The New Middle East (47 page)

Jay Garner, the man selected to lead the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq, was drafted in at the last minute when the administration began to notice that it hadn’t thought very hard about what to do the day after the statue came down. But Donald Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense was so politicised that General Garner came to realise that doctrinally he didn’t fit the bill. More importantly perhaps, neither did many of the team of experts he had begun to gather around him.
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The impression he gathered was that commitment to the cause of creating a beacon of democracy in the Middle East was more important than the ability to carry out the task. He had just two months before the invasion to build his organisation from scratch. Garner struggled to get his team together, he struggled to get resources, then he struggled even to get into the country, and squandered crucial days in Kuwait waiting for a lift into Baghdad. Soon after he finally got there he learnt that his mission was already over.

Emerging through the blizzard of chaos to replace Garner less than a month after he had started the job was Lewis Paul ‘Jerry’ Bremer III, who would head the ‘Coalition Provisional Authority’. Mr Bremer strode into town in a dark suit, white shirt, tie and a pair of tan Timberland boots. They had been given to him by his son with the words ‘Go kick some butt, Dad.’
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He set off a copycat fad among the thousands of American officials living in the Green Zone who started wearing similar combat boots. It was a trend followed too by Bremer’s boss Donald Rumsfeld when he visited the country. The truth is that combat boots were no more needed in the Green Zone than they were in Washington or Wall Street. They were a symbol of the kind of war-tourist mentality that many of the Americans working in Iraq adopted during their tenure. Neither they nor Bremer bothered to properly consult the people they were ruling.
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Bremer just couldn’t stop himself from making promises that nobody around him believed could possibly be kept. In August 2003 he said: ‘About one year from now, for the first time in history, every Iraqi in every city, town and village will have as much electricity as he or she can use and will have it 24 hours a day, every single day.’ That was always an utterly impossible thing to achieve, but he said it, and Iraqis believed him, and yet today they still spend much of their lives without electricity.
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‘We worked really hard to mitigate some of the mistakes that he was making, but they were driven, these people were absolutely driven,’ said the Baghdad-based Western diplomat. ‘A lot of the problems go back to those first few days, to those first few months, certainly to 2003.’

It has become commonplace to say that no one expected Iraq to be consumed by murderous anarchy, that everyone was taken by surprise. It is not true. The fault lines were there for anyone to see if they were willing to look. In September 2002 in the
Boston Globe
newspaper Karen J. Alter, Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, wrote:

Ten years from now, will we be looking back asking how the United States could have thought that an unprovoked, preventive war on Iraq could succeed when the signs of danger were so clear and ominous? How an oil shock and deficit spending for war would plunge the United States and world economies into a major recession? How an administration so focused on getting rid of Saddam failed to create a workable policy to shape a post-Saddam Iraq?
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The answer to all her questions would be a resounding Yes.

Ten years on from her article I asked Professor Alter why it had all gone so badly wrong. It was classic ‘groupthink’, she said, referring to the psychological shift that occurs when a group of people’s desire for harmony overrides a realistic view of the circumstances they face.

George Bush surrounded himself with ideological purists. When I wrote that I could see what was happening. I could see the ideological purity and I could see the effort to villainise and discredit anyone who raised an alternative perception. There was almost the moral belief that they knew what they were doing and that they were right.

From the very beginning the Bush administration seemed almost purposely blind to what was going on. During a press conference given at the US Department of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the lawlessness I’d witnessed in Baghdad with the words: ‘It’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things, and that’s what’s going to happen here.’ But it didn’t.

People are not supposed to be ‘free to . . . commit crimes and do bad things’. That is not what is supposed to happen in a beacon of democracy. ‘Freedom’ is regulated by laws. Freedom without laws is called anarchy. But Rumsfeld, in the same press conference, ridiculed any notion that things were spiralling out of control.

It was symptomatic of the mindset that created the invasion plan. Donald Rumsfeld’s military operation for Iraq was built to test his own theory and rubbish that of his greatest opponent in the administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell. Powell was the architect of the first invasion plan for Iraq in 1991. His plan, defined as the ‘Powell Doctrine’, called for overwhelming force to be used in any invasion. Rumsfeld had nothing but contempt for the notion, and constantly encouraged, cajoled and bullied his staff to bring the numbers down to prove the job could be done with many fewer boots on the ground. The capture of Baghdad was proof of his plan, or so he believed. But what happened afterwards showed its folly. It was like climbing Mount Everest with just enough oxygen to reach the top. Having stood on the summit and congratulated yourself on this remarkable achievement, you now face the fact that you don’t have the means to get down again.

When I first met Souad Abdullah she was quietly sobbing in the corner of her bedroom. Her sister Nadja was perched on an old wooden chair in fluffy baby-blue pyjamas picking shards of glass from what remained of her windowsill. ‘If Bush thinks his soldiers will be welcomed with flowers and music, then he is thinking wrong,’ she told me. ‘We will treat them like robbers who are breaking into our homes.’ It was March 2003, just a few days into the war. ‘Why do they do this?’ wept Souad. ‘We love the British.’ Their flat looked like a bomb had just hit it because one just had. But while her sister tidied up, Souad just watched. She was carefully turned out, with her hair brushed up into a grand bouffant. She may have been the elder sister but she was also the famous one. Years after the glory days of her singing career had ended, she was still a household name in Iraq.

