The Assassins' Gate (64 page)

The Dawoods had once seen the Americans as heroic liberators, but the feeling was short-lived. According to Emad, as the occupation ground on, with constant power outages and rampant crime, ordinary unhappiness was turning into a kind of insanity. “Things are just getting worse here,” Saad added. “Of course, if there was democracy, things would change.”

“But democracy needs a long period of time,” Emad said, “because we've been living so long under Saddam.”

“Most people do not get the idea of democracy,” Saad said. “Ask anybody about democracy, and you'd find most people would say, ‘What am I going to do with democracy? Give me security first.'”

Emad said, “I know a guy who shot two bullets at random. He said, ‘Isn't this freedom?'”

As for Dettman's presentation, it clearly meant something to this couple that Americans had come to meet with them in Hilla. Dettman had given them a lot of helpful information, they felt. Their only complaint was that there was no exam at the end, to test how much they'd learned about democracy.

The chances of the people at the meeting in Hilla having any immediate success on the political stage were poor. Marina Ottoway, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said that, after the fall of dictatorships, “You always have a lot of political parties forming, and they never get anywhere. For that reason,” she added, NDI was “bravely doing something that is completely futile.” But electoral success wasn't the only measure of its effect. In Hilla, it felt like an achievement simply to hold a discussion, amid gunfire, about democracy, in which there was a genuine give-and-take between Iraqis and foreigners. Les Campbell, NDI's Middle East director, said, “Even with all the problems in Iraq, there is already more civil society space and party organizing than in any other Arab country by orders of magnitude.” He described how NDI's Iraqi staff members, such as Mayasa al-Naimy, had begun to blossom intellectually. “Even in the midst of the killings, which are terrible, and even though the planning and administration continue to be a joke, something interesting is going on here. And it makes me sort of sick to think it might not work.”

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I WENT BACK TO IRAQ
one more time in January of 2005. The national elections that Ayatollah Sistani had been demanding ever since the fall of the regime were finally going to happen. The Bush administration, having resisted for the better part of a year and a half, had become their strongest advocate, and the date of January 30, 2005, was now set in stone.

There had been good reasons for delaying elections. The best-armed, best-organized groups, with funding from Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, had all the advantage over the less sectarian or extreme ones, such as those I had seen in Hilla. There were examples in recent history—Bosnia was one—where precipitous postwar elections had simply enshrined the least democratic forces in power for years to come. UN experts had been as wary as American officials of early elections. But as with every other plan for Iraq, events ran out of control and overwhelmed the bright ideas of people in Washington and Baghdad. Former CPA officials began to say privately that the big mistake had been the failure to hold local elections at the start of the occupation. If Iraqis had been able to vote for their local councils soon after the fall of the regime, and then provincial councils, and finally a national government, they would have become participants in Iraq's politics in a way that never happened, and the occupation might have gone very differently. But it was much too late for alternative scenarios.

Instead, the country's first democratic vote would take place almost two years after the invasion, in less than ideal circumstances. Even after a Marine assault in November of 2004 pried Falluja out of jihadi control, the insurgents only seemed to gain strength as they expanded company-size operations from Anbar province to Mosul and took over large areas of Baghdad itself. In Washington there was a new conventional wisdom: Not only was there a full-blown guerrilla war in Iraq, but America was losing it (Colin Powell was reported to have said this to friends). Iraqis would have to vote under the direst threats. The Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi recorded a statement, posted on the Internet, that declared war on the Iraqi elections, calling democracy an evil form of polytheism that replaced God with politicians, a conspiracy of “crusader harlots” and Shiite “rejectionist pigs.” Anonymous leaflets scattered around the capital threatened to “wash the streets of Baghdad with the voters' blood. To those of you who think you can vote and run away, we will shadow you and catch you, and we will cut off your heads and the heads of your children.” In most parts of the country, the essential elements of an election campaign—public meetings, voter education, parades, door-to-door canvassing—were nearly impossible. The parliamentary lists kept the names of most candidates secret in order to protect their lives; voters would hardly know whom they were choosing to represent them. A team of international observers announced that it would monitor the Iraqi elections from Amman, hundreds of miles away in another country. The administration had defined its project for democracy in the Middle East so far downward that it seemed as if the elections would be a bloody exercise in going through the motions.

