by Roy Scranton
The journalists I found myself among were every one of them experts on the region, serious reporters with long careers covering Iraq and the Middle East for major outlets. Their talk was all inside baseball, professional shorthand, and old histories. They were there to get into the nitty gritty on Iraq’s first postoccupation election, which Arraf suggested was Iraq’s “weirdest” election yet.
I was no journalist, no regional expert—this was precisely the second time I’d been to the Middle East in my life. I was a PhD candidate in English at Princeton, working on a dissertation about the politics of sacrifice in American literature about World War II. I was supposed to be working on a chapter about silence and community in the poetry of Kenneth Koch and George Oppen. My only training for all this was having once read Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Sitting in the US embassy in Baghdad didn’t make any goddamn sense.
It made some sense, actually. Since getting out of the army, I’d published a few articles and essays about my experience in Iraq and as a veteran, most notably a five-part series in the New York Times. I started going to a writing group for veterans at NYU, where I met people who would become close friends, some of whom would go on to become successful writers. It was there that Jacob Siegel, Phil Klay, Perry O’Brien, and I decided together to produce an anthology of veterans’ fiction, Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (we brought Matt Gallagher on board later).
With the publication of Fire and Forget, I found myself, disconcertingly, one of the central players in an emerging scene: the veteran-writer racket. There was money to be made talking vet (not a lot, but some), a certain celebrity to be won, and a lot of support and respect from audiences, especially if you suggested you had PTSD. But the best part was that you got to keep being special.
The problem with being a veteran is that the aura you have coming home fades as soon as you do something else. Once you stop making your identity all about the war, you lose your connection to world-historical events. People quit asking you to explain the nature of human suffering, international politics, and the essence of truth. You lose your moral authority. It’s hard to let that go, of course, and the best way to keep the aura shining is to keep reminding people that you’re a veteran. Keep reminding them that you saw or did some fucked-up shit, maybe you had nightmares, maybe you lost a friend. Keep reminding them that you have something they don’t, and keep reminding them that it’s something you only get for going. For many of us, the military was the most intense experience we’d ever had, and it offered the most trustworthy form of social validation we’d ever achieved. We were veterans. And for a shiny dime, we’d sell you our story.
Four months earlier, in the icy dregs of January, I’d been deep into my fifth beer with Matt Gallagher at Pete’s Candy Store, a neighborly bar on the border between Williamsburg and Greenpoint, when it came to me I had to get out of the scene. Matt was dishing over his Guinness about who’d been sleeping with whom (small gossip in the vet writer community), speculating as to whether or not a writer we knew worked for the CIA, and complaining about how some of the younger vet writers seemed merely ambitious, merely hungry for fame, and seemed not to care about literary craft or the truth of experience. Matt, a waggish, pallid Irishman with perpetually uncombed black hair, had recently been interviewed in his Brooklyn apartment by CBS. They’d knocked on his door after the fall of Fallujah and wanted him to tell them what it meant. Did it change how you thought about our sacrifice? Had our soldiers died in vain?
We’d been at Pete’s for an event I had organized, the fourth annual “Bringing the War to Brooklyn” reading. The first time, we’d done it just to give ourselves a chance to read. Since then, I’d worked to find fresh voices. Our reading that night had featured a young poet from New Jersey, a former marine named Johnson Wiley; an MFA fiction student at Columbia who also happened to be a West Point grad with six years in the army, Ravi Venkataramani; and a female National Guard captain, journalist, and blogger, Kristen Rouse. We’d filled the room with fellow veteran writers and friends, including a literature professor from West Point who blogs about contemporary war lit, an anthropologist at the New School who works on resilience and PTSD, and Meehan Crist, a science writer. The reading had gone well, response was good, and everybody had a fine time. After the event, several of us hung around drinking, trading stories, then brainstorming strategies on how I should handle going back to Baghdad. Matt thought I definitely needed to bring a handgun. I wasn’t so sure. Meehan seemed delighted by the conversation: while the streets outside were thick with ice-crusted snow, here we were huddled in a hipster bar arguing about whether or not I needed to pack heat in Iraq.
It was only later, after everyone had left Matt and me to our cups, that the evening took on a sour taste. I had never wanted to be a professional veteran. I had wanted to use my experience, certainly, turn my war into a kind of cultural capital, an investment in my writing career just as the GI Bill was an investment in my education. If I had a special experience, a unique point of view, then people would listen. Some writers get their break because they were drug addicts or because their mom died of cancer. Publishing is a bleak, degrading hustle, like most hustles in this economy, and you sell the story you have. So okay, I’d hustle, flipping the “authenticity” of my war for a chance to keep writing. And it worked. I published an anthology. I did a book tour. I was on Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
But it wasn’t all just hustle. In the early days, when there were only a few of us, it felt like we were genuinely exploring new territory. Iraq and Afghanistan were different from the Persian Gulf War, Vietnam, and World War II, and it was up to us to see how, to understand in what ways the experience differed, to figure out how the world had changed and, in changing, had changed us. As well, we happy few—at least those I knew and talked with—operated under a trust that we would keep each other honest. Our time overseas and in the military was still raw. Even as we were pulled by the expectations of civilian readers toward satisfying lies and drawn by the influences of literary convention toward familiar fables, we could check each other and remind each other of the ways our experiences had belied those expectations and conventions. Finally, there was a profound shared desire for knowledge, maybe even wisdom. We wanted to make sense of our experience. We wanted to understand. Sure, we were ambitious. Of course we wanted to succeed. But the conditions for success weren’t just worldly acclaim and a publishing contract: we wanted to learn something about what our experience was, how the world worked, and who we were.
