The Assassins' Gate (69 page)

The following weeks seemed to prove Powell wrong about Iraq. The elections were the most decisive event since the overthrow of the regime, and Bush's insistence that they not be postponed turned out to be one of his best decisions. Voting gave Iraqis a new confidence in themselves and even, to a degree, in their institutions. In the wake of elections, the insurgency seemed to lose force. Iraq's first elected government, with the first Kurdish president in the country's history, still faced the most daunting tasks: building up its security forces so that the fragile democracy could defend itself, winning public trust, writing a constitution, and sorting out the hardest problems, such as the place of former Baathists in government and the military, the role of Islam in society and the law, and the status of Kirkuk. Drew Erdmann liked to say that it all came down to whether Iraq's new leaders were capable of drawing lines on a map.

Beyond Iraq, a new historical wind was starting to blow through the Middle East. Lebanese gathered in massive numbers in Beirut to demand the withdrawal of Syrian troops; Egypt's Hosni Mubarak reluctantly agreed to a contested presidential election; the opposition in Syria was growing bolder; and the stalled Israeli-Palestinian negotiations lurched into motion for the thousandth time. How much credit went to Iraq, how much to the internal dynamics of each country, and how much to luck depended on whom you asked and what position he or she wanted to justify. The administration's neoconservatives had learned their lesson back in 2003; only in private were some of them ready to declare victory again, even as violence in Iraq returned stronger than ever.

Kalev Sepp, the retired Special Forces officer who had trained soldiers in El Salvador, went back to Iraq in November 2004 after a meeting in which General George Casey, Sanchez's successor as commander, asked for his counterinsurgency expert and was met with dead silence: there was none. In Baghdad again, Sepp found that the U.S. military still didn't have a viable campaign plan that addressed the insurgency in a serious way. With a team of American, British, and other officers, he helped design a new strategy that for the first time put the focus on Iraqi security forces, with thousands of American advisers working intensively with the new battalions. In February 2005, an unnamed official was quoted as saying that “it's dawning on [senior leaders] what they're dealing with now” is the need for an overarching counterinsurgency campaign plan. Almost two years after the fall of the regime, the military had finally come to terms with the fact that the Iraq War never ended. But Sepp was under no illusions about an easy victory. “This is going to be a long war. Americans are going to be shot in the streets of Baghdad five years from now.”

Most of the war's architects remained in power: Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice. They spoke of Iraq so rarely now that one could almost think that Americans were no longer dying there, that the mission was at last accomplished. In the middle of 2005, with Iraq once again consumed in violence that was killing dozens or scores of people every day, Cheney broke his silence to announce that the insurgency was in its “last throes.” He had said the same thing after Saddam was captured, a year and a half before. The administration's policy on Iraq was completely adrift; it amounted to saying such things, in the hope of making them so.

The Pentagon announced that Douglas Feith would be leaving to spend more time with his family. Shortly before his departure, Feith described himself to a journalist as a follower of Edmund Burke, the conservative eighteenth-century British philosopher of stability and tradition. He said that the Bush administration had never wanted to impose American values in Iraq, where “Shiite democracy” was a perfectly acceptable substitute. As philosophy this had the sound of an excuse, turning the chaos and violence for which Feith bore much responsibility into an example of American wisdom and restraint in allowing the Iraqis to do things their way. But it was also likely that Feith, and others in the administration, had never intended from the start to do anything more than remove the tyrant and then walk away.

Paul Wolfowitz became president of the World Bank, the job in which Robert McNamara had sought refuge after leaving the Pentagon at the height of the Vietnam War. But Vietnam, as Leslie Gelb pointed out, had been a liberals' war. Wolfowitz took the job as vindication, not atonement. “Of all the people in this administration who have a hard time sleeping at night,” a former senior official said, “Paul's probably at the peak, because he has a conscience. I'm not sure some of these others do.” When I asked who else had trouble sleeping, the former official said, “That's a good question,” and then he repeated it. But whatever soul-searching Wolfowitz might be doing, he would always believe in the necessity of the war, and in fifty years he might be proved right—“and if some blood is shed and some people die, that's part of life.” Did Wolfowitz feel the shedding of blood? “I think so,” the former official said. “I'd like to think so, anyway. I don't think I would like him very much if I didn't.”