Amman was my point of entry and exit on trips to Iraq. It was a blessedly dull city where the stoplights worked and there were no police checkpoints. At the Four Seasons Hotel, the elevator music and turned-down bedspreads and buffet breakfasts were dreamlike luxuries. The desk clerks were trained to say, “Welcome back, Mr. Packer,” and it always gave me a cheap pleasure to be personally welcomed to a place where I could let down my guard. Tame Amman, with its pleasant hilltop air and dyed-blond Arab women, was the closest thing the Iraq War had to Bangkok. In the plush lobby of the Four Seasons you always met journalists on their way in or out, international aid workers biding their time while they monitored the violence, Iraqi government officials holding meetings that would have been too dangerous in Baghdad, and Iraqi exiles sitting deep in armchairs, sipping Turkish coffee, glancing around with vaguely conspiratorial looks and all the time in the world on their hands.

By the beginning of 2005 there were at least three hundred thousand Iraqis in Jordan, and housing prices in Amman had skyrocketed. Some were escapees from the violence, usually with an unpleasant experience like burglary or kidnapping in their recent past. Others were just taking a breather, as if Jordan were a spa where fortunate Iraqis could go to have their nervous breakdowns. And still others were Sunnis unhappy with the new order of things in Iraq, where Shiite and Kurdish politicians seemed poised to take over their country. Some of these Sunnis had connections to the insurgency; a few were among its leaders.

I stayed in Amman for a few days this time before going on to Baghdad. I wanted to talk with the Sunnis, which had become difficult and risky inside Iraq. Most of their leaders—an assortment of party politicians and conservative imams—were boycotting the elections. Some candidates had withdrawn under threat, and others made the political calculation that boycott and violence would reduce their vote totals to humiliating levels. The hard-liners rejected the whole notion of an election held under occupation. But the insurgency had always been driven in part by the loss of Sunni group power, and as the elections drew near, its sectarian character became glaringly obvious. The Shiite south and Kurdish north were eager to vote. In the Sunni center, if people wanted to go to the polls, they kept their plans for election day to themselves. Real political leadership among the Sunnis, capable of persuading the alienated and armed that the political game was their only hope, did not yet exist. One evening in Amman, I had dinner with Ghassan Salamé, the late Sergio Vieira de Mello's political adviser. When I mentioned the underdeveloped state of Sunni politics in Iraq compared with that of the Shia and the Kurds, Salamé replied by asking me to name the Sunni faction leader in the Lebanese civil war. “You can't,” he said. “Sunnis don't see themselves as one among many factions. They see themselves as power. They consider themselves the inheritors of the Ottoman Empire. This is not going to change.”

Through the good graces of a former Baathist embassy official who had been close to Uday, I met a group of Sunnis from Anbar province who were vaguely connected to the insurgency. Two were tribal sheikhs from Ramadi; the third was a young businessman rumored to have been one of Saddam's bagmen. We met in the offices of his holding company on a quiet Amman street. The businessman, Talal al-Gaaod, had a master's in construction management from USC, wore jeans and suspenders, and was up on the latest op-eds from the American press. All of them presented themselves as anxious to build a democratic Iraq. They had nothing against Americans; they had long dreamed of the good things America could bring to Iraq, and they had welcomed the overthrow of the regime. “I am a believer in the Americans' good intentions,” Gaaod said, “but something happened on the way from Washington to Baghdad.” The whole guerrilla war was a terrible misfortune that needn't have happened if only the Americans had listened to people like them instead of invading their houses and dishonoring their women and compelling the Iraqis to seek revenge. Gaaod admitted that some of the insurgents were living in the Middle Ages, extremists who gave the rest of them a bad name. But the legitimate resistance, as they called it, was an Iraqi resistance against occupation. It included two hundred thousand people, and if the elections went ahead, Gaaod said, it would increase tenfold. The civil war would become quite real. These were hardly the masked cutthroats of my imagination. They were recognizable Iraqis, the tribal sheikhs traditional, the businessman modern, and they had far more connections to my world than I had thought possible.

