The Assassins' Gate (51 page)

I spent several nights at the base. On the second evening, two mortar rounds flew overhead and exploded somewhere outside the perimeter, but otherwise my visit to Mahmudiya was quiet. One morning I went out on patrol in a convoy of two Bradleys and two armored Humvees (in Zafaraniya the thirty-ton Bradleys had stayed at the base, but here no one patrolled without them). The commander of the Humvee I rode in, Sergeant Scott McKissen, had seen his son a total of fourteen days in the boy's fourteen-month life. Another soldier had canceled his wedding three times. McKissen, a blond, good-natured thirty-one-year-old from a small town in Utah, was still doing his damnedest to complete the mission, waving at pedestrians on the main road who resolutely refused to wave back. Most Iraqis didn't look at the heavily armored vehicles lumbering through their town, but the few stares were hard; no one smiled, not even a child.

“The hardest thing is treating these people with dignity and respect,” McKissen said, “because I haven't met one yet that I can trust. We know what they'd do if they got their hands on us. And the fatigue of being here so long and wanting to go home doesn't make you want to be friendly. I think the biggest battle here is just trying to be friendly with these people. You gotta try—it's the only way to fight the fight, trying to set them up with a democratic government. It's not going to work if you just shoot 'em. They've been living this way for centuries. Are we going to change that in a year? All you can do is try.”

At the southern edge of town a tread fell off one of the Bradleys, and we stood out on the shoulder of the road in the summer heat, soldiers fanned out with guns at the ready position, while a mechanic lay in the dirt with a wrench. I started broken conversations with a couple of Iraqis walking by and took a perverse pleasure in the knowledge that I wouldn't have lasted here more than a few seconds on my own. Later, we heard over the radio that a car bomber was cruising the area. After an hour we moved on in what struck me as a pro forma patrol, speeding down the stretch of highway south of the city where IEDs were particularly bad. McKissen looked hard at every pile of garbage and dead dog on the roadside. The land was flat and dust blown, with lines of palm trees in the distance and fields of sunflowers wilting on their stalks.

We stopped by the railroad tracks, near a canal overgrown with papyrus rushes. A section of the line had been blown up near here two weeks ago. Eight lonely Iraqi national guardsmen were digging a trench in the dirt perpendicular to the tracks. The Americans stopped and got out to talk, but there was no translator with them. “Good idea, but it's facing the wrong way,” a soldier tried to explain to the guardsmen. “You want to face toward the tracks.”

It was a pathetic sight. A lot of sweating and digging had gone into the trench, but the sandbag and plywood reinforcements were next to worthless. The men themselves looked too skinny and too old for the work; a few had gray hair. They wore different pieces of uniform, some without regulation boots, none with flak vests. Their only protection was their AK-47s. The area was rife with insurgents, and within a couple of weeks these guardsmen or others like them would start to die five or ten at a time under daily attacks against which they would be practically defenseless.

McKissen was on the radio back to the base chuckling about the new fighting positions. An Iraqi explained with gestures that a nearby unit had been fired on a few minutes ago. “I'm not surprised,” McKissen said matter-of-factly. “It happens often.”

The Americans offered their counterparts a thumbs-up and headed back to the base. The Iraqis returned to digging.

That night, I shared a dinner of MREs around a table in Charlie Company's cramped tactical operations center, which doubled as Prior's sleeping quarters, with Prior, his lieutenants, and his new first sergeant. Mark Lahan had gone back to Germany, and his replacement, Karl Wetherington, a wiry thirty-nine-year-old, let me know what he thought about the people that the Americans had come here fifteen months ago to liberate. “An Iraqi came up to me and said it pisses them off to have to wait for military traffic. I told him, ‘If you wouldn't blow us up with car bombs, we'd let you pass us.' Shitheads.”

The men around the table, from small towns in Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina, all had the same view: After working here for more than a year, they had concluded that Iraqi men were unreliable, didn't tell the truth, couldn't think rationally, never showed initiative. Prior had reluctantly come to believe that the religion, with its treatment of women and its pervasive fatalism, was a serious obstacle to democracy in Iraq—that it would take years and years. After relinquishing his company command he was going to study for a year on an Army fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and he imagined that the other students would think him a right-wing racist if he dared to utter these hard-learned home truths.

