Imperial Life in the Emerald City

by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

  Bremer and his governance team gave the Shiites the majority they sought, and allowed religious Shiite political leaders, particularly Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, effective veto power over the selection of other Shiite members. As a result, several more liberal and secular Shiites favored by the CPA were kept off the council, strengthening the position of SCIRI and Dawa. Leaders of the governance team argued that SCIRI and Dawa would have refused to participate in the council had more moderates been selected. Perhaps, but Agresto and others in the palace maintained that Bremer and the governance team hadn’t pushed hard enough to get secular, nonpartisan professionals on the council.

  Bremer’s approach “magnified rather than muted the very divisions that so many Iraqis rejected,” Agresto said. “The best Iraqis knew that they could not form one country, one democratic country, unless they were somehow able to get these categories behind them and look for leaders who, one way or another, would transcend these divisions. The best Iraqis… knew this. We didn’t.”

  On January 18, 2004, a white pickup truck loaded with a thousand pounds of plastic explosive and several 155-millimeter artillery shells exploded at the Assassin’s Gate. More than twenty people were killed and at least sixty were wounded, almost all of them Iraqis. Many of them worked for the CPA.

  Agresto, who heard the blast from inside the palace, assumed that the attack would rally popular sentiment against the insurgency and in favor of the goals of the occupation. “What I expected was the ‘Mothers’ March for Peace’ or the ‘Don’t Kill Our Kids Movement’ or somebody to come out and say: Stop this. We want democracy,” he said. But Iraqis held funerals and went on with life. U.S. troops erected larger concrete blast walls in front of the gate. When Agresto asked Iraqis working for the CPA why there was not more outrage, everyone he talked to was too scared to condemn the insurgents in public. “I saw people still afraid,” he said. “I saw how easy it was to speak against the Americans and how dangerous it was to speak for democracy and liberty.”

  During anguished rumination in the days after the bombing, he concluded that America had been shooting for the moon. It was a profound break with his ideological allies, with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz. “We should have been less ambitious,” Agresto said. “Our goal should have been to build a free, safe, and prosperous Iraq—with the emphasis on safe. Democratic institutions could be developed over time. Instead, we keep talking about democratic elections. If you asked an ordinary Iraqi what they want, the first thing they would say wouldn’t be democracy or elections, it would be safety. They want to be able to walk outside their homes at night.”

  Agresto tried to discuss these ideas with members of the governance team, but they pushed him away. He was the guy who worked on universities. He offered to help advise the Iraqis drafting the interim constitution. Perhaps, he said, they’d want to talk to someone who knew a bit about the history of democratic thought. Once again, he was dismissed. With nobody willing to listen, he wrote a note to a friend in the palace who worked for the CIA and had studied at St. John’s College:

  The problem with democracy-building is that I think we think democracy is easy—get rid of the bad guys, call for elections, encourage “power-sharing,” and see to it somebody writes a bill of rights. The truth is exactly the opposite—government by the few, or government by one person is what’s easy to build; even putting together good autocratic rule doesn’t seem to be that hard. It’s good, stable and free democracies that are really the hardest thing.

  America’s been so successful at being a free and permanent democracy that we think democracy is the natural way to rule—just let people go and there you have it: Democracy. But all the ingredients that make it good and free—limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, calendared elections, staggered elections, plurality selection, differing terms of office, federalism but with national supremacy, the development of a civic spirit and civic responsibility, and, above all, the breaking and moderation of factions—all this we forget about. We act as if the aim is “democracy” simply and not a mild and moderate democracy. Therefore… we seek out the loudest and most virulent factions and empower them… .

  We, as a country, don’t have a clue as to what has made our own country work, and so we spread the gospel of democracy-at-all-costs abroad. Until this country can find a Madison, it would be far better off with just a good ruler.

  Before the handover, Bremer said a long goodbye. He flew in one of the army’s Black Hawk helicopters, skimming atop the palm trees to avoid shoulder-fired missiles, to visit cities in the Shiite south and the Kurdish north. He threw dinner parties in his villa for Iraqi politicians, and he stopped CPA staffers in the palace halls to thank them for their work.

  In his farewell meetings, he insisted that the CPA had set Iraq on the path to a democratic government, a free-market economy, and a modern infrastructure. He ticked off the CPA’s accomplishments: nearly 2,500 schools had been repaired; 3 million children had been immunized; billions of dollars had been spent on reconstruction; 8 million new textbooks had been printed. New banknotes had replaced currency with Saddam’s visage. Local councils had been formed in every city and province. The most expansive bill of rights in the Arab world had been written into the interim constitution.

  But where the CPA saw progress, Iraqis saw broken promises. As Bremer prepared to depart, electricity generation remained stuck at around 4,000 megawatts—resulting in less than nine hours of power a day to most Baghdad homes—instead of the 6,000 megawatts he had pledged to provide. The new army had fewer than 4,000 trained soldiers, a third of what he had promised. Only 15,000 Iraqis had been hired to work on reconstruction projects funded with the Supplemental, rather than the 250,000 that had been touted. Seventy percent of police officers on the street had not received any CPA-funded training. Attacks on American forces and foreign civilians averaged more than forty a day, a threefold increase since January. Assassinations of political leaders and sabotage of the country’s oil and electricity infrastructure occurred almost daily. In a CPA-sponsored poll of Iraqis taken a few weeks before the handover of sovereignty, 85 percent of respondents said they lacked confidence in Bremer’s occupation administration.

