The Assassins' Gate (33 page)

Erdmann said, “I hope we'll both be able to look back in a few years and say we did good work.”

“Don't forget us there, at your new position.”

I saw Erdmann again in September, back in Washington. He was wearing a blue business suit and a White House pass draped around his neck. Iraq was not his portfolio, but he was soon drawn back to working on it again almost full-time. Erdmann found that no one, in or out of government, really understood what it was like in Iraq. The gap between headquarters and the field was profound. “I sound like, ‘It's Khe Sanh, damn it! Charlie's inside the wire!'” he said, laughing grimly and adopting a Dennis Hopper tremor.
“‘You don't understand, man!'”
He said that he was still unable to think as a historian. He joked that he hoped never to write a book on Iraq called
Strange Defeat.
But it made no sense to claim any certainty about how Iraq would emerge from the ordeal. “I'm very cautious about dealing with anyone talking about Iraq who's absolutely sure one way or the other.”

*   *   *

BY LATE AUGUST
, Paul Bremer was ready to lay out an ambitious vision for the CPA in Iraq. It would require spending tens of billions of dollars, which the American public and Congress had no idea they would be asked to pay. And it would mean a seven-step political process—writing a constitution and organizing several stages of national elections, before turning sovereignty back to Iraqis—that might last another year or more. America finally had a plan for Iraq.

A new entity called the Governing Council had been established in July, composed of twenty-five Iraqis and dominated by former exiles, but its power was unclear, its visibility poor, and ordinary Iraqis felt little connection to it. To create the Governing Council, Bremer had relied on the help of the United Nations mission in Baghdad, led by the secretary general's special representative. Sergio Vieira de Mello, a career UN diplomat from Brazil, had reluctantly left his new job as high commissioner for human rights in Geneva to take a temporary post in Iraq whose authority and purpose were worryingly vague. The Bush administration decided soon after the fall of Baghdad that, whatever its rhetoric about a “vital” role for the UN, the country that had waged the war should control the postwar and enjoy its benefits. No incentives were offered to countries that had opposed the war to involve their own troops and money in the reconstruction. Bremer saw no reason for internationalizing Iraq as time went on, and whenever a colleague—usually British—brought up the UN at a meeting, Bremer would roll his eyes as if the subject were a waste of time. The occupation would remain an American affair, and its legitimacy would depend on America's legitimacy.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British UN ambassador who came to Baghdad in September as Tony Blair's envoy, told me, “The UN wouldn't have begun to be capable of keeping the lid on this. A, they were unpopular before it began. B, they don't produce that kind of leadership. Third, you can't have this kind of exercise being run by committee like the Security Council. I've been on it for five years—I know where the capability of the UN runs out, and so does Kofi Annan. He's never looked to be in charge of this theater.” Between UN control and American control, there was always a third option: the early formation of an interim Iraqi government, not by the Pentagon with its handpicked favorites, but by a national conference under international supervision, with Iraq's many constituencies, including the Sunnis, represented. Bremer never seemed to consider it; he was moving ahead resolutely with his own plan.

But the small UN team in Baghdad brought certain virtues that the CPA lacked. One of them was experience in the nation-building efforts of the nineties that the Bush administration considered irrelevant and worse than useless for Iraq. Another was a corps of Arab officials who knew the region's politics. The team also had an ability to reach out and listen to a broader array of Iraqis than the Americans seemed able to. UN officials traveled to the disaffected Sunni provinces, where violence against the occupation was beginning to grow serious, and heard the complaints of Sunni Arabs who felt marginalized by the dissolution of the army and debaathification. Vieira de Mello himself met personally in the holy city of Najaf with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's highest Shiite cleric, who commanded vast support among the country's religious majority. Sistani refused to receive CPA officials. He made it clear from the beginning that he wanted elections in Iraq as soon as possible, and he issued a fatwa insisting that the new constitution must be written by an elected, not an appointed, body. Banners repeating the words of his fatwa hung from walls throughout the Shiite districts of Baghdad. But when people who had audiences with Sistani at his rented house in an alleyway in Najaf tried to convey the importance of the fatwa to Bremer, the administrator brushed them off. “Sistani is saying different things in private,” he assured a visiting delegation. One ayatollah wasn't going to tell the occupation authority how to run the country. With the formation of the Governing Council, Bremer seemed to regard the UN's role as finished. By the time I met Vieira de Mello in August, he no longer knew exactly why he was still in Iraq. His mandate would expire soon, and he would return to Geneva.

