Father of Money

by Jason Whiteley

  FATHER OF MONEY

  RELATED TITLES FROM POTOMAC BOOKS

  Iraq in Transition:

  The Legacy of Dictatorship and the Prospects for Democracy

  —Peter J. Munson

  Losing the Golden Hour:

  An Insider’s View of Iraq’s Reconstruction

  —James Stephenson

  FATHER OF MONEY

  Buying Peace in Baghdad

  JASON WHITELEY

  FORMER CAPTAIN, U.S. ARMY

  Copyright © 2011 by Jason Whiteley

  Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Whiteley, Jason, 1977-

  Father of money : buying peace in Baghdad / Jason Whiteley. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59797-544-5 (hardcover: alk. paper)

  1. Whiteley, Jason, 1977- 2. Civil-military relations—Iraq—Baghdad. 3. Postwar reconstruction—Moral and ethical aspects—Iraq—Baghdad. 4. Iraq War, 2003—-Personal narratives, American. I. Title.

  DS79.767.C58W44 2011

  956.7044’31—dc22

  2011009433

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.

  Potomac Books, Inc.

  22841 Quicksilver Drive

  Dulles, Virginia 20166

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  for My Brothers

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1 HEAVY BUSINESS

  2 BULLETS AND BEDOUINS

  3 LEARNING FROM THE MASTERS

  4 SITTING IN JUDGMENT

  5 BANNERS AND UPRISINGS

  6 TEA WITH TERRORISTS

  7 MONEY BY THE BARREL

  8 ALLEGIANCE

  9 NEW ARRIVALS

  10 FIGHTING AND FASTING

  11 BALLOTS AND BANALITY

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  A WARM THANK-YOU to my family, my friends, and my classmates at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, who have all heard these stories more times than is humane. Thanks also to Don McKeon for his brutal honesty and relentless editing. Finally, my deepest appreciation and undying admiration for all of the Misfits, without whose support this story would never be told.

  Introduction

  THIS BOOK IS THE STORY of an army officer’s winding road down into a moral morass, where bribes and blood money, not principle, governed the dissemination of power and the possibility of survival. In March 2004, as a captain in the U.S. Army, I was appointed the governance officer for Al Dora, one of Baghdad’s most violent districts. My job was to establish and oversee a council structure that would allow Iraqis to begin governing themselves and reconstruct their homeland. I had received no training whatsoever for the post—in fact, the role of a governance officer wasn’t even part of an armor battalion’s organization—but I believed in myself and in what we were trying to achieve in Iraq. I wanted to do something good, something significant. I wanted to help. Yet in a place of extreme violence and devoid of order, the practical subsumes the principle, and I drifted down the path of bribery and corruption that seemed endemic on the streets of Baghdad. Instead of a principled council structure, I watched the evolution of a tangled web of alliances based on power, opportunity, and survival.

  General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a fellow West Point graduate, summed up his feelings of war more succinctly than many before or since when he said, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” That is a sentiment not well understood by those outside the military, especially by those indifferent masses who, between meals at the drive-thru, find a spare minute to tie a yellow ribbon on a tree and congratulate themselves for being patriotic. In short, it is not well understood by those who have no idea how to sacrifice or what it means to fight a war that they know isn’t right.

  This is not a traditional war story. This is not about a black-and-white world, with intrepid American heroes versus murderous villains. Nor is this a story about greedy defense contractors throwing lavish parties with imported alcohol or the hedonism of young State Department workers reveling in the Green Zone. Those stories have been written, and they have been well received. Instead, this is the story of forging alliances and friendships, with money and violence, among the Iraqi people in the alleys of a Baghdad district amid the chaos of war. It is the story of paying people to attend coalition events and council meetings to preserve the pretext that democracy was taking root—long enough for us to receive promotions and please the politicians. It is a story about moral relativism and changing value systems to accommodate the daily demands of desperate circumstances.

  One

  HEAVY BUSINESS

  RIDING SOUTH ON HIGHWAY 8 out of Baghdad, I scanned the sprawling collection of one-level, sand-colored buildings and their corrugated-steel fences that were cobbled together along the two-lane asphalt highway. In another moment, I could have been driving down the streets in my hometown, where the trailer parks and the junkyards provide a similar backdrop for the hardscrabble scenery. Unlike in Lumberton, Texas, though, in Iraq rusted cars lay beside goats and donkeys, while women draped in black robes from head to toe walked to the market. Here and there, smoke rose from the houses. Gray tendrils from burning trash and pungent compost mingled with household aromas of baking bread and freshly washed laundry. Caught by the breeze, the jumbled odors carried through the open windows of the Humvee. It was not as unpleasant as it was striking.