  Because of bureaucratic delays, only 2 percent of the $18.4 billion Supplemental had been spent. Nothing had been expended on construction, health care, sanitation, or the provision of clean water, and more money had been devoted to administration than all projects related to education, human rights, democracy, and governance combined. At the same time, the CPA had managed to dole out almost all of a $20 billion development fund fed by Iraq’s oil sales, more than $1.6 billion of which had been used to pay Halliburton, primarily for trucking fuel into Iraq.

  In early June, I ventured to the Daura Power Plant in southern Baghdad. It was supposed to be a model of the American effort to rebuild Iraq. Bombed in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and neglected by Saddam’s government, the station could operate at no more than a quarter of its rated capacity, which had led to prolonged blackouts in the capital. After CPA specialists had toured the decrepit facility in 2003, they’d vowed to bring it back to life. It was placed atop a list of priority projects, and German and Russian firms were hired to make repairs. But the paroxysm of violence that gripped the country in the spring halted reconstruction work at Daura and almost everywhere else.

  The German contractors fled in April. The Russians departed in late May, after two of their colleagues were shot to death as they approached the plant in a minivan. As I walked through the power station, I saw parts strewn on the floor, awaiting installation. Iraqi technicians in blue coveralls loitered and smoked cigarettes. In the turbine room, graffiti on the wall read LONG LIVE THE RESISTANCE.

  Work proceeded at a far more active pace at recruiting facilities for Iraq’s army and police force. The CPA and the U.S. military had finally settled upon what it deemed to be a successful training strategy once Bernie Kerik
and Walt Slocombe were out of the picture. The CPA’s missteps, a senior American general told me, “cost us one very valuable year.”

  Within the Green Zone, there was an aching sense of a mission unaccomplished. “Did we really do what we needed to do? What we promised to do?” a senior CPA official asked over drinks at the al-Rasheed bar. “Nobody here believes that.”

  In an interview before his departure, Bremer insisted to me that Iraq was “fundamentally changed for the better” by the occupation. The CPA, he said, had put Iraq on a path toward a democratic government and an open economy after more than three decades of a brutal socialist dictatorship. Among his biggest accomplishments, he said, were the lowering of Iraq’s tax rate, the liberalization of foreign-investment laws, and the reduction of import duties.

  As our conversation was drawing to a close, I asked a broad question about unfinished business. “When I step back,” he answered, “there’s a lot left to be done.”

  After returning to America, Bremer ruefully complained that the Pentagon had failed to send enough troops to Iraq. His implicit argument was that had there been enough soldiers on the ground, he could have accomplished his grand plans. But Bremer’s original political plan hadn’t been doomed by attacks; it had been done in by a half-page fatwa written by an old man in Najaf.

  The day after my interview with Bremer, I met Adel Abdel-Mahdi for breakfast in the front courtyard of his modest house. As we nibbled from a plate of dates and pastries, I asked him what the CPA’s biggest mistake had been. He didn’t hesitate. “The biggest mistake of the occupation,” he said, “was the occupation itself.”

  He, of course, had wanted the United States to anoint exiled politicians as Iraq’s new rulers in April 2003. But his self-interest aside, what he said was true. Freed from the grip of their dictator, the Iraqis believed that they should have been free to chart their own destiny, to select their own interim government, and to manage the reconstruction of their shattered nation. Their country wasn’t Germany or Japan, a thoroughly defeated World War II aggressor to be ruled by the victorious. Iraqis needed help—good advice and ample resources—from a support corps of well-meaning foreigners, not a full-scale occupation with imperial Americans cloistered in a palace of the tyrant, eating bacon and drinking beer, surrounded by Gurkhas and blast walls.

  The compromise between their desire for self-rule and the absence of a leader with broad appeal could have taken many forms, as the State Department’s Arabists pointed out over the months after the invasion: a temporary governor appointed by the United Nations, an interim ruling council, or even a big-tent meeting—similar to the loya jirga convened after the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan—to select a crop of national leaders. There certainly was a role for a tireless, charismatic American diplomat to shepherd the process. It could easily have been Bremer, with a different title and a shorter mandate, with a viable political plan and meaningful resources for reconstruction.

  Would that have made a difference? We’ll never know for sure, but doing a better job of governance and reconstruction almost certainly would have kept many Iraqis from taking up arms against their new leaders and the Americans. There still would have been an insurgency, led by zealots who saw no room for compromise, but perhaps it would have been smaller and more containable.

  “If this place succeeds,” a CPA friend told me before he left, “it will be in spite of what we did, not because of it.”

  At 10:00 a.m. on June 28, Bremer’s motorcade traveled across the Green Zone to Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s office. The viceroy walked into a nondescript room where Allawi, President Ghazi al-Yawar, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, and Chief Justice Mahdi Mahmoud were waiting. They greeted each other and sat on chairs upholstered in gold fabric.

