Imperial Life in the Emerald City (23 page)

A few hours after Bremer sent the letter, Rice called him. She wanted him to brief the president in person. She told Bremer to come back to Washington as soon as possible.

         

The only plane departing from Baghdad that night was a medical evacuation flight to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Normally, the viceroy would have waited for his own C-130 transport to fly him to Amman, where he'd hop aboard a U.S. government Gulfstream jet with reclining leather seats for the flight to Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington. But there was no time. Bremer sat in a canvas jump seat amid litters of wounded soldiers, some of them moaning in pain, in the frigid cargo bay of the C-141 Starlifter. He wrote out his White House presentation in longhand. Martinez sat next to him and typed it into his laptop, creating a series of PowerPoint slides.

Bremer landed at Andrews at eight o'clock the next morning. He had just enough time for a quick shower at the base before rushing off to the White House, where Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice were seated in the Situation Room. They were joined by CIA director George Tenet and White House chief of staff Andrew Card. At Rice's request, aides and assistants were kept out. The meeting was too sensitive.

The CPA's new plan was straightforward: an interim constitution would be written by the spring of 2004; elections would be held in the summer; sovereignty would be handed over as soon as an elected government was in place; and a constitutional convention would be held in early 2005. Rice and Powell voiced concern about trying to hold elections in less than a year. Bremer told the group that elections experts consulted by the CPA had determined that “rough and ready” elections could be held in six to nine months. It wouldn't be ideal. There wouldn't be time to conduct a census so district lines could be drawn, but it would meet international standards for fairness. After a lengthy discussion about the feasibility of elections, Bush adjourned the meeting. They would resume discussions the following day.

The next morning, Bremer called O'Sullivan in Baghdad and told her he needed to know exactly how long it would take to organize elections. He asked her to check once again with the International Foundation for Election Systems, which had assured her earlier that elections could be held within six months.

This time, the IFES team equivocated. It could be six months, they said, or it could be a year. They couldn't give her an exact time.

When Bremer heard that, he decided to change the plan yet again. Although O'Sullivan, Martinez, and Carpenter regarded elections as a prerequisite to ending the occupation, hinging the handover of sovereignty on a shifting date wasn't what the White House wanted. What if violence increased and IFES judged it too dangerous to hold elections? When O'Sullivan had mentioned in a meeting in Baghdad a few days earlier that the election might not occur until the late summer of 2004, Blackwill had said, “That's a little too close to another election.” The U.S. presidential election would be in November.

Bremer grudgingly deleted the proposal for elections. But that raised a pressing question: How would the interim government be chosen? He, Carpenter, and Martinez decided to resurrect a proposal they'd made to the Governing Council for choosing constitution drafters—holding caucuses in each province. Bremer's new plan called for caucuses to select delegates to a national convention, which would choose an interim government. To prevent the Governing Council from manipulating the process, its role in organizing the caucuses would be limited. Each caucus would have a fifteen-member organizing committee that would choose who could participate. Only five committee members would be selected by the council. Of the remaining ten, five would be picked by each province's own ruling council, and five would be picked by the city councils in the province. It sounded complicated, but Bremer and his team were convinced that it was the most democratic way to pick a government short of elections. They still wanted to leave Iraq with the nearest thing to a representative government.

Blackwill and his staff questioned the complexity of the caucus plan. Blackwill told O'Sullivan and Martinez that it would “work perfectly, but you have to go door-to-door in Iraq and knock on the door and say, ‘We hate to bother you, but can we have your afternoon to explain the caucus system to you?' And then you'd have to go over to the next house.” But Bremer and his team were insistent. It was the closest to their ideal. Blackwill and the others backed down. Bremer had already ripped his seven-step plan to shreds. If he wanted caucuses, fine. He could have his caucuses.

When the meeting resumed in the Situation Room, Bremer described the new plan. It called for a handover of sovereignty by June 30, 2004, more than four months before Bush faced reelection. It was just what the president and Cheney wanted to hear.

