The Assassins' Gate (68 page)

The final count at the Republican School was 721 for the Allawi list, 595 for the Sistani list, and a handful of votes scattered among the others. The total number of ballots distributed was two greater than the number of votes counted, and so the men stood around the table in the middle of the room for half an hour more, their faces lit from below, going over the tallies again and again, until they realized that two ballots had been left blank. Everything had come out right.

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THE ARRIVAL
of the Americans and the British in 2003 freed Iraqis from Saddam but not from their own suspicions and grievances and fears. It was a victory of foreigners, and the occupiers wondered why they were greeted with prickliness instead of mere gratitude. Liberation was, in a way, humiliating, and the almost two years that followed brought new calamities. On election day, the foreign troops were nowhere to be seen, and when Iraqis went to vote, the achievement was finally their own.

Two days after the election, I went back to see Majid al-Sary and found him elated. After the fall of the regime, with all the looting and violence, he had been too ashamed of his country to bring his family to Basra, and he had been thinking of going back to Sweden if the election results meant the loss of his job in the Defense Ministry. Now, he was determined to stay: Iraqis, he had learned, were worth fighting for. “The elections showed the strength of religious ideas here. I will stay and fight those bad ideas. It's changing from a fight against violence and explosions to a new category—thoughts.”

After a few days, the euphoria from the elections began to wear off, along with the ink on index fingers. Nationwide, the Sistani list won nearly half the vote, and in Basra it took 70 percent. The Allawi list won less than 15 percent nationally, 20 percent in Basra. In the provincial election, the local Shiite coalition won a third of the vote, with the Fadilah Party a strong second and the Allawi list a distant third. The coalition of small parties put together by Jawdet al-Obeidi, the former limousine company owner from Portland who had attended the workshop in Hilla, didn't even register in the national results. The success of the religious parties left the supporters of Allawi and other secular candidates stunned, and some of them attributed the result to the misuse of Sistani's name and face. Some Iraqis said that Mohamed Rida, Sistani's son and spokesman, had panicked on the eve of the elections and ordered the imams to hand down an official endorsement of List No. 169. (Sistani's office denied this.) It was the Ghadir al-Khumm Surprise. In this first chance to “give their voice,” most Shia had obeyed their religious leaders.

In Basra, at least, there had been a contest. Iraq as a whole emerged from its first democratic election profoundly split between those who voted and those who did not. The national turnout was 58 percent, but the voters were overwhelmingly Shia and Kurds. The Sunni turnout was estimated to be 15 percent; in Anbar province, it was 2 percent. The party of Ghazi al-Yawer, the interim president and a tribal sheikh from Mosul, won two seats in the new national assembly. Adnan Pachachi, a former foreign minister and elder statesman of Arab politics, could not even win a seat for himself.

I visited Pachachi in Baghdad to find out how Iraq could move forward from such a divisive event, in which the country's historical losers had become winners and its winners losers. The transformation would be felt beyond Iraq: The country's Arab neighbors were already alarmed by the specter of Iranian and Shiite influence rising in the Middle East, disturbing the old Sunni order. Pachachi, a man of liberal views, told me, “I hope there will never be Sunni politics in Iraq. I don't think there should be Shiite politics, either. We don't want to be like Lebanon. I think this is a temporary thing, this ascendancy of Shiism. Eventually, the majority of the Shia will turn away from the religious parties. It's an aberration,” he said. “You will see. I think probably sooner rather than later Iraqis will go back to their secular roots.”

Pachachi was busy holding meetings with Sunni politicians and religious leaders to find out what it would take to bring them and their constituents into the political game. “They said they were eager to rectify this mistake” of sitting out the elections, he said, chuckling—“without admitting it, of course.” Pachachi was acting as a broker between the marginalized groups and the new centers of power, trying to find a formula by which Sunni leaders could join in the writing of a new Iraqi constitution despite their lack of representation in the assembly. This would both act as a brake on Shiite sectarianism and provide a way for Sunnis who were weary of fighting to rejoin politics. The vote magnified ethnic and religious divisions, and it moved the Americans farther from the center of Iraq's political life. The contest was more and more among Iraqis themselves. At a meeting of tribal leaders in Baghdad several weeks after the elections, a Sunni Arab from Kirkuk said, “The Americans aren't the problem. We're living under an occupation of Kurds and Shia. It's time to fight back.” Kirkuk once again became ground zero for the dreaded, threatened, desired civil war. Another tribal leader at the gathering declared, “The Kurds are asking for Kirkuk. Later on they will start asking for Baghdad. It was Saddam Hussein who gave the Kurds too much, more than they deserved.” The Arabs would soon rise up, he said. “The last remedy is burning.”

