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!”
16
A Lot Left to Be Done
JOHN AGRESTO HAD BEEN IN BAGHDAD for two weeks, and his ivory-tower plans to overhaul Iraq’s university system, crafted back home in New Mexico, had met reality. Promoting academic freedom and opening liberal-arts colleges would remain pipe dreams until he addressed the devastation wrought by postwar looting. His big ideas would have to wait. He needed desks, chairs, books, and blackboards.
/> Agresto, the CPA’s senior adviser for higher education, didn’t have a budget. In September 2003, before the Supplemental, America’s paltry reconstruction funds were controlled by the U.S. Agency for International Development. So he walked across the palace to the USAID office to ask for help. He’d heard that they had $25 million set aside for Iraqi universities.
A USAID program officer told Agresto that the money was already earmarked for grants to American universities that wanted to establish partnerships with Iraqi institutions. Agresto was dumbstruck. American universities? What about rehabilitating looted buildings? Restocking libraries? Reequipping science laboratories? Perhaps the American universities will help with that, the program officer said. It’s up to each school to decide how it wants to use the money.
Well, Agresto replied, can I at least see the proposals from the American universities? Sorry, the program officer said. I’m not authorized to show them to you.
When Agresto threatened to file a Freedom of Information Act request with USAID, bureaucrats in Washington relented. He read the documents in near disbelief.
The University of Hawaii’s College of Tropical Agriculture had been selected to partner with the University of Mosul’s College of Agriculture to provide advice on “academic programs and extension training.” Not only was Mosul’s near-alpine climate far from tropical, but the college had been burned to the ground by looters. What it needed was a new building.
A consortium led by the University of Oklahoma was tapped to work on “leadership strengthening” with five Iraqi schools, including the University of Anbar, based in Ramadi. Anbar province was the most dangerous area in all of Iraq, a no-go zone for Americans. How, Agresto wondered, would a bunch of Oklahomans ever meet up with their counterparts in Anbar? A team from the State University of New York at Stony Brook won a $4 million grant to “modernize curricula in archaeology” at four of Iraq’s largest universities—schools where students were sitting on the floor because they lacked desks and chairs.
“It was like going into a war zone and saying, Oh, let’s cure halitosis,” Agresto said.
With no money from USAID, Agresto set his sights on the Supplemental. He heard that Bremer was going to ask the White House for $20 billion. Such a large request, he figured, had to have a budget line for Iraq’s universities. He assembled what he deemed to be an exceedingly modest proposal, asking for only $37 million to reconstruct the universities.
Bremer’s office rejected it without explanation.
Agresto, a stalwart Republican, eventually got a little help from Representative Nita Lowey, a Democrat from New York. During negotiations over the Supplemental in Congress, she insisted that $90 million be devoted to education. Of that, $8 million would go to universities.
It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. Then Agresto discovered that USAID was claiming that it held the purse strings. He went ballistic and sent a letter to Bremer saying he’d rather not have the money than have it go to USAID. Bremer’s secretary called Agresto and told him to rewrite his letter; it was too inflammatory.
A few days later, he confronted a USAID official by the pool. “You folks go on all the time about how we work together. We never work together,” he growled. “You never listen to me. You know I put in for this money. You know I put in for thirty-some-odd million dollars, and all I’m getting is eight, and now you want to take my eight away. I’m not gonna let you take my eight away.”
USAID relented, but Agresto still had to work with a new bunch of Pentagon bureaucrats whose job was to disburse the billions of Supplemental dollars. He was told that he’d have to deduct $500,000 for administrative fees. He reluctantly agreed and told the bureaucrats what he wanted to do with the remaining $7.5 million: buy basic science lab equipment for every Iraqi university. The bureaucrats told him it would take a while. They needed to write up a request for proposals, solicit bids, select a winner, and then manage procurement and distribution. By the time Agresto left Iraq in June 2004, just before the handover of sovereignty, no lab equipment had yet arrived.
None of the $400 million in international pledges, made months earlier at a donors’ conference in Madrid, had come through either. He also couldn’t get a cent from the CPA to support the “College of Humanity” at the University of Dohuk—the project that had made Agresto want to stay in Iraq for “the duration.” Agresto had asked the palace bean counters for just $3 million to build the college.
With only pocket change for reconstruction, he turned back to the item atop his original to-do list: promoting academic freedom. It didn’t cost a thing.
