The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  Garner, who was about to head out to the Middle East with his ORHA team, wanted as little instruction as possible; he had his own ideas. He found Miller, Elliott Abrams, and the White House staff “at best disruptive. They were a pain in the ass. Whatever we were doing, they were trying to achieve the opposite. From my side of it, they were determined to make sure it failed. That’s a strong statement, but they did everything they could to cause us problems.” Meanwhile, over at the Pentagon, Feith was planning on sending out his ideological appointees, Rhode and Rubin, to keep tabs on ORHA in Kuwait and give Chalabi a head start in Baghdad. Rumsfeld’s spokesman, Larry Di Rita, would accompany Garner everywhere he went. Even as it prepared to take over a foreign country, the administration remained hopelessly at war with itself. No one in charge was asking the most basic question: what will we do if it all goes wrong?

  * * *

  ON MARCH 16, three days before the first bombs fell on Baghdad, 169 ORHA members flew from Washington to Kuwait. Among them was Drew Erdmann.

  Though he had left academia behind, Erdmann’s reasons for going to Iraq were, in a sense, professional. “My analysis was that we really are at a defining turning point in history. I had a particular historical perspective. I felt that this was a defining event which, good or bad, would have an impact for the next decade. If it went bad, the consequences would be worse than Vietnam. And second—this was not exactly rocket science—the postwar phase was going to be the most important. So that’s the syllogism: postwar, defining turning point, and you have an offer to participate.”

  In Erdmann’s view, Saddam was becoming an increasing threat as containment eroded with the expulsion of inspectors and the weakening of sanctions. This was the “realist” argument for war, but Erdmann, like most people, didn’t think entirely in the categories of international relations theory. He also believed in American exceptionalism—the idea that America’s role in world affairs was something higher than mere power politics, that from the founding of the republic American liberty was inextricably bound up with human liberty (this was the subject of one of his dissertation chapters). He differed from the neoconservatives less in what he thought than how he thought. His idealism was tempered by a historian’s natural attraction to facts and a sense of the fallibility and occasional folly of American behavior in the world.

  He had to convince both his boss, Richard Haass, and his wife, who didn’t see the need for a war, to let him go to Iraq. “I knew if I didn’t, I’d always regret it. And my wife did, too—she knew that my regret would be corrosive.”

  Erdmann asked to join the civil administration team, led by Feith’s ex–law partner Mobbs. By the time they reached the beachfront villas at the Hilton Hotel south of Kuwait City, where ORHA set up headquarters, the operation was in disarray. Upon arrival, Garner and his inner circle disappeared without a word into their own villa, and the other ORHA members didn’t see their leaders for two days. Among the fishing buddies and Space Cowboys there was tremendous élan, but it never traveled outside their group. Everybody liked Jay, but nobody understood the mission. Mobbs, looking as if he were dressed for West Palm Beach, was frozen out of the retired generals’ deliberations, and his sporadic meetings with his own civil administration team never produced any decisions. Garner had almost no contact with the team at all. Gordon Rudd, the military historian, was worried enough to speak to him about it. “We’re not putting enough attention on civil administration,” Rudd said. “Gordon, that can wait,” Garner replied. “We’ve got to focus on humanitarian assistance.” At the time, Rudd thought, the choice made sense: Save lives first, then reform Iraq.

  But in the humanitarian assistance pillar, led by a peacekeeping expert named George Ward, things weren’t much better. Meghan O’Sullivan found herself tasked with spending the day as an extra body in a car to fulfill security requirements. She was kept out of meetings where larger policy questions, the kind that had been her bread and butter at State, were discussed; she and her colleagues couldn’t even get phones. O’Sullivan was an attractive, fair, slender redhead from Massachusetts whose light self-mockery could be misleading, since she was also ambitious and cool under pressure and had a knack for landing professionally on her feet (it would happen again after she got to Baghdad). She had written a book on “smart sanctions” as a fellow at the Brookings Institution before joining the State Department—which, in the eyes of the neoconservatives, made her soft on Iraq. Iraq had been one of America’s biggest foreign-policy problems her whole adult life: What Europe had meant to a previous generation, Iraq and the Middle East meant to hers. O’Sullivan’s reasons for supporting the war were essentially the same as Erdmann’s, her colleague from policy planning. As far back as September, she had told Richard Haass during a walk on the Mall that, if there was a war, she wanted to go to Iraq afterward. By the early spring of 2003, after advocating the administration position at conferences in Europe and being repeatedly hammered, after months of almost unbearable pressure, she had also reached the point of simply thinking: Let’s just do it, for God’s sake! Now the war had started, and she was seventy miles away in Kuwait and desperate to get to Iraq.

