The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  Dr. Baher Butti didn’t vote; Dora, the violent Baghdad neighborhood where he lived, was too dangerous. But when I met him after the elections, Butti had some news: His old idea for the Gilgamesh Center for Creative Thinking would take the form of a new psychiatric clinic that was about to open, with Iraqi and American funding, near the Olympic Stadium in a former social club of Uday’s. The al-Janna Center, with twenty inpatient beds and fifty outpatients, would allow Butti to teach advanced techniques to the dozen psychologists and social workers on his staff, and to provide good care for the ailments of Iraqis’ minds.

  After almost two years, Butti still harbored suspicions about the Americans. Before we said goodbye, he asked me for the fifth or tenth time whether there had been some plan behind the chaos that the occupiers had allowed to overtake his country. “I’m not being paranoid,” he said, “but it’s a question.” I agreed that it was a question, and I said that, as far as I knew, the chaos was worse than a crime, it was a blunder. But the Americans were a fact in Iraq, and Butti was now counting on them to prevent the religious Shia from taking too much power and to protect American interests, which had converged with his. Meanwhile, for better or worse, he and his wife would stay.

  “It’s Russian roulette,” he said. “Every morning we leave, and we don’t know if we will come home. We are habituated to this Russian roulette. So we go on.”

  Aseel voted. She and her parents walked six hours across the city to Adhamiya, their former neighborhood, where their food-ration cards were registered, and back. Aseel wore a full-length black abaya and training shoes, and in the pro-Saddam streets of Adhamiya the family walked under the unfriendly gaze of local young men. Aseel was frightened but defiant, and when they finally reached their polling station, she cast her vote for the Sistani list only because it included Ahmad Chalabi, whom she was counting on to finish off the Baathists once and for all.

  When I saw her after the elections, Aseel had exchanged the abaya for a resplendent royal blue tailored suit with a knee-length skirt and a jacket with padded shoulders, a cream-colored turtleneck, stockings, and high heels with ankle straps. She was also wearing lipstick, mascara, and plenty of jewelry. We sat together in the garden of the Palestine Hotel, enjoying the mild winter sun, and she undid her braid and let her hair down in the golden light. There was something different about Aseel, as if she had cast off a burden. She was working as a secretary at a ministry in the Green Zone (there had been no follow-up to her interview with Kanan Makiya), and a man in her office had proposed marriage. He was good-looking but dull; she knew that she couldn’t love him and told him so, but she consented to let him and his family visit hers. They sat in the living room of her family’s newly constructed house, and as the two sets of parents discussed a dowry, Aseel imagined a life with this man: As soon as they were married, he would break all his promises to respect her independence of spirit and start crushing it into that of an Iraqi housewife. Tears came to her eyes, and the prospect filled her with such dread that she imagined it would be just like living under Saddam again. For the first time in months, she remembered exactly what that had felt like. She could never let it happen. She said nothing that day, but she knew that she would refuse the offer.

  “I want to travel,” she said as we walked out of the hotel to say goodbye on the street. “My mind doesn’t match this society. I need more freedom.”

  EPILOGUE

  IN THE FIRST DAYS of 2005, Drew Erdmann packed up his desk at the National Security Council, left government service, and joined his wife and their baby daughter in St. Louis, where he planned to take a job in the private sector. Erdmann had been working on Iraq, in Baghdad and in Washington, for the better part of three years. It had been challenging and fulfilling work, and, as for his own part in it, he could sleep at night. But he was still going home with the sense that he hadn’t contributed enough. The cost in human lives weighed heavily. He had lost friends, both American and Iraqi, and he considered himself lucky, but if he’d been single, he would have stayed on in Iraq.

  In St. Louis, Erdmann tried not to follow the news from that part of the world. Though he would never again be a professional historian, he wanted to achieve enough distance to consider the war historically, which would probably take years. The biggest questions—Would it succeed? How could it have been done better? If it couldn’t be done right, should it have been done at all?—were out there waiting for him, and for others like him, but Erdmann was not yet ready to answer them.