Dr. Baher Butti didn't vote; Dora, the violent Baghdad neighborhood where he lived, was too dangerous. But when I met him after the elections, Butti had some news: His old idea for the Gilgamesh Center for Creative Thinking would take the form of a new psychiatric clinic that was about to open, with Iraqi and American funding, near the Olympic Stadium in a former social club of Uday's. The al-Janna Center, with twenty inpatient beds and fifty outpatients, would allow Butti to teach advanced techniques to the dozen psychologists and social workers on his staff, and to provide good care for the ailments of Iraqis' minds.

After almost two years, Butti still harbored suspicions about the Americans. Before we said goodbye, he asked me for the fifth or tenth time whether there had been some plan behind the chaos that the occupiers had allowed to overtake his country. “I'm not being paranoid,” he said, “but it's a question.” I agreed that it was a question, and I said that, as far as I knew, the chaos was worse than a crime, it was a blunder. But the Americans were a fact in Iraq, and Butti was now counting on them to prevent the religious Shia from taking too much power and to protect American interests, which had converged with his. Meanwhile, for better or worse, he and his wife would stay.

“It's Russian roulette,” he said. “Every morning we leave, and we don't know if we will come home. We are habituated to this Russian roulette. So we go on.”

Aseel voted. She and her parents walked six hours across the city to Adhamiya, their former neighborhood, where their food-ration cards were registered, and back. Aseel wore a full-length black
abaya
and training shoes, and in the pro-Saddam streets of Adhamiya the family walked under the unfriendly gaze of local young men. Aseel was frightened but defiant, and when they finally reached their polling station, she cast her vote for the Sistani list only because it included Ahmad Chalabi, whom she was counting on to finish off the Baathists once and for all.

When I saw her after the elections, Aseel had exchanged the
abaya
for a resplendent royal blue tailored suit with a knee-length skirt and a jacket with padded shoulders, a cream-colored turtleneck, stockings, and high heels with ankle straps. She was also wearing lipstick, mascara, and plenty of jewelry. We sat together in the garden of the Palestine Hotel, enjoying the mild winter sun, and she undid her braid and let her hair down in the golden light. There was something different about Aseel, as if she had cast off a burden. She was working as a secretary at a ministry in the Green Zone (there had been no follow-up to her interview with Kanan Makiya), and a man in her office had proposed marriage. He was good-looking but dull; she knew that she couldn't love him and told him so, but she consented to let him and his family visit hers. They sat in the living room of her family's newly constructed house, and as the two sets of parents discussed a dowry, Aseel imagined a life with this man: As soon as they were married, he would break all his promises to respect her independence of spirit and start crushing it into that of an Iraqi housewife. Tears came to her eyes, and the prospect filled her with such dread that she imagined it would be just like living under Saddam again. For the first time in months, she remembered exactly what that had felt like. She could never let it happen. She said nothing that day, but she knew that she would refuse the offer.

“I want to travel,” she said as we walked out of the hotel to say goodbye on the street. “My mind doesn't match this society. I need more freedom.”

E
PILOGUE

IN THE FIRST DAYS
of 2005, Drew Erdmann packed up his desk at the National Security Council, left government service, and joined his wife and their baby daughter in St. Louis, where he planned to take a job in the private sector. Erdmann had been working on Iraq, in Baghdad and in Washington, for the better part of three years. It had been challenging and fulfilling work, and, as for his own part in it, he could sleep at night. But he was still going home with the sense that he hadn't contributed enough. The cost in human lives weighed heavily. He had lost friends, both American and Iraqi, and he considered himself lucky, but if he'd been single, he would have stayed on in Iraq.

In St. Louis, Erdmann tried not to follow the news from that part of the world. Though he would never again be a professional historian, he wanted to achieve enough distance to consider the war historically, which would probably take years. The biggest questions—Would it succeed? How could it have been done better? If it couldn't be done right, should it have been done at all?—were out there waiting for him, and for others like him, but Erdmann was not yet ready to answer them.

