The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  At the College of Dentistry, students insisted on attending the vote. Erdmann resisted—all sorts of groups wanted to pack the halls and influence the outcome—and then agreed to bring one student in as his guest. The election was by secret ballot, and as the votes for the two front-running candidates were tallied on the blackboard of the stuffy lecture room, the student at Erdmann’s side began to cry. He had never seen anything like it. “This is an answer to my prayers,” he said. “We prayed for this, to see this.”

  Erdmann had gambled, and the gamble paid off. There was a safety net—if a college made a selection the CPA deeply disapproved, the nominee would have been struck down—but allowing a free choice and then interfering might well have been worse than never going down the road at all (this happened early in the occupation, when Marine commanders in Najaf organized an election for provincial government, only to have the CPA in Baghdad call it off at the last minute, prompting the outraged people of Najaf to question the Americans’ true commitment to democracy). The trade-off between control and legitimacy was the recurring dilemma of every CPA decision, and there were dozens made every day by fallible human beings, and each one was going to push the project in one direction or another. Iraq was still fluid, Erdmann said, still plastic and malleable, but it would harden soon. The psychological demands of the occupation were daunting. “It comes down to judgment,” he said. “Some people can navigate it, some people can’t. Some people can make a mistake and recalibrate, others can’t. On both sides. So much of this is up to the wisdom of people, their prudence, their judgment.”

  * * *

  THE LEISURE READING of Americans in Iraq tended toward unhappy analogies—guerrilla wars and botched peaces. Colonel William Grimsley, an infantry brigade commander, was reading A Savage War of Peace, Alistair Home’s study of the French-Algerian conflict: “Lots of similarities to this place.” In the tent of Jordan Becker, a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant up in Kirkuk, there was a shelf with several books on Kurdish and Iraqi history, a book about Algeria’s recent civil war, and Four Hours in My Lai. Drew Erdmann was bogged down in David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, as well as John Maynard Keynes’s account of the 1919 Paris peace conference. No one at the CPA had much time to read, though, or to think.

  On the first floor of the palace, off the rotunda, past the metal detector and the bodyguards, Paul Bremer’s long, high-ceilinged office was lined with bookshelves that were nearly bare when I visited. Rudolph Giuliani’s Leadership stood on one shelf, and a book about the management of financial crises on another, near a box of raisin bran. On Bremer’s desk, next to a wood carving that read “Success Has a Thousand Fathers,” were several marked-up reports about postwar Iraq, and on the coffee table lay a pile of maps: Iraq’s power grid, administrative districts, railroad lines. At sixty-one, Bremer had the thick hair, boyish eyes, and willful jaw of a Kennedy. Like his reading, he came across as operational, a disciplined man with an even temperature.

  He had served as a State Department counterterrorism official and ambassador to Holland, then became the managing director of Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm. He was also “a bedrock Republican,” Bremer told me, with strongly conservative values. This background made for an interesting mix that eluded the simple Washington categories of neoconservatives and realists, Defense and State. He was acceptable to both departments, but he would report to the secretary of defense, and at the start he would carry out policies that had originated in the Pentagon. Bremer was driven and hard charging, with no shortage of self-confidence. Though he admitted privately before leaving for Baghdad that he had questions about the wisdom of the war, he would approach the running of Iraq like a demanding corporate executive, insisting on fast and quantifiable results from his staff, hating surprises and setbacks, imagining that he could prevail over adversity on the strength of his character. Those who worked for him described Bremer as a ferocious boss—one of them spoke of being “Bremerized” in meetings—and they tried hard to make him happy even when the facts didn’t warrant it.