  One day early in the war, O’Sullivan saw a Silkworm missile fly overhead and realized that if she were back at policy planning in the State Department she would have her hands on all sorts of classified intelligence about what was happening just to the north; as it was, she knew nothing beyond what she saw on CNN. She started waking up in the middle of the night with an unfamiliar emotion that she couldn’t at first identify but that seemed to be consuming her physically. It was regret. She lay awake second-guessing the decision that had brought her to Kuwait.

  Even Barbara Bodine, a senior member of the team, was cut out of the loop. Bodine had served in the Baghdad embassy in the 1980s and been held hostage in the embassy in Kuwait for several months after the Iraqi invasion in 1990. Her tenure as ambassador to Yemen under Clinton was controversial: After the bombing of the USS Cole at Aden in 2000, she and the FBI’s chief investigator, John O’Neill, clashed over his team’s comportment in the country, and eventually she barred his reentry. O’Neill quit government service in disgust and took a job as chief of security at the World Trade Center, where he died on September 11. Among the senior people in Kuwait, Bodine was one of the few nonmilitary and the only woman, and she found herself slowly disappearing from the circle of leaders like the Cheshire Cat. Just to keep in touch with the State Department, she had to go around Garner and the Pentagon and have communications gear flown in from Washington to the embassy in Kuwait City. In furtive conversations she urged her colleagues at State whose appointments were being blocked by Feith’s office to fly in under embassy country clearance. And she spent hours counseling and consoling tearful young men and women who had left interesting jobs in Washington to languish in Kuwait on what felt like a terrible five-week holiday at the beach, amid the stress of frequent gas-attack alerts, the close quarters, the humiliations of menial work and intellectual idleness, the information blackout, and the confusion of not knowing what they would do once they got to Baghdad. No planning documents were distributed to the team; there weren’t even org charts of the Iraqi ministries. In the end, ORHA produced a single, elegantly written twenty-five-page paper called “A Unified Mission Plan for Post-Hostilities Iraq.” It was never sent back to Washington for approval, so its only real function was historical. The document began, “History will judge the war against Iraq not by the brilliance of its military execution, but by the effectiveness of the post-hostilities activities.” The top of the title page read “Initial Working Draft,” and it was dated April 16, 2003—three days before the first members flew up to Baghdad, which had fallen a week earlier. “That wasn’t a plan,” Bodine said. “It was an outline that never saw the light of day. The ‘plan’ was to be out of Iraq by the end of August.”

  Garner was talking about putting in ninety days in Iraq and then heading home. This struck O’Sullivan, Erdmann, and other
s as not even remotely realistic. At dinner in the Hilton restaurant with two Senate staffers who had flown in from Washington, Garner laid out his timetable: reconstruct utilities, stand up ministries, appoint an interim government, write and ratify a constitution, hold elections. By August, Iraq would have a sovereign, functioning government in place. There was a stunned silence. Someone at the table said, “Which August?”

  Garner was carrying out his instructions from Defense as he understood them, but they were vague and sparse. The makeup of an interim government remained unknown; Garner knew that if he floated any names, one agency or another of the bitterly divided administration would shoot them down. The only subject on which Garner thought he had everyone’s sign-off was the Iraqi army: He had briefed the president, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith, and they all agreed with his plan to keep it intact and pay salaries. There were daily video teleconferences in Kuwait with the Pentagon, and at Garner’s side the whole time, shadowing him, was Rumsfeld’s spokesman, Larry Di Rita.

