The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  I once sat in on a meeting between three American junior officers in Kadhimiya and two Sunni tribal elders from Adhamiya, the district just across the river. Rockets were being fired from their neighborhood over the Tigris into the Americans’ base, and the officers wanted the elders’ help in stopping it.

  One of the elders, wearing a gold-bordered brown robe and a kaffiyeh, lit a cigar and urged the Americans to emulate the British down in Basra. “I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but you don’t have any experience here,” he said. “You have to study the psychological way, study the community and the faith. That’s why they have no problems.”

  “The reason is they have a long history of colonialism,” the American captain said. “We have no interest in this. We don’t want to stay here and run Iraq.”

  The elder puffed on his cigar and smiled. “The Americans need a lesson from the British.”

  The elders launched into a familiar litany of complaints: the power outages, the security situation, the checkpoints, the abuse of women during raids, the Americans’ aggressiveness, the Americans’ passivity. The soldiers sweated heavily in their flak vests, with helmets and M-16s at their sides. Every now and then one of them tried to mount a defense.

  “There are explosives on the highways,” an elder said.

  “We can’t watch every inch of road,” the major replied. “This is where we need help we’re not getting.”

  The elder ignored him. “And four a.m. is too early for the curfew to end.”

  Finally, one of the elders seemed to take pity on the American officers, who were so much less skilled at this old game of negotiation that was apparently a specialty of tribal sheikhs and British colonial officials. He put an end to the criticism with the faintest possible praise: “If we have to choose between the former regime and this one, we choose this one.”

  “But it’s not a regime,” the captain said, rousing himself. “We’re here helping. That’s important to understand. We are not here to impose a regime. I’d love for my job to be taken by someone from Kadhimiya and go home.”

  The elder recited an enigmatic aphorism. “If you’re piloting a boat, why burn it?”

  The meeting ended in the handshakes, the hands on hearts, the elaborate displays of cultural sensitivity and mutual respect with which such encounters always began and ended. I imagined the officers going back to their base in a rage. The whole point of the meeting—the rocket attacks—had barely been mentioned.

  * * *

  THE SOLDIERS were out on the streets, and so they began to grasp the difficulty of the occupation much earlier than the CPA in the palace. They were on the front line of complaints: It was the lieutenant on foot patrol, not the senior adviser to the Ministry of Electricity, who was asked by the woman standing outside her house why the electricity kept going off and who had to explain that he couldn’t do anything about it. The soldiers were also less invested in their ideological preconceptions, and though they were often woefully ignorant of the country and the region, the nature of their work forced them to be pragmatists. Debaathification and the dissolution of the Iraqi army were generally unpopular with the American military; soldiers sometimes lost their hardest-working counterparts just as they were beginning to form a relationship, and soon found that the same Iraqis or ones like them were now shooting at them. In the absence of guidance from the center, commanders in the provinces, such as the 101st Airborne’s Major General David Petraeus in Mosul, moved ahead with forming councils, finding business partners for reconstruction, training security forces, even setting local economic and border policy. They were in a hurry, and they often didn’t bother to coordinate their work with the various international organizations and occupation officials who were working on the same problems. Meanwhile, the CPA was still drafting its blueprint for the future of Iraq. A lieutenant colonel in Kirkuk showed me a chart of projects—police stations, fire stations, schools, parks—that his brigade was ready to start. I asked how much money had been allocated by Baghdad, and he held his thumb and finger up in a zero. “I could do so much in this town with a frigging bag of money!” He was afraid that the new Kirkuk police force, which the battalion he commanded had already set up, would have to be scrapped when Bernard Kerik—the colorful former New York police chief, whom President Bush sent to Iraq to rebuild security forces—finally got around to announcing his national plan. Instead, Kerik spent his time in Baghdad going on raids with South African mercenaries while his house in New Jersey underwent renovation. He went home after just three months, leaving almost nothing behind, while the lieutenant colonel spent almost a year in Kirkuk. Among some soldiers, the occupation authority’s initials stood for Can’t Provide Anything.

  The civilians in the palace saw it differently. At the end of his daylong tour of southern Iraq, Paul Bremer urged me to look into just the kind of reconstruction projects that I had already seen consuming John Prior’s energy. “That money that we’re putting out through the brigades and the divisions is the fastest-spent dispersing money I have,” Bremer said. The CPA handed out money from seized assets of the old regime in lump sums of half a million dollars at division level and two hundred thousand at brigade. When the unspent amount approached zero, the sum was audited and replenished. The Commanders Fund had gone through twenty-three million dollars by mid-August, in more than two thousand reconstruction projects. “We can’t even keep track of how many,” Bremer said. “It’s small things—sewers, opening amusement parks, fixing schools, clearing out drains.” These were the most visible achievements of the early months, and at times it seemed that the CPA could point to nothing else when Iraqis wanted to know what the occupation was bringing them.