Since America's fate is now tied to Iraq's, it might be years or even decades before the wisdom of the war can finally be judged. When Mao's number two, Chou En-lai, was asked in 1972 what he thought had been the impact of the French revolution, he replied, “It's too early to tell.” Paul Wolfowitz and the war's other grand theorists also took the long view of history; if they hadn't, there never would have been an American invasion of Iraq, or, at least, not nearly so soon. Pragmatic officials who asked hard questions about allies, evidence, timing, and plans—especially those, like Powell, who'd been tempered in combat—were not likely to doom flesh to metal on behalf of an idea, even one as compelling as the transformation of the Middle East from an incubator of mass killing to a collection of ordinary, semidemocratic states. There was no immediate threat from Iraq, no grave and gathering danger. The war could have waited.

Who has the right to say whether it was worth it? Chris Frosheiser, who lost so much in Iraq, asks himself the question every day, but he never comes closer to an answer than pride in his son's service and grief at his death. He would not have chosen to give up Kurt for democracy in the Middle East; now he wants Kurt's death to be part of some historical good. Yet Frosheiser always has to pull back, he said, whenever the vision grows too grand, the language too abstract, or else what matters most will be lost: one life, one death.

Daily existence in Iraq remains a nightmare. In the world's newest democracy, most people aren't free to speak their minds, belong to a certain group, wear what they want, or even walk down the street without risking their lives. During the worst of the violence, some Iraqis said that they had been better off under Saddam, that America should never have overthrown him if the result was going to be so much more bloodshed. Few Iraqis I knew ever said it, though. Experts in suffering, they are better qualified than people in Cairo, Rome, London, or Washington to balance their costs against their gains. When I told Aseel that, after the weapons turned out not to exist, some Americans felt betrayed by the Bush administration and Ahmad Chalabi, she exclaimed, “We are more important than missiles!” What the war gave people like her is hope.

The long view of history made the war possible, and the long view of history made the war costly. Out of government, Drew Erdmann dwelled on the institutional character of the administration's mistakes, but in Baghdad in the summer of 2003 he had said that success or failure would largely depend on the judgment of individuals. I came to believe that those in positions of highest responsibility for Iraq showed a carelessness about human life that amounted to criminal negligence. Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one. When things went wrong, they found other people to blame. The Iraq War was always winnable; it still is. For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive.

*   *   *

ONE DAY IN JANUARY
, I met three Iraqi men who were having lunch in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Amman: a Shiite, a Sunni, and a Kurd. They were in Jordan on business, but they had all lived in Baghdad throughout the rule of Saddam. Wearing jackets and ties, they had the gentle manners of an older Iraqi generation, and they invited me to join their table. The Kurd, a financier named Mahmood, and the Sunni, an architectural engineer named Hisham, were friends of the father of Kanan Makiya. Hisham, the oldest of the three, mentioned with a slight smile that he had made an appearance in Makiya's book
The Monument.
He had been the consulting engineer on a memorial to the Iraqi dead in the war with Iran, the Martyrs' Monument, and had written a fawning tribute to the “Leader-President” for the unveiling in 1983, which Makiya quoted at length.

Mahmood said, “Kanan Makiya was too idealistic, too detached from reality. He came to Baghdad and saw that everything was different.”

“Everyone living on the outside thought Iraq was different,” Hisham said.

“From the first day, there was a distinct difference between how the internals thought and how the expatriates thought,” Mahmood said. “You could see it. Those from outside, the liberal idealists, wanted to put in power believers in Jefferson. That was a good thing. But on the ground, you have people who are still living in the Middle Ages, the tribes, the deprived, the criminal, the religious. And all these will have to be either appeased or won. They couldn't just be swept aside. We knew these people, we were living among them.”

