The Assassins' Gate (29 page)

The failure of the first weeks, and the replacement of Garner with Bremer, produced a new vision of the American role in Iraq. The Pentagon had prevented a serious strategic plan from ever being written. Now, the CPA under Bremer began to plan in earnest, essentially forcing the White House and Pentagon to go along with initiatives taken in Baghdad. The CPA was going to fill in all the blanks left empty back in Washington by the war's visionaries who had imagined that freedom and democracy would appear spontaneously in Iraq. The new plans included goals and timetables for the training of Iraqi security forces, the writing of a constitution, the creation of new government structures, economic reform, legal reform, education reform: nothing short of an overhaul of Iraqi society from top to bottom, culminating in the return of sovereignty at an indeterminate date.

Brad Swanson, an investment banker who arrived in Baghdad some months later to work in the CPA on economic development, described the reversal this way: “First there was the arrogance phase, and then there was the hubris phase. The arrogance phase was going in undermanned, underplanned, underresourced, skim off the top layer of leadership, take control of a functioning state, and be out by six weeks and get the oil funds to pay for it. We all know for a variety of reasons that didn't work. So then you switch over to the hubris phase: We've been slapped in the face, this is really much more serious than we thought, much more long-term, much more dangerous, much more costly. Therefore we'll attack it with everything we have, we'll throw the many billion dollars at it, and to make Iraq safe for the future we have to do a root-and-branch transformation of the country in our own image.” The two approaches seemed like opposite extremes, Swanson added, but they had this in common: “They're very conceptual, ideological. They're not pragmatic responses to a detailed understanding of facts on the ground.”

With such an ambitious undertaking, the CPA faced, and in some ways didn't face, a paradox that was unavoidable. The Americans were trying to rebuild Iraq in a way that allowed Iraqis, for the first time in their history, to take control of their own destiny. But if the power, the money, the guns, and the ideas remained with the Americans, how would all the plans ever lead to Iraqi control?

On the second floor of the palace, where the senior advisers to the ministries had their offices, Drew Erdmann was trying to negotiate the paradox every day, and the effort was wearing him down. People he hardly knew were telling him, “You look beat.” His temper was worse than it had ever been in his life.

“The thing that I am constantly struggling against,” he said, “and this is the American part of you, whether it's a national attribute I don't know—you just want to get things done. But of course you can't just keep doing that, you can't just keep doing it for these people. And you've got to let them fail sometimes. And you know it's going to happen.” He gave me an example: At a recent meeting on budgets, one university president had requested a doubling of his faculty over the next six months. “In a situation where the country just went through this. What do you think? I mean, why even … you know, come on. It defies … what planet are these people on? It reaches the level of literally defying common sense. It doesn't pass anyone's laugh test anywhere in the world. But then you have to work through it.” With so many highly educated and technically skilled people in Iraq, Erdmann had concluded that the administrative incompetence must be a product of “the absolutely pernicious effects of living in this police state that has beaten people down so much.”

Erdmann decided from the start to put as much authority as possible in Iraqi hands. In May, after he convinced all the university presidents appointed under Saddam to resign, Erdmann announced that their replacements would be chosen in open elections by the faculties. He came to this decision only after intense debate within the CPA, his team of mostly Iraqis, and himself. These would be among the very first votes in Iraq, and some in Washington and Baghdad feared that Baathists or religious extremists might be able to hijack any elections. But Erdmann concluded that entrusting the Iraqi faculties themselves, though not without risk, was the best option available. With communications nearly impossible in large parts of the country, the CPA had little idea who the best candidates might be. That was the practical reason. The principled reason was to get Iraqis involved quickly, to give them the feeling that a new era had indeed begun. If the newly arrived administrator vetoed the idea, Erdmann had made up his mind that he would have to resign, since his credibility with the Iraqi educators would be gone at the start. But with Bremer's backing, the votes went forward in mid-May.