Nobody searched me on my way into the Canal Hotel, the UN's three-story headquarters on a lonely stretch of highway east of downtown Baghdad: two guard booths, but no searches. Vieira de Mello's staff occupied a hall on the third floor, but before going to his corner suite I stopped to talk with his political adviser, a Lebanese professor and former culture minister named Ghassan Salamé. Vieira de Mello and Salamé had both been students in Paris during the events of May 1968, but they had met only a few months ago, when the career international civil servant from Brazil asked the political veteran from Beirut to help him in what seemed an impossible assignment. “He said he knew nothing of Iraq,” Salamé said, “and less of me.”

It was the last week of my first stay in Iraq, and a particularly bad one: continuing power failures, numerous ambushes, explosions at an oil pipeline in Kirkuk and a water main in Baghdad, fatal riots in Basra, a devastating car bomb at the Jordanian embassy. Though I didn't know it then, two days before my visit to the Canal Hotel, the UN had received intelligence reports of an imminent bomb attack.

In spite of all this, Salamé, who occupied the office of the former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, was thinking historically. “My deep feeling is that the problem is not in Baghdad, but in Washington,” he said. “Those who decided this war and did it and won it are not the type of Americans Arab countries have been used to in the past fifty years or so. This is not the Corps of Engineers, this is not the American pragmatist problem solver.” Salamé, a brusque man with thick black eyebrows, was fiddling with a strand of gold worry beads. “They are new Americans, unknown Americans, Americans with an ideology, with a master plan, with friends here, not open to everybody, with interests—somehow missionaries.”

I pointed out that these new Americans were not unlike some of the old Americans who had fought the ideological Cold War in Europe and Asia. Salamé seized on the comparison.

“When I listen to Mr. Wolfowitz, I feel that he mistakes Baghdad for Berlin in 1945. He doesn't know the place.” Salamé went over the main decisions taken by the CPA, singling out the plans for economic reform and a new investment code. “This country does not need at all the kind of sweeping privatization that these guys back in Washington are looking for. Either it's ideological, or they have an interest—they want to sell away Iraqi properties before there is a legitimate Iraqi authority.” Ideology, he said, accounted for debaathification and the dissolution of the army, which led to security problems and ongoing sabotage. If only the Americans in Baghdad could liberate themselves from “this ideological-industrial complex” in Washington, Salamé said, “they would be able to do a much better job.”

The special representative's office was at the end of the hall, overlooking an access road and a new security wall of hollow concrete blocks built to within a yard of the Canal Hotel. The section of wall just below the office was still unfinished—it reached only seven feet of an intended thirteen. Vieira de Mello had his jacket off, but as he sat down across his corner coffee table from me, the perfectly pressed suit pants and sky-blue shirt, the sleek gray hair, above all the emphatic film actor's voice, made him every bit the elegant diplomat of reputation. Vieira de Mello's UN career had taken him from Cambodia and Angola to overseeing the early reconstruction of Kosovo, and finally to playing the role of Paul Bremer in East Timor.

Upon arriving in early June, Vieira de Mello tried to help the Americans out of the trap in which they found themselves and to help the Iraqis at the same time. Bremer, having taken charge of a project in jeopardy, seemed unwilling to loosen his grip. An advisory council of Iraqis with no substantive powers was the only proposal on the table other than complete American control.

