"Mr. Bush says this is the main front in the war on terror. He should put his best team here!" Othman said in an October 2003 interview in Baghdad.
Othman couldn't understand why the Americans weren't sending larger numbers of more experienced people to Baghdad. Those who arrived were either inexperienced Bush administration true believers or American private contractors on eight-figure reconstruction deals. Years later the CPA would admit to a nine-billion-dollar gap in its accounting, all of which might have been excused if the money had produced a functioning Iraq. At the time, while he was on the council, Othman was denouncing it to anyone in earshot.
"Iraqi firms or even some other firms could do it for half the amount. I don't know why they're just wasting money like that," said Othman. "And the Americans get salaries so high! Some of them get two thousand seven hundred dollars a day! The lowest get four hundred a day. What's going on? With four hundred dollars you could recruit ten Iraqi policemen!"
As the waste continued and the violence got worse, the ranks of believers shrank, but among those still hanging on to the American dream for Iraq were Kurdistan's most talented players: Hoshyar Zebari and Barham Salih. Zebari had been appointed interim foreign minister in September 2003, and he jetted around the world trying to put a professional face on the new Iraq. He had easy acts to follow—Baghdad's recent public faces had been either the ridiculous Muhammad Saeed al-Sahaf (a.k.a. "Baghdad Bob" or "Comical Ali") or the cold-blooded Tariq Aziz. As Iraq's new über-ambassador, Zebari pushed for debt relief at a donor conference in Madrid, asking European countries to put aside their distaste for the American war and support his new state. The Arab League debated about inviting Iraqi's foreign minister at all, arguing that the Governing Council wasn't a legitimate government for Iraq. When they finally invited Zebari to attend the September 10 summit, he let them have it—in flowing Arabic—for their years of unfaltering support for Saddam. Zebari's belief in the new Iraq made him almost cocky.
"Iraq is a founding member of the Arab League and should not be left out," Zebari told Secretary General Amir Moussa, no doubt aware that these words had special sting coming from a Kurd. "If you leave Iraq out, you will lose. Because among Iraqis, there isn't much love for the Arab League and its stance."
Even with Zebari's success as a globe-trotting diplomat, the Kurds' delicate position reared its head. If Zebari ever misspoke or even referred too strongly to federalism, his critics would seize on it as proof that Zebari's true loyalties lay in Kurdistan. In fact he was growing more independent by the day and building his own stature apart from the Barzani family. But in Kurdistan he also had to be careful not to seem too happy to work with Arabs; many nationalists thought Zebari wasn't being Kurdish enough and blamed him for not hanging a Kurdish flag next to his seat at the United Nations.
Barham Salih tried to bring to Baghdad some of the experience he had from governing in Sulimaniya. More than that, he could still play the part of a Washington insider. In Iraq's government only Salih remained on good terms with all the branches of the Bush administration, and at the same time he had realistic expectations of how little Washington understood about Iraq. Where many Iraqis saw conspiracies behind the erratic behavior of the Americans, Salih understood that the conflict between the State Department and the Pentagon was just as bitter, senseless, and tribal as Iraq's own divisions. He continued to play it straight with Bremer, but often his honesty made him something of a lone voice.
"You know how Middle Easterners are," said Salih. "You can't say no to the Americans in public. Many of my Iraqi colleagues in the leadership were going along with these American guys, just telling them what they'd like to hear. But because I lived in the West, I didn't have that complex. I could tell them, 'No, this is "not on," Mr. Bremen'"
But as time passed, the rest of the Governing Council would learn to tell Bremer the same thing. After six months in power, departing Iraq became the CPA's central mission. Ayatollah Sistani's veto of the American plan to write a constitution before holding elections meant Iraqis needed some sort of transitional law for the interim government. Bremer hoped to finish to CPA's mandate by the middle of summer 2004. He convinced the Governing Council to set a deadline to write a transitional administrative law, or "TAL," and ratify it by the end of February 2004, under which Iraq would select an interim government that would rule once the CPA left Iraq on July 1. The interim system was to last until elections in 2005 would put a four-year government in place. All the parties dug in their heels.
