Imperial Life in the Emerald City (19 page)

In September 2003, Bremer traveled to Washington to testify before four congressional committees considering the Supplemental. He compared the aid package with the Marshall Plan.

         

The grants to Iraq the president seeks bespeak a grandeur of vision equal to the one which created the free world at the end of World War II… . Iraqis living in freedom with dignity will set an example in this troubled region which so often spawns terrorists. A stable, peaceful, economically productive Iraq will serve American interests by making America safer.

When we launched military operations against Iraq we assumed a great responsibility that extends beyond defeating Saddam's military. We cannot simply pat the Iraqis on the back, tell them they are lucky to be rid of Saddam and then ask them to go find their place in a global market—to compete without the tools for competition. To do so would invite economic collapse followed by political extremism and a return to terrorism. If, after coming this far, we turn our backs and let Iraq lapse into factional chaos, some new tyranny, and terrorism, we will have committed a grave error. Not only will we have left the long-suffering Iraqi people to a future of danger and deprivation, we will have sown the dragon's teeth which will sprout more terrorists and eventually cost more American lives.

         

Five weeks later, Congress approved the Supplemental after cutting out the ZIP codes, the wireless Internet service, and several other small projects. The final total was $18.4 billion.

The night President Bush signed the Supplemental into law, I saw Bremer in his office. It was almost ten o'clock. His tie was loosened and his sleeves rolled up. Get ready for a big change, he said. He predicted that funds from the Supplemental would begin flowing into Iraq within weeks. “We're going to transform this place,” he said.

         

Bremer's ambition wasn't confined to the Supplemental. It was across the board. Over the summer of 2003, the CPA's Policy Planning Office created a twenty-eight-page list of milestones that were to be accomplished before sovereignty was returned to the Iraqi people. The document was divided into three phases: August to October 2003, November 2003 to January 2004, and February 2004 onward. The list of milestones became the playbook for Americans in Baghdad.

The very first goal was to “defeat internal armed threats.” The task was assigned to CJTF-7—Combined Joint Task Force Seven, the formal name for the U.S.-led military forces in Iraq. All the bad guys were to be taken care of in the first phase, by October 31. Power generation was to reach 5,000 megawatts by January, even though Browning couldn't keep the system above 4,000. The airport was to open by October, despite warnings that the insurgents had hundreds of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.

When it came to economic reform, Bremer and his policy planners weren't daunted by the challenges Glenn Corliss and Brad Jackson were facing with the Ministry of Industry. Privatization of state-owned enterprises was to begin by October. A trust fund modeled after one in the state of Alaska was to be established to provide Iraqis with annual cash rebates from oil sales. Monthly food rations were to be converted into cash payments by November. The food subsidies, along with below-market prices for gasoline and electricity, were to be eliminated after February. Iraq was to prepare to join the World Trade Organization, which meant the elimination of tariffs, the creation of new laws to protect businesses, and the entry of foreign-owned banks. “It's a full-scale economic overhaul,” Bremer said. “We're going to create the first real free-market economy in the Arab world.”

The political plan was just as bold. Bremer had rejected advice from Wolfowitz and Feith to cede more authority to the former exiles and had instead formed the Governing Council. The twenty-five-member body was Bremer's answer to the political-transition debate that had vexed Washington for months. The council was his showpiece: a multiethnic, multi-religious group that included men in turbans and men in suits, women and tribal sheiks, Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Kurds. Council members looked good on paper and in pictures, but their on-the-job performance exasperated the CPA. The council had taken weeks to select a president, and then had opted for a rotating presidency among nine members, eight of whom were former exiles. Once the leadership was settled, many members stopped attending meetings. They used their new status to stake claim to riverfront villas and to travel overseas at government expense.