Then the underside began to emerge. One of the sheikhs, Zaydan Halef al-Awad, claimed that the Sunnis were the majority in Iraq—63 percent, in fact. “If Sunnis settled in America, they would rule America,” the sheikh said. “We always carry the stick in the middle. We can move it any way—we control it.” The politicians running for office in Iraq, Kurdish and Shiite, were illegitimate pawns of the Americans or the Iranians, and if they happened to be assassinated, too bad for them.

Gaaod distributed copies of boycott declarations issued by most of the major Sunni tribes.

“What if some people in the tribes want to vote?” I asked.

“They cannot.”

“What would happen to them?”

“If anybody goes to vote, he will be killed.”

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THE IMMIGRATION OFFICER
at the Amman airport looked at my passport, looked at me, and pointed to his temple. “Iraq. Iraq. Head—no head.” There were several ways to interpret this, none of them reassuring. The charter flight to Baghdad, with its South African crew, was full nevertheless. There were always people ready to go to Iraq, most of them drawn by the money. In the seats around me I noted a group of grizzled construction contractors with Southern accents wearing baseball caps, and another group of beefy young security guys with iPods. Farther back there were South Asians and Iraqis. In the front row sat Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq's Kurdish foreign minister. The journalist next to me was chewing a piece of gum as if she was determined to destroy it. No one spoke. “We'll follow a zigzag course all the way to Baghdad,” the captain announced cheerfully. “Once we get overhead, we'll spiral down.”

Baghdad was in a state of dread. There were more roadblocks than ever, more Apaches buzzing the city from low overhead. The last Humvee in the American convoys now displayed a sign that said, in English and Arabic, “Stay 100 meters back or you will be shot.” Campaign posters of Prime Minister Allawi and of the coalition that Ayatollah Sistani had assembled covered the walls and hung from the streetlights, but all the election talk was of security measures and bloodbaths. I spent two nights at the Rashid Hotel, which meant that for the first time I slept inside the Green Zone, and being sealed off from Iraq only heightened the sense of anxiety. The Rashid was under the command of Lieutenant Colonel E. A. Strosky, of the Army Reserve and the Buffalo electrical utility. Strosky, a small, exasperated man with a big mustache, asked each new guest, “Do you want a room on the bullet side or the mortar side?” The house rules were: no communications equipment in the rooms, no visitors, no conversation with military personnel, stay off other floors and out of the canteen. “You are here to eat and live in a safe place,” Strosky said. “If there's a mortar or rocket attack, go into the bathroom. A Gurkha will come to explain what is happening.” For security reasons I was told to sign in under the name “Strosky #494.” “Forget about logic here,” he said. The war seemed to have entered the
M*A*S*H
phase—on my next trip, I would expect Lieutenant Colonel Strosky to be wearing a dress.

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MY DESTINATION WAS BASRA
, Iraq's largely Shiite second city, in the country's far southeastern corner. I wanted to see the elections where it would be possible to move around with some freedom, and where they would have more to do with politics than killing. I flew down in a British military transport plane. Basra was in the British sector. That interested me, too.

The flatness of the light told you that the Persian Gulf coast was only an hour away. The water table in this marshy region was so high that Basra depended on a system of canals for drainage. But the canals were blocked, and on one winter day a hard rain submerged whole neighborhoods under several feet of water and sewage; a week later, the flooding ebbed, turning the streets to mud and the city into a picture of soggy neglect. The poverty in Basra, surrounded by most of Iraq's oil reserves as well as export-crop plantations, was on an African or Asian scale. Clay houses that had proliferated illegally jostled for space amid the garbage heaps of the Shiite flats; they provided shelter to families that had been driven from the marshes drained by Saddam after 1991. The city center was choked with decaying shops and the ruins of concrete government buildings that were hit by American air strikes during the invasion. Near the Ashar mosque, an Islamic group had taken over a park with a derelict Ferris wheel and a sun-bleached tyrannosaurus. Looted buildings overlooked the banks of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which emptied the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates into the Persian Gulf. Downstream, toward the gulf, was the domed palace complex that Saddam had built and allegedly visited only once. It was now occupied by the British and American regional embassies.