman standing outside her house why the electricity kept going off and who had to explain that he couldn't do anything about it. The soldiers were also less invested in their ideological preconceptions, and though they were often woefully ignorant of the country and the region, the nature of their work forced them to be pragmatists. Debaathification and the dissolution of the Iraqi army were generally unpopular with the American military; soldiers sometimes lost their hardest-working counterparts just as they were beginning to form a relationship, and soon found that the same Iraqis or ones like them were now shooting at them. In the absence of guidance from the center, commanders in the provinces, such as the 101st Airborne's Major General David Petraeus in Mosul, moved ahead with forming councils, finding business partners for reconstruction, training security forces, even setting local economic and border policy. They were in a hurry, and they often didn't bother to coordinate their work with the various international organizations and occupation officials who were working on the same problems. Meanwhile, the CPA was still drafting its blueprint for the future of Iraq. A lieutenant colonel in Kirkuk showed me a chart of projects—police stations, fire stations, schools, parks—that his brigade was ready to start. I asked how much money had been allocated by Baghdad, and he held his thumb and finger up in a zero. “I could do so much in this town with a frigging bag of money!” He was afraid that the new Kirkuk police force, which the battalion he commanded had already set up, would have to be scrapped when Bernard Kerik—the colorful former New York police chief, whom President Bush sent to Iraq to rebuild security forces—finally got around to announcing his national plan. Instead, Kerik spent his time in Baghdad going on raids with South African mercenaries while his house in New Jersey underwent renovation. He went home after just three months, leaving almost nothing behind, while the lieutenant colonel spent almost a year in Kirkuk. Among some soldiers, the occupation authority's initials stood for Can't Provide Anything.

The civilians in the palace saw it differently. At the end of his daylong tour of southern Iraq, Paul Bremer urged me to look into just the kind of reconstruction projects that I had already seen consuming John Prior's energy. “That money that we're putting out through the brigades and the divisions is the fastest-spent dispersing money I have,” Bremer said. The CPA handed out money from seized assets of the old regime in lump sums of half a million dollars at division level and two hundred thousand at brigade. When the unspent amount approached zero, the sum was audited and replenished. The Commanders Fund had gone through twenty-three million dollars by mid-August, in more than two thousand reconstruction projects. “We can't even keep track of how many,” Bremer said. “It's small things—sewers, opening amusement parks, fixing schools, clearing out drains.” These were the most visible achievements of the early months, and at times it seemed that the CPA could point to nothing else when Iraqis wanted to know what the occupation was bringing them.

But twenty-three million dollars in four months was a very small amount of money—less than a dollar for each Iraqi. It stood no chance against the gathering sandstorm of expectation. Officers in Iraq and officials in Washington, including Wolfowitz and Rice, accused Bremer of being far too slow to release control of the money in the Commanders Fund. Iraq's infrastructure had been deteriorating for years—an American development expert once told me that, if Iraq were a used car, Saddam got rid of it at just the right time—and with the collapse of the regime, along with the departure of its top managers, the jury-rigged machinery seemed to give out. By the end of the summer, Bremer understood both the extent of the problem and its political urgency. He went to Washington and let the White House know that Iraq was going to cost America tens of billions of dollars. Iraqi oil money and seized assets wouldn't come close to covering it. The reassuring forecasts of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz went into the dustbin of history.

President Bush broke the news to the country on September 7, 2003, and Congress quickly passed an $87 billion appropriation bill that included $18.4 billion for Iraq's reconstruction. Much of the money was earmarked for the huge infrastructure projects—power plants, water and sewage treatment, telecommunications—that only large multinationals could carry out. There was much criticism of the restricted- or no-bid contracts that went to American companies with Republican Party ties, but the problem wasn't so much the coziness of Bechtel and Halliburton with the Bush administration as the kind of projects they contracted to undertake and their execution in Washington and Baghdad. The projects were so big, and the official American procurement regulations so cumbersome, that the money made its way into Iraqi society at the pace of tar poured on a cold day. By August 2004, ten months after the appropriation, only $400 million of the $18.4 billion—barely two percent—had been spent. By the time Iraqi subcontractors saw any of the money, all but a small fraction had been lopped off in overhead, security (as much as 40 percent of any contract), corruption, and profits. The CPA kept promising Iraqis that the spigot was about to be turned on and the country was going to be flooded with lifesaving cash that would put tens of thousands of people to work. It never happened.

Part of the problem lay in the business-as-usual attitude back in Washington. Rumsfeld, still technically in charge of the postwar, set the tone: In mid-September, just a few days after Bush's televised speech, the defense secretary said, “I don't believe it's our job to reconstruct the country. The Iraqi people will have to reconstruct that country over a period of time.” He even offered the Iraqi people a reconstruction plan of sorts: “Tourism is going to be something important in that country as soon as the security situation is resolved, and I think that will be resolved as the Iraqis take over more and more responsibility for their own government.” Key officials who might have been able to negotiate the byzantine guidelines for congressional expenditures never went to Baghdad. On one of his trips to Washington, Bremer approached the acting secretary of the Army, Les Brownlee, and confessed, “I have no contracting expertise over here at all. I am going to be in deep trouble. Can you help me?” With the approval of Wolfowitz, the Army dispatched forty contracting officers from the Corps of Engineers to Baghdad. Halfway through the life of the CPA, it was the beginning of the Project Management Office. “It didn't work very well,” a senior administration official told me. “They were too scared. They were scared to death to let that money go out because they already saw what was happening with some of the Iraqi money”—accusations of waste and corruption were beginning to plague the CPA—“and they were already being visited by congressional delegations.” The failure to spend Iraq reconstruction money wisely, or quickly, or at all, became one of the less publicized but more significant scandals of the occupation. In the end, the CPA inspector general's report found that nine billion dollars in Iraqi funds had gone missing on Bremer's watch, and this was only a preliminary figure. “Someday, somebody is going to sit down and figure out how much damn money was wasted,” the senior official said. “You can sit there and say, ‘Kofi, you really didn't waste a whole lot, considering the normal corruption and profligacy and stupidity of international programs.' I believe in Iraq we wasted more than Kofi did.” He added, “If you're past the political and security breaking point, all the contracts in the world won't help you.”

Jerry Silverman, a former official of the U.S. Agency for International Development who worked in Vietnam for four years, found himself, two decades later, in Iraq. The assumption behind the development efforts in both wars, he said, was that “if you do good things for people, it will result in political support. There's no evidence for that. The Viet Cong sent their kids to the schools we built, and they shot us during the day anyway.” But in Iraq, unlike in Vietnam, the political war was still to be won or lost at the outset. If the Americans had established security early on, Silverman said, “It's possible—not inevitable, but possible—that reconstruction could have taken hold. It's been impossible since then.” Compared to the American soldiers and civilians in Vietnam, he went on, the ones in Iraq were not prepared to take the kind of casualties necessary to secure the cities and the highways so that reconstruction stood a chance of succeeding. “Our troops are in force-protection mode. They don't protect anyone else. They're another private militia.” Vietnam and Iraq, he said, were cases of “different mistakes, same hubris.”