The Assassins' Gate (22 page)

But Chalabi short-circuited the plan. According to a prominent Iraqi politician who was close to the negotiations, the INC chairman, along with the late Shiite leader Mohamed Baqr al-Hakim, who was killed in an August 2003 car bombing outside the holy shrine in Najaf, resisted expanding their ranks beyond the original circle. This would have been closer to the State Department's idea of a broad-based interim government. “If the group of five became twenty-five or became fifty, their influence will diminish. They wanted basically to control who will be there,” the politician said. “The exiles—they made a big mistake, thinking that because they have the Americans on their side, they thought that they can ride an American tank into Baghdad, they can gain legitimacy. It just doesn't work that way. It would have been a colossal mistake to push them on the Iraqi people. They would have been immediately identified as nothing but surrogates of the United States.”

The Pentagon was still trying. Without informing the White House or military commanders, it had flown Chalabi and seven hundred followers—with American uniforms and weapons—from northern Iraq down to the desert outside Nasiriya. The idea was to give Chalabi a head start in the race to power. He and his followers found their way to Baghdad, installed themselves at the exclusive Hunting Club in upscale Mansour (where Chalabi was soon joined by Harold Rhode), and began commandeering choice property. One of Uday Hussein's Ferraris ended up parked outside the house occupied by Chalabi's good-looking young aide, Nabil al-Musawi. After things went wrong in Iraq, Chalabi, Makiya, and their allies in the administration would blame the failure to stop the looting and bring order to Baghdad on the State Department, which, they charged, had held up the plans to train six thousand Iraqi exiles. This has far more merit as an alibi than an argument. The Iraqi army and police had vanished. “The state disappeared,” Erdmann said. “Either the people melted away or the institutions were melted down by them.” This was exactly what the INC had advised would not happen, and the resulting security vacuum was far too vast for a few thousand half-trained Iraqi exiles, many of them strangers to their own country of years or decades, to fill. Those who had been flown in with Chalabi did more to join the looting than to stop it. Gordon Rudd warned Garner that the Free Iraqi Forces were beginning to look like a “warlord group.” Garner, whose opinion of Chalabi was sinking rapidly, said, “Gordon, I don't like that word.” The exiles' countrymen did not receive them as the natural rulers of free Iraq. The neoconservative answer to every hard question about postwar Iraq, the ingenious escape clause drawn up at the American Enterprise Institute,
The Wall Street Journal,
and the Office of Special Plans, fell apart in Baghdad while the toasts were still being drunk in Washington.

One afternoon, Barbara Bodine, who was nominally in charge of Baghdad, drove through the wrecked city with Lieutenant General Dave McKiernan, commander of ground forces in Iraq, past a checkpoint manned by Chalabi's militia, to a house in a well-off neighborhood. The CIA, trying to head off the Pentagon's plan for an imminent handoff of power to the exiles, had organized a meeting for Bodine and McKiernan with fifteen or twenty local businessmen, academics, and judges. One by one, the Baghdadis told their stories of lives lived inside Iraq under Saddam. Then one of them came to the point: “Would you Americans please impose martial law? There is anarchy out there. We don't want authoritarianism, but we need authority.” As if to underscore the urgency of the plea, while the meeting was going on, with the escort of the leading American civilian and military authorities in Baghdad parked outside, several of Chalabi's militiamen came over and carjacked the host's car, with the driver inside.

The troops standing around while Baghdad was sacked were under McKiernan's command. He had instructed his senior officers that war fighting should not be distracted by postwar planning, and had amended the instruction only on April 19. But the incident in Baghdad finally brought home to McKiernan the gravity of the situation. The next day, he wrote a brief order declaring the coalition to be the “military authority” in Iraq. Bodine relayed the order to the State Department and was stunned to learn that it was the first assertion of legal responsibility under the Geneva Conventions. The administration's rhetoric of liberation had become a cover for abdicating its obligations to the Iraqis and was creating conditions that were bound to threaten the troops themselves. But McKiernan's order was never backed up by Rumsfeld in Washington or by Franks in Qatar. It became one of the noble failures of those irretrievable early days.