The transitional law became the next arena for the factions. For the Shi'ites it would be a test to see if they would finally get the power accorded to their majority status; Sistani indirectly pushed for a religious tone in the new government. Individual Sunni Arab leaders hadn't really emerged but it was clear Sunnis were the most vulnerable in the negotiations and essentially wanted to return to some semblance of the strong central government they had once dominated. For the Kurds the question was basic: would they gain or suffer by fully rejoining Arab Iraq? The Kurdish negotiators knew that the rest of Iraq, Shi'ite and Sunni, was tilting toward religious government. Despite the landmark meeting between Barzani and the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, ancient divisions had resurfaced, stirred up deliberately by attacks on civilians. As car bombings increased, mostly at police and army recruitment centers, the rumors in the crowd around the wreckage followed a similar theme: these killers want to start a war between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites. And they seemed to be succeeding, as bodies of those killed simply for being a member of the wrong sect began turning up at Baghdad's morgue.
With the sectarian rift showing, several prominent Iraqis and Americans had begun to ask if Iraq would not survive better as three almost separate states. Some even suggested that Iraq should be cut neatly before it tore, with the natural divisions that existed before the British cobbled Iraq into a country in 1919 restored. When the "three-state solution" was pushed in Washington by several Iraq skeptics, it was decried as defeatist and unworkable, especially because the lines between the regions could not be drawn without a massive population transfer from mixed areas. The Kurds didn't say it publicly, for fear of being called separatists, but the three-state solution suited them perfectly. The crux of their message to the CPA was that they could survive without Baghdad unless their terms were met. They set out a list of demands that would drive Bremer mad, including retention of their armed forces, supremacy of Kurdish laws in the north, and shared control of local oil resources with the central government. The Kurds pushed for a referendum in Kirkuk, in which people from the city and the surrounding province could vote to join the Kurdish region, which all the other parties saw as a blatant bid for independence.
ON DECEMBER 14, 2003, American soldiers captured Saddam Hussein hiding in a dirty hole near Tikrit. At the news, Kurds throughout the country poured into the streets to celebrate, and a picture of a haggard Saddam obediently undergoing a medical checkup was pulled off the Internet and distributed across the north by gloating Kurds.* Four of the Governing Council members had managed to see Saddam shortly after he was captured, escorted by Paul Bremer to a small prison cell where they woke Saddam from a nap.3 The former opposition leaders were all Arabs, though one of them did ask Saddam why he had gassed the Kurds in Halabja. The fallen dictator, unrepentant, claimed it was Iran that did the gassing, and he responded with crude jokes to the other demanding questions of his visitors. Strangely, none of the prominent Kurdish leaders ever met with Saddam in his jail cell, perhaps not wanting to revisit the deals they had tried to make with Baghdad in the past. Talabani announced that he didn't support capital punishment and preferred to see the ex-dictator suffer a long prison term and a full interrogation, but he never deigned to go ask Saddam any questions himself. "Why would I go? I don't want to see such a thing," Talabani said, and declined to answer any more questions on the subject.4
The new year of 2004 should have ushered peace and stability to Iraq. Most of the regime's top tier sat in
a U.S. military brig, awaiting trial for crimes against humanity, and coalition forces claimed to be mopping up the last throes of the resistance. Instead, on New Year's Eve, three car bombs rocked Baghdad, killing at least nine people, including an eight-year-old girl standing too close to the U.S. Army Humvee that was the bomber's target. Another of the bombs ripped through the Nabil restaurant, wounding three reporters who were enjoying what would turn out to be the end of Baghdad's nightlife. Instead of reconstruction, the city saw a rampant growth of ten-foot gray concrete blast walls, which turned the capital into an apartheid maze, separating the powerful from unprotected civilians and paralyzing traffic.
