The Assassins' Gate (21 page)

Other Pentagon officials, including Harold Rhode from the Office of Special Plans, joined ORHA in Kuwait, but no one could figure out what they were doing; they seemed to exist in a parallel universe. Rhode stayed in a villa with members of the Iraqi National Congress, where he and Salem Chalabi punched out memos back to Wolfowitz and Cheney. Rhode was pushing for the swift formation of an Iraqi interim government led by Chalabi and the INC. Other ORHA members began to think of the Defense officials among them as commissars, sent to Kuwait to keep an eye on the team. Chatting at dinner, people would suddenly glance over a shoulder to see who might be listening. One of them finally said, “Isn't this the kind of regime we're supposed to be getting rid of?”

Drew Erdmann began to feel so unguided that he looked around for tasks to assign himself. Together with a few colleagues, he drew up a list of sixteen key sites around Baghdad that the military should secure and protect upon the fall of the city. For help they consulted a Lonely Planet guidebook. At the top of the list was the Central Bank. Number two was the National Museum. “Symbolic importance,” Erdmann explained.

The rest were ministries, with the Ministry of Oil last. On March 26, the list went to the military at Camp Doha, an hour away near the Iraq border. Franks had put ORHA under the operational control of his war-fighting commanders on the ground there, rather than taking direct responsibility for the postwar himself, with the higher authority of Centcom. “I don't want to get into the business of managing bus schedules,” Franks told Garner.

The distance between ORHA and Camp Doha replicated in Kuwait during the war the lack of joint planning for Phase IV between the Pentagon and Centcom during the prewar—even as the Third Infantry Division and First Marine Expeditionary Force were chewing up hundreds of miles of desert on their way to the Iraqi capital, leaving in their path liberated but unsecured territory. The military-police and civil-affairs units were far behind and extremely thin on the ground. On the second day of the war, a young contractor with USAID named Albert Cevallos was standing with a group of civil-affairs officers at the Iraq-Kuwait border, when one of the officers turned to him and asked, “Albert, what's the plan for policing?”

Cevallos's job was in the field of human rights. “I thought you knew the plan,” he said.

“No, we thought you knew.”

“Haven't you talked to ORHA?”

“No, no one talked to us.”

Cevallos wanted to run away. He later remembered the incident as “a Laurel and Hardy routine. What happened to the plans? This is like the million-dollar question that I can't figure out. There was planning—I know there was. I saw it, I took part in it. It was a failure either to accept those plans or to communicate it down to where it mattered, on the ground.”

A few weeks later, as Baghdad fell and intense looting got under way, Erdmann and the others went to Camp Doha to find out what had happened to their list of sites. They met with a young British lieutenant colonel, sitting on a stool in desert camouflage, who said, “Well, you know, I just yesterday became aware of this big stack of stuff that you ORHA guys had done.” The officer held his hand up a few inches from his face. “You must understand. We've been focused like
this
on fighting the war. Now we can begin looking at what you sent.” The list had fallen somewhere into the bureaucratic gap between ORHA and the military, and now it was too late—Erdmann was watching the sites being looted and burned on television. “This is, in a microcosm, how the gears, or the communication network, the rhythms, were just not right,” he said. “And I don't know if it's because we weren't taken seriously.”

In Washington, a government official took his concerns about the looting over to the Pentagon. He told Feith's deputy, William Luti, that the administration needed to learn the Arabic for curfew:
mamnua altajawwul,
“it is forbidden to go out.” Luti didn't seem alarmed; the generals in the field knew what they were doing, he said.

*   *   *

THE FALL
of the statue of Saddam in Baghdad's Firdos Square on April 9 was received by many Americans as the sudden and dramatic end of a lightning war. The liberation of Iraq had come faster, with fewer casualties and less destruction, than anyone, even the optimists, had imagined possible. None of the disasters that ORHA had prepared for—refugees, chemical weapons, burning oil fields, massive civilian casualties—came to pass, thanks in part to the astonishing speed of the invasion and of the regime's collapse. In many cities, Iraqis celebrated in the streets and embraced American soldiers. Some even threw the flowers that Kanan Makiya had predicted.