  He arrived on May 12 knowing almost nothing about Iraq, and before he had been in Baghdad four days Bremer made three momentous decisions: He dissolved the Iraqi army, he fired high-ranking Baathists from the civil service, and he stopped the formation of an interim government. A more cautious viceroy would have gauged the lay of the land and spoken with a range of Iraqis before taking such far-reaching steps. Bremer arrived amid general collapse, and his first moves left no doubt that he was now in charge. But his decisions changed or reversed the hastily drawn policies approved by the president a week before the war, as well as the ones that Jay Garner had been improvising on the ground. When Garner objected to the depth of debaathification, Bremer refused to amend the policy. “Look, I have my instructions,” he said. The decisions on the Baath Party and the army reflected views held by the administration’s neoconservatives (as well as Chalabi), while the indefinite postponement of an interim government was anathema to them. So the CPA was launched with a hodgepodge of improvised moves that reflected no one agency’s strategy, no considered strategy at all other than a belated assertion of American control. People who knew him said that Bremer would never have accepted this nearly impossible job if he hadn’t secured wide latitude to carry it out as he saw fit. In this, as in everything else, he was the opposite of his predecessor.

  Jay Garner, who had surrendered the reins to Bremer, later told me that he woke up on the morning of Saturday, May 17, to find “three or four hundred thousand enemies and no Iraqi face on the government.”

  Garner’s approach had been to slice off as little of the old regime as possible, removing a handful of senior Baathists at the top and trying to work with the rest. The idea, Barbara Bodine said, was to accept anyone who was competent and not tainted by crime or corruption. This had led to some embarrassments, as when a Baathist chosen to run the Ministry of Health had to be removed when doctors staged protests and the minister refused to renounce the party. But the Americans were treading with care, until Bremer’s Debaathification Order on May 16 barred from government service the entire top four layers of the party, down to firqa or divisional level, meaning those in charge of up to fifty lower-ranking members—regardless of whether they were implicated in actual crimes. At least thirty-five thousand mostly Sunni employees of the bureaucracy, including thousands of schoolteachers and midlevel functionaries, lost their jobs overnight. And American officials who had begun establishing relations with Iraqis in the ministries and other offices were suddenly partnerless. The order allowed Iraqis to appeal and, in principle, regain their jobs, but the CPA was unequipped to hear the cases fast enough to prevent thousands of people from hanging in limbo with no position or pay.

  “Bremer likes to say, and I think he’s right, that it was the most popular decision he ever made,” one of Bremer’s top advisers told me. “But the people it was popular with were already on our side. I think that base was pretty solid. If you want to come in and restore things, you want to come in with malice toward none and charity toward all—you want to take a Lincolnian approach. You don’t want to take a carpet-bagger approach. People in Falluja told me, ‘We were happy when you threw out Saddam. It’s what you did after you threw out Saddam that’s pissed us off.’ Our whole approach was wrong.”

  The alternative would have been to try those Baathists accused of crimes, vet out the corrupt and incompetent on a case-by-case basis, retain the rest, and organize a nationwide truth-and-reconciliation commission along the lines of the South African experience. But debaathification had been a consistent theme of the Iraqi exile groups and their allies in the Pentagon. The obvious precedent was denazification in Germany. Yet not even the Report on the Transition to Democracy in Iraq suggested anything as deep as Bremer’s order; Kanan Makiya had primarily focused on the need to cleanse Iraqi society of Baathist ideology, which would be a project of many years. Dougl
as Feith told me that the policy of cutting down four levels in the party hierarchy originated in the Pentagon. Some observers also saw the hand of Ahmad Chalabi, who soon gained control of the Debaathification Commission and used it to squeeze his political enemies.

  In Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, I met a leather-faced father of nine with Coke-bottle glasses named Othman Ali Sadiq. He had worked as a technical supervisor for fire and safety at the oil company, until Bremer’s order left him unemployed. Sadiq’s twenty-eight years at the company were four fewer than his service to the Baath Party, in which he rose to a level that made him responsible for keeping tabs on two hundred families. “Every country has its system,” he said. “In Iraq it was the Baath Party.” He described his party job as a kind of civic duty, like serving on the board of aldermen. He got nothing for his pains except fired, he said. He never wrote a bad report on anyone; he never saw evidence of Baathist crimes. “What I heard is these mass graves are thousands of years old.” His only way to feed his family now was to drive a taxi. If he were younger, he implied, he would pick up a gun and fight the occupation. No one at his level of the party had clean hands; morally, the Debaathification Order seemed unassailable. Such things were clearer before the insurgency ignited and Bremer’s critics began to point to the May 16 order as an aggravating factor. It was the policy of an occupier that didn’t think it needed to worry about making enemies. Drew Erdmann liked to say that American foreign policy at its best went by the dictum that what is right is also what is wise. In occupied Iraq, this became harder and harder to do.