The council was just the first step in Bremer's seven-step transition plan to full Iraqi sovereignty. The other steps were the selection of a “preparatory committee” to devise a way to draft a constitution, the council's assumption of more day-today governing tasks, the writing of a constitution, popular ratification of the constitution through a national referendum, the election of a government, and, finally, the handover of sovereignty. Just when that would occur, Bremer did not say. He hoped it would happen by late 2004, but many of his aides expected the occupation to stretch into 2005. Whenever he was asked how long the occupation would last, he relied on the same vague sound bite: “We have no desire to stay a day longer than is necessary.”

Bremer discussed elements of his plan on video teleconferences with senior members of the Bush administration, but there was no comprehensive, interagency discussion about America's exit strategy. He didn't share a draft with the State Department, the National Security Council, or the CIA. The first time Colin Powell saw the plan was on the editorial pages of
The Washington Post,
which published an op-ed by Bremer titled “Iraq's Path to Sovereignty.”

The viceroy was adamant that his plan was the best. He rejected the idea of holding early elections, he said, because voter rolls and election laws didn't exist. But the real reason was that he feared Baathists or religious extremists might triumph. He nixed the idea of an interim constitution, invoking Saddam's reliance on temporary constitutions as an example the United States did not want to emulate. “Electing a government without a permanent constitution defining and limiting government powers invites confusion and eventual abuse,” he wrote in the op-ed. And he shook his head at the notion of simply handing power over to the council. If Iraq was going to be a beacon of democracy in the region, he insisted, it needed a democratically elected government.

He continued to brush off Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani's fatwa stating that Iraq's constitution had to be written by elected representatives. But it was evident to anyone who spent any time among Iraq's Shiite majority, either in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood or in Basra or any other city in the south, that al-Sistani's religious authority was unparalleled. He was the spiritual leader. Every other cleric was subordinate to him. Inside the Emerald City, however, al-Sistani was just another old man in a black turban.

Some of the viceroy's political advisers did grasp the grand ayatollah's influence, but they still refused to heed his fatwa. To them, it was a matter of principle. They wanted to establish an American-style separation of church and state. Giving in to al-Sistani, they maintained, would set a dangerous precedent.

To veteran Middle East hands in the State Department, Bremer's plan sounded awfully unrealistic. Iraqi politicians had the same reaction. “It seems impossible,” one Governing Council member said.

But Bremer was unmoved. “This is the only way to go,” he told me. “I don't see any other option.”

         

John Agresto arrived in Iraq with two suitcases, a feather pillow, and a profusion of optimism. His title was senior adviser to the Ministry of Higher Education, but he envisioned the job in grander terms. It was not just to oversee but to overhaul the country's university system. He wanted to introduce the concept of academic freedom and to open liberal arts colleges. He hoped to restock libraries with the latest books and to wire classrooms with high-speed Internet connections. He regarded the postwar looting, which had eviscerated many campuses, as a benefit. It provided “the opportunity for a clean start” and was a chance to give Iraqis “the best modern equipment.”

Agresto was a lifelong Republican. The son of a Brooklyn dockworker, he was the first in his family to go to college. He went on to earn a doctorate in political science from Cornell University. After a brief teaching career, he joined the National Endowment for the Humanities during the culture wars of the 1980s. Along with Lynne Cheney and William Bennett, he hectored the higher-education establishment as liberal and lazy. After leaving the NEH, he spent eleven years as president of St. John's, a small, classical liberal arts college known for its Great Books curriculum. In 2000, he retired and set up a consulting company. In his spare time, he prepared homemade Italian sausage and relaxed with his wife in their cabin near the Pecos River in New Mexico.

A few weeks after U.S. troops rolled into Baghdad, Agresto got a call from his predecessor at St. John's, Edwin Delattre, who asked if he'd be interested in going to Iraq. A professor of philosophy at Boston University and an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Delattre had been approached about the Iraq job by John Silber, BU's president emeritus, who had been contacted by Jim O'Beirne, the White House liaison at the Pentagon. O'Beirne had figured that Silber, one of the few social conservatives in American academia, could recommend candidates who supported President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. Agresto most certainly did. He described himself as a “strong supporter” of the war.