All Iraq shut down the first weekend in February, but for joyful reasons: Eid al-Adha, one of the most important holidays in Islam, which celebrates Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son to God. Shi'ites and Sunnis sometimes disagree on the exact day the holiday starts, but it doesn't usually matter much, because no one really goes to work on any of the few days before or after. Talabani returned to Sulimaniya, and Barzani remained up in Salahudin as usual, but both party headquarters in Erbil threw gala receptions. The KDP still dominated the city, but with the Kurdistan Regional Government set to resume its duties again, the PUK had also beefed up its presence. Eid al-Adha makes for a delightful holiday, which usually involves the slaughter of a sheep (which Abraham sacrificed in lieu of his son), lots of feasting, and spending a few days calling upon friends and neighbors. This time the one-upsmanship was more friendly, with each party trying to impress the other with their Eid reception.
Sami Abd-al-Rahman, now in his seventies and the deputy prime minister of the KDP region, spent the morning of February i at the KDP reception hall, sipping tea and greeting the two hundred or so well-wishers crowded into the hall. Some American officials came to pay respects, and just after ten thirty A.M. Colonel Harry Schute sat down next to Abd-al-Rahman. True to form, Sami was pleasant and cordial for a moment or two, and then he got down to business about a few bones he had to pick with the way the coalition had organized border patrols. They spoke for a quarter of an hour, and then Schute excused himself, anxious to spend exactly the same amount of time at the PUK reception across town. Abd-al-Rahman went back to the receiving line, to smile and greet the steady flow of visitors. Outside the building Colonel Schute ran into his colleague Army Major Randy Wade and took a moment to make fun of Wade's continuing attempts at speaking the Kurdish language. The two Americans chatted as dozens of Kurds pressed by them, barely stopping at a security detail that had relaxed in the spirit of the holiday. One of the men who passed was an unremarkable curly-headed fellow wearing jeans, a baggy black jacket, and yellow running shoes. A recording made by a Kurdish TV crew shows the man approach the line of KDP dignitaries as if to shake hands. At the last minute he reached inside his sleeve, as if feeling for a wristwatch, then everything went bright white.
The explosion seemed impossibly big for anything one man could carry in a suicide vest. It blew out the ceiling tiles and sent shards of glass flying out all the windows. The killer had planted himself expertly in the middle of a tightly packed holiday crowd, a murderer's dream. He had packed the vest with ball bearings, which flew out like a hundred shotgun shells. Across town, and almost simultaneously, another bomb—perhaps a bigger one—exploded inside the PUK reception, blasting through dozens of men, women, and children and blowing the southern wall of the ballroom clean off the building.
Harry Schute and his fellow7 officer called for American medical assistance and then rushed back in the building to administer first aid. Among the first pulled from the dust and carnage was Sami Abd-al-Rahman, carried by two pesh merga with a peppered red patch in his abdomen. Abd-al-Rahman asked repeatedly if his son was alive. Abd-al-Rahman's son, a London businessman, had arrived the night before to surprise his father for the holiday. He had been standing near his father in the receiving line and was killed instantly by the bomb. The medics lied to Abd-al-Rahman, who died on the way to the hospital.
The dead from the two blasts numbered more than one hundred, and twice that many suffered burns and shrapnel wounds. One survivor, his face and scalp glazed dark red and black from the explosion, said he had no doubt who was responsible.
"Ansar al-Islam, those Arab fascists," he said.
In fact, the killers were almost certainly Kurdish Islamist members of Ansar, since Arabs would have never made it so close to their targets unchallenged. Despite the fact that Ansar was homegrown, Kurds considered its members part of the plague of violent Islam and thereby connected to the Arab world. (Ansar later changed its name to Ansar al-Sunna, supporters of Sunnism, casting their lot with Iraq's increasingly bloody Sunni Arab insurgency against Shi'ites and secular Kurds.)