The next morning, Bremer and his aides headed back to Baghdad. The death of the seven-step plan was depressing, but they had cause to be upbeat. They had blocked the Pentagon's plan to hand over sovereignty to an expanded Governing Council without an interim constitution. Bremer had also beaten back Blackwill, who hadn't wanted caucuses. Not only was the president happy, Bremer thought, but the Iraqis would be overjoyed to have sovereignty in less than eight months.

He arrived in Baghdad on November 14 and summoned the council's nine presidents to his villa that night to brief them on the new plan. As Bremer talked, the Iraqis began to realize that they had won.

As soon as Bremer finished, the members stood and congratulated him, and one another. Ahmed Chalabi launched into a speech about the importance of returning Iraq's sovereignty.

Carpenter interjected. Bremer hadn't delved into the details of how the caucuses would be organized. Perhaps, Carpenter suggested, “we should walk through this in detail.”

Chalabi and Bremer cut him off.

“We need to keep our eye on the ball here,” Chalabi said. “The goal is sovereignty—it's ending the occupation and the insurgency.”

Bremer agreed, and the self-congratulatory speeches continued. The details would be addressed the following day, at Jalal Talabani's villa.

         

In Talabani's dining room, members sat shoulder to shoulder—the table was smaller than the one in the council's chambers—but everyone managed to fit because nobody wanted to be a backbencher. A drab green cloth covered the table. At its center was a bouquet of white and yellow silk roses and several boxes of tissues. Gold curtains over the windows prevented the guards and aides waiting outside from observing the proceedings.

Talabani had parked himself at the head of the table. To his right was Chalabi. To his left was Bremer, with Carpenter, Martinez, and O'Sullivan standing behind him, ready to pass notes and whisper instructions.

Bremer began by going over the new plan. It had been transformed into a three-page agreement that he and Talabani would sign as soon as the council voted to approve it. Council members had copies, in English and Arabic, and they read along as Bremer addressed each point. The first two sections—on the process of creating an interim constitution and allowing American troops to remain in Iraq after a handover of sovereignty—went smoothly. But when Bremer got to the formation of the interim government and the complicated method of selecting who could participate in the caucuses, Adel Abdel-Mahdi objected.

“This will split our people,” he said. “We will not accept it.”

Abdel-Mahdi was the political chief of the country's largest Shiite party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, known by the acronym SCIRI. He was one of the most skilled and most mercurial politicians in the room. In his teens, he had been a Baathist. Then he became a communist, and then an Islamist, though I never regarded him as a hard-core Islamist. He didn't believe women had to be subservient to men or that sharia should be the law of the land, but many in his party did, and he represented their views with vigor. He was in his fifties but appeared a decade older. A chain-smoker with a sizeable gut, he had suffered during Saddam's reign. Several of his relatives were tortured and executed. He eventually fled to France, where he had joined other exiles seeking political change.

The United States government had long been wary of Abdel-Mahdi's party. It had been based in Iran when Saddam was in power, and many in Washington believed that its leadership was riddled with Iranian agents and that many members were on Tehran's payroll. But it represented millions of Shiites and was a political force that the United States couldn't ignore.

At least, that's what everyone thought. It was never clear just how popular SCIRI was. Before the war, SCIRI and another Shiite party, Dawa, were the two largest Shiite opposition groups. But after the fall of Saddam, new political, religious, and social forces had appeared in the Shiite-dominated south. A young firebrand cleric named Moqtada al-Sadr had been attracting tens of thousands of followers, many of them disaffected young men drawn to his strident calls for the Americans to leave. Small political parties had sprung up in cities across the south.

Abdel-Mahdi was worried about losing control of the caucuses. Under the CPA's system, the Governing Council would choose only five of the fifteen members of each province's coordinating committee. The other positions would go to local politicians. Many local leaders across the south were not members of SCIRI. Abdel-Mahdi feared that members of his party would get shut out of the process. He proposed that the council be able to select eight of the fifteen members. Local officials could choose the remaining seven.