  The night Di Rita flew into Kuwait in early April, he was briefed by ORHA’s senior officials, and when the deputy leader of the reconstruction pillar, Chris Milligan of USAID, spoke about the need to show early benefits to the Iraqi people, Di Rita slammed his fist down on the table. “We don’t owe the people of Iraq anything,” he said. “We’re giving them their freedom. That’s enough.” A few days later, by which time ORHA officials realized that Di Rita had the full confidence of Rumsfeld, the secretary’s spokesman stood up at a meeting of about fifty people in the Hilton conference room. The State Department messed up Bosnia and Kosovo, he told his audience (which included many foreign service officers), and the Pentagon wasn’t going to let that happen in Iraq. “We’re going to stand up an interim Iraqi government, hand power over to them, and get out of there in three to four months,” Di Rita announced. “All but twenty-five thousand soldiers will be out by the beginning of September.” To Paul Hughes, Garner’s planning chief, “It sounded like they were going to package up five pounds of shit in a nice foil wrapper and hand it off and say, ‘Good luck.’ It might look nice, but it would still be a package of shit.”

  Other Pentagon officials, including Harold Rhode from the Office of Special Plans, joined ORHA in Kuwait, but no one could figure out what they were doing; they seemed to exist in a parallel universe. Rhode stayed in a villa with members of the Iraqi National Congress, where he and Salem Chalabi punched out memos back to Wolfowitz and Cheney. Rhode was pushing for the swift formation of an Iraqi interim government led by Chalabi and the INC. Other ORHA members began to think of the Defense officials among them as commissars, sent to Kuwait to keep an eye on the team. Chatting at dinner, people would suddenly glance over a shoulder to see who might be listening. One of them finally said, “Isn’t this the kind of regime we’re supposed to be getting rid of?”

  Drew Erdmann began to feel so unguided that he looked around for tasks to assign himself. Together with a few colleagues, he drew up a list of sixteen key sites around Baghdad that the military should secure and protect upon the fall of the city. For help they consulted a Lonely Planet guidebook. At the top of the list was the Central Bank. Number two was the National Museum. “Symbolic importance,” Erdmann explained.

  The rest were ministries, with the Ministry of Oil last. On March 26, the list went to the military at Camp Doha, an hour away near the Iraq border. Franks had put ORHA under the operational control of his war-fighting commanders on the ground there, rather than taking direct responsibility for the postwar himself, with the higher authority of Centcom. “I don’t want to get into the business of managing bus schedules,” Franks told Garner.

  The distance between ORHA and Camp Doha replicated in Kuwait during the war the lack of joint planning for Phase IV between the Pentagon and Centcom during the prewar—even as the Third Infantry Division and First Marine Expeditionary Force were chewing up hundreds of miles of desert on their way to the Iraqi capital, leaving in their path liberated but unsecured territory. The military-police and civil-affairs units were far behind and extremely thin on the ground. On the second day of the war, a young contractor with USAID named Albert Cevallos was standing with a group of civil-affairs officers at the Iraq-Kuwait border, when one of the officers turned to him and asked, “Albert, what’s the plan for policing?”

  Cevallos’s job was in the field of human rights. “I thought you knew the plan,” he said.

  “No, we thought you knew.”

  “Haven’t you talked to ORHA?”

  “No, no one talked to us.”

  Cevallos wanted to run away. He later remembered the incident as “a Laurel and Hardy routine. What happened to the plans? This is like the million-dollar question that I can’t figure out. There was planning—I know there was. I saw it, I took part in it. It was a failure either to accept those plans or to communicate it down to where it mattered, on the ground.”

  A few weeks later, as Baghdad fell and intense looting got under way, Erdmann and the others went to Camp Doha to find out what had happened to their list of sites. They met with a young British lieutenant colonel, sitting on a stool in desert camouflage, who said, “Well, you know, I just yesterday became aware of this big stack of stuff that you ORHA guys had done.” The officer held his hand up a few inches from his face. “You must understand. We’ve been focused like this on fighting the war. Now we can begin looking at what you sent.” The list had fallen somewhere into the bureaucratic gap between ORHA and the military, and now it was too late—Erdmann was watching the sites being looted and burned on television. “This is, in a microcosm, how the gears, or the communication network, the rhythms, were just not right,” he said. “And I don’t know if it’s because we weren’t taken seriously.”

  In Washington, a government official took his concerns about the looting over to the Pentagon. He told Feith’s deputy, William Luti, that the administration needed to learn the Arabic for curfew: mamnua altajawwul, “it is forbidden to go out.” Luti didn’t seem alarmed; the generals in the field knew what they were doing, he said.

