The Assassins' Gate (16 page)

When I met him in mid-July, Erdmann was still seething from a meeting earlier that day in which he had tried not to humiliate a university president who asked what “operating budget” meant in the middle of the fifth or sixth discussion of the subject. Two weeks before, a twenty-two-year-old soldier from Erdmann's security detail, Specialist Jeffrey Wershow, had been shot in the head at point-blank range on the campus of Baghdad University while waiting for him to come out of another meeting. Erdmann had helped evacuate the dying soldier.

Erdmann's features and oarsman's physique, together with the double-barreled middle initials, prepared me for a terse, anglophilic bureaucrat. Instead, lying on his cot in the trailer and fiddling with a Swiss army knife, feet propped on an army duffel bag, his desk littered with water bottles and empty packets of Meals Ready to Eat and unread books on the Middle East, Erdmann brooded. He spoke in long reflective sentences that were frequently interrupted by second thoughts and qualifications, then settled into a faster, more explosive rhythm when recounting something that angered or amused him. By his own account he was short-tempered and close to nervous exhaustion.

The ministry that was his responsibility, like almost every other government building, had been looted down to the wiring and pipes; even the urinals had been unbolted from the bathroom walls. The top ministry officials, along with the presidents of Iraq's universities, were all prominent Baath Party members and had been sacked; one of them, the notorious president of Baghdad University and a doctor, was soon afterward shot dead in his office while writing a prescription. University classrooms and libraries across the city and across the country were trashed and plundered, thousands of books and computers stolen, windows lifted from window frames, desks left lying in twisted heaps amid the dust and broken glass. Erdmann was trying to see the interrupted academic year to its close, and students were sitting for exams in ovenlike classrooms without air conditioners, fans, or steady electric light.

The Iraqi state had collapsed, and there was nothing to take its place.

I wanted to know how the study of history had prepared Drew Erdmann for the job that he was trying to do in Baghdad. What were the historical analogies that he was carrying in his head? The British in colonial Iraq? The Americans in occupied Germany? Erdmann flashed a self-mocking grin. “I'm a historical cipher. I can't think historically,” he said. “There've been times when I don't even know what I did forty-eight hours before. I try—it's like a test for myself. Can I remember what I did the day before? I eventually can, but it takes effort. But I think that's not a good situation. You should be able to remember what you did in the last twenty-four hours.”

One of Erdmann's favorite books, which he was trying to find time to reread in Baghdad, was the French historian Marc Bloch's
Strange Defeat,
a firsthand account of the French collapse before the Nazi blitzkrieg in the spring of 1940. Bloch served in the French army in both world wars and then joined the resistance before his capture, torture, and execution by the Nazis. In talking about his own work in Iraq, more than once Erdmann cited a passage from
Strange Defeat
that was marked in his old paperback copy. “The ABC of our profession,” Bloch wrote, “is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings.”

The deadly chaos that followed the American invasion of Iraq is a story of abstract terms and concrete realities. Between them lies a distance even greater than the eight thousand miles from Washington to Baghdad, yet the ideas of the war's architects produced consequences as tangible as gutted offices and homemade bombs. Those consequences must be understood above all in the lives of human beings, Iraqis and Americans, thrown together by the fierce history of a war.

*   *   *

BEFORE GOING TO IRAQ
, Drew Erdmann had done a lot of relevant historical thinking. The quotation from
Strange Defeat
served as the epigraph of his Harvard dissertation, which was titled “Americans' Search for ‘Victory' in the Twentieth Century.” It examined the way the concept of securing political ends by military means changed over the course of the century in the minds of Americans. The gap between military and political in the transition from war to peace was a recurring problem throughout the century, and bridging it became the object of increasingly self-conscious effort. The creation of institutions like the Army War College, the National Security Council, and the State Department's policy planning staff showed that, at high levels of government and the military, there was a growing realization that the aftermath of war is a complex process and just as crucial to ultimate victory as battlefield success. “The language that we live with today of ‘exit strategy,'” Erdmann said, “which is already cliché, the focus on the ‘end game,' another cliché—that's recent, and that's part of this historical evolution.”