Bremer turned to Carpenter, Martinez, and O'Sullivan. They urged him to reject Abdel-Mahdi's proposal. If we're serious about making the new government more representative, we can't let the council exercise a veto over who gets to participate in the caucuses, Carpenter argued. Bremer agreed.

But Abdel-Mahdi refused to back down. Concerned about losing SCIRI's support, Martinez and Chalabi pulled Abdel-Mahdi aside for a chat. They urged him to reconsider.

Abdel-Mahdi said he needed more time to discuss it with leaders of his party. Martinez and Chalabi proposed a compromise: in order for a person to participate in a caucus, eleven of the fifteen caucus members would have to agree. That would give the five Governing Council appointees effective veto power. Abdel-Mahdi said it was a step in the right direction, but he asked Martinez and Chalabi for more time to talk to SCIRI officials.

When they returned to the meeting, Bremer asked Abdel-Mahdi if he was willing to support the agreement.

“We need more time to discuss this,” Abdel-Mahdi said.

Bremer shot him a look of exasperation. Other members began whispering to each other. Carpenter, Martinez, and O'Sullivan huddled behind the viceroy.

Several members suggested waiting a day so Abdel-Mahdi could talk to his party, but Bremer and his team refused. There was a great deal on the table, and the council needed to approve it.

Dan Senor, Bremer's spokesman, hadn't waited for the agreement to be signed to call a news conference. Hundreds of journalists were assembled in the Convention Center, eager for the details of the new plan. Senor reminded Bremer that the press was expecting an announcement.

Bremer's trio of political advisers found the council's desire for consensus maddening. This was no way for a democracy to operate. They should call a vote, Carpenter said to his colleagues. Let Abdel-Mahdi vote against it. The rest of them will support it.

Martinez had been traveling for the better part of a week. As the council dithered, he grew angry. He and his colleagues had trashed their seven-step plan to give Iraqis the sovereignty they so desperately wanted, and now the council had the temerity to object to the terms?

He passed a note to Bremer urging him to take a hard line and call a vote.

The viceroy silenced the room.

“Frankly, I'm disappointed in the council's deliberations,” Bremer said. The CPA “has come a very long way to meet your interests. If we don't reach agreement today, I will have to answer questions from the press… . If I speak to the press, I'll have to explain that we were unable to agree because the Governing Council is standing in the way of returning sovereignty to the Iraqi people and is trying to control the process by which the interim government will be chosen.”

Some members gasped. He had never strong-armed the council that way before.

Talabani called a vote. Twenty members supported the plan. Abdel-Mahdi and two others opposed it.

Bremer instructed Talabani to talk to the press. A half hour later, he stood in front of a phalanx of cameras to announce the November 15 Agreement.

“This is a feast for the Iraqi people,” Talabani proclaimed. “This is what Iraqi people were dreaming to have.”

Abdel-Mahdi didn't appear at the press conference. He had stormed out of the villa after the meeting.

         

Ten days later, Abdel-Mahdi and his boss, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, SCIRI's top leader, climbed into an armored Toyota Land Cruiser and told the driver to head south—to the city of Najaf and the home of His Eminence, the Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani.

Al-Hakim met with al-Sistani for more than an hour. Al-Sistani began by offering condolences to al-Hakim. His brother, an ayatollah who had been SCIRI's spiritual leader, had died in a car bomb attack in Najaf in late August. Al-Hakim thanked the ayatollah for his sympathies and then turned the conversation to the November 15 Agreement. He outlined his concerns with the caucus system, arguing that there was a grave risk of manipulation by local politicians. Al-Sistani listened carefully, and afterward he seemed to agree with al-Hakim's concern. Al-Hakim didn't tell al-Sistani what to do—you don't say such things to a grand ayatollah—but he hoped that the cleric would issue a statement criticizing the terms of the CPA's caucus plan. After leaving the meeting, al-Hakim told reporters that al-Sistani had expressed “deep concern over real loopholes” in the plan “that must be dealt with, otherwise the process will be deficient and will not meet the expectations of the people of Iraq.”