General Franks and his commanders wanted to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible. Rumsfeld suspended the deployment of the First Cavalry Division into Iraq and gave an order for accelerated withdrawal of troops in mid-April. As late as early May the Pentagon was anticipating a force level below thirty thousand in country by the end of summer, on the assumption that countries that had sat out the war would begin contributing troops. Everything was going to be turned over to ORHA—a skeletal, disorganized, impecunious crew of fewer than two hundred unarmed civilians wandering around in the dust and dark of the Republican Palace searching for colleagues because they didn't have phones to call one another. ORHA was going to get Rumsfeld and Franks out of Iraq. The thought in Washington and Qatar was: Over to you, Jay. The abysmal coordination now took on the most concrete and disabling forms. There were never enough military escorts to provide security so that ORHA members could leave the palace and go out into the city in search of Iraqis with whom they could work. Though telephone service was down all over the country, the military officer in charge of communications saw no reason why Iraqi university presidents should be given satellite phones. There were nowhere near enough translators to go around. Timothy Carney, a career foreign-service officer who was called out of retirement by Wolfowitz to work in Baghdad, said that the military simply didn't understand or care what ORHA was supposed to do. “It was as if these guys didn't have a clue what Jay Garner was on about. There was no priority given to the essential aspects of the mission.”

With hardly any solid information, Erdmann and the others in civil administration tried to find the highest-ranking officials from the old regime still left standing—if only to fire them. A few stalwart Iraqis would show up at work, hoping that someone from ORHA would stop by. The continued functioning of the state depended almost on random meetings around the city—where firefights were not uncommon—between Iraqi bureaucrats and newly arrived foreigners. Erdmann recalled these encounters as something out of a
Star Trek
episode. “Welcome. Take me to your leader,” the Iraqis would say. “I represent the Grand Galactic Federation. The Federation of Planets. We are not implementing the prime directive here.” “Who are you?” the Americans would call out, and the translator would repeat it (Erdmann cupped his hands around his mouth to make a ghostly echo):
“Who are you?”
“And what is your position?” The Iraqis would announce their position, and the Americans would look at one another. “What the hell office is that?”

Back in Washington, Mitchell Daniels, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and his assistant Robin Cleveland were determined to keep ORHA on a lean diet so that the administration's rosy financial predictions for Iraqi reconstruction could be kept. As a result, the ministerial teams in Baghdad initially had just twenty-five thousand dollars to resurrect the devastated Iraqi administration. Even this wasn't cash—the funds required grant applications that took several weeks for approval. Erdmann longed for the fistfuls of dollars with which Special Forces in Afghanistan had jump-started projects and won cooperation in the crucial early days, before that window shut. “Postconflict reconstruction, you need to have the ability to deliver the resources right away,” he said. “People in a desperate situation need help. Boy, that's a blindingly obvious insight. The next thing is that if you're not giving them help, they're going to go somewhere else.”

*   *   *

GARNER RETURNED
from Kurdistan still trying to carry out the Pentagon plan. On April 28, he stood up in his open-neck polo shirt before a meeting of 350 Iraqis at the Baghdad Convention Center, which was littered with broken glass and debris. There was no agenda. Kanan Makiya, back in the city of his birth for the first time in thirty-five years, read a paper on the need for a liberal constitution to protect individual rights. When he finished, a tribal sheikh stood up and said, “I have no running water, no electricity, no security—and you are talking about a constitution?” Another sheikh asked Garner, “Who's in charge of our politics?”

“You're in charge,” Garner answered. There was an audible gasp in the room. Noah Feldman, the constitutional adviser, realized later, “They were losing faith in us by the second.” Iraqis, for whom any sign of individual initiative could have been fatal under Saddam, were waiting to be told what would come next, and no one told them. An old man in a Shiite neighborhood approached Feldman and asked who was running Iraq. No one seemed to know.