  For Erdmann, who had to fire seventeen hundred Baathist university professors and staff, the German analogy was apt. He bristled at any notion that academic freedom might be at issue. “In June 1945 you’re not going to have a discussion about the legitimacy of the Nazi ideology and the legitimacy of the Nazi Party and you’re sitting in Germany,” he said. “It’s not academic! Hello? It’s only a few months ago, the people are still living next door, they’re still working next door, they’re still on campus, they’re still around, they’re still threatening.”

  Erdmann explained his support for debaathification by telling me about the Saddam bonus. On the scale of the dictator’s crimes, the Saddam bonus was a minor atrocity. Under Iraq’s college admissions system, students were ranked by test scores, and with thousands applying for a limited number of openings, a few points made a great difference. The Saddam bonus awarded five extra points to high school boys who married widows of the Iran-Iraq War, women often twice their age. “This is just the beginning of this fucked-up example,” Erdmann said. The last Baathist minister of higher education under Saddam had withdrawn the points of certain applicants after determining that the marriages were fraudulent. “These guys came to me so they could get back their bonus points,” Erdmann marveled. “Me, the American coalition guy! They think I’m going to give them the fricking Saddam bonus points for a fake marriage? To war widows? This is my example of how it penetrated in such a twisted way, and you multiply this by how many times to understand how deep this goes and how dark and twisted it is.”

  The dissolution of the army was harder to justify even at the time, and it came to be seen as one of the disasters of the war. With a stroke of the pen, Bremer put several hundred thousand armed Iraqis on the street with no job and no salary. It could have occurred only to an occupying power that was sure its enemy was beaten. The order was immediately unpopular with officers of the American military, who had no trouble grasping the likely strategic consequences in a country where unemployment was somewhere over 50 percent.

  Douglas Feith and others would later say that the Iraqi army had already demobilized itself with the arrival of the invasion forces, when soldiers went home rather than putting up a fight. The dissolution order simply made it official. Walter Slocombe, a rare senior Democrat in the CPA, who had been Clinton’s Feith and whom Feith asked to rebuild the Iraqi military after the war, told me, “There wasn’t any army left. The assumption we had, which was that we were going to have substantial intact units, was wrong. What are we going to do? There was nothing to decide.” It would have been impossible as well as stupid to summon the units back to duty, Slocombe said. The mostly Shiite conscripts were happy to be home and couldn’t have been called back for love or money; and an Iraqi army composed of the remnant of a mostly Sunni officer corps would have driven the majority of Iraqis into opposition.

  In the first two weeks of May, Colonel Paul Hughes, Garner’s planning chief, was meeting with a group of eight Iraqi generals and colonels to organize the distribution to ordinary soldiers of twenty-dollar salary payments. Hughes and the Iraqi officers met at the Republican Guard officers club, an elegant plate-glass structure that had been partially looted. The Iraqis, remnants of a defeated army, wore coats and ties and looked anxious. “They knew I had them by the balls,” Hughes said. “I told them that the future of Iraq belonged to their children. It was evident to me they as officers had no loyalty to Saddam Hussein, otherwise they wouldn’t be talking to me. I said, ‘You guys had best not be Baathists, because if you guys are Baathists I’m gonna come get you.’” The Iraqis wanted to cooperate, and after four meetings they had collected the names of one hundred thousand soldiers. Hughes felt a level of trust in American goodwill. He began the process of securing the money at the CPA. No one in Washington seemed to care one way or the other.

  “Anyone who’s done postconflict work says do not get rid of the military,” Hughes told me. “You’ve got to control them—if you don’t control them, you don’t know what they’re going to do. As long as we paid them twenty dollars, they were going to dance a jig for us.”