During Saddam's time, whenever Hisham traveled from Baghdad to London, the exiles there assumed that he was an agent of the regime. Hisham, who had been imprisoned and sentenced to death after the concrete paving slabs of the Martyrs' Monument began unaccountably to curl up at the edges, would say to them, “After you have your revolution and get rid of Saddam, there will be one million Baathists. What are you going to do with them? Are they all enemies, to be set aside?” The exiles had no answer, or else they answered with a single word—debaathification. “They weren't ready for what they are facing now,” Hisham said. “They did not think of a solution for a million Baathists.” After the fall of the regime, he added, Kanan Makiya was given too large a role in Iraqi politics.

“I disagree,” Mahmood said. “We need him in Iraq. We need his ideas.”

“I agree with you,” Hisham said. “But that attitude should not be made a ruler of the country. I need such a person to argue with, to hear his ideas, to learn from. But I cannot take him as a legislator.”

Mahmood said, “When people are being beheaded and there is so much cruelty in the country, you are glad there's someone like Kanan Makiya, because he is so idealistic. His ideas are so good that we need him. Even if he is a dreamer.”

Two months later, in March, I went to see Makiya at his clapboard house on a side street in Cambridge. This wasn't the same place where we'd had so many conversations before the war: After his divorce he had bought this house and filled it with his books. When I arrived, workmen were putting the last coat of paint on the woodwork before sanding the floors.

Makiya wasn't alone in his new house. Wallada al-Sarraf was with him now. Just six weeks before, she had packed two small bags, left her husband and everything else, and come to America to join Makiya. It was an extraordinary act for an Iraqi woman; her friends couldn't understand why she didn't do the normal thing, which was to keep the affair an open secret and go on living as a respectable woman in Iraqi society. Now the gossip was flying around Baghdad, her two older sons refused to talk to her, and Wallada was miserable. Yet she had an air of decision and relief about her.

“I was tired of the lies,” she said. “I couldn't stand the pretending.” Makiya was still traveling back and forth to Baghdad, but she wanted him to stop going, for her sake and his own. “They are hypocrites. They use him,” she said. “They aren't worth someone as naïve and good as Kanan. I know Arab culture—he doesn't.”

We went around the corner for lunch. It was snowing, the big wet flakes of a New England nor'easter turning the sidewalks to ponds of slush. I thought back to the snowy Cambridge night in late 2002 when Makiya and I had spent hours discussing the future of Iraq after Saddam, back when everything still lay ahead. He was a dreamer, and his words that night had the purity of untested thoughts, which, more than two years later, I still associated with the white snowfall outside his window. Too much had happened since then for any thought to stay pure. I had seen Makiya many times, in Cambridge, New York, Washington, London, and Baghdad, but I had never been able to sort out my feelings. He was my friend and I loved him. He had devoted his life to an idea of Iraq that I embraced. He had attached that idea to the machinery of war, and a lot of people had gotten killed. No idea remains intact once it's been bloodied by history, and history had not followed Makiya's blueprint. At times, his vision of Iraq had been so at odds with what I saw and heard there that dreaming began to seem irresponsible and dangerous. I wanted to know what the past two years had done to him.

Makiya seemed to guess my thoughts. As we ate our lentil soup, he mentioned his friend Mustafa al-Kadhimi, the exile I'd met in London who went back to Baghdad and was now working for Makiya's Memory Foundation. Mustafa had never been an intellectual, but he had been one of the few exiles who showed real wisdom as he negotiated the realities on the ground in Iraq. What mattered was the elusive human factor. “The single biggest test Iraqi exile politicians coming back faced was not one of ideas,” Makiya said, and I sensed that he was speaking of himself. “The ideas were fundamentally all there and sound. Ideas are important, yes. But the test was one of character. And here they virtually all failed.” The world of exile politics was dominated by programs and statements, including many that Makiya himself had written or signed. “But in the actual playing out of this since April of 2003, suddenly human character, individual character traits, become very important. People fall flat on their face or shine not because of their great ideas, but because of certain traits of character which suddenly acquire great importance in the actual practice of politics in these extremely tumultuous times.”