On May 17, seven hundred faculty members packed the sweltering theater of Baghdad University, along with al-Jazeera, CNN, and other media. Sweating in his poplin suit, Erdmann stood up to make a few opening remarks. “It's time to mark a fundamental change and a liberation of the academic establishment from the old order,” he said. “And part of that is new leadership. There was a regime change, and this is a tremendous opportunity to bring in a new era.” Then he stepped aside, to let the Iraqis run the process of nominating, voting, and counting ballots. The winner was a biochemist, Dr. Sami Mudhafar, respected for his integrity under Saddam.

At the College of Dentistry, students insisted on attending the vote. Erdmann resisted—all sorts of groups wanted to pack the halls and influence the outcome—and then agreed to bring one student in as his guest. The election was by secret ballot, and as the votes for the two front-running candidates were tallied on the blackboard of the stuffy lecture room, the student at Erdmann's side began to cry. He had never seen anything like it. “This is an answer to my prayers,” he said. “We prayed for this, to see this.”

Erdmann had gambled, and the gamble paid off. There was a safety net—if a college made a selection the CPA deeply disapproved, the nominee would have been struck down—but allowing a free choice and then interfering might well have been worse than never going down the road at all (this happened early in the occupation, when Marine commanders in Najaf organized an election for provincial government, only to have the CPA in Baghdad call it off at the last minute, prompting the outraged people of Najaf to question the Americans' true commitment to democracy). The trade-off between control and legitimacy was the recurring dilemma of every CPA decision, and there were dozens made every day by fallible human beings, and each one was going to push the project in one direction or another. Iraq was still fluid, Erdmann said, still plastic and malleable, but it would harden soon. The psychological demands of the occupation were daunting. “It comes down to judgment,” he said. “Some people can navigate it, some people can't. Some people can make a mistake and recalibrate, others can't. On both sides. So much of this is up to the wisdom of people, their prudence, their judgment.”

*   *   *

THE LEISURE READING
of Americans in Iraq tended toward unhappy analogies—guerrilla wars and botched peaces. Colonel William Grimsley, an infantry brigade commander, was reading
A Savage War of Peace,
Alistair Home's study of the French-Algerian conflict: “Lots of similarities to this place.” In the tent of Jordan Becker, a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant up in Kirkuk, there was a shelf with several books on Kurdish and Iraqi history, a book about Algeria's recent civil war, and
Four Hours in My Lai.
Drew Erdmann was bogged down in David Fromkin's
A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East,
as well as John Maynard Keynes's account of the 1919 Paris peace conference. No one at the CPA had much time to read, though, or to think.

On the first floor of the palace, off the rotunda, past the metal detector and the bodyguards, Paul Bremer's long, high-ceilinged office was lined with bookshelves that were nearly bare when I visited. Rudolph Giuliani's
Leadership
stood on one shelf, and a book about the management of financial crises on another, near a box of raisin bran. On Bremer's desk, next to a wood carving that read “Success Has a Thousand Fathers,” were several marked-up reports about postwar Iraq, and on the coffee table lay a pile of maps: Iraq's power grid, administrative districts, railroad lines. At sixty-one, Bremer had the thick hair, boyish eyes, and willful jaw of a Kennedy. Like his reading, he came across as operational, a disciplined man with an even temperature.

He had served as a State Department counterterrorism official and ambassador to Holland, then became the managing director of Henry Kissinger's consulting firm. He was also “a bedrock Republican,” Bremer told me, with strongly conservative values. This background made for an interesting mix that eluded the simple Washington categories of neoconservatives and realists, Defense and State. He was acceptable to both departments, but he would report to the secretary of defense, and at the start he would carry out policies that had originated in the Pentagon. Bremer was driven and hard charging, with no shortage of self-confidence. Though he admitted privately before leaving for Baghdad that he had questions about the wisdom of the war, he would approach the running of Iraq like a demanding corporate executive, insisting on fast and quantifiable results from his staff, hating surprises and setbacks, imagining that he could prevail over adversity on the strength of his character. Those who worked for him described Bremer as a ferocious boss—one of them spoke of being “Bremerized” in meetings—and they tried hard to make him happy even when the facts didn't warrant it.