There was celebration in Washington, too—an outburst of triumphalism and gloating that was as much partisan as patriotic and looked not at all like the simple joyful kiss of a sailor and a nurse in Times Square on VJ Day. On April 13, Dick and Lynne Cheney threw a dinner party at the vice president's residence with their friends Ken and Carol Adelman, Paul Wolfowitz, and Scooter Libby. Adelman had predicted in print that Iraq would be a “cakewalk,” and the small group toasted the president and savored the victory over the naysayers (the press, Brent Scowcroft, above all Colin Powell) as much as over the Baathist regime. The leading neoconservative publication,
The Weekly Standard,
declared that the weakness of the Clinton years was over and the world had been made new. “The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably,” wrote the editor of the
Standard,
William Kristol. “But these are only two battles.” And his colleague David Brooks, quoting Orwell, warned, “Now that the war in Iraq is over, we'll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts.” Brooks meant the Arabs, the Europeans, and the Bush haters, none of them able to accept the American liberation of a Muslim country. Neither writer noticed, let alone faced, the unpleasant facts unfolding on the ground in Iraq even as they declared victory in Washington. From the Pentagon, flush with the success of his war plan, Rumsfeld regarded the rising chaos in Baghdad with equanimity. “Stuff happens,” the official in charge of postwar Iraq said, “and it's untidy, and freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”

Rumsfeld's words, which soon became notorious, implied a whole political philosophy. The defense secretary looked upon anarchy and saw the early stages of democracy. In his view and that of others in the administration, but above all the president, freedom was the absence of constraint. Freedom existed in divinely endowed human nature, not in man-made institutions and laws. Remove a thirty-five-year-old tyranny and democracy will grow in its place, because people everywhere want to be free. There was no contingency for psychological demolition. What had been left out of the planning were the Iraqis themselves.

For Rumsfeld, this view was a matter of convenience more than anything else, since nothing in his career suggested that he had given the subject any thought. For others, including those working under him at the Pentagon, it was something like an article of faith, and when their critics used the word “theology”—as they often did—to describe the neoconservative approach to spreading democracy in the region, they weren't completely wrong. This faith defied both history and the live evidence on CNN. It led directly to the gutting and burning of all the key institutions of the Iraqi state.

General Franks's innovative strategy used enough troops to take the country but nowhere near enough to secure it. Even so, a concerted effort could have stopped the most egregious looters and warned off others with a show of force. It never happened. In vain, employees of the museum begged the leader of a nearby tank platoon to park one tank at the museum entrance and scare off the pillagers who were making free with the country's antiquities. Soldiers without orders to intervene stood by while men and boys hauled computers, copiers, desks, staplers, carpets, and eventually wiring and pipes out of the ministries and other government buildings and took them away in trucks, cars, donkey carts, rickshaws, and on their own backs. In the war log of an infantry captain, the days leading up to the fall of Baghdad are crowded with incident. But immediately after April 9, the entries turn brief to the point of minimalism: “Nothing significant to report, stayed at airport all day doing maintenance and recovery operations.” It was as if the sole objective had been the fall of the city. An administration official who had served in Vietnam used the phrase “commanders' intent”—the mind-set instilled down the chain to soldiers on the ground: “All of a sudden they got there—and there was no intent. There were no rules of engagement. Everything was for the battle. And commanders sat around and didn't do anything about it.” Meanwhile, the destruction being visited upon the city and its leading institutions by Baghdadis themselves was far outstripping the damage from bombing and firefights. Afterward, some Iraqis insisted that they had seen soldiers not just permitting but encouraging and helping looters, as if the mayhem were joyous celebration of the fall of the regime. This was the secretary of defense's view. Only the Ministry of Oil was protected.