All that was gone now. The focus shifted over time from trying to plumb the depths of experience to something else: trying to convey something to audiences, trying to relate something you knew to something they knew, trying to make a connection. As we’d gone on, we’d created our own set of conventions and expectations, shorthand tropes and easy frames that dulled questions and blurred complexity, because that’s what’s necessary for translating lived reality into language other people can comprehend. What I realized talking with Matt in Pete’s Candy Store, over my last beer of the night, was that I had long ago stopped learning anything new about my war. I had gone from being someone who asked what it meant to being someone who explained what it was like.
The truth is, I’d always been ambivalent about being a veteran. On the one hand, I was proud of my service. I’d done something difficult that few Americans show the courage or wherewithal to do, and I’d come out stronger for it. My year in Iraq with the First Armored Division was spent mainly on two kinds of missions: For the first six months of our tour, in 2003, we picked up artillery rounds all over Baghdad. We kept Iraqi kids from blowing themselves up and denied insurgents weapons. For the next six months, I drove a Humvee around a Sunni neighborhood in south Baghdad called Dora, and then down the highway from Baghdad to Karbala and Najaf, looking for roadside bombs and snipers.
On the other hand, the war was the most dehumanizing experience of my life. Inside the wire, w
e lived like prisoners, staring at the same walls and the same faces, lifting weights, watching DVDs, killing time until we got to go back home. Outside the wire, we moved in an alien, hostile world luminous with adrenaline and danger. Over time, as we were shot at, mortared, and sometimes blown up, fear and rage built up in us like toxins, until we were praying for reasons to shoot—but not people, mind you, just fucking hadjis. We harassed and intimidated hadjis on the street. We humiliated hadjis in their homes. We ran hadji cars off the road when they got in our way. We locked hadjis up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of us did worse. Some of us did a lot worse.
Meanwhile, the war itself never made any sense. Like many veterans, when it came to my role, I relied on a rhetoric of professionalism and camaraderie and a narrow focus on personal experience to help me ignore heavy questions about the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Later, I let the relative peace following America’s 2011 withdrawal confirm the official narrative: we had made mistakes, but the surge had worked, and we’d left Iraq a functioning democracy. I had my doubts, but it was a story I wanted to believe. Over time, I took up a mantra of comforting phrases that numbed those doubts and fuzzed out my connection to the big picture:
“I’m proud of my service, but it’s complicated.”
“I did the best I could in a bad situation.”
“The war was fucked, but I did my job.”
After Fallujah fell, though, I found myself beginning to think that either we hadn’t, in fact, done our job, or that the job we’d actually been sent to do was so reprehensible that even if we were successful, there was no way I’d want to claim it. What if the US military hadn’t been sent to Iraq to create a democracy, stabilize a failed state, or even establish a bastion of secular capitalism in the Middle East, as we’d been repeatedly told, but rather to oversee the sectarian partition of a sovereign nation, install a weak authoritarian ruler whose regime would be justified by carefully stage-managed elections, and turn Iraq into a cockpit for regional sectarian and political bloodletting? What if the main US interest wasn’t regional stability but rather regional instability, with just enough infrastructure in place to keep oil flowing out and American-made weapons flowing in? This was undoubtedly what US policy had accomplished, through countless deliberate decisions over many years, and what if it hadn’t been a mistake—what if it had been intended?
I couldn’t ask Ambassador Beecroft to verify an American policy of divide and rule, but I decided I could ask him to square America’s promise of democracy in Iraq with what looked like its support for a developing autocracy. Nouri al-Maliki had been picked by US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad to succeed elected Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari in 2006, after Khalilzad had orchestrated Jaafari’s ouster. Then, in 2010, Maliki lost the election to Ayad Allawi, but, with US support and the threat of violence, managed to hang on to power. Over the years since, Maliki had worked to bring the organs of state power under his direct control. Now, he controlled the most important ministries, the judiciary, the military, and the police. He ignored parliament when it went against him. He tortured and assassinated his rivals. He had banned Al Jazeera and the Iraqi TV station Baghdadiya from broadcasting or reporting in Baghdad. He ruled over one of the most corrupt governments in the world and had been manipulating the conditions for the current election for months. The Supreme Court, alleged to be acting at his behest, struck down a law passed by parliament that would have limited the prime minister to two terms. The Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC)—the supposedly independent body that manages and monitors elections in Iraq—was widely held to be staffed by Maliki loyalists and showed its colors by disqualifying numerous opposition candidates because of alleged Baathist connections. Another win for Maliki seemed like a defeat for real democracy in Iraq. Was this what we had fought for?