He arrived on May 12 knowing almost nothing about Iraq, and before he had been in Baghdad four days Bremer made three momentous decisions: He dissolved the Iraqi army, he fired high-ranking Baathists from the civil service, and he stopped the formation of an interim government. A more cautious viceroy would have gauged the lay of the land and spoken with a range of Iraqis before taking such far-reaching steps. Bremer arrived amid general collapse, and his first moves left no doubt that he was now in charge. But his decisions changed or reversed the hastily drawn policies approved by the president a week before the war, as well as the ones that Jay Garner had been improvising on the ground. When Garner objected to the depth of debaathification, Bremer refused to amend the policy. “Look, I have my instructions,” he said. The decisions on the Baath Party and the army reflected views held by the administration's neoconservatives (as well as Chalabi), while the indefinite postponement of an interim government was anathema to them. So the CPA was launched with a hodgepodge of improvised moves that reflected no one agency's strategy, no considered strategy at all other than a belated assertion of American control. People who knew him said that Bremer would never have accepted this nearly impossible job if he hadn't secured wide latitude to carry it out as he saw fit. In this, as in everything else, he was the opposite of his predecessor.

Jay Garner, who had surrendered the reins to Bremer, later told me that he woke up on the morning of Saturday, May 17, to find “three or four hundred thousand enemies and no Iraqi face on the government.”

Garner's approach had been to slice off as little of the old regime as possible, removing a handful of senior Baathists at the top and trying to work with the rest. The idea, Barbara Bodine said, was to accept anyone who was competent and not tainted by crime or corruption. This had led to some embarrassments, as when a Baathist chosen to run the Ministry of Health had to be removed when doctors staged protests and the minister refused to renounce the party. But the Americans were treading with care, until Bremer's Debaathification Order on May 16 barred from government service the entire top four layers of the party, down to
firqa
or divisional level, meaning those in charge of up to fifty lower-ranking members—regardless of whether they were implicated in actual crimes. At least thirty-five thousand mostly Sunni employees of the bureaucracy, including thousands of schoolteachers and midlevel functionaries, lost their jobs overnight. And American officials who had begun establishing relations with Iraqis in the ministries and other offices were suddenly partnerless. The order allowed Iraqis to appeal and, in principle, regain their jobs, but the CPA was unequipped to hear the cases fast enough to prevent thousands of people from hanging in limbo with no position or pay.

“Bremer likes to say, and I think he's right, that it was the most popular decision he ever made,” one of Bremer's top advisers told me. “But the people it was popular with were already on our side. I think that base was pretty solid. If you want to come in and restore things, you want to come in with malice toward none and charity toward all—you want to take a Lincolnian approach. You don't want to take a carpet-bagger approach. People in Falluja told me, ‘We were happy when you threw out Saddam. It's what you did after you threw out Saddam that's pissed us off.' Our whole approach was wrong.”

The alternative would have been to try those Baathists accused of crimes, vet out the corrupt and incompetent on a case-by-case basis, retain the rest, and organize a nationwide truth-and-reconciliation commission along the lines of the South African experience. But debaathification had been a consistent theme of the Iraqi exile groups and their allies in the Pentagon. The obvious precedent was denazification in Germany. Yet not even the Report on the Transition to Democracy in Iraq suggested anything as deep as Bremer's order; Kanan Makiya had primarily focused on the need to cleanse Iraqi society of Baathist ideology, which would be a project of many years. Douglas Feith told me that the policy of cutting down four levels in the party hierarchy originated in the Pentagon. Some observers also saw the hand of Ahmad Chalabi, who soon gained control of the Debaathification Commission and used it to squeeze his political enemies.