But he did read a book—from cover to cover, for the first time in a while—that had some relevance. It was
Bureaucracy Does Its Thing
by “Blowtorch” Bob Komer, who had run the pacification program in Vietnam under Johnson. Copies had been circulating in Baghdad, and a few people there had said, “You want to understand what's going on out here? Read this report.” A copy landed on his desk in Washington. Erdmann had always rejected crude Vietnam analogies, and he still did: Iraq was strategically far more central, the nature of the insurgencies was different, and the chances for success in Iraq were better. The constant remained the U.S. government: the ongoing effort to put its civilian and military branches to work in concert, the institutional constraints that made it so hard, the halting efforts to adapt imaginatively to new kinds of war, the sheer organizational difficulty of pulling off something on the scale of Iraq. All of this had been the theme of his dissertation, and when Komer's book sent Erdmann back to it, he discovered that he had foreseen much of his own experience. “There are many things about Iraq that fit right into the pattern of the kind of stuff I was thinking about and working on before,” Erdmann said. In 1917, for instance, with the American Expeditionary Force readying to sail to Europe, General John “Blackjack” Pershing looked around for a plan and found none. “So it doesn't come as a surprise to me, and only now that I have a little time can I piece things together in the mosaic and see more clearly some of the continuities.”

His dissertation had focused on the elusiveness of victory. The defeat of Japanese militarism did not come with the surrender in August 1945 on board the battleship USS
Missouri,
but six years later, with the end of the American occupation and the birth of a democratic Japan. Because victory is a process, not an event, with fundamentally political rather than military goals, victory in Iraq, including the transformation of Iraqi politics, lay beyond the reach of American power alone. “Ultimately, it is always about the Iraqis,” Erdmann said. “The ultimate objectives can only be achieved by the Iraqis. Maybe these are peculiarly American objectives. We can help. But we are in a position where victory will only be achieved through the efforts of others. That's a paradoxical situation. We may have the power, but precisely because of the nature of our objectives, we can't use our power to force a specific outcome. Ultimately, our fate is tied to theirs.”

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IN THE SAME WEEK
of early January that Erdmann left Washington, Colin Powell was summoned to the White House for his farewell conversation with the president. All along, Powell had been the dutifully quiet dissenter on Iraq, concerned about the damage to alliances, skeptical (but not enough) of the administration's more fevered claims about weapons and terrorism, realistic about the difficulties of the postwar. But his prestige was badly tarnished when his prewar speech to the UN about Iraqi weapons was proved mostly false. Though Iraq became more and more the responsibility of his agency, Powell had lost almost every major fight back when the crucial decisions were made. His tenure as secretary of state was a great disappointment. In his final months at the State Department, an aide quoted to Powell Churchill's answer to someone's comment on the ingratitude of the British public for voting him out before the Second World War was even won. “Neither look for nor expect gratitude,” Churchill said, “but rather get whatever comfort you can out of the belief that your effort is constructive in purpose.” Powell, the aide believed, had served some constructive purpose. This was probably a lower standard than the one to which Powell held himself. Now, sooner than he wanted, he was being replaced by Condoleezza Rice, a shrewder bureaucratic survivor.

After a few awkward minutes in the Oval Office, Powell realized that Bush had no idea what his secretary of state was doing there. The White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, was summoned, but he, too, was clueless. Who had called for the meeting? It began to seem entirely possible that the phantom vice president had arranged one more parting humiliation for his old colleague and more recent nemesis. Powell drew himself up and informed the president that he had come not for their weekly meeting but to say goodbye. Finding himself alone with Bush for perhaps the last time, Powell decided to speak his mind without constraint. The Defense Department had too much power in shaping foreign policy, he argued, and when Bush asked for an example, Powell offered not Rumsfeld, the secretary who had mastered him bureaucratically, not Wolfowitz, the point man on Iraq, but the department's number three official, Douglas Feith, whom Powell called a card-carrying member of the Likud Party. Warming to his talk, Powell moved on to negotiations with North Korea, and then homed in on Iraq: If, by April 1, the situation there had not improved significantly, the president would need a new strategy and new people to implement it. Bush looked taken aback: No one ever spoke this way in the Oval Office. But because it was the last time, Powell ignored every cue of displeasure and kept going until he had said what he had to say, what he perhaps should have said long before.