  * * *

  THE FALL of the statue of Saddam in Baghdad’s Firdos Square on April 9 was received by many Americans as the sudden and dramatic end of a lightning war. The liberation of Iraq had come faster, with fewer casualties and less destruction, than anyone, even the optimists, had imagined possible. None of the disasters that ORHA had prepared for—refugees, chemical weapons, burning oil fields, massive civilian casualties—came to pass, thanks in part to the astonishing speed of the invasion and of the regime’s collapse. In many cities, Iraqis celebrated in the streets and embraced American soldiers. Some even threw the flowers that Kanan Makiya had predicted.

  There was celebration in Washington, too—an outburst of triumphalism and gloating that was as much partisan as patriotic and looked not at all like the simple joyful kiss of a sailor and a nurse in Times Square on VJ Day. On April 13, Dick and Lynne Cheney threw a dinner party at the vice president’s residence with their friends Ken and Carol Adelman, Paul Wolfowitz, and Scooter Libby. Adelman had predicted in print that Iraq would be a “cakewalk,” and the small group toasted the president and savored the victory over the naysayers (the press, Brent Scowcroft, above all Colin Powell) as much as over the Baathist regime. The leading neoconservative publication, The Weekly Standard, declared that the weakness of the Clinton years was over and the world had been made new. “The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably,” wrote the editor of the Standard, William Kristol. “But these are only two battles.” And his colleague David Brooks, quoting Orwell, warned, “Now that the war in Iraq is over, we’ll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts.” Brooks meant the Arabs, the Europeans, and the Bush haters, none of them able to accept the American liberation of a Muslim country. Neither writer noticed, let alone faced, the unpleasant facts unfolding on the ground in Iraq even as they declared victory in Washington. From the Pen
tagon, flush with the success of his war plan, Rumsfeld regarded the rising chaos in Baghdad with equanimity. “Stuff happens,” the official in charge of postwar Iraq said, “and it’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”

  Rumsfeld’s words, which soon became notorious, implied a whole political philosophy. The defense secretary looked upon anarchy and saw the early stages of democracy. In his view and that of others in the administration, but above all the president, freedom was the absence of constraint. Freedom existed in divinely endowed human nature, not in man-made institutions and laws. Remove a thirty-five-year-old tyranny and democracy will grow in its place, because people everywhere want to be free. There was no contingency for psychological demolition. What had been left out of the planning were the Iraqis themselves.

  For Rumsfeld, this view was a matter of convenience more than anything else, since nothing in his career suggested that he had given the subject any thought. For others, including those working under him at the Pentagon, it was something like an article of faith, and when their critics used the word “theology”—as they often did—to describe the neoconservative approach to spreading democracy in the region, they weren’t completely wrong. This faith defied both history and the live evidence on CNN. It led directly to the gutting and burning of all the key institutions of the Iraqi state.

  General Franks’s innovative strategy used enough troops to take the country but nowhere near enough to secure it. Even so, a concerted effort could have stopped the most egregious looters and warned off others with a show of force. It never happened. In vain, employees of the museum begged the leader of a nearby tank platoon to park one tank at the museum entrance and scare off the pillagers who were making free with the country’s antiquities. Soldiers without orders to intervene stood by while men and boys hauled computers, copiers, desks, staplers, carpets, and eventually wiring and pipes out of the ministries and other government buildings and took them away in trucks, cars, donkey carts, rickshaws, and on their own backs. In the war log of an infantry captain, the days leading up to the fall of Baghdad are crowded with incident. But immediately after April 9, the entries turn brief to the point of minimalism: “Nothing significant to report, stayed at airport all day doing maintenance and recovery operations.” It was as if the sole objective had been the fall of the city. An administration official who had served in Vietnam used the phrase “commanders’ intent”—the mind-set instilled down the chain to soldiers on the ground: “All of a sudden they got there—and there was no intent. There were no rules of engagement. Everything was for the battle. And commanders sat around and didn’t do anything about it.” Meanwhile, the destruction being visited upon the city and its leading institutions by Baghdadis themselves was far outstripping the damage from bombing and firefights. Afterward, some Iraqis insisted that they had seen soldiers not just permitting but encouraging and helping looters, as if the mayhem were joyous celebration of the fall of the regime. This was the secretary of defense’s view. Only the Ministry of Oil was protected.