His thesis ended with the reaction against Vietnam and the rise of the Powell Doctrine of “decisive force.” But this latest concept, Erdmann wrote, is not a once-and-for-all solution to the problem of achieving victory any more than the twentieth century's earlier concepts had been (as interventions in the Balkans showed even as he was writing). The learning process throughout the century was fitful and halting. He wrote, “Americans—leaders and citizens alike—have thus been usually ill-equipped to conceive of the ramifications of the use of force when the next crisis arrives, as it surely does in this tragic world.”

The thesis was exploratory and inconclusive; it showed a keen interest in the models and values that shaped Americans' thinking about war and peace. It was not the kind of dissertation written to land a job. Erdmann always called it “a failure.”

He received his PhD in 2000 and promptly abandoned an academic career. His interests were out of favor in the field. And there was something self-punishing and obsessive in his character. A life spent analyzing military history would be insufficient; he was the sort of academic who had to know how he would do under fire. In his copy of
Strange Defeat
there was another marked passage to which he drew my attention: “The real trouble with us professors was that we were absorbed in our day-to-day tasks. Most of us can say with some justice that we were good workmen. Is it equally true to say that we were good citizens?”

In early 2001, Erdmann was about to fly to Kosovo and take the first job he could find—“Anything. Load bags of grain. That's how far away I wanted to get from academia”—when a call came from Richard N. Haass, who had just been named director of policy planning at the State Department by Colin Powell. Haass had once taught with Erdmann's thesis adviser, Ernest May, and Erdmann's name had been passed along by Philip Zelikow, the University of Virginia professor who had been Rice's colleague in the first Bush presidency. By June, Erdmann was in Washington, working in an office he had already researched extensively for his thesis. At Harvard he had been an Eisenhower specialist, and he entered government in the old-fashioned spirit of a political independent. “This is a little too grandiose,” he said, “but there is a previous tradition in foreign-policy circles of being more nonpartisan, serving the national interest.”

On September 11, 2001, Erdmann was in his office at the State Department writing a draft of a policy document on America's role in the world, and in fact was in the middle of a sentence on the threat of terrorism, when the phone rang: It was his wife, with the news of the World Trade Center attacks. The effect on Erdmann's life was dramatic—not just in the greatly raised stakes and intensity of doing government work (he was assigned the counterterrorism portfolio at policy planning), but in his sense that what he was doing could make a difference. “It confirmed the wisdom of my decision to leave the world of academia.”

In the summer of 2002, when war with Iraq became the administration's unannounced policy, Haass directed Erdmann to write an analysis of postwar reconstructions in the twentieth century. In fifteen single-spaced, classified pages—epic length for a State Department memo—Erdmann applied the ideas in his dissertation to a series of case studies from the two world wars through more recent conflicts such as Bosnia and Kosovo. One of his fundamental conclusions was that long-term success depended on international support. In the short run, he explained when we met in Baghdad, “the foundation of everything is security,” which partly depended on having sufficient numbers of troops. “That was the concern of the project, and my concern—were we prepared to do what it took in the postwar phase? Not exactly rocket science.”

That fall, Powell circulated the memo to Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice. “It may have been irrelevant,” Erdmann said. “Maybe it wasn't read.”