With the help of CPA lawyers, he assembled an eight-point bill of rights that called for universities to be “independent in the managing of their academic affairs” and guaranteed the “freedom of thought, belief, and clothing.” It prohibited weapons on campus and the coercion of others “to join a religion, sect, race, or political ideology.” It was a direct challenge to Shiite student activists who had been threatening secular-minded professors and hectoring female students to cover their hair. The university presidents unanimously adopted the bill of rights in March and had it printed up as a large poster to hang on the walls of every campus.
Agresto regarded the document as one of his most significant achievements, although it didn’t really change anything other than the dynamics of the minister’s meetings with the university presidents. Like the traffic code and all of the other CPA edicts, it sounded good on paper but there were no resources to implement it. The colleges couldn’t afford to hire guards to confront the Shiite activists, who continued to swagger around the campuses, forcing women to wear head scarves and demanding holidays for religious festivals. When I asked Taki Moussawi, the president of Mustansiriya University, why he didn’t enforce the bill of rights, he pointed to the hallway walls, which were plastered with photographs of Shiite ayatollahs. “The bill of rights is a good thing and I agree with it, but I cannot use it,” he said. “It would be very dangerous to confront the students.”
Two days after the November 15 Agreement, the CPA’s Governance Office sent an e-mail to Agresto and his fellow senior advisers asking for their thoughts on the decision to hand over sovereignty by the following June. Agresto typed up a short note, but before hitting Reply, he added one more address on the carbon-copy line: “All Hands”—everyone in the Republican Palace.
If you’re asking how the departure of the CPA will affect all that we have tried to do in our Ministry, the short and sad answer is that there is much that we had hoped to do that we now know we cannot. Serious curricular reform? Beginning an American University? Reorganizing 20 universities into some kind of rational system? Starting Western-style business schools? We can do all the groundwork on these we’d like, but once we’re gone the inertia of the system will take over and all will wither. We will concentrate our efforts on those things that have hope of surviving our departure—infrastructure rebuilding, partnerships with some American universities, some scholarship programs, and the like.
If you’re asking our view on the transfer of sovereignty, my answer is even more pessimistic. Thirty years of tyranny do terrible things to a people: It breeds a culture of dependency; it breaks the spirit of civic responsibility; it forces people to fall back upon tight-knit familial, ideological or sectarian groups for safety and support. The professors I work with are still incapable of believing they can do something on their own, freely, and not ask permission. Freedom, democracy and rights are not magic words. The transfer of sovereignty will bring about some form of “democracy.” But a liberal democracy, with real notions of liberty and equality and open opportunity—without strongmen, or sectarian or sectional oppression—well, I think that’s doubtful.
Agresto’s bitterness was bred of experience. Two weeks before he had arrived, the Governing Council appointed twenty-five ministers. Each of the members staked claim to a different ministry—and the right to appoint the minister. Governing Council member Mohsen Abdul Hamid
, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni organization with ties to the radical Muslim Brotherhood, demanded the Ministry of Higher Education. Hamid appointed Ziead Abdul-Razzaq Aswad, a professor of petroleum engineering and an ardent supporter of Hamid’s party, as minister. Aswad’s first act was to fire all of the university presidents. He wanted to replace them with his allies, many of whom were Sunnis. Agresto didn’t want to meddle in the day-to-day operations of the ministry, but Aswad had gone too far, and Agresto commanded him to rescind the order.
Agresto had never worked in an emerging democracy before, but his bookshelves in New Mexico were filled with volumes by Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. He had read the Federalist Papers and countless histories of America. Forming a democracy was easy, but forming a liberal, moderate democracy wasn’t. He believed that the CPA had committed a catastrophic error by establishing a quota for Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds on the Governing Council, and then by filling many of those seats with politicians and religious leaders who were more interested in doling out favors to their supporters than in doing what was best for their country.
Agresto believed that Iraqis hadn’t focused on ethnic and religious divisions before the war, and that it was the CPA’s quota system that had encouraged them to identify themselves by race and sect. He and the few others in the palace who shared this opinion were half right. Iraqis hadn’t flaunted their differences under Saddam’s Sunni-dominated government. Shiites and Kurds were fearful they would get classified as troublemakers and shipped off to Abu Ghraib. And Sunnis, in order to mask the fact that a minority was ruling the majority, perpetuated the myth that “we’re all Iraqis.” Liberation finally allowed the Kurds and, to a greater degree, the Shiites to worship openly. They could cover their car windows with paintings of the Imam Ali and make pilgrimages to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Shiite political leaders also demanded a majority of seats on the Governing Council. Even so, many of the Iraqis I met wanted leaders who would overcome divisions of race and sect, not those who pandered to differences.
Imperial Life in the Emerald City Page 30