  But twenty-three million dollars in four months was a very small amount of money—less than a dollar for each Iraqi. It stood no chance against the gathering sandstorm of expectation. Officers in Iraq and officials in Washington, including Wolfowitz and Rice, accused Bremer of being far too slow to release control of the money in the Commanders Fund. Iraq’s infrastructure had been deteriorating for years—an American development expert once told me that, if Iraq were a used car, Saddam got rid of it at just the right time—and with the collapse of the regime, along with the departure of its top managers, the jury-rigged machinery seemed to give out. By the end of the summer, Bremer understood both the extent of the problem and its political urgency. He went to Washington and let the White House know that Iraq was going to cost America tens of billions of dollars. Iraqi oil money and seized assets wouldn’t come close to covering it. The reassuring forecasts of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz went into the dustbin of history.

  President Bush broke the news to the country on September 7, 2003, and Congress quickly passed an $87 billion appropriation bill that included $18.4 billion for Iraq’s reconstruction. Much of the money was earmarked for the huge infrastructure projects—power plants, water and sewage treatment, telecommunications—that only large multinationals could carry out. There was much criticism of the restricted- or no-bid contracts that went to American companies with Republican Party ties, but the problem wasn’t so much the coziness of Bechtel and Halliburton with the Bush administration as the kind of projects they contracted to undertake and their execution in Washington and Baghdad. The projects were so big, and the official American procurement regulations so cumbersome, that the money made its way into Iraqi society at the pace of tar poured on a cold day. By August 2004, ten months after the appropriation, only $400 million of the $18.4 billion—barely two percent—had been spent. By the time Iraqi subcontractors saw any of the money, all but a small fraction had been lopped off in overhead, security (as much as 40 percent of any contract), corruption, and profits. The CPA kept promising Iraqis that the spigot was about to be turned on and the country was going to be flooded with lifesaving cash that would put tens of thousands of people to work. It never happened.

  Part of the problem lay in the business-as-usual attitude back in Washington. Rumsfeld, still
technically in charge of the postwar, set the tone: In mid-September, just a few days after Bush’s televised speech, the defense secretary said, “I don’t believe it’s our job to reconstruct the country. The Iraqi people will have to reconstruct that country over a period of time.” He even offered the Iraqi people a reconstruction plan of sorts: “Tourism is going to be something important in that country as soon as the security situation is resolved, and I think that will be resolved as the Iraqis take over more and more responsibility for their own government.” Key officials who might have been able to negotiate the byzantine guidelines for congressional expenditures never went to Baghdad. On one of his trips to Washington, Bremer approached the acting secretary of the Army, Les Brownlee, and confessed, “I have no contracting expertise over here at all. I am going to be in deep trouble. Can you help me?” With the approval of Wolfowitz, the Army dispatched forty contracting officers from the Corps of Engineers to Baghdad. Halfway through the life of the CPA, it was the beginning of the Project Management Office. “It didn’t work very well,” a senior administration official told me. “They were too scared. They were scared to death to let that money go out because they already saw what was happening with some of the Iraqi money”—accusations of waste and corruption were beginning to plague the CPA—“and they were already being visited by congressional delegations.” The failure to spend Iraq reconstruction money wisely, or quickly, or at all, became one of the less publicized but more significant scandals of the occupation. In the end, the CPA inspector general’s report found that nine billion dollars in Iraqi funds had gone missing on Bremer’s watch, and this was only a preliminary figure. “Someday, somebody is going to sit down and figure out how much damn money was wasted,” the senior official said. “You can sit there and say, ‘Kofi, you really didn’t waste a whole lot, considering the normal corruption and profligacy and stupidity of international programs.’ I believe in Iraq we wasted more than Kofi did.” He added, “If you’re past the political and security breaking point, all the contracts in the world won’t help you.”

  Jerry Silverman, a former official of the U.S. Agency for International Development who worked in Vietnam for four years, found himself, two decades later, in Iraq. The assumption behind the development efforts in both wars, he said, was that “if you do good things for people, it will result in political support. There’s no evidence for that. The Viet Cong sent their kids to the schools we built, and they shot us during the day anyway.” But in Iraq, unlike in Vietnam, the political war was still to be won or lost at the outset. If the Americans had established security early on, Silverman said, “It’s possible—not inevitable, but possible—that reconstruction could have taken hold. It’s been impossible since then.” Compared to the American soldiers and civilians in Vietnam, he went on, the ones in Iraq were not prepared to take the kind of casualties necessary to secure the cities and the highways so that reconstruction stood a chance of succeeding. “Our troops are in force-protection mode. They don’t protect anyone else. They’re another private militia.” Vietnam and Iraq, he said, were cases of “different mistakes, same hubris.”