  But he did read a book—from cover to cover, for the first time in a while—that had some relevance. It was Bureaucracy Does Its Thing by “Blowtorch” Bob Komer, who had run the pacification program in Vietnam under Johnson. Copies had been circulating in Baghdad, and a few people there had said, “You want to understand what’s going on out here? Read this report.” A copy landed on his desk in Washington. Erdmann had always rejected crude Vietnam analogies, and he still did: Iraq was strategically far more central, the nature of the insurgencies was different, and the chances for success in Iraq were better. The constant remained the U.S. government: the ongoing effort to put its civilian and military branches to work in concert, the institutional constraints that made it so hard, the halting efforts to adapt imaginatively to new kinds of war, the sheer organizational difficulty of pulling off something on the scale of Iraq. All of this had been the theme of his dissertation, and when Komer’s book sent Erdmann back to it, he discovered that he had foreseen much of his own experience. “There are many things about Iraq that fit right into the pattern of the kind of stuff I was thinking about and working on before,” Erdmann said. In 1917, for instance, with the American Expeditionary Force readying to sail to Europe, General John “Blackjack” Pershing looked around for a plan and found none. “So it doesn’t come as a surprise to me, and only now that I have a little time can I piece things together in the mosaic and see more clearly some of the continuities.”

  His dissertation had focused on the elusiveness of victory. The defeat of Japanese militarism did not come with the surrender in August 1945 on board the battleship USS Missouri, but six years later, with the end of the American occupation and the birth of a democratic Japan. Because victory is a process, not an event, with fundamentally political rather than military goals, victory in Iraq, including the transformation of Iraqi politics, lay beyond the reach of American power alone. “Ultimately, it is always about the Iraqis,” Erdmann said. “The ultimate objectives can only be achieved by the Iraqis. Maybe these are peculiarly American objectives. We can help. But we are in a position where victory will only be achieved through the efforts of others. That’s a paradoxical situation. We may have the power, but precisely because of the nature of our objectives, we can’t use our power to force a specific outcome. Ultimately, our fate is tied to theirs.”

  * * *

  IN THE SAME WEEK of early January that Erdmann left Washington, Colin Powell was summoned to the White House for his farewell conversation with the president. All along, Powell had been the dutifully quiet dissenter on Iraq, concerned about the damage to alliances, skeptical (but not enough) of the administration’s more fevered claims about weapons and terrorism, realistic about the difficulties of the postwar. But his prestige was badly tarnished when his prewar speech to the UN about Iraqi weapons was proved mostly false. Though Iraq became more and more the responsibility of his agency, Powell had lost almost every major fight back when the crucial decisions were made. His tenure as secretary of state was a great disappointment. In his final months at the State Department, an aide quoted to Powell Churchill’s answer to someone’s comment on the ingratitude of the British public for voting him out before the Second World War was even won. “Neither look for nor expect gratitude,” Churchill said, “but rather get whatever comfort you can out of the belief that your effort is constructive in purpose.” Powell, the aide believed, had served some constructive purpose. This was probably a lower standard than the one to which Powell held himself. Now
, sooner than he wanted, he was being replaced by Condoleezza Rice, a shrewder bureaucratic survivor.

  After a few awkward minutes in the Oval Office, Powell realized that Bush had no idea what his secretary of state was doing there. The White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, was summoned, but he, too, was clueless. Who had called for the meeting? It began to seem entirely possible that the phantom vice president had arranged one more parting humiliation for his old colleague and more recent nemesis. Powell drew himself up and informed the president that he had come not for their weekly meeting but to say goodbye. Finding himself alone with Bush for perhaps the last time, Powell decided to speak his mind without constraint. The Defense Department had too much power in shaping foreign policy, he argued, and when Bush asked for an example, Powell offered not Rumsfeld, the secretary who had mastered him bureaucratically, not Wolfowitz, the point man on Iraq, but the department’s number three official, Douglas Feith, whom Powell called a card-carrying member of the Likud Party. Warming to his talk, Powell moved on to negotiations with North Korea, and then homed in on Iraq: If, by April 1, the situation there had not improved significantly, the president would need a new strategy and new people to implement it. Bush looked taken aback: No one ever spoke this way in the Oval Office. But because it was the last time, Powell ignored every cue of displeasure and kept going until he had said what he had to say, what he perhaps should have said long before.