“During Vietnam, Americans were against the soldiers
and
the administration,” Wetherington said. “Here at least the public supports the soldiers, even if they might not support the administration.”

“Although that's changing with Abu Ghraib,” Prior said. When he was in Boston in April, he had seen demonstrations and overheard bar talk that disheartened him.

“I'm sick of reading about what five people did to a bunch of shit-bag Iraqis,” Wetherington said. One day, while he was driving in a convoy through Mahmudiya, children had lined the streets holding up newspapers with pictures from Abu Ghraib. “I mean, what they did was wrong. Just not representative.”

Prior said that, compared with Abu Ghraib, the mutilations of the contractors in Falluja
was
representative. “It would be nice to let the American people know that the problems here aren't just because Americans have cultural flaws. It's because these people have cultural flaws, too.” He added, “We can change a culture. We have to lean on it, and lean on it, and lean on it. And Americans want it to be done in three months. If people are getting killed, fuck it. And that's a cultural flaw.”

Wetherington sat brooding. “I hate the motherfuckers. Muslims are worthless. I don't mind Iraqis—they're okay—just Muslims.”

“What the sergeant means,” Prior said in his deadpan way, “is that there are many challenges in understanding each other.”

The soldiers of Charlie Company were still proud of what they had done. A sergeant named James Jett told me that, compared with other units that used rougher tactics, the restraint and respect shown by the company were the best way to win over Iraqis who were still sitting on the fence. That, even more than catching bad guys, was the thing that mattered most in winning the war—not turning friends or neutrals into enemies. Prior was pleased that during the year of the occupation only one of his soldiers had died and two had had to shoot Iraqis. Later, when we were alone, I reminded him of the speech on evidence and due process that I'd heard him give almost a year ago at the gas station in Zafaraniya. I suggested that he wouldn't give it now, at the end of his long tour.

Prior shook his head. “In my heart I believe everybody's American. George, I'm a complete idealist. All that stuff I told you in August—none of that has changed. My frustration with the Iraqi people, that has increased. But my attitude toward wanting to fix this place hasn't changed. I can't give up on them just because I'm frustrated. I would still give that speech today.” What he wouldn't do, Prior said, was tell Iraqis what he had told me tonight, because he didn't want to destroy their confidence. “Everything I told you in August was from my heart. Now I'm just more frustrated because they're not a Mom and apple pie people in my mind. But I still love my country, I still believe in public service, I still want to give back to my nation. And part of me giving back to my nation is me giving to other nations.”

*   *   *

AT THE END OF JUNE
I was back in Baghdad for the handover of sovereignty. To foil any attacks, it occurred unannounced two days ahead of schedule, on June 28, in a hasty private ceremony in the Green Zone, after which Paul Bremer and his top aides were spirited to the airport and flown out of Iraq. The sudden end of the CPA was in keeping with its short life.

The interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, which was to have been chosen by Lakhdar Brahimi's UN team, in fact was the result of a deal brokered between Washington and the Governing Council, with Ayatollah Sistani's blessing. The public seemed prepared to give it a chance. On a single Thursday a few days before the handover, at least a hundred people died across Iraq. Explosions and assassinations were now part of everyday life, and any change would be change for the better.

I visited several government offices and found Iraqis grimly determined to take on the new responsibility that most of them felt should have been theirs from the start. Every official, every secretary, every policeman, was risking his or her life just by leaving home in the morning. In his chambers at the Central Criminal Court, I asked Raed Juhi, the young judge who had issued the arrest warrant for Moqtada al-Sadr and was now leading the investigation of Saddam Hussein, what kept him coming to work every day. He had already survived three attempts on his life.

“If I stay at home, and you stay at home, and the other guy stays at home, who will build Iraq?” Juhi said, and he leaned forward and fixed me with a look. “This is a battle, mister. And we're all soldiers in this battle. So there are only two choices—either to win the battle or to die. There's no third choice.”

10

C
IVIL
W
AR
?