But it was more than ideology that drove him to say yes. He was in graduate school during the Vietnam War. Although his draft status was 1A, his number never came up in the lottery. Going to Iraq, he reasoned, “was a way of finally serving” his country.
I'm almost sixty years old,
he said to himself.
I don't have that many years left to do good.

“This is what Americans do: they go and help,” he explained to me later. “I guess I just always wanted to be a good American.” And, he said, he had “an inkling that this would be a never-to-be-repeated adventure.”

Before he committed to go, he called Don Rumsfeld, whose wife had served on the St. John's board. He didn't have Rumsfeld's number at the Pentagon, so he left a message for him at home. “If there's any reason I shouldn't consider it, phone me back at once,” Agresto said. He never got a call. But when he talked to O'Beirne again, he was told that Rumsfeld had weighed in on Agresto's selection. “Put a rush on it,” the defense secretary had said.

Agresto knew next to nothing about Iraq's educational system. Even after he was selected, the former professor didn't read a single book about Iraq. “I wanted to come here with as open a mind as I could have,” he said. “I'd much rather learn firsthand than have it filtered to me by an author.”

His training from the Defense Department was no more extensive. “They taught me how to put on a gas mask, how to get the helmet snug, how to button up your flak jacket,” he said. “That's it.”

None of that fazed him. The televised images of Iraqis cheering as the statue of Saddam was toppled in Firdaus Square seemed like the Middle Eastern version of the Berlin Wall coming down. “Once you see that, you can't help but say, Okay. This is going to work,” Agresto said.

In September 2003, he flew from Texas to Kuwait on a chartered 747 and then into Baghdad on an air force C-130, a propeller-driven cargo hauler that served as the CPA's personnel shuttle. The plane approached the airfield at a high altitude and then corkscrewed straight down to avoid insurgent missles, leveling off just above the runway. Upon disembarking, Agresto was ushered into a heavily armed convoy for the journey along the treacherous eight-mile road to the Green Zone. It was his first taste of how security trumped everything—work, comfort, pleasure—in Iraq.

As a senior adviser, Agresto had no budget. If he wanted to accomplish anything, he'd have to cozy up to USAID, which had earmarked $25 million for Iraqi universities. He hoped to get millions more—hundreds of millions, even—from the Supplemental and from other nations. A needs assessment conducted by the World Bank and the United Nations estimated that Iraq required almost $2 billion to “ensure minimal quality standards of teaching and learning.”

Much of the money was needed to repair and reequip looted universities. At Baghdad's Mustansiriya University, the pillaging began the day Saddam's government collapsed. In three days, the campus of yellow-brick buildings and grassy courtyards was stripped of its books, computers, lab equipment, and desks. Even electrical wiring was pulled from the walls. What was not stolen was set ablaze, spreading dark smoke over the capital. When Agresto saw the damage to Mustansiriya and the nearby College of Technology—where three thousand computers and every bit of laboratory equipment had been stolen in a four-hour period—he stopped thinking of the looting as the “opportunity for a clean start.” Rebuilding the campuses would be his primary challenge. Without desks, books, or science labs, there was no way Agresto would be able to talk about academic freedom and a liberal arts curriculum.

A month after he arrived, representatives from donor nations gathered in Madrid to consider Iraq's reconstruction needs. Agresto put together what he hoped was a persuasive plea for international aid that included plans for “a nationwide electronic library network” and a “Western-style graduate business school.” He asked for money for new textbooks, new classrooms, and for sixteen “Centers of Advanced Study” in fields such as biotechnology, conflict resolution, and information technology. The total price tag for Iraq to “take its rightful place in the world's intellectual, cultural, economic, and political communities” was $1.2 billion.

“We now have the opportunity to make a new start, and to supply Iraq with, for example, some of the best classrooms, laboratories, and libraries possible,” Agresto wrote in the CPA's pitch to donors.