“I have what may seem like an unfair question,” I said to the Ambassador. “It seems like the best-case scenario is a peaceful transition to a new, democratically elected government. If that doesn’t happen, what does that mean for the legacy of the American intervention and occupation of Iraq?”
Reporting the conversation that followed is difficult, since the conditions for the briefing were that it was “deep background,” not for attribution, quoting, or paraphrase, and the embassy press attaché, Donald Maynard, declined to approve any of the quotations I sent him. Thus I’m limited to describing what other people said and the general outlines of the conversation.
At first, the conversation focused on the credibility of the upcoming elections, then began to move around the question of whether or not the previous Iraqi national election, in 2010, had been fair and credible. I suggested that it wasn’t. There was some lively back and forth, and the conversation stalled in a difference of interpretation.
What happened with the 2010 elections was this. As the votes came in, showing that Ayad Allawi’s secular, multisectarian Iraqiyya coalition had won a slight majority over Maliki’s State of Law coalition, ninety-one seats to eighty-nine, Maliki launched three challenges to the election results. The first was to demand a recount, backed up by the veiled threat of military force. On March 21, the day before the final election results were confirmed, Maliki held a press conference and made his position clear: “I demand, in my capacity as the direct executive authority responsible for the formulation and implementation of state policy and in my capacity as commander in chief of the armed forces, that the Independent High Electoral Commission respond immediately to the demands of these blocs to safeguard political stability and prevent security from deteriorating and violence from increasing.” Reminding people of his role as commander in chief of the armed forces in this context was taken as a veiled military threat. Maliki’s second challenge was to lean on the Iraqi judiciary to disqualify winning Iraqiyya candidates because of alleged Baathist ties. The third challenge also involved the judiciary, and especially Supreme Court Chief Justice Medhat al-Mahmoud: Maliki asked for a ruling from the court on Article 76 of the Iraqi Constitution.
The article reads: “The President of the Republic shall charge the nominee of the largest Council of Representatives bloc with the formation of the Council of Ministers within fifteen days from the date of the election of the President of the Republic.” As written, it is straightforward: the nominee of the winning bloc forms the government. Maliki saw a loophole, however, and had his office ask the Supreme Court whether “largest bloc” meant the coalition that won the most seats in the election, or the coalition that put together the most seats after the election. Maliki’s office made their request on March 21, the same day he threatened military force to ensure a recount; the Supreme Court took four days to decide that Article 76 meant the largest bloc either before or after the election. In their book Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, Michael Gordon and General Bernard Trainor write, “The ruling appeared to be a blatant reinterpretation of the framers’ intent.”
Having gotten his recount, disqualified fifty-two candidates from other parties because of “Baathist ties,” and succeeded in revising the Iraqi constitution so as to make an electoral majority essentially irrelevant, Maliki then merged his State of Law party with other Shiite groups to form the National Alliance coalition, which commanded 159 out of 325 seats, shutting out Iraqiyya and taking the right to form the next government.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration stood by watching—with upwards of fifty thousand US troops still on the ground. The official line was that it was an Iraqi election and an Iraqi process. The Americans were deeply involved in the process of forming a government, however, through a shady series of backroom deals that took almost nine months. Against the opposition of the Kurds, Sunni politicians, Shiites in ISCI, and even CENTCOM commander General Jim Mattis, Vice President Joe Biden and newly appointed Ambassador James Jeffrey pushed through a Maliki government, in part through soliciting various promises from Maliki that, after he too
k power, fell to ashes. But there’s more: the real story behind Maliki’s 2010 win wasn’t just about how the US worked to engineer his victory in the face of widespread opposition, but also about how Iran brokered a deal between Maliki and Muqtada al-Sadr to secure Sadrist support for State of Law. The real story, that is, was how the US and Iran worked together to ensure the continued rule of a sectarian autocrat.
When I asked Ambassador Beecroft more specifically about this problem and the disturbing parallels between Saddam’s brutal regime and Maliki’s increasingly repressive and violent rule, the conversation grew very lively. The journalists got involved, especially Ned, Prashant, and Jane, and a distinct gap opened up between what Iraq looked like from inside the Green Zone and what it looked like from outside. Ned, Prashant, and Jane had all talked to Iraqis who saw parallels between Maliki’s presidency and Saddam’s dictatorship, and even more emphatically, had talked to many Iraqis who thought their lives had been better and safer under Saddam’s regime than they were now. Working to clarify their positions in what had become an energetic exchange, Ned, Prashant, and Jane tried to make it clear that they weren’t asserting such parallels between Maliki and Saddam, but merely saying that they had talked to thoughtful, educated, intelligent Iraqis who did so. In the end, no agreement in perception could be reached.