“My message from day one, to them and to Jerry in particular, was this won't fly. It didn't fly in my experiments elsewhere, and I'm sure it won't fly here in the circumstances.” Vieira de Mello told Bremer that the council needed to have executive powers. “You've got to give them responsibilities, even though you might be ultimately challenged. Iraqis are traumatized, Iraqis feel humiliated, rightly so. Iraqis feel, you know, orphaned—there is a huge power vacuum there. They might be happy that Saddam is gone forever, thank God, but they're not happy with this kind of situation.”

Vieira de Mello, Salamé, and others began to hold a series of conversations around the country with leading Iraqis. Gradually, the ranks of the original group of exiles and Kurds were expanded with Iraqis who had lived under Saddam. The negotiations with the CPA became more informal and took on their own momentum, as Iraqis began to influence the selection of names. Vieira de Mello spent hours persuading a representative from the main Shiite party that joining the council would not be political suicide. When Bremer objected to the appointment of a communist, Vieira de Mello argued that secular Iraqis who didn't speak for sectarian groups would be vital. Ghassan Salamé came up with the Arabic term
majlis al-hokum
in place of the CPA's toothless “advisory council,” and in early July the Governing Council became the first indigenous authority in Iraq since the fall of Saddam. “Over half would not have been there if Jerry could have had it his own way in the first half of June,” Vieira de Mello said. The council functioned, he admitted, “in a kind of cocoon.” Still, he thought that it would ultimately succeed. “I wouldn't be touring countries in the region trying to sell the Governing Council if I didn't believe what I'm saying, because the last thing I need and the organization needs is to be marketing the interests of the United States.” He hoped for a fast political timetable, with a constitutional referendum, national elections, and a return of sovereignty by early spring. Occupation would soon become untenable.

As the secretary general's representative in Iraq, Vieira de Mello had every reason to snipe at the Bush administration, which had spent much of the past year ridiculing, bullying, and snubbing the UN. In Iraq its profile was so low that Vieira de Mello admitted feeling irritated and embarrassed by “the total lack of authority.” But because he was pragmatic, and because he had once been in a role like Bremer's elsewhere, he refused to be churlish. “I don't want to be unfair to people who are up against an almost impossible task, having myself done similar things,” he said. “Criticism can be made in a constructive way, but simply to criticize without telling people how to do it better is pretty irresponsible, because you're sitting on the fence and nothing is easier than to criticize those who actually are confronted with the challenge.”

Bremer, Vieira de Mello suggested, had two sides: a more internationalist face, which perhaps came from his years in the diplomatic corps, and a more hard-line face that reflected the administration in Washington. Their relationship had recently been getting rockier, as what he called “the more neocon side of Jerry's personality” started emerging. But even when I threw what I thought was my fattest pitch and asked whether greater UN involvement early on might have prevented some of the CPA's mistakes, Vieira de Mello was modest.

“Yes, we could have helped, and we would have been only too happy to do so, also pointing to our own mistakes—because unless you admit why things went wrong and why it is you are now offering a lesson, you won't be heard. You see? And we could probably have done that. We still can. There's still time.”

He looked at his watch: In a few minutes he had a press conference downstairs.

Six days later, at four-thirty on the afternoon of August 19, the day I left Iraq, an orange flatbed truck moving at high speed down the access road pulled up along the new security wall under Vieira de Mello's corner office. American forces had blocked off the road with a five-ton truck, but because it was uncomfortable with a heavy military presence, the UN had asked that the obstacle be removed, along with an observation post on the roof and armored vehicles in front of the compound.

Sergio Vieira de Mello was sitting at the coffee table with several staff members and visitors when the one-ton bomb exploded. Ghassan Salamé, with glass in his hair, ran down the hall and found that Vieira de Mello's office had collapsed two floors to the ground. “Sergio,
courage,
” he called down, in the French they used because of the shared experience of May 1968. “We're coming to help you.”

A shaft of light shone down through the destroyed outer wall, and though Vieira de Mello didn't answer, Salamé saw him wave his right hand.