  The following weeks seemed to prove Powell wrong about Iraq. The elections were the most decisive event since the overthrow of the regime, and Bush’s insistence that they not be postponed turned out to be one of his best decisions. Voting gave Iraqis a new confidence in themselves and even, to a degree, in their institutions. In the wake of elections, the insurgency seemed to lose force. Iraq’s first elected government, with the first Kurdish president in the country’s history, still faced the most daunting tasks: building up its security forces so that the fragile democracy could defend itself, winning public trust, writing a constitution, and sorting out the hardest problems, such as the place of former Baathists in government and the military, the role of Islam in society and the law, and the status of Kirkuk. Drew Erdmann liked to say that it all came down to whether Iraq’s new leaders were capable of drawing lines on a map.

  Beyond Iraq, a new historical wind was starting to blow through the Middle East. Lebanese gathered in massive numbers in Beirut to demand the withdrawal of Syrian troops; Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak reluctantly agreed to a contested presidential election; the opposition in Syria was growing bolder; and the stalled Israeli-Palestinian negotiations lurched into motion for the thousandth time. How much credit went to Iraq, how much to the internal dynamics of each country, and how much to luck depended on whom you asked and what position he or she wanted to justify. The administration’s neoconservatives had learned their lesson back in 2003; only in private were some of them ready to declare victory again, even as violence in Iraq returned stronger than ever.

  Kalev Sepp, the retired Special Forces officer who had trained soldiers in El Salvador, went back to Iraq in November 2004 after a meeting in which General George Casey, Sanchez’s successor as commander, asked for his counterinsurgency expert and was met with dead silence: there was none. In Baghdad again, Sepp found that the U.S. military still didn’t have a viable campaign plan that addressed the insurgency in a serious way. With a team of American, British, and other officers, he helped design a new strategy that for the first time put the focus on Iraqi security forces, with thousands of American advisers working intensively with the new battalions. In February 2005, an unnamed official was quoted as saying that “it’s dawning on [senior leaders] what they’re dealing with now” is the need for an overarching counterinsurgency campaign plan. Almost two years after the fall of the regime, the military had finally come to terms with the fact that the Iraq War never ended. But Sepp was under no illusions about an easy victory. “This is going to be a long war. Americans are going to be shot in the streets of Baghdad five years from now.”

  Most of the war’s architects remained in power: Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice. They spoke of Iraq so rarely now that one could almost think that Americans were no longer dying there, that the mission was at last accomplished. In the middle of 2005, with Iraq once again consumed in violence that was killing dozens or scores of people every day, Cheney broke his silence to announce that the insurgency was in its “last throes.” He had said the same thing after Saddam was captured, a year and a half before. The administration’s policy on Iraq was completely adrift; it amounted to saying such things, in the hope of making them so.

  The Pentagon announced that Douglas Feith would be leaving to spend more time with his family. Shortly before his departure, Feith described himself to a journalist as a follower of Edmund Burke, the conservative eighteenth-century British philosopher of stability and tradition. He said that the Bush administration had never wanted to impose American values in Iraq, where “Shiite democracy” was a perfectly acceptable substitute. As philosophy this had the sound of an excuse, turning the chaos and violence for which Feith bore much responsibility into an example of American wisdom and restraint in allowing the Iraqis to do things their way. But it was also likely that Feith, and others in the administration, had never intended from the start to do anything more than remove the tyrant and then walk away.