*   *   *

THE REAL ACTION
was elsewhere. In September, around the time that Erdmann's memo was making the pro-forma rounds in Washington, across the river at the Pentagon, the Office of Near East and South Asia's Northern Gulf Directorate was setting up an annex in empty offices one floor above its regular location on the fourth floor. The extra space would accommodate and also separate the overflow of people who were being brought in to work on planning for Iraq. The new unit was called the Office of Special Plans. It was overseen by Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's undersecretary for policy, and his deputy William Luti. Feith, a Washington lawyer, had been out of government for almost two decades; in 1983 he had been fired by Reagan's national security adviser William Clark and was then brought over to the Pentagon by Richard Perle. Feith's political activities and writings were largely devoted to bolstering the hard-line policies of the Likud Party. He owed his important new job to his friend and former boss Perle, who had turned it down himself and then recommended this relatively unknown man to Rumsfeld. “All right, I'm taking Feith,” Rumsfeld told Perle, “and he'd better be as good as you say.” So it was Douglas Feith who assumed the administration's crucial position on postwar Iraq. After the invasion, he would claim that Special Plans' enigmatic name was necessary: “At the time, calling it Iraqi Planning Office might have undercut our diplomatic efforts.” This lawyerly reasoning didn't explain why the State Department's Future of Iraq Project was taking place in full public view with no adverse consequences—why the postwar planning effort couldn't be seen as a credible threat that strengthened the administration's hand at the UN.

But for the Office of Special Plans, secrecy was not only convenient, it was necessary. One could even say that it was metaphysically necessary. The man brought in by Feith and Luti to direct the operation was Abram Shulsky, a former Perle aide and consultant at the Pentagon's in-house think tank, the Office of Net Assessment. Shulsky, Wolfowitz's housemate at Cornell and Chicago, had coauthored a short essay in 1999 called “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean
Nous
).” Shulsky believed that the writings of his old professor Leo Strauss could be useful antidotes to the narrow-mindedness of the American intelligence community. Rather than relying on statistics and social science, which are based on universal categories, intelligence analysts should turn back to the giants of political philosophy, such as Thucydides, who understood that the nature of regimes differs profoundly. (“Regime,” translated by Strauss from the Greek
politeia,
suggested the character of a society's ideals and its leaders; perhaps it's not an accident that the rubric of the administration's Iraq policy became “regime change.”) Tyrannies cannot be understood in the image of democracies, and the tendency of established analysts to try (known as “mirror-imaging”) guarantees that they will fail to grasp the essential nature of an Ayatollah Khomeini when he comes along. Tyrants rely on deception, which makes the work of the analyst harder but also more philosophically interesting, and which brings to mind the relevance of Strauss's idea of esoteric or hidden writing in the great political texts: “Strauss's view certainly alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception,” Shulsky wrote. “Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception.”

It isn't such a long step from this insight to the creation of an office that conceals its work behind a deliberately obscure name like “Special Plans.” There's mirror-imaging of a different kind going on here—not the mistake of seeing your enemy as a reflection of yourself, but the mistake of trying to see your enemy as he sees himself until you begin to reflect him. “When you look long into an abyss,” wrote Nietzsche, the bête noire of the Straussians, “the abyss also looks into you.” Something like this had already happened in Feith's office before Special Plans was set up, in a predecessor unit, the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group. The idea for the unit was Wolfowitz's, and it went all the way back to 1976 and Team B, the group of CIA-appointed outside experts, including Wolfowitz, that had come to much more alarmist conclusions about the Soviets than the intelligence agencies. This time, the purpose was to gather intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and their possible nexus in Iraq. The operation was led by David Wurmser, author of
Tyranny's Ally
and the “Clean Break” strategy paper from which it emerged. Together with his partner, F. Michael Maloof, who had served under Perle in the Reagan Defense Department (all roads from Special Plans led back to Perle), Wurmser collected raw data, much of it from defectors provided by the Iraqi National Congress, in order to prove an assumption: that Saddam had ties to al-Qaeda and was likely to hand off WMD to terrorists. Wurmser and Maloof were working deductively, not inductively: The premise was true; facts would be found to confirm it. All the better that much of the data was doubted or even dismissed by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the Energy Department. In the eyes of the Pentagon civilians, the methods of the intelligence agencies were deeply suspect, and mainstream analysts had a long record of failure in the Middle East. A new method was urgently needed, starting with the higher insights of political philosophy rather than evidence from the fallen world of social science.