When she opened the door to me in March 2010 I barely recognised her. Her hair was a mass of knots and tangles. She peered around the door like a frightened child as my Iraqi colleague reminded her of our visit seven years before. The only thing that stood out in her now gloomy and bedraggled little home was the photograph of her son Khalil in pride of place on the living-room wall. ‘They kidnapped him in 2006,’ she said. ‘They would ring and I could hear them beating my son. We paid thousands of dollars but we never got him back.’ Tears welled up in her eyes. ‘We don’t even know where his body is.’ The family believed the local clerics hated Souad because she was a performer, which even back in the days of Saddam was considered a slightly disreputable profession for a woman. The death threats eventually drove her sister Nadja to move out and stay with a brother. I asked Souad the inevitable question. Was her life better before the Americans came or now? ‘I don’t want to talk about politics,’ she said, ‘but every day is dark . . . see how we live.’

It is possible to trace back the roots of the sectarian violence that destroyed Souad’s life to three very stupid decisions.

‘Early Friday morning May 16 2003 I signed Coalition Provisional Authority order No 1,’ wrote Bremer in his memoirs. It decreed that Ba’ath Party members ‘shall be removed from their employment . . . This includes those holding more junior ranks.’ During Saddam’s regime, being a member of the Ba’ath Party was often not about ideology or supporting the regime, it was about finding a decent job as a teacher or civil servant, or getting your children into a good school. It was basically about surviving. Two million people were in the Ba’ath Party. Bremer compared it to both the Nazis and the Soviet Communist Party under Stalin. In the preamble to his declaration he said the Ba’ath Party had to go because it had abused the Iraqi people and was a continuing threat to the Coalition Forces. He wrote later: ‘our intelligence estimated that . . . only 20,000 people, overwhelmingly Sunni Arabs’ would be affected. Like much of the American intelligence about Iraq before, during and after the invasion, it was wrong. He essentially threw the entire bureaucracy and everyone in it on the scrap heap. The country lost the wherewithal to function.

Then a week later, on 23 May, Bremer did something that even now looks startling in its scope. He issued ‘Coalition Provisional Authority order No 2. Dissolution of Entities’. The annex then lists what he was abolishing with the stroke of a pen:

The Army, Air Force, Navy, the Air Defence Force, The Ministry of Defence, The Ministry of Information, The Ministry of State for Military Affairs, The Iraqi Intelligence Service, The National Security Bureau, The Directorate of National Security, The Special Security Organization, The Republican Guard, The Special Republican Guard, The Directorate of Military Intelligence, The Al Quds Force, Saddam Fedayeen, Ba’ath Party Militia, Friends of Saddam, Saddam’s Lion Cubs, The Presidential Diwan, The Presidential Secretariat, The Revolutionary Command Council, The National Assembly, The Youth Organization, Revolutionary, Special and National Security Courts.

At the end for good measure he threw in the National Olympic Committee. ‘In retrospect I should have insisted on more debate on Jerry’s orders, especially on what message disbanding the army would send and how many Sunnis the de-baathification would affect,’ wrote President Bush in his memoirs.

The orders had a psychological impact I did not foresee. Many Sunnis took them as a signal they would have no place in Iraq’s future. This was especially dangerous in the case of the army. Thousands of armed men had just been told they were not wanted. Instead of signing up for the new military, many joined the insurgency.
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It was a catastrophe. It was pretty clear to me and everyone in Baghdad that the Iraqi army was not made up of die-hard Saddam supporters when I saw a podgy bald man running along the side of the Tigris river in a pair of baggy longjohns. He’d just got his first sight of the US troops. Crouching behind my hotel balcony I watched the capital’s supposed defenders simply leap from their trenches and flee without firing a shot. The Americans got to Baghdad so quickly because they met very little resistance. In the final days before Baghdad fell I drove around the city looking for signs that the Iraqi army were massing or preparing for a siege. I couldn’t find them.

Saddam’s army was a mess. I’d seen for myself at parades that were supposed to show their strength that many of the soldiers didn’t even have boots. These men had no reason to fight for Saddam, and so they didn’t. But then after the war was supposed to be over Bremer gave them a cause. He took away everything they had: their pride, their jobs, their hopes of a place in the new Iraq. The only thing he left them was their guns. Then he gave them something to fear – each other.

‘We talk a great deal about the fundamental error of demobilisation and deba’athification,’ says Ambassador Bodine.

But there was a third major legacy from the American occupation that I think is going to continue to corrode Iraqi political progress. We sectarianised the country in a way that it had not been before. The way that the neo-conservatives viewed Iraq was: ‘All Shia are good, all Sunnis are bad and all Kurds are small “d” democrats.’ Yes Sunni, Shia, Kurds existed in Iraq, and there’s a long-standing debate in Iraq as to whether they are an Arab state or is there a unique Iraq-ness to them. Those kind of identity issues have been going on for a very long time and we’re not responsible for creating them, but what we did is that we basically took the country made up of twenty-seven ethnic and religious groups and we brought it down to three and we basically said: ‘Which one of those three boxes you are in will determine whether you have political and economic power or not.’ You could be the best Sunni in the whole world, but if you are not a Shia your chances of actually moving into a position of real power was very much circumscribed. We made it a determination and set off the ethnic cleansing, the near civil war, and you see that playing out in their politics even now.

‘There is a history of sectarianism in Iraq,’ said Shirouk Abayachi.

Saddam used sectarianism but Bremer’s policies escalated those tensions. I saw maps in Baghdad made by his administration based on the sectarian divide. This street is Sunni, this street is Shia, this is mixed. I have no idea how they knew, we didn’t even know this, so how did they manage to divide us so easily? They shaped things like this from the very beginning. Even when they distributed positions it was based on sectarian lines, which was very new in Iraqi political life. Paul Bremer on behalf of the American administration created the sectarian divide in Iraqi society.