  In mid-May, Hughes went home on a brief leave for his daughter’s college graduation. The day before returning to Iraq, he turned on the TV and heard the news that the Iraqi army had been abolished, with no provision for soldiers to be paid. Back at the Republican Palace, three officers from the group that he’d been meeting with at the officers club came to see him. Hughes went down to meet them in the rotunda. “I couldn’t look them in the face. I was completely discredited in their eyes.” Hughes assured them that he would somehow find a way to cover the salaries. The Iraqis thanked him. “They were complete gentlemen. That was the thing that just broke my heart, that I had built trust with these guys and people had taken steps to break it.”

  To Hughes, the dissolution of the Iraqi army was a decisive turn in the American presence in Iraq. “From the Iraqi viewpoint, that simple action took away the one symbol of sovereignty the Iraqi people still had,” he said. “That’s when we crossed the line. We stopped being liberators and became occupiers.” A fatal riot of cashiered soldiers at the Assassins’ Gate forced the CPA to begin paying off the men it had just fired.

  The two orders had their origins in the Pentagon, and, probably, the vice president’s office. Bremer’s decision to break up the Iraqi leadership group that Garner had been organizing and to amass much more authority under himself and the CPA was his own initiative. After the occupation went bad, neoconservatives in and out of the administration would accuse Bremer of being responsible. If their idea of installing the exiles under Chalabi in power early on had been followed, they argued, America would not have become an unwanted occupier. The most basic of this argument’s many flaws is that everything Bremer did was approved by Rumsfeld, who had laid claim to the postwar in Iraq. A senior official involved in Iraq policy said, “It is absolutely ludicrous for someone in Rumsfeld’s office to say, ‘Oh, well, gee, if only we’d been in charge.’ They were in charge. That’s the other side of the coin. Bremer increasingly turned himself into a viceroy answerable only to God, and the control freak let him get away with it. It’s stunning.”

  By midsummer, some of Bremer’s aides were privately acknowledging that the early orders had been ill considered. “He was a very dynamic person, very capable guy, very sincere,” a top adviser said. “But he’s a man in a hurry, and he made decisions quickly.” The adv
iser saw in some of those decisions the origins of the insurgency: “Over time I think we all came to believe that we were creating enemies in Iraq. My personal belief is that the insurrection in Iraq is a result of those initial policy mistakes—failure to stop the looting, failure to establish firm control right away, and the initial decisions which were made when Bremer came in that pissed off Iraqis.” Bremer himself never admitted any such thing. He struck visitors from Washington that first summer as absolutely sure of himself, too sure—depending largely on speculation because he didn’t know the country, surrounded by aides no better informed than he, imagining Iraq as postwar Germany or postcommunist Europe, charging ahead with plans to apply economic shock therapy and privatize state industries despite the soaring unemployment, carrying out the ideological vision as if only will and determination were what mattered. By the end of the CPA’s tenure, an Iraqi politician who knew Bremer said that he had begun to understand his early mistakes. Over time, his decisions became less ideological, more practically attuned to the reality in which he found himself. He put aside the privatization plans, he partly reversed debaathification. If he had waited a few months, Bremer might not have made the fateful choices of his first days in Baghdad.

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  IRAQ WAS A NONSTOP CRISIS, and the CPA existed in a temporal as well as spatial bubble; any attention to a past or future beyond thirty days was a luxury. When I went to see him in mid-August 2003, Bremer was completely immersed in the details of running the country. A question I asked about the historical precedents for his position led him almost directly to the urgent need for a 20-kilowatt generator at the oil refinery in Basra. That week riots had broken out in Basra over long fuel lines directly related to the electricity shortage, which was reaching a critical state. Bremer, wearing a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, khakis, and combat boots, leaned over the coffee table where we sat and spread out his map of the electrical grid to show me why the existing system was in such disrepair and demand still exceeded supply. The CPA now had a plan for increasing megawattage, he said; unfortunately, it would cost billions of dollars. Meanwhile, Iraqis were growing unhappier and blaming it on the Americans.