Martial law was not declared; a curfew was not immediately imposed. No one told Iraqis to stay at home or to go to work. Later, Douglas Feith would insist to me that, technically, the American military asserted its authority early on. “When the Saddam government fell, it was going to be necessary to issue a first proclamation,” Feith said. “But there had been an Iraqi history that whenever there was a coup, somebody issued Proclamation No. 1. So we decided that we didn't want that, which is why it was renamed ‘Freedom Message.'” Feith pointed out that the Freedom Message even announced the creation of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which most people assume began with the arrival of Paul Bremer in May. But this was just the kind of lawyerly cleverness that had once led Tommy Franks to conclude that Feith was “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.” If anyone in Iraq actually received a copy and read the statement issued on April 16 from Centcom in Qatar by the man who was in charge—General Franks himself—it had no discernible effect in the streets of Baghdad. The implications weren't lost on Iraqis, including potential adversaries. “We're incompetent, as far as they're concerned,” said Noah Feldman, the New York University law professor who went to Baghdad as a constitutional adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority. “The key to it all was the looting. That was when it was clear that there was no order. There's an Arab proverb: Better forty years of dictatorship than one day of anarchy.” He added, “That also told them they could fight against us and we were not a serious force.”

When Saddam suddenly ordered the release of tens of thousands of prisoners from Abu Ghraib and other jails in October 2002, the surge of inmates from within the walls and family members from without overwhelmed prison guards and crushed a number of people to death at the very moment of freedom. Reporters who ventured into the bowels of the prison were struck by the appalling smells of long human confinement. Six months later, when the American invasion finally broke the seal on Saddam's Iraq, the surge was just as intense, and the smell of decades of repression just as pungent. Seeing that no one would stop them, more and more Iraqis made mistakes and did bad things, until the civil disorder turned into rampant violence, much of it perpetrated by criminal gangs of those same freed prisoners: carjackings, kidnappings, rapes, murders, score settling of all kinds, and, soon enough, sporadic attacks on American troops. Iraqis still refer to the spoils of looting by the name Saddam gave to this war—
al-hawasim,
the decisive one.

Eventually, CPA officials did a rough calculation of the economic cost of the looting in those early weeks. The figure they came up with was $12 billion, canceling out the projected revenues of Iraq for the first year after the war. The gutted buildings, the lost equipment, the destroyed records, the damaged infrastructure, would continue to haunt almost every aspect of the reconstruction. But the physical damage was less catastrophic than those effects which couldn't be quantified. Iraqis' first experience of freedom was chaos and violence; the arrival of the Americans brought an end to the certainty of political terror and at the same time unleashed new, less certain fears.

*   *   *

THE DISORDER
kept Garner and ORHA stuck in Kuwait for two weeks. Garner wasn't able to secure Franks's clearance to fly to Baghdad until April 21; most of the others drove up on April 23 in a convoy of several hundred Chevy Suburbans, past blown-out tanks, past heaps of empty MRE bags, past crowds of Iraqis, some waving, some giving unfriendly stares, some busy looting, straight into the rush-hour traffic of southern Baghdad. They moved into the vast Republican Palace on the west bank of the Tigris because it was in better shape after the fighting than any other suitable government building—though even the palace at first lacked water, electricity, working phones, and even window glass. Everything was coated in half an inch of fine yellow silt, and across the floors were footprints of the soldiers who had taken the palace two weeks before. There was rotten meat in the kitchen, and half the toilets were clogged with human waste. Next to the parking lot, American firepower had turned Iraqi army foxholes into fifty-eight shallow graves. One of Drew Erdmann's first ideas was to install window screens to keep out the bugs.

The scale of the looting in Baghdad left Garner stunned. In Kurdistan in 1991, the looting had been relatively light (though in the south it had been extensive and violent). But after spending just twenty-four hours in Baghdad, Garner flew north to Kurdish territory, where he knew the people and the terrain, and was acclaimed as a hero. He was still fighting the last war. He met with the two Kurdish leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, to discuss the political handoff: The Kurds and the other opposition leaders who had been in exile—including Chalabi—would form a leadership group in Baghdad, along with a few “internals,” Iraqis from inside the country. The exiles had been trying to agree on a ruling structure ever since the London conference. “And what I assumed at the time, rightly or wrongly, was this was just an extension of those talks and all the work that had gone on,” Garner told me when I visited his business offices near the Pentagon in the fall of 2003. Once there were Iraqi faces on the American presence, the Americans could slough off responsibility without giving up power. Gordon Rudd, the military historian, called Garner “a world-class informal leader,” and Garner described his moves in Iraq as if the political component had been left to his intuition. I asked if these were his instructions from the Pentagon. “I never got a call from anybody saying, ‘Don't do that,'” Garner said. “You follow me?”