  It was May 2004. I had been in Iraq for two months. Transplanted from my sterile, sanitized life in the United States, I was still overwhelmed by the raw reality of daily life in Baghdad. I had grown accustomed to measuring the severity of my day by the amount of time I spent in traffic or the tone of my boss’s latest e-mail. Somehow I had let those banal experiences desensitize me to the magnitude of man’s daily struggle, where under sweat-soaked brows he labored strenuously simply to exist. The rising smoke represented a day’s work—a small, successful step forward for all to see. I inhaled the sweet, earthy smell and savored the charcoaled hopes and burning desires that had stoked it into existence. I glanced sideways at a woman and a child struggling to carry an oversized burlap bag of produce to their flimsy roadside market stand. I admired their pride and sense of purpose, traits that had historically made Iraqis resistant to foreign occupation. I needed to find a way to give them hope and patience with the American soldiers and the fledging Iraqi government. If I could not give them a better opportunity to wait for, their determination and willingness to sacrifice would find a ready outlet in the insurgency that was eager to exploit their impatience.

  Farther down the road, Iraqi children of all ages played soccer with shiny new balls that American soldiers had handed out during one of our patrols. Marked with logos of professional teams from Europe and America, soccer balls were our most popular item. Hundreds of children would routinely besiege the soldiers and ask for balls to replace the rolls of tape, plastic, and laundry with which they were currently playing. A cloud of dust enveloped the makeshift field as the nylon balls ricocheted erratically across the bare ground between the highway and an abandoned railroad track. The children had not adjusted to the new balls’ improved buoyancy. Occasionally, the kids would pause long enough to allow herds of goats and their transient herders to pass by. The goats scavenged ove
r the trash caught along the rails and drank from the pools of raw sewage along the roadside. As we passed, the game stopped and a flurry of young hands flailed in the air. The children took turns waving or shooting imaginary weapons at us, depending on whether they were screaming requests or insults. Between the insurgents and the soldiers, the children received so many conflicting messages, they did not know what to believe. At least they had soccer to provide a refuge. In those friendly games no one asked them at gunpoint whom they were playing for or why they were playing. They could be kids without consequence, although, like everything else, that would eventually change.

  Within minutes, our convoy of three Humvees passed beneath a huge pair of crossed swords, allegedly cast from a mold of Saddam’s own hands and enlarged to enormous size. The monument demarcated the southern city limit of Baghdad, and the row of Iraqi police vehicles just beyond its shadow marked a police checkpoint. Vehicles in the tightly packed traffic—freshly imported luxury sedans, worn-out passenger cars, and rusted freight trucks—aggressively jostled for position as each hoped to avoid a random stop and search by the police.

  The police had motioned a truck filled with watermelons to pull over into a search queue as it trundled beside a bus full of Shi’a pilgrims traveling to the holy city of Najaf. Curious passengers pulled back the black curtains on the bus, eying our passing trucks with suspicion. Although the Shi’a had initially welcomed the invasion, there had been significant changes to the relationship. Disenchantment with the pace of American progress and the political flip-flopping in post-invasion power structures had allowed a charismatic rogue Shi’a cleric named Muqtada Al-Sadr to amass an army of disgruntled followers. One month ago, a battle between his followers and American soldiers in Najaf had angered most of the devout Shi’a, who saw the fighting as a religious transgression on sacred ground. Regardless of their personal feelings about the cleric, they blamed the United States and the American soldiers for bringing violence to a holy city. Although the coalition powers in the Green Zone had made numerous overtures to the Shi’a leadership, the icy stares and the tightly clutched fists on the bus showed me that these Iraqis had not regained their confidence in Americans, at least not yet.

  As the traffic came to a standstill, I directed our convoy to the shoulder of the road, and we bypassed the checkpoint with a quick wave to the police and to the pilgrims. If my plan succeeded today, at least the Shi’a in my neighborhood would have a reason to believe in American promises again.

  We were traveling a few miles farther south of the checkpoint, beyond the edges of the sprawl created by legions of impoverished Shi’a who had arrived in the last few months to look for opportunities in Baghdad. We were going to a junkyard created by the initial American invasion force, which was nothing more than a mountainous collection of Iraqi army vehicles abandoned and piled together as scrap. Many were tanks and armored personnel carriers destroyed by American air strikes in the invasion. Scavengers had begun devouring these piles of metal, cutting them and piling them onto trucks for export to Turkey, Iran, and Jordan—even as far away as China. Made of high-quality alloy, these vehicles represented a sizable return on investment for the looters who were daring enough to orchestrate the pillaging. Although there was technically no law against this activity, many members of the local community had expressed outrage that they were not receiving a percentage of the proceeds, nor were they given a chance to work on the dumping sites. Their dissatisfaction came not from the idea that a potentially illegal activity was taking place, but rather from the fact that the profits were not being shared locally. After they made their case at a recent neighborhood council meeting, I had vowed to intervene on their behalf, if only to bolster my standing as the new governance officer for the area.

  The council comprised secular and religious leaders and was chaired by a senior tribal sheik named Said Mallek. I met with the council every week to listen to its members’ grievances and offer them solutions. At first, it seemed odd that I would be involved in a plan to extort money from a quasilegal operation like this smuggling venture, but my credibility with the council lay not in my military authority but in my ability to quickly and satisfactorily resolve the council’s problems. On its behalf, I had agreed to investigate and, if possible, help the neighborhood derive some revenue from exporting the scrap. Said Mallek had previously tried to get a piece of the action but had been outgunned and out-muscled by the smugglers. He had appealed to me to restore the dignity of his tribe and the authority of the council by returning to the councilmen a right to benefit from these “resources” located within their tribal boundary. At first, I had been skeptical of his true intentions. Said Mallek’s chiseled, gray-bearded olive face never betrayed his emotions. The man was a survivor. He had shown me his aged, tattered Communist Party membership card, but he had also told me that he was a Ba’ath Party believer. His shifting allegiances were those of an opportunist who might become an ally if I could prove to be a worthy partner.