  Paul Wolfowitz became president of the World Bank, the job in which Robert McNamara had sought refuge after leaving the Pentagon at the height of the Vietnam War. But Vietnam, as Leslie Gelb pointed out, had been a liberals’ war. Wolfowitz took the job as vindication, not atonement. “Of all the people in this administration who have a hard time sleeping at night,” a former senior official said, “Paul’s probably at the peak, because he has a conscience. I’m not sure some of these others do.” When I asked who else had trouble sleeping, the former official said, “That’s a good question,” and then he repeated it. But whatever soul-searching Wolfowitz might be doing, he would always believe in the necessity of the war, and in fifty years he might be proved right—“and if some blood is shed and some people die, that’s part of life.” Did Wolfowitz feel the shedding of blood? “I think so,” the former official said. “I’d like to think so, anyway. I don’t think I would like him very much if I didn’t.”

  Since America’s fate is now tied to Iraq’s, it might be years or even decades before the wisdom of the war can finally be judged. When Mao’s number two, Chou En-lai, was asked in 1972 what he thought had been the impact of the French revolution, he replied, “It’s too early to tell.” Paul Wolfowitz and the war’s other grand theorists also took the long view of history; if they hadn’t, there never would have been an American invasion of Iraq, or, at least, not nearly so soon. Pragmatic officials who asked hard questions about allies, evidence, timing, and plans—especially those, like Powell, who’d been tempered in combat—were not likely to doom flesh to metal on behalf of an idea, even one as compelling as the transformation of the Middle East from an incubator of mass killing to a collection of ordinary, semidemocratic states. There was no immediate threat from Iraq, no grave and gathering danger. The war could have waited.

  Who has the right to say whether it was worth it? Chris Frosheiser, who lost so much in Iraq, asks himself the question every day, but he never comes closer to an answer than pride in his son’s service and grief at his death. He would not have chosen to give up Kurt for democracy in the Middle East; now he wants Kurt’s death to be part of some historical good. Yet Frosheiser always has to pull back, he said, whenever the vision grows too grand, the language too abstract, or else what matters most will be lost: one life, one death.

  Daily existence in Iraq remains a nightmare. In the world’s newest democracy, most people aren’t free to speak their minds, belong to a certain group, wear what they want, or even walk down the street without risking their lives. During the worst of the violence, some Iraqis said that they had been better off under Saddam, that A
merica should never have overthrown him if the result was going to be so much more bloodshed. Few Iraqis I knew ever said it, though. Experts in suffering, they are better qualified than people in Cairo, Rome, London, or Washington to balance their costs against their gains. When I told Aseel that, after the weapons turned out not to exist, some Americans felt betrayed by the Bush administration and Ahmad Chalabi, she exclaimed, “We are more important than missiles!” What the war gave people like her is hope.

  The long view of history made the war possible, and the long view of history made the war costly. Out of government, Drew Erdmann dwelled on the institutional character of the administration’s mistakes, but in Baghdad in the summer of 2003 he had said that success or failure would largely depend on the judgment of individuals. I came to believe that those in positions of highest responsibility for Iraq showed a carelessness about human life that amounted to criminal negligence. Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one. When things went wrong, they found other people to blame. The Iraq War was always winnable; it still is. For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive.

  * * *

  ONE DAY IN JANUARY, I met three Iraqi men who were having lunch in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Amman: a Shiite, a Sunni, and a Kurd. They were in Jordan on business, but they had all lived in Baghdad throughout the rule of Saddam. Wearing jackets and ties, they had the gentle manners of an older Iraqi generation, and they invited me to join their table. The Kurd, a financier named Mahmood, and the Sunni, an architectural engineer named Hisham, were friends of the father of Kanan Makiya. Hisham, the oldest of the three, mentioned with a slight smile that he had made an appearance in Makiya’s book The Monument. He had been the consulting engineer on a memorial to the Iraqi dead in the war with Iran, the Martyrs’ Monument, and had written a fawning tribute to the “Leader-President” for the unveiling in 1983, which Makiya quoted at length.