IRAQ WAS CREATED
by European diplomats in Paris after the First World War out of three Ottoman provinces: Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra. According to the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 between Britain and France, Mosul, believed to have valuable oil fields, was to come under French control after the war, but Clemenceau graciously handed it over to Lloyd George. The first civil commissioner of the British Mandate, Sir Arnold Wilson (in a sense, Paul Bremer's predecessor in Baghdad), thought from the start that Iraq was too fractured to become a viable independent state. The Kurds in the northern mountains, part of the old province of Mosul, had expected to achieve an independent Kurdistan after the war; they suddenly found themselves ruled from Baghdad in the name of an overwhelmingly Arab entity. The Kurds “will never accept an Arab ruler,” Wilson wrote to London. And there was another problem. The majority Shia would not accept Sunni rule, but at the same time, because the officer corps and the administrative class under the Ottoman Empire were Sunni, “no form of Government has yet been envisaged, which does not involve Sunni domination.” Wilson's legendary assistant, Gertrude Bell, who had been traveling and writing in the region for years, was warned by an American missionary, “You are flying in the face of four millenniums of history if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a political entity! Assyria always looked to the west and east and north, and Babylonia to the south. They have never been an independent unity. You've got to take time to get them integrated, it must be done gradually. They have no conception of nationhood yet.”

In Iraq, as elsewhere, the British brazened through the absurdities of their own making. They soon had their hands full with another, more immediate problem than the ultimate viability of Iraq, for one thing that seemed to unite Kurds, Shia, and Sunnis was their rebelliousness against British rule. In June 1920, a revolt began among the Shiite tribes near the holy cities and spread to the Sunnis of Falluja, while in the north the Kurds had been causing trouble for months. British troop levels were grossly insufficient to keep the vast territory under control, and in London there were serious misgivings about the wisdom of an occupation. A headline in
The Times
proclaimed, “Bad to Worse in Mesopotomia.” It took additional troops from the Indian colonial army, British air bombardments, and the deaths of six thousand Iraqis and almost five hundred British soldiers to put down the revolt.

According to the historian David Fromkin's excellent account of the era,
A Peace to End All Peace,
Wilson found the uprising almost incomprehensible: “What we are up against is anarchy plus fanaticism. There is little or no Nationalism.” The government in London saw the hand of various conspirators from outside Iraq: Turks, Pan-Islamists, Germans, oil companies, Bolsheviks, and Jews. But Gertrude Bell understood the force of Arab nationalism in Iraq, and she proposed to Winston Churchill, the colonial secretary, that Iraq be ruled not directly but as a protectorate, with the core of the old Ottoman Sunni elite built up into the administration of a modern state. In November 1920, she wrote to her father that the new Sunni-dominated council in Baghdad “has against it almost the whole body of Shiahs, first because it's looked upon as of British parentage, but also because it contains considerably less Shiahs than Sunnis. The Shiahs, as I've often observed, are one of the greatest problems.” For their part, the Sunnis “are afraid of being swamped by the Shiahs,” she wrote two months later. “The present government, which is predominantly Sunni, isn't doing anything to conciliate the Shiahs.”

Bell died and was buried in Baghdad in 1926, probably a suicide, without resolving the problem that she had helped to create. The majority Shia and the Kurds fell under the rule of the minority Sunnis, first during the Mandate and then after independence in 1932. Shiite and a handful of Kurdish politicians served in the numerous Iraqi governments of the monarchy period, including several Shia as prime minister, and in republican Iraq after the 1958 coup that overthrew the king. Iraq's powerful Communist Party was largely Shiite, and in its early years the Baath Party had Shia in key positions. But during the decades of Baath Party rule, the Sunni came to dominate, and under Saddam the ruling class telescoped down to a clique of cousins and tribal relations from around Tikrit. When Islam became a political force among the Shia of Iraq in the late 1970s, Saddam repressed it brutally, and Shiite consciousness spread across the country's south. The Kurds had never completely stopped fighting since the creation of the state. So there was reason to worry that the American occupation would inherit three pieces that had never fit together and were bound to chafe until they combusted if they weren't separated.