  He was also a man who emanated authority. Every time I gripped his hand, he shook my confidence. His empty black eyes bored into my naive blue ones, staring directly at the scared kid from East Texas underneath. I always sought to mimic his cold demeanor but never succeeded. Once, in a desperate attempt to flush emotion onto his face, I had donned a redcheckered shemagh and tied it around my face in my best impression of a mujahideen fighter. As he sat with his back to me at a table, I crept up slowly behind him and put a gun to his head. With characteristic stoicism, Said Mallek turned and calmly looked at me, “Salaam, ahouya. Minoo?” (Hello, my brother, who are you?)

  Perhaps because of his calculating demeanor or his pivotal presence on the council, I felt obligated to help him in any way that I could. This scrap metal business could have been a purely personal ploy for most Iraqis, but any plan to line his own pockets would adversely affect Said Mallek’s reputation and label him a thief. His status as a sheik was his foremost possession, and he did not seem like a person who would exchange a lifetime of pride and honor for personal gain. No stranger to sacrifice, he had forgone the relative security of staying uninvolved with the council in favor of having a chance to advocate directly for his people and his neighborhood. Said Mallek, like all council members, risked his life merely by being on the council and attending the meetings, which were perceived by many as traitorous acts, in and of themselves. Yet he went further than passively attending meetings; he had openly advocated for nonviolence during a recent volatile incident.

  A few weeks earlier, an errant insurgent rocket had damaged a key Shi’a mosque near our base, not far from Said Mallek’s home. Immediately, rumors that the rocket had come from an American helicopter electrified the local populace and injected rage into countless devotees who thought the strike was a deliberate American action. Within minutes, a revenge-minded mob surged forth and began to coalesce around the damaged mosque. I responded to the scene with the hope that I could locate Imam Al-Jaferi, who had attended council meetings on occasion, to appeal to him to help alleviate the tension. The imam was not receptive, preferring instead to bask in the anger of the crowd, inciting them to further violence to avenge their religion and force the American occupiers from their homeland.

  The tension created a palpable barrier between the mob and the American soldiers who had arrived as reinforcements. Both sides were eyeing each other warily. Hundreds of Iraqis surrounded the mosque, moving between rooftops, appearing in windows, and clustering in alleys. The crowd began a hostile chant. I noticed the menacing glint of metallic weapons changing hands amid the throng.

  The army’s rules of engagement prohibited us from clashing with unarmed civilians, and their weapons were not raised or even clearly identifiable. Unfortunately, any minute now the weapons might find their way to someone who could, in the heat of the moment, decide to fire at the soldiers and turn a tense standoff into a tragedy. Precisely at that critical moment, Said Mallek emerged from the crowd. I quickly walked over to him and handed
him a piece of metal that I had collected from the exploded rocket. It was stamped with an Iraqi seal and “Made in Iraq” in Arabic. He listened to me explain how the rocket had come from a hostile Sunni area and had been meant for the American base. He placed the scrap in his pocket, then turned, draped his arm around the imam, and led him inside. The imam returned and addressed the crowd, assuring them of the missile’s Iraqi origin and encouraging people to return to their homes. As the crowd dissipated, I asked Said Mallek what he had told the imam. He smiled and said, “I told him you would pay for it to be fixed.”

  As we pulled off the highway almost fifteen miles outside of Baghdad, I replayed the scene from the mosque and thought about the obligation that Said Mallek created for me, an obligation that I had tacitly accepted. I had requested a disbursement of emergency money from the army, but the army would not pay for damage done by insurgents. It would be up to me to deliver. This was my chance to prove to the council that I could reciprocate its cooperation and help. If I could successfully engineer this small plan, it would win enormous currency with the council going forward. The council members’ continued participation and intervention in local affairs had become increasingly pivotal to combat the escalating number of religious fanatics who were operating in our neighborhood. It was essential to make the council as effective and powerful in the eyes of the people as I could.

  As the dust from the Humvees cleared and we slowed into the driveway of the junkyard, I found only a lone office building. There was no activity, only a few scattered workers who ran to the back of the yard as we drove in. The sounds of slamming doors and diesel engines roaring to life alerted my soldiers and me to something beyond the back fence. As Ali, my interpreter, and I jumped out of our Humvee, the other two Humvees in my patrol roared past us toward the noise. I heard some shouting and a few gunshots. Over the radio, one of my soldiers gave a quick update, “Warning shots.” As Ali and I entered the one-room building, a middle-aged Iraqi was running out the back door, a pistol clearly showing in the back of his waistband. While Ali yelled for him to stop, we caught up to him, and I reached for my Taser.