  * * *

  FROM THE FIRST DAYS of the invasion all the way through the occupation, a controversy persisted in Washington about whether there were enough troops in Iraq. Beginning in May 2003, Powell told Bush several times that there were not, and each time the president heard him out and then followed the advice of his secretary of defense instead. Whenever the question was put to Rumsfeld, he simply repeated his generals’ assurances that no additional American divisions were needed. General John Abizaid, Franks’s successor at Centcom, and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, McKiernan’s successor as commander of ground forces in Iraq, said again and again that they had enough troops to do all the missions they had been assigned. This had the sound of a reply with a catch—for what were the missions? The debate in Washington was fixed, the answer predetermined by the phrasing of the question. One of Paul Bremer’s aides said that the administrator never looked worse than the day he was told by Rumsfeld in a video teleconference that he couldn’t have any more troops. After leaving Iraq, Bremer criticized the troop levels, but while he was in Baghdad he never publicly broke with the administration’s united front that preserved the fiction. Some champions of the war, such as Senator John McCain, Robert Kagan, and William Kristol, began to get nervous as summer turned to fall and the forces that the administration assumed would be provided by foreign countries never materialized. Other neoconservatives remained sanguine. Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute spent a few days in Iraq in September and published an op-ed in The New York Times expressing her satisfaction with troop levels. Richard Perle asked me rhetorically, “What would be accomplished by having patrols up and down the highway? The point of our presence there, it seems to me, is not to make sure that all the highways are open all the time. That isn’t how this is going to be won, in my view. This is going to be won when we have a flow of intelligence that identifies the guys we’re fighting.”

  Unless you had an ideological stake in it, this controversy didn’t survive your first contact with Iraqi reality. There weren’t enough troops to patrol the road between Baghdad International Airport and the city center so that visitors didn’t have to take their life into their hands upon arrival. There weren’t enough troops in the city streets to act even as a deterrent to someone who wanted to steal a car or shoot up a convoy or assassinate an official. There weren’t enough troops to guard a fraction of the million tons of munitions left lying around in dumps all over Iraq that were being steadily looted by insurgents. There weren’t enough troops to provide a token presence along Iraq’s borders with Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, which might dissuade some jihadis and intelligence agents from infiltrating across. There weren’t enough troops to prevent militias from gaining control of entire provinces. There weren’t enough troops on the major highways to keep bandits and insurgents from terrorizing the truckers carrying essential goods, such as reconstruction materials or even food for the Green Zone. There weren’t enough troops to allow CPA officials to do their jobs.

  Perhaps the connection between patrolling highways and winning the war was too abstract for those supporters of administration policy who never went to Iraq, and for a few who did. It shouldn’t have been that hard. Why would Iraqis join the American effort when their personal safety, or even a minimum of public order in their country, couldn’t possibly be upheld by the occupying forces?

  The number of American soldiers in Iraq, which hovered around 135,000, sometimes spiking or dropping by ten or twenty thousand in response to events, reflected nothing other than Rumsfeld’s fixed idea of military transformation. If more troops had to be found and sent, the direction in which he wanted to take the twenty-first-century military would be called into serious question. It’s hard to imagine that Rumsfeld suffered even private doubts about this: He had a vision, and the messy aftermath of the Iraq War wasn’t going to turn him aside. General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had the legal authority under the Goldwater-Nichols Act to ask for a meeting with the president in case the secretary of defense rejected his advice. “Myers knows—he’s got to know by now,” a senior official said. “He’s got a goddamn Marine as his vice chairman. They should have gone over and said, ‘Mr. President, we don’t have enough troops,’ and suffered the consequences. The consequences, in my view, would have been the president and the vice president siding with the secretary of defense and the chairman leaving. But at least he would leave with the idea that ‘I’ve exercised my right under Goldwater-Nichols and I feel better.’” Instead, Myers kept his counsel and his job. There was always the example of General Shinseki to dissuade him and other senior officers from excessive candor. A few of them found ways to get the point across privately. Officers in Iraq talked off the record about the need for two more divisions. As Senator Joe Biden was boarding a helicopter at the end of one of his visits, a Mar
ine general rushed up and said, “Senator, if anybody tells you we have enough troops over there when you get back, tell them to go to goddamn hell.”

  The top civilians in the administration, and the top brass at the Pentagon, and the top officials in Iraq all held on to their positions and failed the men and women they had sent to carry out their policy. They failed in the most basic obligation to give those men and women what they needed. The slow, mismanaged arrival of armored vehicles and bulletproof plates for flak vests was only the most conspicuous demonstration of how the Iraq War, like every war—just or unjust, won or lost—became a conspiracy of the old and powerful against the young and dutiful.

  As the war went on, I noted how often Paul Wolfowitz traveled to Iraq. Sometimes he was accompanied on these three- or four-day excursions by a coterie of sympathetic journalists who then filed stories about how well it was all going. But it was impossible not to see that Wolfowitz himself was deeply moved by the commitment of soldiers in mess halls and combat hospitals, how (he said) they buoyed his morale rather than the other way around, how well he listened to them (the battalion commander I met in Kirkuk was disarmed by the deputy secretary’s attentiveness when they had a few minutes together), how poignantly he spoke, ashen faced, after the rocket attack on the Rashid Hotel that killed an Army lieutenant colonel on the floor just below his. Then Wolfowitz’s visit would end, and he would return to Washington, where he was never able or willing to do the most important thing he could for the soldiers, which was to give them what they needed. Over time, it became hard to think of the dedication of soldiers like John Prior, the resourcefulness and good faith with which they undertook their task, and not feel a particular bitterness.