But the disturbing news was beginning to filter back to Washington. On May 6, President Bush announced that the former diplomat and counterterrorism expert L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer III would replace Jay Garner in Baghdad. (Rumsfeld had informed a surprised and hurt Garner, on April 24, that he was a lame duck.) The Pentagon would always maintain that the changeover had been planned from the beginning. But the original idea had been for a civilian to come later on and with a lower profile, as a kind of super ambassador to what would be the interim government. As it was, Bremer told me, “I had ten days to get ready to come here.” As a hard-liner he was acceptable to Rumsfeld, and his selection represented a brief truce in the war between Defense and State. Though it marked a sudden turn toward a more rational policy, no one in the administration has ever explained the decision that led to Garner's hasty departure. Barbara Bodine, who was fired by Rumsfeld just before Bremer's arrival, concluded that there was only one person in the world with the knowledge, access, and influence to point out to Bush that Iraq was hemorrhaging and it needed to be stopped: Tony Blair.

On May 10, Garner flew to Qatar to brief Bremer. When Garner mentioned that there would be a meeting with the Iraqi leadership group in several days, Bremer looked at his predecessor and said, “That probably isn't going to happen.” Garner found Bremer cold, if hardworking, and imagined that Bremer considered him to be out of his depth, the man who had screwed things up in Iraq. The period of their overlap in Baghdad promised to be excruciating, and Garner was determined to keep it as short as possible.

On May 12, Bremer arrived in Baghdad wearing a dark suit. He was referred to as “Ambassador Bremer.” Three weeks later, Jay Garner, whose fishing buddies had begun to grumble that they'd been set up by the neoconservatives back in Washington, quietly went home. He was taken by Rumsfeld to the White House for a farewell conversation with the president. Garner had written up a two-page memo for Bush and Rumsfeld, dated May 27, that portrayed Iraq as a country well on the road to stability and just a few weeks away from full reconstruction. This good news made it all the easier for Bush to thank Garner graciously for the work he had done. Garner, in turn, assured the president that he had chosen a wonderful successor in Bremer. “I didn't choose him,” Bush said. “Rumsfeld chose him.” This was news to Garner, whom Rumsfeld had once called his man in Iraq.

The conversation lasted forty-five minutes, with Cheney and Rice sitting in for the second half, and yet the president did not take the chance to ask Garner what it was really like in Iraq, to find out what problems lay ahead in the weeks and months to come. When Garner had come back from northern Iraq in 1991, after Operation Provide Comfort, he had answered questions for four or five days. This time, no one—neither Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, nor Rice—seemed to give a damn what he had to say.

“You want to do Iran for the next one?” the president joshed as the meeting came to an end.

“No, sir, me and the boys are holding out for Cuba.”

Bush laughed and promised Garner and the boys Cuba. And that was it: Garner shook hands with the president, then with the vice president, who had said nothing the whole time, and he caught Cheney's wicked little smile on his way out. Garner left with the impression that Bush knew only what Cheney let into his office. It was early June 2003, and anyone listening to the conversation between the officials who had greatest responsibility for Iraq could only conclude that Operation Iraqi Freedom was a triumph.

In Baghdad, ORHA was dissolved into the Coalition Provisional Authority, and Bremer, with the status of a presidential envoy, the legal imprimatur of a UN Security Council resolution, and the command authority that Garner never had, let it be known that he was in control. The Iraqi army was promptly abolished, all members of the top four levels of the Baath Party were expelled from government service, Chalabi's militia was disarmed, and the formation of an interim government was stopped cold. There was even talk of shooting looters, though it didn't happen. The Pentagon extended indefinitely the deployment of battle-weary divisions. What had been conceived as a swift liberation became a prolonged occupation.

*   *   *

LOOKING BACK
, Drew Erdmann was impatient with any facile condemnation of the planning. Citing his hero Marc Bloch, he insisted on the actual circumstances in which the planners had to work. When I mentioned a four-hundred-page manual that the U.S. military produced for the occupation of Germany, he shot back that, given the available lead time, a fairer comparison with Iraq would be the wartime occupation of French North Africa, which was so beset with problems that it nearly cost General Eisenhower his job. In the case of Iraq, any planning at all was a delicate matter: The administration had to prepare for the effects of a war it was still claiming it wanted to avoid. “How much diplomacy would there have been at the UN if people had said, ‘The president is pulling people out of the Departments of Agriculture and Commerce to take over the whole Iraqi state'? That's the political logic that works against advance planning.”