By the morning after the bomb, Kurdistan showed its reaction, almost literally shutting the door on the rest of Iraq. Kurdish security forces rounded up any Arabs discovered in the city of Erbil and took them in for questioning, even those who had come north from Baghdad to work with foreign companies. The former green line, now a dozen miles expanded in most directions, hardened into a real border again. Pesh merga at the checkpoints told Arabs they would be best advised to simply turn the car around and stick to their prewar side of the line. At a checkpoint on the road from Erbil toward the town of Makhmur, KDP soldiers roughed up an Arab newspaper reporter from Baghdad, though they stopped short when they noticed that a foreigner was watching. Perhaps Iraqis thought that the suicide bombs in the north would inspire the Kurds' sympathy and solidarity with the rest of Iraq, but the more common Kurdish reaction was revulsion toward everything to the south. Kurdish negotiators returned to the table in Baghdad wanting everything short of complete independence.
WHILE THE CPA and the White House offered condolences, they clearly didn't appreciate how hard it would now be to budge the Kurds from their demands in exchange for joining with a government based in Baghdad. In fact Talabani and Barzani had met with Bremer on January 27 and had been persuaded to sign off on a very weak form of federalism. Luckily for them, they never had to break off their deal with Bremer—instead the White House spiked it. The National Security Council, in charge of the Iraq portfolio since fall 2003, had made the ridiculous demand that all mention of the Kurdistan Regional Government be stricken from the TAL. Bremer was stuck delivering Washington's ruling, and the Kurds stomped their feet and stormed at having been betrayed. In fact they were delighted to avoid fighting their way out of the January agreement. On February 11, the Kurdistan Regional Parliament ratified its own set of conditions for the TAL, giving the Kurdish delegation in Baghdad the backing of the closest thing to a democratic body in Iraq.
The Kurds had one more advantage: ringers on their negotiating team. While both the Shi'ite and Sunni blocs had their patrons in the CPA, including some skilled Iraqi expats, the Kurds came around to the idea of hiring a small group of constitutional experts from universities in Europe and America. Among them was Peter Galbraith, the former Senate staffer who had worked so hard to bring attention to the Kurds' situation during the Saddam years. Asking for outside help was a sign of political maturity on the Kurds' part. It helped them stick to their guns and remain unintimidated by the Americans in the CPA and made for a much easier understanding of the legalese of Bremer's small team of lawyers who ended up drafting the TAL. As usual, the negotiations went down to the wire of the February 28 ratification deadline, and then another day past. Bremer seemed obsessed with the question of language and fought the Kurds hard over the putting Kurdish alongside Arabic as an official language in Iraq, something no one else made a fuss about. The Shi'ite block focused mostly on the role of Islam in the new constitution, and while Sistani of course wouldn't attend, he still had to be consulted, making for maddening delays. In the end the Kurds compromised on most of their key demands, allowing ambiguous language to be inserted and accepting Bremer's promise that the real deal would be the Iraqi constitution, to be drafted later. Yet again, however, they felt like being so close
to America had not brought them any benefit.
"Mr. Ambassador, you are asking us to join an Iraq in which we'll have less freedom than we had while Saddam was in power," Jalal Talabani said, according to Bremer's memoirs.
With that in mind, the Kurdish team pulled a masterstroke. At three A.M. on March 1, the Kurds inserted a short clause, article 61(c), that erased their worries about the entire process.5 It stated simply that if any three provinces rejected the permanent constitution by a two-thirds margin, the document was dead. Only the next morning, after it was signed, did the rest of the Governing Council realize that the three provinces in mind made up the current Kurdish region, which had thereby granted itself a veto over Iraq's constitution. Sistani wrote to Bremer, telling him that this Kurdish veto was unacceptable. Finally, the "special relationship" with the Kurds actually came into play. Even with Washington pushing him to yield to Sistani, Bremer resisted, seeing that the Kurds were fighting for the same ideas as the Americans.
"If we forced the Kurds to cave while the US was still robustly present in Iraq, there was little hope for a secular, united Iraq once we left," Bremer wrote in his memoirs. After two days, Sistani gave in and accepted the signed document as it was. An elaborate ceremony on March 8 set the stage for the CPA to turn over power to an interim government by July 1. Then the real world of Iraq stepped in.
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