  Bremer began by noting that Allawi’s government had taken control of all of Iraq’s ministries. The participants stood, and the viceroy opened a blue portfolio. He read from the document inside.

  “The task of the Coalition Provisional Authority will end on the twenty-eighth of June, and at this time, the occupation will end and the interim Iraqi government will assume complete sovereignty on behalf of the Iraqi people,” he said. “We welcome the steps of Iraq toward assuming its legitimate role among all free countries of the world.”

  When Bremer had finished, he turned to Allawi and al-Yawar. “You are ready now for sovereignty,” he declared.

  He handed the portfolio to the chief justice. With that simple act, America ended the occupation.

  Allawi uttered a few sentences, as did al-Yawar, who called it “a historic, happy day, a day that all Iraqis have been looking forward to… a day we take our country back.” There was no pomp or circumstance, no marching band or fireworks, no honor guard or grand speeches, no spectators or live television coverage. The Iraqi people didn’t know the handover had occurred until afterward. Everyone had expected it to happen on June 30, but Bremer had moved it up, at President Bush’s suggestion, to avoid the risk of an insurgent attack. The ceremony lasted no more than five minutes.

  After a round of brief but tearful farewells in the palace, Bremer climbed into a dual-rotor Chinook helicopter idling on the Green Zone’s landing strip. Removing his sunglasses, he strapped a camouflage flak vest over his white French cuff shirt. As the chopper rose into a cloudless sky, he remained seated instead of peering out of the portholes for one last glimpse of his domain. But he had seen the Green Zone from the air many times before. From above, the majesty of the palace wasn’t apparent. It was only a blue-domed roof sprouting a dozen satellite dishes, surrounded by the PX, the parking lot sowed with Suburbans, hundreds of corrugated-metal housing trailers, and finally, the seventeen-foot-high blast walls that separated the Emerald City from the rest of Iraq. From the air, the Green Zone was shaped like a giant jigsaw puzzle piece cast down in the middle of a dusty, sprawling city.

  Epilogue

  A YEAR AFTER JERRY BREMER left Iraq, CPA staffers gathered for a reunion in Washington. The party, held at a furniture showroom on the top floor of a downtown office building, featured three kegs of beer, mini artichoke quiches, and a cheese platter. A slide projector displayed a series of high-school-yearbook-like shots of CPA personnel in Iraq—clowning around the palace, posing in front of a Black Hawk chopper, eating in the dining hall, lounging by the pool.

  WELCOME TO THE GREEN ZONE, a spray-painted plywood sign proclaimed at the room’s entrance. WHO’S YOUR BAGHDADDY? asked another wooden placard, propped up next to the bar. Near a table with hors d’oeuvres was a plastic children’s tub filled with bubble wrap, intended to evoke the palace pool. Flak jackets and Kevlar helmets were strewn about on the floor.

  More than a hundred people showed up, many coming straight from the jobs they had landed at the Pentagon, the White House, the Heritage Foundation, and elsewhere in the Republican establishment, upon their return from Baghdad. Several men in suits had changed into tan combat boots—the official footwear of the Green Zone—before walking in the door. Others adorned their lapels with pins depicting an American flag crossed with an Iraqi one.

  There were handshakes, hugs, and even Iraqi-style kissing on the cheeks—left, right, left. It was the first time most Green Zone alumni had run into one another since the occupation, and they soon slipped back into their old roles, talking up their former bosses, praising one another for a job well done, lauding the Bush administration’s foreign policy. They reminisced about their work in Iraq and dismissed media coverage of the war as defeatist. Success was just around the corner.

  “Things are not as bad as people think,” one man told me. “Oh,” I said, “how recently were you there?” He had left a year earlier, he said, as had almost everyone in the room.

  Conversations at the party began with an unspoken premise: the CPA was responsible for Iraq’s progress, and Iraqi politicians were responsible for the problems. We’ve set them on the right path, one woman told me. It’s up to them to follow it.

  Another woma
n, who worked in Paul Wolfowitz’s office at the Pentagon, proclaimed to me that she and her colleagues had become impervious to criticism of the administration’s handling of the war. In her office, she said, the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” was regarded as a badge of loyalty.

  John Agresto wasn’t there. It was his old crowd—the neoconservatives, the true believers—but their self-congratulation now made him queasy. He was at home in New Mexico, reading, writing, and making homemade sausage. A month later, he would send me an e-mail telling me he had just returned from a brief trip to Iraq with a few American experts in history and law. They had gone to meet with members of Iraq’s constitution-writing committee. “I’m even more pessimistic than before,” he wrote. “Or, at least, no less.”

  Bremer and his wife entered. Everyone wanted to shake his hand, to say hello. He waded through the crowd in his old combat boots. There was a relaxed ease in his bearing that I had rarely seen in Iraq. A few times, he threw his head back and laughed. He had recently finished writing My Year in Iraq, a book about his experience as viceroy. Now his only obligations were a series of speaking engagements, and his only worry was the progress of kitchen renovations at his country house in Vermont, which included the installation of a custom-made, $28,000 La Cornue stove.